Page 68 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
Be careful with my ‘gifts.’ you mean, Rebecca thinks sulkily, but she knows better than to let that thought escape her.
“I’m always careful with myself, Daddy,” she says, even as she thinks that might not entirely be true, even as she remembers all the ways Thornchapel has slid into her veins and coaxed her into untrammeled recklessness.
“I know,” he murmurs. “But I thought I was being careful too. I thought I was—” He stops. He stops and Rebecca finally notices how tightly one hand grips the other behind his back, how rigid the set of his shoulders is. He’s bowed his head and his breaths come quicker than they did before, like he’s trying to outrun a wave about to break onto the shore.
“Daddy?” she asks, worried enough to stand. Her father does not do this; Samson Quartey does not feel. He certainly does not feel inside his own office, where anyone can see.
He doesn’t seem to hear her, doesn’t notice her getting to her feet. “I can’t believe Adelina’s dead,” he finally whispers, and it’s the first he’s mentioned Poe’s mother since Rebecca told him about finding the bones in the ruins weeks ago. “She was so happy. Always so happy. Smiling and laughing, full of life.”
She doesn’t respond, not wanting to break the spell of her father actually talking to her.
“I wonder if David will come back,” he says after a moment, more to himself than to her, it seems.
“David?”
“David Markham,” he says automatically, still lost to himself and his memories. “Proserpina’s father.”
“I don’t know.”
“I would like to—just once—” her father ducks his head, shoulders slumping some. “Just once. Just to see him one more time.”
“Daddy,” she says carefully. “Did you and David know each other well?”
The light coming in from the window catches the dark amber flecks in his eyes and the high curves of his cheeks. If she didn’t know that he’d just celebrated his fiftieth birthday, she would have thought him much, much younger. Young enough to be in love.
“Yes,” he says wistfully. “We knew each other well.”
Rebecca remembers the picture again, the way her father’s fingers laced through David Markham’s, like they couldn’t stand not touching one another for the time it took to pose for the picture. She doesn’t want to think what she’s thinking, not only because no one likes to think of their parents having sex, but who likes to think of their parents having affairs?
“You would tell me, Rebecca?” her father asks suddenly. “If David came back to see his daughter—you would tell me?”
Rebecca nods because she can’t speak, because she’s too stunned to remember words. How can this be her father, this man sounding desperate to hear from a former lover? A former lover who is a man? This father who never stops telling her about the importance of family, of appearances, who said nothing when she came out to him as bisexual except “Don’t tell your mother”?
She might be angry. She might be gutted.
She really can’t tell, even after he mumbles a hurried excuse and then makes an abrupt exit from her office. Even after she begins packing up her work to leave and go pick up Delphine.
It’s not that she hates feelings, Rebecca reminds herself as her driver parks in front of a sparkling glass tower in the City. It’s only that she knows feelings for what they are.
Feelings are fictions. They are lies.
They are myths one tells oneself in order to make sense of chemical reactions and environmental pressures. Feelings fold over on themselves like origami—tucks and deceptions, hidden planes never meant to be scrutinized. So here is anger, for example, anger that her father has had an affair, anger that he treated her queerness like a mediocre report card she’d brought home from school. But then if she uncrimps even one corner of that anger, she finds empathy, as unsettling as that empathy is, because she knows her mother has never been an easy woman to be married to and she doesn’t know how faithful she could have been in her father’s shoes either. Empathy because she sees that her father’s reaction to her coming out as bisexual had everything to do with his own story and possibly nothing to do with hers.
And then the empathy opens up into a kind of loneliness, a loneliness for something she’s never had and has never even dared name to herself, and then that loneliness unfolds into a fear that she will never have this nameless need met after all.
Yes, underneath all her anger, all her empathy and all her loneliness, is fear.
Creased, ugly fear—all the more ugly for how utterly boring it is, how utterly ordinary—and it’s so ugly, in fact, that she can’t look at it for long, tucking everything back into its place and shoving it down by the time the car door opens and Delphine slides into the backseat with a pink holdall and wearing a dress so short that Rebecca sees the quick flash of red, intimate lace when she gets in.
And just like that, all of the feelings—myths and lies that they are—melt away like ice in the sun. There’s no loneliness, no fear.
Just the urge to press Delphine back into the seat, to wedge her thigh between Delphine’s knees and push that short, slutty dress up to her hips.
She hasn’t had her thigh between anyone’s knees in far too long; she’s taken no one to bed since Delphine, she’s come alone since the night she beat Poe. She hasn’t even gone to the club. She knows the reason why, even if she doesn’t want to admit it to herself.
Even if she’s afraid of untucking that feeling to see all the other feelings underneath.
“Golly, this traffic,” Delphine sighs, and then begins a very Delphine routine of reflexes—checking her hair, checking her phone, running a tongue over her front teeth for any rogue lipstick, checking her phone again. She’s so beautiful that everything she does is mildly hypnotizing, like she’s living, breathing art, like she’s stepped through a warp in the very air from some immortal realm of unearthly beauty and enchantment. Rebecca can never decide exactly what it is that makes Delphine so deeply lovely, just that there must be something, some Platonic form of beauty that Delphine is hewing to. It could be those honey-colored eyes, or maybe her mouth, plump-lipped and always slightly open, like she’s waiting to be kissed. Or maybe it’s all that hair, hair so silky and so blond that to look at it is to imagine it sliding across your stomach—or maybe it’s her body, which makes Rebecca feel like a pirate, like she needs to plunder and seize and keep.
