Page 57 of Art of Sin

25envy

Gideon drivesus back to the city. It’s dark by the time we pull into his driveway, and the long silence and many miles thicken the air. Like we’ve been traveling our whole lives to this moment.

He turns off my car but doesn’t move to get out. Something’s coming. We both feel it. Energy zings beneath my skin. Potent. Boiling.

“You haven’t seen your mother since the day she left?”

I shake my head. “And I haven’t seen my stepfather since a few months before that.” I pause, weigh the consequences of the following truth, then decide it’s too late to care. “He’s doing twenty-five years for a drug deal gone wrong. Someone died, and he took the fall.”

I wait for the questions he hasn’t asked—what I did from the time I left home until enrolling in community college at nineteen. How I managed a degree without a high school diploma. I’m also half-expecting a veiled assumption that I must have slept my way to success, because how else could I have secured my position at the PR firm before I was thirty…

But for whatever reason, he doesn’t. Maybe he doesn’t care about those details. Maybe he’s heard enough.

“My mother was schizophrenic.”

His voice in the quiet is as shocking as the words themselves.

“Around a year before she died, my father had her committed. Fancy place. We visited on Sundays. She was there a few months, then came home. Exactly one week later, she killed herself.” Heavy sigh. “It was too soon, but my father wanted her out for an important business dinner. He went against the recommendation of her doctors and sacrificed her health for his greed.”

The magnitude of it all—what I shared with him today, what he knows about me now, what I know about him—sinks in. Anxiety crawls over the back of my scalp. My stomach rolls with nausea.

“So we’re comparing fucked-up childhoods now? How quaint. I gave you what you wanted, so this is over.” I reach for the door handle, but he seizes my bicep.

“This isn’t a game to me, Deirdre. I know I’ve asked a lot from you. I’ll keep asking. I want all of it. And I won’t apologize.”

I wrench my arm away. The indents from his fingers tingle warmly. “Fine. So your mother was crazy and your dad’s a dick. I bet he never put you in pigtails and used you as a shield during drug deals, or killed a man right in front of you then made you help bury him.”

Gideon can’t hide the flash of horror. The following sympathy. It makes me want to scream.

“And because you couldn’t save your mother, now you have a God complex and try to save broken women. Even women who don’t fucking want it!”

“I told you,” he snarls, “I don’t want to save you.”

I growl. “Right, I’m supposed to be saving you. How? By giving you all my secrets so you can finally accept that some of us had it worse and stop feeling sorry for yourself?”

His grin is cutting. “Your anger is so fucking stunning.”

This time when I reach for the car door, he doesn’t try to stop me. Seconds later I’m rounding the hood and pulling open the driver’s side. All I want in the world right now is a stiff drink and a sleeping pill. Maybe three of each.

Gideon gets out of the car, but only crosses his arms over his chest, blocking my entrance.

His head tilts, eyes curious. No trace of pity, only that intense focus. “Why do you hide? There’s nothing wrong or shameful about the life you’ve lived. Byron said ‘The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.’ You have felt more life than most, mon bijou. It makes you precious to the world.”

A breeze lifts a tendril of my hair across my face. I brush it away, but not before seeing the brown strands. The darkness is still a shock, my reasons for returning to my natural color still baffling.

Because of him.

He uses pretty words, weaves a seductive sense of security around me, but what he wants is raw and dark and there’s nothing precious about it. Some secrets aren’t mine to tell. Some are better left buried.

Sometimes, even in the midst of insanity, there’s a kernel of reason. Sometimes, even in the dark, there is a promise of light. Nate is my light, and he means far more to me than anyone will ever know. I will protect him until I die.

My shoulders slump, my mind and body wrung dry. I want my safe hole in the earth, the protection of my imaginary tree above. Emptiness and darkness, where no one can touch me. I want to be alone—without this horrible need for something I don’t deserve and can’t have. Intimacy. Companionship. I thought I’d made peace with my fate.

Until him.

I massage my temples. “Either fuck me or fire me, Gideon, because you’re making me deranged.”

He huffs a soft, short laugh. “And what is it you want of the two options? Because if it means you don’t abandon this project, I’ll do either right now. God knows I don’t want a publicist. Just you.”

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