Page 75 of The Hundred Loves of Juliet
HELENE
I drift off to sleepfor a little bit, and when I wake, gone is the bottomless pit of despair from the confrontation with Merrick. Instead, it’s replaced with the kind of drowsy, deep-seated contentment of finding what you’ve spent your life looking for. Story Sebastien is the same as the Sebastien spooned against me in the tangle of plaid comforter. I didn’t make him up; he was here, waiting for me all along. I sink into him.
In response, Sebastien holds me tighter, as if he, too, needs to keep me close, in case all this vanishes like a dream. But then I’m reminded that he’s had no delusions about us from the start. Sebastien’s known since I walked into The Frosty Otter who we are and what we’ve meant to each other, even if he tried to keep our paths from colliding.
I nestle into him as I think about what he calls his “curse.” It’s still incomprehensible how it could be true, and yet, when he made love to me, I felt our history coded into every cell of my body.
I am Juliet,I think.I live for a while, then die, then forget everything and come back to do it all over again.Impossible. And at the same time, utterly real, and tragic and romantic at the same time. Instinctively, I clasp Dad’s watch in my hand as I contemplate it all.
Sebastien shifts behind me and kisses my hair. “I could fix that for you, you know.”
Right. Because he was a clockmaker, once upon a time.
Maybe someday in the future, I’ll want the watch to work again. But for now, I don’t want it tinkered with. As Mom likes to say, things happen for a reason. And I think the watch is broken in order to serve as a reminder to me to live unapologetically, likeDad did. I suspect he left it to me, rather than Katy, because he knew I’d need the reminder more.
“It’s okay,” I say to Sebastien. “I need the watch this way, for now.”
But he must hear the slight quaver in how I say the word “need,” because his next question is, “Are you all right?”
I don’t answer right away. I’m still contemplating our complicated past, and our fate. The part about me dying lingers like smoke after a fire. I can have this mad, all-encompassing love, but at the cost of my life.
Sensing my tension, Sebastien kisses the nape of my neck. He brushes his fingertips along the backs of my arms, which sends tremors through my body and leaves me breathless. He murmurs my name across my skin, leaving behind a hot trail of wanting in its wake. A history of knowing.
Am I scared of dying?
Utterly terrified.
But—as irrational as it is—if this is our curse, I still covet it.
“Yes,” I say, finally answering Sebastien’s question. “I’m all right. More than all right.”
“Are you sure?”
I answer by kissing the white scar over Sebastien’s eyelid. I kiss a faded nick on his chest, left behind by an arrow shaft. There’s a ghost of a stab wound under his ribs, burns from when he dove into the flames to save Cosmina from the stake, and countless other scars, a constellation over his body. Skirting death for centuries leaves marks behind.
I know a few of the stories.
But I want to know them all.
HELENE
After lingering in bed awhilelonger, reality demands to be dealt with.
“What are you going to do about this place?” Sebastien says as he brushes a lock of hair from my face.
“I don’t know. Maybe I could talk to the landlady and promise I’ll pay her rent as soon as my lawyers can sort things out with the court and the bank. But I’m worried about what Merrick will do if I don’t show up at the Anchorage airport later today. When someone makes an enemy of him, he crushes them.”
I think about what happened to those poor editors at our grad school newspaper, when they kicked Merrick and his friend Aaron Gonchar off the staff. Merrick and Aaron dug up every piece of dirt on those editors and waged a massive smear campaign by anonymously sending the so-called “dirt dossiers” to every media company the editors were applying to for jobs.
Not a single one of them landed anywhere good postgraduation, even with prestigious Northwestern journalism degrees in hand. Meanwhile, Merrick and Aaron emerged with nary a scratchon them—Merrick on the fast track atThe Wall Street Journal’s West Coast bureau, and Aaron with a well-paid gig at TMZ, finding and airing celebrities’ dirty laundry.
Sebastien props himself up on a pillow. “About Merrick…I have resources who can help.”
The way he says it is an odd combination of bashful plus spy-novel mysterious. I tilt my head and ask, “What do you mean,resources?”
He blushes, and it’s adorable on a man as big as he is. “You’ve heard of Swiss banks? Well, Julius A. Weiskopf Group in Geneva is kind of like my Swiss army knife. When you’ve been around as long as I have, you need a few people you can trust. They’re my financial advisers, lawyers, procurers of false identification papers…anything I need. I could ask them to take over your divorce case, if you’d like. They’d get your bank account unlocked, for starters, but also be able to handle anything Merrick and his attorneys try to throw at you.”
I just stare at Sebastien, because I’m still stuck on the first thing he said. “You have a Swiss bank account? That’s only for, like, mega millionaires. In movies.”
