Page 83 of The Moon & His Tides
A sound of pure relief, a little desperate, a lot hopeful.
It made some last wall erected around my heart crumble into dust.
“Adam,” I soothed. “What happened?”
He swallowed so hard, the movement looked painful. “We fought.”
“That’s not very like you,” I noted, because they hadn’t had so much as a tiff since I’d lived with them.
At least to my knowledge.
Adam’s smile was a mockery of the term, crooked like the picture frame on the wall. “It’s very like us. It’s all we ever seem to do these days.”
At my puzzled look, he let out a short chuckle that was more a barking scoff than true laughter. “Before you, it was all we could do to maintain a charade in public. With you, it’s been, well, brilliant again. I thought we might regain some of what went missing over the years, but then you left, and… it all fell apart again.”
“How, though?” But even as I asked, I could imagine it now that he’d brought their tension to my attention.
I’d often thought of them as my moon and sun, guiding me, acting on me in their different yet elemental ways. But I’d never thought about their relationship to one another. How did two opposing forces coexist in perfect harmony?
They didn’t, not really. One took the spotlight at night and the other in the day. They had a symbiotic nature, of course, the moon reflecting the sun and one giving way to the other, but rarely did you see them together in the same sky.
And maybe for Adam and Savannah, I was that strange anomaly, the moon viewed during the day, two opposites held together in the same sky.
What an awesome and awful power.
What a wild responsibility.
Adam tipped his head back and closed his eyes, like even recounting the argument was exhausting. “She was angry with me for agreeing to talk to Sylvia Ramone about a theatre project in the West End after filming finishes forThe Devil Cares. I want to stay in London for a while longer. I want to have some time to rest. Savannah doesn’t believe in being idle.”
I winced a little bit because I knew her well enough to acknowledge that truth.
Though she was always poised, Savvy was rarely still. Her datebook was busier even than Adam’s most days, filled with meetings about ad campaigns, future projects, networking with studio executives and the wives of other influential actors and generally famous people. On the rare day when she didn’t have much to do, she roped me into keeping her company on a variety of tasks she seemed to pick from thin air to pack her schedule with.
Success is never attained by the lazy, she liked to say.
While I thought she was right, it still puzzled me slightly that she was so focused on success, yet it was never directly for her; it was always a proxy. Adam, mostly, and now, myself.
Before Adam, I knew she had been with an influential American who moved to Britain with her and whose success Savannah took a large deal of accreditation from, but she never told me who it was.
“I told her I was tired,” Adam admitted quietly as if he was confessing some great flaw and not something that was easily comprehensible.
The man had been making three to four movies every year for the past four years. When he wasn’t filming, he was on a press tour or preparing for the next role. He was like some kind of savant machine, slipping in and out of characters so seamlessly I wondered secretly if he ever forgot who he truly was.
“It’s okay to feel burnt out,” I told him, squeezing his thigh and moving to my knees between his thighs.
I was tall enough that when he tipped his head back down, he wasn’t much taller than me even seated on the bed. This close, I could see the dark circles beneath his verdant green eyes and the tension in the crow’s feet beside them. He looked tired of body and of spirit. No, even more than tired, he looked defeated.
By his very own wife.
“Savannah should understand more than anyone how hard you work,” I said carefully when he only searched my face intently, looking for validation I was eager to give him. “She’s the one who manages you, after all.”
“She does. I’ve often wondered if that might be the problem,” he admitted softly, reaching for my shoulder as if to ground himself. “At some point, I became her puppet more than her husband.”
“That’s harsh,” I objected because I couldn’t believe Savannah was that cold, no matter how hard she tried to prove she was in business.
He shrugged expansively, an Italian expression that I thought he might have picked up from me. “The truth often is.”
“So you told her you were tired, and she stormed out? That seems like an overreaction.”
