Page 145 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
She’s already shaking her head. “She spanked me, Rebecca. Only that. Until the kiss.”
I don’t want to know. I need to know. “Did you fuck?”
“No.” Her voice is thick with tears, but she meets my eyes so I’ll know she’s telling the truth. “We didn’t fuck. No one came. No one even tried to come.”
“But you kissed,” I say.
“In the lobby, afterwards. She started it, but I—” Delphine looks away now, sucking in a deep breath as if to steel herself into giving me every piece of the horrid puzzle. “I kissed her back, Rebecca. There was a moment when I knew what was happening, and I chose it anyway. For another few seconds, at least.”
I don’t think I can breathe. My eyes are hot, my heart is gone, my veins are dry. I’m nothing and I’m dead.
“Why?” I whisper. “For the sin of standing you up? For not saying I love you? Why did you get on that stage with her? Let her taste the mouth you knew belonged to me?”
Delphine winces at my use of the past tense, and she turns away so she’s in profile again. “I didn’t think you wanted me,” she says miserably. “I thought you were embarrassed of me—too embarrassed to show me off to your friends at the club.”
This is the literal last thing I would have ever guessed she would say. My mouth is open in shock. “You didn’t think I wanted you?”
With her profile contrasted against the rain, I can easily see the defensive workings of her jaw, the quivering of her chin. “No, Rebecca. I didn’t.”
I’m almost sputtering, that’s how utterly gobsmacked I am. “You’re a fucking model, Delphine. You’re famous, wealthy, brilliant, beautiful—and you thought I didn’t want you?”
She swallows, looking down at her feet in their ballet flats. “I’m not a model like most people use the word, Rebecca. I have the body I have.”
“Yes, a body I’ve been insatiable for! A body you’ve made an entire brand about being proud of!”
“It’s not like—” She’s crying now, tears sliding over her cheeks like rain on the windows. “—It’s not like I was completely at peace with my body and then I made the brand. I made the brand because I wasn’t at peace and I was tired of feeling alone about it all. And it still didn’t get any easier—I have to have an assistant moderate my comments on an hourly basis, because people tell me horrible things about myself every day. Every day, Rebecca, someone reminds me that the world doesn’t think I’m worth anything. Not desire, not respect, not the ability to travel, not decent medical care. So yes, I’m still insecure; so yes, I didn’t think you wanted me, or if you did, you were embarrassed by your own attraction.”
I don’t even have the words for this, that’s how nonsensical it is. “We were together publicly, Delphine. Photographed, Instagrammed, Tatlered—everything. I hardly hid you.”
“Because you don’t care about those things. But it felt like you did care what the people at Justine’s thought.”
“Delphine, the only reason I hadn’t played with you publicly was because I hated the idea of sharing you so soon. I was—” I don’t relish admitting this “—jealous. Possessively so. The idea of other people getting to see what was mine made me want to lock you in a tower and breathe fire at anyone who came near. Always, my time and my work and my energy have been at the disposal of someone else—even my mind, especially my mind—and I’ve always been expected to give it all without complaint or reserve. You were the first person who was just for me, the only thing I’d ever had that didn’t belong to anyone else. So no, I wasn’t eager to share you, but it wasn’t because I was ashamed, Delphine. It was because I was so fucking proud to call you mine that I could have died.”
And now I am dead. Not of pride, but of pain. Pain she sowed and watered and nurtured into torment. Her and Emily Fucking Genovese.
I press my fingers against my eyelids, trying to press the heat out of my eyes. I feel worse than dead, I feel like I’m dying. Because death would be a relief and there’s no relief for me here. I’m shredded pulp and jagged bones.
“Rebecca,” Delphine says, still not looking at me. “I’m sorry. I know—I know that’s not enough, that it could never be enough, but you should know all the same. I’m so sorry it hurts.”
Yeah. It hurts me too.
“Do you think . . . ” She stops and then starts again. “I meant what I told you in that text. I’m still yours. If you want me to be.”
I could almost laugh. In fact, I do laugh, a short bark that grates its way past my lips.
She finally lifts her eyes to mine. The hurt there—the pain—it almost matches my own.
But I’ve fallen for those eyes before, and I know where it gets me. I know now what happens when I offer her my love, when I show her where I’m softest, rawest, tenderest—I know what happens when I believe even for a second that I could have something good in my life. Something wonderful. Too wonderful to be true.
I can’t be broken. I won’t be. She doesn’t deserve that, she doesn’t deserve my pain, my sadness, my anguish. Those I’ll have to save until I’m alone.
So for now: “I don’t want you to be mine.”
And even that’s not enough, so I add emphatically, “In fact, I would like to never see you again.”
Her face crumples, but she nods, as if she was expecting it.
“Yes, Rebecca.” And she hugs herself once more, crying while the rain cries behind her. A pearl girl in a pearl world.
