Page 42 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
“Promise me you’ll think about the gala,” she says, crawling under the covers and snuggling right into my arms. It feels so good to hold her that I could cry. “Promise me you won’t shut yourself out from everything. From the rest of us.”
I have a lot of things I could say to that—defensive and bitter things, maudlin things—but instead I say the most painfully honest thing of all. “It’s not about shutting myself out, Poe. It’s about him. It’s about seeing him, talking to him, brushing shoulders with him while he wears a tuxedo and smells like a forest. I can’t do it. I can’t see him being so . . . him, and then be okay. I just can’t.”
“Because you’re still angry with him?” she whispers.
“Because I’m still in love with him.”
“Then why separate yourself from whom you love?”
Through the window, I watch a moth-eaten cloud stretch across the sky, trying to reach the moon. It makes me feel lonely in a familiar way, in my usual way.
“Loving him is wrong,” I say. “That’s irreducibly true, Poe. It can’t be navigated around. It’s just wrong. But I also don’t know if I can stop, and until I figure out what to do about that, I don’t know how I can be near him.”
“It’ll break him,” she murmurs on a yawn. I don’t need to see her face to know her eyes are closed. “You’ll break him if you stay away.”
It won’t be the first time.
The thought, and the sheer truth of it, makes me miserable. But what am I supposed to do? Really? Drop everything I know about right and wrong—admittedly not much—and embrace a life of iniquity with him? Eat forbidden fruit forever?
How could a love like that, unholy and unhealthy, ever survive?
Here, it could.
The thought comes unbidden, but intoxicating nonetheless. I push it away.
“Don't forget,” Poe murmurs again, and then presses her closed fist to my chest, right above my heart. She falls asleep clenching her fist over and over again, the heartbeat the three of us share, and when it finally stops and she starts snoring in my arms, I gently take her hand away from my chest and try to forget the feel of it. The memory of our joined love.
But still I lie awake a long time, Thornchapel awake around me too, with owls and breezes and restless trees who miss their master.
I don't have to be at the library until after lunch, so I let myself doze later than usual, well past dawn. Poe is predictably still asleep next to me, a tangle of blankets and long, dark hair, and I spend a long time simply looking at her, savoring her closeness, her trust, the innocence of her sleeping face which never quite vanishes, even when she's awake.
But eventually I get up and treat myself to a shower and one of the new toothbrushes stocked in the bedroom’s en suite, and by the time I get out, Poe is blinking against the sunlight like a sleepy kitten.
I sit down on the edge of the bed and stroke her hair away from her face. “Morning,” I say.
She mumbles something mostly unintelligible, and I wish there was no real world, no other life than this, and I could just spend the day in bed with her, napping and fucking and napping some more. But she has an entire library to catalog and I have my own little kingdom of picture books and free Wi-Fi to manage, and there's something else I need to do anyway.
“I need to go,” I tell her. “I just wanted to say goodbye first.”
She pouts. “No. You can't leave.”
“We both have to work,” I say, kissing her on the nose and then nuzzling her neck. “And Sir James is ready for breakfast.”
The dog in question has been trotting in and out of the room all morning, eagerly wagging his tail whenever I so much as look at the door, and it’s him jumping up on the bed and snuffling wetly at Poe's face that finally has her sitting upright and opening her eyes for real.
“Hate you both,” she mumbles, but then she slumps against me and lets me pet her hair for several minutes, yawning and grumbling and finally turning back into a living girl.
“Are you going now?” she asks.
“Yes.” I don’t mean to say more, but I’m addicted to sharing my most private thoughts now, I guess, because I add, “I’m going to look through my mom’s office some more. And I’d like to call her cousin before I go to work.”
She gives me a squeezing hug, but she doesn’t remark on it, she doesn’t exhort me to be brave or anything condescending like that. Instead, she just says, “Okay. Let me get dressed and I’ll walk you out.”
Like the besotted wraith I am, I drift behind her as she goes down the hall to the bedroom she shares with Auden. The same bedroom the three of us were supposed to share.
It’s very hard not to imagine the version of myself who moved his threadbare T-shirts into the dressers, and left his scuffed boots next to Auden’s gleaming dress shoes in the massive walk-in closet. Who already has a stack of books on the end table, who’s already had to take off Auden’s glasses and put them on the same end table after he fell asleep wearing them.
A whole other life, stolen away.
