Page 62 of Gift Horse

Will I be his? I bury my face in his chest, the tears pricking my eyes. The lump in my throat is too great for speech.Will I be his. What manner of madness is this?“Yes.” But what I don’t say—what is too big to say—isI already am, I already have been all this time. I just couldn’t admit it, couldn’t trust it before now.

I touch his face to pull him into a kiss, to tell him in that wordless way everything I’m feeling, and find he’s crying just as hard as me as we dissolve into one another and then, eventually, when we’re no longer human, but only beings made of love, we sleep.

BREAKFAST IN BED

Mariano Arias. The Great House. The Cotswolds, England.

Lolly of the Laughter lies sleeping, her face a mask of calm, her hair wild and winding across her pillow, her arm thrown across my chest as if we have clasped each other so for years, decades, lifetimes. We fit, not only in the “slot part A into part B” way, though that’s a miracle in itself, but in a “matched perfectly” sense. At the atomic level. Maybe sub-atomic.

Just as the continents drifted apart and the stars exploded outward after the Big Bang, we—we being all the entities living and dead in all the universes known and uncharted—were once knitted together. I don’t know how I know this. Perhaps I read it somewhere, or mymamátaught me when I was trailing the horses with my schoolboy lasso and dreams of cantering across thepampas. But I know. We were once one, then two, then many, and finally infinite. But sometimes the lucky ones—and I am the luckiest of all men—find their singular match. Not their “other half,” that’s a distant cousin to the bond I’m talking about. No, this is all the way down to my shimmering cells. Charlotte “Lolly” Benoit is mine, and I am hers, and so it will be until the end of days.

I slip from her embrace and pad to the bathroom, easing the door shut so I don’t wake her. I take the phone to the far corner of the room and turn my back, whispering into the mouthpiece. “I’d like to order breakfast.”

“Yes, sir. We have you down for a Continental breakfast with fresh orange juice. Is that right?”

That is not right. We are in England and if the English do anything well, it’s breakfast. “I’d like the full-English, but two helpings.”

“Two!” The room service clerk doesn’t try to hide her shock. “Two sausages? Two rashers of bacon? Two, what?”

“Two whole breakfasts, please. With fresh-squeezed orange juice, a bottle of champagne, a pot of tea, and a pot of coffee.”

She repeats it back to me and is unabashed in her horror when I insist that it be “enough tea and coffee for six” because I don’t know what Lolly prefers and I want to be sure she has everything, all the time,siempre,forever.

“We also have you down for a newspaper, sir. Anything you want to change there?” How is it that English service people can be so rude? So blatantly sarcastic? Is it that they aren’t tipped and, unlike their American counterparts, can let you know how they feel? There’s a part of me that enjoys her shock at me wantingso many things,so I tell her to send “all the papers,” even though I’m not sure what I’m asking for.

I use the bathroom, brush my teeth, run my hand through my hair and tiptoe back to bed to wait for my love to wake. She rotates her shoulders as I lower myself back into bed, stretching like a leopard, then laughing when she sees me looking at her.

“I look like hell.” She tucks her head under her pillow.

I remove it. “You look likeel cielo.”

“The sky?”

I plant a kiss on her wrinkled brow. “Heaven.”

“I need to brush my teeth.” She stretches again, her back arching the way it does when she climaxes. My response is instant, but I don’t reach for her because I don’t want her to be uncomfortable. She races for the bathroom, laughing all the way.

There’s a knock at the door. “Room service.”

My robe is over the chair in the lounge, but I manage to belt it before our breakfast is wheeled in. The attendant is wide-eyed and alert, wondering no doubt who is here to help me eat so much food. He hovers, hands behind his back. I do not think it’s customary to tip here, but I want him gone.

“Thank you.” I hand him a fifty-pound note and watch his saucer eyes turn to plates.

“No, thank you.” He backs towards the door, bowing all the way. “I don’t believe what they’re saying.”

“Sorry?”

“About you. Don’t believe a word of it.”

“Saying? About me?”

“It’s nothing.” He’s gone and the door is closed before I can ask him to clarify.

That’s unsettling. From the sounds of things, the staff has been talking. Have we been here long enough to have a reputation for anything? I’ve been courteous, I hope. Thoughtful. I don’t make my bed or clean my bathroom, but it’s functionally a hotel, so I thought that was something that was included. Perhaps I’m expected to tip the cleaner? There’s no envelope or instructions as there would be in an American hotel. I’ll ask Lolly. She’ll know what to do.

“Criminy Biscuits! What did you do? Raid the kitchens?” She takes the top plate from a pagoda of stacked plates and removes the lid. “Cumberland sausage! Scrummy.”

“Go back to bed.”

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