Savannah was just standing up to do similarly, I think, when Elena finally croaked, “Please stay, Savvy. I know I’m wretched but please, stay for a while.”
The older woman looked quickly at Mama, who was thoroughly shocked into silence, and then at Sebastian who seemed to teeter between disgust and sympathy for his older sister.
“Okay,” Savannah said slowly. “But only if we can play charades.”
Elena’s lip trembled fiercely before she finally gave into a weepy laugh.
Chapter Seventeen.
I played one game of charades with the rest of the guests but my mind was hazardously preoccupied with thoughts of Sinclair and after one too many confused glances my way from Mama and Cosima, I said my goodbyes with the excuse of a stomach ache.
And it did ache; a deep churning that twisted my gut up like a coiled snake ready to strike out against my impure thoughts. I couldn’t help replaying the dinner over and over in my head, Elena’s intense disdain and Sinclair’s utter defeat. The perfect couple I had constructed of them in my mind was far from reality but the fractured nature of their relationship – very much like my own with Elena – didn’t make my love for Sinclair any more okay. We were still two people actively deceiving someone we had made a promise to love and care for; Elena’s bad behavior did not justify our own.
I self-flagellated myself the entire cab ride, each stroke harder than any Sinclair would ever land, and yet I still told the cabbie to take me to the Faire building, still walked the steps to the wide glass doors and buzzed in with the night receptionist who thankfully recognized my name from the gallery. I watched my reflection in the shiny chrome of the elevator doors as they closed and ferried me up to Sinclair’s 60th floor and, instead of running away from the villain I faced in the mirror, I smiled sharply at myself and strode from the elevator with the confidence of a seasoned sinner.
He knew the moment I entered his office even though I didn’t make a sound and he didn’t change his position, angled away from me as he stared out the glass walls behind his desk at the glimmering city rolled out before us. I stayed close to the door because despite my determination to see him, I didn’t know how to articulate my desire to comfort him. More importantly, I didn’t know if he would even accept it.
“I love you.”
That was what I wanted to say. I wanted to smooth it like salve into the wounds Elena had inflicted with her scared and bitter words, wanted to coat him in it until he shone with it for everyone to see.
How many times in the past few weeks had I imagined hearing those words from his lips? Imagined how the power of them would ignite the latent fire in my heart until it raced through my veins, eviscerating everything heavy and dull, the boulders of rationale and pain, the horrors of guilt and yearning. Burning it all clean until I wasn’t even a vessel anymore, maybe not even human, just red, smoldering flames feeding on shiny weightless air.
“I love you.”
Sinclair turned to face me but I tucked my chin in so that the long curtain of my hair would conceal the grotesque longing on my face. He didn’t need to see that. I didn’t want him to see that. It was bad enough that I saw it every day in the mirror, felt it in every single pore of my skin like old sweat and grime. I wanted Sinclair to see me differently, supple and shiny with love.
“Giselle.” His cold tone cracked through my simmering thoughts and I jerked towards him unconsciously. We were suddenly so close that I could see the texture of different blues in his crackling eyes.
“Are you going to say something?” he asked.
He was grinning but it was twisted badly, like a misshapen paperclip, rendered useless.
“I’m sorry, I must have been zoning out.” I clamped my sweaty palms together in my lap. “What did you say?”
“I love you.”
Blink. Pulse. Blink. Pulse, stutter, and pulse.
One hand ran through his hair and he looked away, slightly over my shoulder as if he couldn’t bear to look at me.
“I love you so much that I’m clumsy with it. There are so many times when I stared at you and waited for some sort of poetry to form, words that were worthy of my love for you, the intense, nonsensical, filled to the brim way that I feel about you. I pride myself on being an elegant man. I wasn’t born that way but I was raised it, and when those words won’t come, others do. The crass, dirty and poor part of me emerges like a fucking animal and all I want to do is claim you, put my scent onto every inch of your gorgeous skin, scream like a psychopath at everyone who looks at you that you are mine.”
He was panting, almost, his chest heaving and his features cracked wide open to reveal the massive crater I had unknowingly excavated, a yawning darkness filled with his love for me. The heavy sound of his breath and the sight of his pulse fluttering desperately in his throat reminded me to breath.
“Do you understand, Elle? What you do to me? I want to brand you and fuck you and marry you and breed you and do any God damn thing I can think of to bind us together so that no one, not one single fucking person, can get between us. Because, fuck, ever since I saw you pale and needy and so gorgeous my bones ached on that plane there have been things between us. Damned important things that just won’t go away.” He sucked in a deep breath and ran both hands through his hair before his eyes finally landed on mine, sliding into place like a key turning in a lock. “I know you don’t want to hurt your sister, you don’t want to cause any more turmoil in your family but, Elle, my siren, my love, I am being ripped to pieces every day knowing I can’t have you.”
These words were better than anything I could have possibly thought to long for, to imagine, and they settled around me like fine silk, the softest satin. But instead of luxuriating in the feel of it, I tangled myself up until I couldn’t breath.
“You don’t mean it, I mean, not really. It’s the excitement, the novelty and mystery of being with someone new, someone so different and, I don’t know, maybe younger?” I turned away from the slow freezing of his features; I couldn’t bare to watch the ice creep over my favorite blue eyes. “You think you want me but maybe you just don’t want Elena, especially right this moment when she was just so cruel to you, or maybe you’re having a midlife crisis or maybe you just want a submissive or—“
His hand on my arm was firm but not painful as he pulled me around to face him, our hips flush and his breath on my cheeks. “That is an awful lot of maybes, Elle.”
“We barely know each other,” I lied and it felt like blasphemy.
“I will tell you anything you want to know. You have free reign to dissect my soul, it is yours to do with as you please.”
My heart beat rapidly at the back of my throat, so fiercely that I almost gagged. I had never pictured a declaration of love like this. Everyone spoke of softness and ease as love words spilled from their lips, of euphoria and the miasmic shift as a yearning heart clicked into place with its soul mate. So why did I feel sick and aching, poised on the edge of an abyss so gargantuan and dark that I could see no means of escape. My fears lived within that crater, the deepest and darkest of them, and as I looked down at them I knew the decision I had to make – to love Sinclair or not – would mean the difference in facing them.