The angle of the bed and the placement of the window frames a gap in the thick trees surrounding the cottage, and in that gap there are stars.
Not tonight. Tonight it’s just the constant fast-falling snow lit up by a hidden full moon. But the heavy flakes make a white curtain that dulls the blackness of space and makes me feel like I’m underneath a fluffy down comforter.
I stare at it, lids heavy and tired, even though five minutes ago the idea of sleep felt as foreign as the man out in my living room, so I allow myself to drift away…
When he comes up the stone stairs to the second floor of the tower his expression is one of expectant surprise. And by that I mean he knew this was coming. Some part of him knew that I’d get a night alone with him eventually.
It’s only fair, right?
“What’s going on? Where’s Sofia?”
“She has the night off,” I say, then add, “I guess,” to make it seem like I didn’t play a part in these unusual circumstances.
“Huh,” he says, taking a seat on the long, crushed-velvet couch.
The couch was Camille’s request. It’s been here since the second week we played this little game. Camille got the point of the game before the rest of us because she and Bennett went first, so she took that little pad of paper sitting on top of the wooden box marked “suggestions” seriously.
This room is her imagination incarnate because that first night we came up here the whole floor was empty. Nothing but cold stone to fill up the darkness.
We each had a candle. There’s no power in this building. It’s some leftover relic of master masonry from back in the days of soldiers and forts. So that’s all there was. Just seven people holding seven candles, standing in the dark.
But tonight the walls are covered in elaborate tapestries. The cold floors are warmed with threadbare Persian rugs. There’s more than just one couch too. Louise asked for another one about a month into things. That’s the one I’m sitting on. Thick pillows and soft cushions slipcovered in cream mold to my body like perfect summer-day clouds.
This couch is out of tune with Camille’s vision of the room, but no one cared. Not even Camille, because that first crushed-velvet couch is about as comfortable as a church pew.
There are four more chairs, each situated on a diagonal so that all the seating is arranged in an elaborate circle built for conversation.
And oh, the conversations we’ve had up here.
That alone could fill a book.
Not a sexy one. Not an erotic one, like what was actually being written. But a fantastic mystery for sure.
How many nights did we sit up here in our circle of seven, trying to figure out what was happening? Who was doing this? What it all meant and how we’d have to pay the price for the hedonism that took place within these four walls?
Too many.
Hayes wanted a bar. Fully stocked with a long list of expensive liquor and champagne. The sound of ice dropping into cut-crystal glasses will always remind me of Hayes. Hayes and I were always drunk when we had our time together. Louise didn’t partake, but she tried to opt out of everything.
Bennett wanted a Victrola you could make play by turning a crank. Old, crackly music will always remind me of Bennett. He would offer Camille his hand and she’d accept. He’d pull her into the center of the room and they’d dance in slow circles for hours sometimes. Putting off the inevitable.
Sofia wanted clothes. Gowns. Racks and racks of them. We played dress-up when I spent the evening with Sofia and Connor. It was so weird.
Louise wanted games. Monopoly, checkers, chess, backgammon, Life, Trouble, Hungry Hungry Hippos. Shit like that. Every fucking week it was another goddamned game.
She’d gone well past weird by that time, but it wasn’t this place that did that to her. Louise was just naturally weird. Always asking us weird questions about shit.
What were those questions?
I can’t remember. I just remember the games.
I asked for books. So by this time, at the end of the school year, we had stacks and stacks of them. No shelf—no one bothered to waste a suggestion on a shelf, not even Camille, even though she sometimes read them too. Always looking for a way to escape her fate. They just lined the perimeter of the room in tall towers like soldiers keeping the walls at bay.
Connor wanted nothing. He never once dropped a suggestion into the box.
I admired that about him. How he resisted the perks but never the acts.
He was into the acts.
We all were, even me, who was only there to write them all down in perfect detail.
I’d gotten good at my job by this time. My words flowed effortlessly as I chronicled what happened in the second floor of the tower. Maybe they weren’t prose, but they were on their way.