Starling House, page 27
He climbs up and up, through the cellar door, past the library, back to his little room in the attic. He lights the lamp and sits in the soft light, wondering if he should sleep, knowing he won’t. A stray breeze fingers through the window, rich and sweet-smelling, and flutters the drawings pinned to his wall. One of them comes loose and slips to the floor.
Arthur bends toward it and pauses, seeing that streak of cinder on the page. He laughs, harshly, and for the first time a shard of pain pierces his weird elation. “Give it up,” he says. “She’s not coming back, this time.”
It is at precisely this moment, as if the House itself arranged it so, that he hears the distant thud of a fist on his front door.
When someone crosses onto Starling land, Arthur knows it. It’s simply a part of being Warden, a melding of land and house and body that leaves none of those things entirely distinct from the other. But he hadn’t felt the draft of the gates opening, the faint tick of a foreign heartbeat.
Perhaps the House hid her from him; perhaps she’s been here so many times, sweating and bleeding and breathing, that the land no longer greets her as a trespasser, but as a part of itself.
Arthur stumbles twice on the stairs. He pauses before the front door, panting, feeling desperate and helpless and hungry and profoundly annoyed, the way he always does around her.
She knocks again. He is aware that he shouldn’t answer it, that it will only make everything harder.
He answers it.
Opal is standing on his threshold, looking up at him with the same wary, weary expression she wore the first time he found her outside his gates. He has a maudlin impulse to memorize her: the canny silver of her eyes and the crooked front teeth, the lunar white of her skin and the startling black of her freckles, like constellations in negative. There are swollen red rings around each of her wrists, and two of the knuckles on her right hand are split.
Arthur shouldn’t reach for that hand. He shouldn’t turn it in his and run his thumb over the crusted ruin of her knuckles, thinking of Elizabeth Baine’s busted lip and feeling a swell of strange, possessive pride. He certainly shouldn’t bring the knuckles to his lips.
He hears a quick inhalation. Opal’s eyes are dark, uncertain. “Are you sober?”
“Yes.” He wonders if that’s true. He hasn’t had a drop of actual alcohol since the day Jasper broke in, but he feels weightless, unmoored from himself, and the lights have a fevered, splintered look he associates with cheap whiskey. The entire House feels alive around him, a presence that pulses beneath his bare feet.
Opal doesn’t look convinced. Her eyes flick to her hand, still held in his, then back to his face. Her chin lifts. “Are you going to kick me out again?” It’s supposed to sound like a challenge, a mocking gauntlet, but there’s a roughness to her voice that Arthur doesn’t understand.
“I should,” he says, honestly, but he doesn’t let go of her hand. He reminds himself firmly that there’s no room for wishes or wants in his life, that every time he’s caved to his own childish desires it’s come at a terrible cost. That he has what he needs, and it’s enough.
It’s just that, sometimes, God help him, he wants more.
A tremor moves through Opal. He follows it down her arm, up to her face. In the split second before she looks away, he sees her unmasked. He sees her terror and desire and bitter disappointment, the particular desolation of a lonely person who thought, briefly, that they might not be. Already she is steeling herself against him, like a girl bracing against the cold.
This, Arthur finds, he cannot tolerate. His life so far has been nothing but a wound on hers. She wears the scars well—she’s made her life into an act of defiance, a laugh in the dark, a smile with bloodied teeth—but he refuses to add even one more.
He opens the door wide and pulls her inside.
* * *
I shouldn’t have come here, but I did. I shouldn’t go inside, but I do.
The house is quiet tonight, and darker than I’ve ever seen it. No candles or lamps sit on the sills, no lights flicker to life overhead. Even the moonlight falling through the windows seems muted and obscure, a gaze averted.
Arthur reaches around me to shut the door and a last rush of perfume slides into the hallway. The vines on the house are blooming—I saw them when I climbed the steps, lavish cascades of flowers that turn the night thick and sweet. I always thought wisteria grew best on the riverbank, but maybe Starling House makes its own rules.
Arthur doesn’t step away when the door latches. We stand facing each other, unspeaking, letting everything between us—the confessions and recriminations, the lies and betrayals—slip away into the dark, until all that’s left is what comes next.
It’s not something I need. It’s something from that second, more dangerous list, the one I thought I burned eleven years ago. It’s something I want, and the knowledge makes me feel reckless and raw, a soft-bodied animal running too fast through the woods. It’s not cold, but I’m shivering.
Arthur tucks my hair behind my ear for the second time tonight, but now his hand lingers against the line of my jaw. He takes a step closer and the air between us turns thin and hot.
“May I kiss you, Opal?” The question is polite, restrained; his eyes are not.
I’ve never been shy about sex. It’s always been easy for me, a safely transactional exchange of needs, but a tremulous fragility overtakes me now. I can’t speak. I manage a shallow nod.
I’m expecting it to feel like it did before: a reckless collision, a thing that could only happen at the ragged edge of his self-restraint. But this time is different. This time Arthur kisses me with an awful, excruciating tenderness, like I’m spun sugar or fine crystal, like he has all the time in the world. It feels good. It feels dangerous. I want him suddenly to be less tender, to leave me with my lips split and my heart perfectly whole.
I’m shaking worse now, breathing too hard. Arthur’s chest touches mine and my entire body flinches away, as if I’m protecting some delicate instrument behind my breastbone.
Arthur pulls instantly back. “Did I hurt you?”
“No.” My voice is small and wretched.
“Do you—do you want to stop?”
“No,” I say, even more wretchedly.
Arthur pauses, studying me. I can’t meet his eyes. He touches his thumb to my lower lip, still so gentle I want to weep. “You asked me why I paid for Jasper’s tuition.”
“Because you didn’t want me to come back.”
“I lied.” He’s whispering now, his breath ghosting across my skin. “I did it so you wouldn’t have to come back. So that, if you came back, it would be because you wanted to.” Then, even softer, as if the words are coming from inside my own skull, “What do you want, Opal?”
“I want—” The truth is I want him and I’m scared of wanting him and ashamed of being scared. The truth is I’m a coward and a liar and a cold bastard, just like my mother, and in the end I will let him drown to save myself. I should cut and run right now, before it’s too late, before he finds out what kind of person I really am.
But I can’t seem to make myself move.
I close my eyes. Maybe there’s no difference between wanting and needing except in degree; maybe if you desire something badly enough, for long enough, it becomes a demand. “This,” I whisper. “I want this.”
Arthur’s hand slides to the back of my neck and the flat of his palm steadies me, pins me gently to the earth. “It’s alright.” He lowers his face until I can feel the rush of his breath on my lips. “I’ve got you, Opal.”
And I feel myself going under, sinking into the weight of his hand. My limbs go slow and heavy. I’m not shaking anymore.
I let him back me against the door. I let him touch me, his hands simultaneously rough and reverent. He lays his jaw along mine and speaks to me, and his voice is like that, too—the tone harsh, the words sweet. “It’s alright,” he says again, and “let me,” and once, raggedly, “fuck, Opal.”
I let him lay me down on the floor, the rug impossibly soft under the bare wings of my shoulder blades. I let him press into me so slowly I can’t breathe, can’t think, for wanting.
Arthur holds himself still, then, his body strung tight. “Are you sure—” he starts, but I’m suddenly, entirely sure, and tired of waiting.
“Christ on a bicycle,” I say, and shove him over, rolling until he’s beneath me, inside me, his hair a tangled black halo on the floor. His expression is stark and scraped raw, almost desperate; it’s the face of a starving man before a feast, holding on to his table manners only by the very tips of his fingers.
I imagine stamping on those fingers, one by one. I smile down at him, and I know by the hitch of his breath that it’s my real one: crooked and mean and just as hungry as he is.
I catch his hands—hovering, uncertain—and slide them up my thighs. I press his fingers into my hips, hard enough to hurt, hard enough that tomorrow I will see the faint blue ghosts of his thumbs and remember his hands holding me like I belong to him.
There’s no more hesitating, after that, no more doubt. There’s just the two of us and the thing between us, an urgent, animal hunger that swells until it swallows us both.
I let him hold me, afterward, and the geometry of our bodies feels natural, inexplicably familiar. It feels like four walls and a roof overhead, a space stolen from the rest of the world that belongs only to me. I don’t let myself think the word, but it moves through me like a shout down a mine shaft: a subterranean echo that goes on and on, loud enough to make the timbers shake.
Arthur’s knuckle traces a tear from the corner of my eye to my temple. He doesn’t say anything.
“Can I—” I’ve never asked to stay the night with anyone before and I don’t like it much. It feels like turning belly up, exposing my weakest flesh to him. “It’s just, with the motel gone, I don’t really know where to…”
A darkness passes over Arthur’s face, and for an unbearable second I think he’s going to send me away again, but then he presses his lips to the place where my collarbone meets my shoulder.
He leads me upstairs.
* * *
Arthur has spent his life preparing—for battle, for Beasts, for his own bitter end—but he wasn’t prepared for this. He wasn’t prepared for the flayed look in her eyes or the feel of her above him, or the way she wept when she came, like some final barricade had been breached inside her and left her without defense. He wasn’t prepared for the sight of her in his bed, the way the white tops of her shoulders would extend past the edge of his quilt. He looks away, but their afterimage lingers on the backs of his eyelids, a ghostly pair of half-moons.
Opal falls asleep easily and thoroughly, as a child would. Arthur thinks it’s probably a sign of physical exhaustion more than an act of trust, but he resolves to deserve it anyway. He holds himself rigidly awake, listening for the creak of a hinge, the scrape of a key in a lock. Baast keeps him company, sitting in the round window with her eyes fixed on the ground below.
Sometime in the black hours after midnight, Opal tenses. Her hands curl into fists and her lips press together, like she’s trying desperately to keep something in or out. A shiver begins in her spine and extends down each of her limbs, until she’s shaking against him. Arthur folds himself more tightly around her, one arm braced across her stomach, as if there’s a physical cold he can keep at bay.
Opal’s eyes open on a gasp. She blinks down at Arthur’s arm with an expression suggesting she’s never seen one before.
He loosens his hold, feeling foolish. “Nightmare?”
“Yeah.” Her voice is hoarse, as if she’s been screaming. “The river again.”
Guilt strikes him, familiar as a fist. He remembers the sound of Opal’s voice as she told him how to find the fourth key—dull and cold, everything she isn’t—and it strikes him as a miracle that she ever spoke to him again. “I’m sorry,” he says, thickly. “I know it doesn’t matter now, it doesn’t fix anything, but I’m sorry.”
Opal cranes her neck around to look at him, her face stricken. “It was you,” she says, and Arthur wonders if she’s still half asleep.
“Yes. It was me. I let the Beast take your mothe—”
“No, I mean, it was you on the riverbank.” Opal doesn’t look half asleep. Her eyes are bright silver, full of eerie clarity. “It was you holding me.”
Arthur hadn’t thought she could possibly remember that. By the time he dragged her out of the river she was half-drowned and three-quarters frozen, her flesh a sickly, mottled blue, a crystalline rime of frost forming on the ends of her hair. He was cold, too, but his head hadn’t gone under and his coat was thick wool, and also he was still slightly drunk.
Arthur withdraws until there’s a tiny space between them on the mattress. “I called 911, but I didn’t know how long they’d take, and your skin was the wrong color…”
Opal is propped up on her elbows now, looking at him with inexplicable urgency. “Did you find me on the shore? Or did you—was I still—” Her chest is rising and falling too fast.
Arthur isn’t sure what answer she wants, so he tells the truth. “All I saw was the car. It wasn’t that deep yet so I waded in. Your window was down, your seat belt was off—but you weren’t swimming out. You must have been stuck on something, because I pulled and you came loose.”
That night is a nauseous blur—the Beast rising from the mist, antlered and awful; his own feet slapping the frozen ground; the scream of tires; a girl’s face, blue beneath the water—but he remembers the way her wrist felt in his hand, the moment something gave way and she slid up to the surface.
Opal’s eyes are huge, filling fast. “I wasn’t stuck. I was holding on to—” The tears refuse to fall, pooling on her eyelashes. “I always thought I let go,” she whispers, and then the tears come in a dismaying flood. Arthur isn’t sure exactly why she’s crying or whether it’s his fault, but he touches her shoulder, tentatively, and she buries her face in his chest.
He holds very still while she cries, making his breath slow and even, as if he is trying to pet Baast without being bitten. After a while, Opal says, somewhat incoherently, “I read the letter. I’m sorry.”
Arthur doesn’t know which letter she could mean, but he says, “That’s alright,” in case there’s still a chance of being bitten.
“The one from your mother. I stole it. I tried to put it back, but then Jasper found the second half…”
Arthur was already still, but he feels himself calcifying. It simply isn’t possible that he would have left either half of that letter lying carelessly among his other notes, no matter how drunk or dissolute he’d been. Which means the House had taken matters into its own metaphorical hands.
Arthur briefly imagines shoving gum in all the light sockets, or perhaps breaking all the windows on the third floor, before he remembers that he won’t have time.
He clears his throat and produces a feeble “Oh.”
Opal has peeled her face off his chest. “I’m sorry. I know it was wrong.” She pauses. “It was beautiful, though.” She pauses again, seeming to pull the next words from some hard place inside herself. “It made me so damn jealous.”
“Why?”
A fresh sheen of tears turns her eyes into shards of mirror. “Because like—at least she said goodbye. At least she tried to do right by you.” But it’s not jealousy in her voice; it’s just grief.
Arthur asks, “What was she like?”
Opal exhales. “A fucking mess. A natural disaster wearing Daisy Dukes.” She smiles, and God, Arthur is going to miss that sharp twist at the corner of her mouth, that edge that never quite dulls. “I don’t know. I guess she was trying, too.”
They’re quiet for a little while after that. Arthur lies on his back and she fits herself easily into the crook of his arm, her arm resting in the dip of his sternum. He feels it rise and fall as he breathes. He pictures the two of them as children, separated by a handful of years and a couple of miles. Both of them lonely, both of them bound to a place that didn’t want them. Both of them bent beneath the weight of what their parents left behind: a baby brother, a house, a battle that never ends.
“Arthur … why did you stay? She said you didn’t have to.”
Her hair is silver in the dark. He wraps a curl around his finger. “Why didn’t you hand Jasper to the state and run away?”
“Maybe I will. Run, I mean.”
“No, you won’t.” Jasper had been right. “And neither will I.”
And maybe it’s this that makes them truly and terribly alike, this refusal to run, this mad urge to dig their nails into the dirt and stay. None of the other Gravelys had risked it, but Opal had.
She makes a small sound beside him, and Arthur notices that his fingers have curled into a fist, tugging her hair. Her head tilts up to his and this time she does not flinch when his lips touch hers.
This time he holds himself over her, looking into the ravenous black of her eyes. This time she slides her wrists beneath his palms and whispers: don’t let go. He doesn’t, even when she twists and cries out, even when she sets her teeth to his throat. He can feel the trembling in her, the fear of her own appetites, and wants to tell her so many things: that there’s nothing to be afraid of, that he will take care of her, that he’ll hold her and never, ever let go. But he was never a good liar. So he doesn’t say anything except her name, at the end.
This time when she falls asleep against him, it feels like trust. This time, he follows her.
Arthur dreams, and this time he isn’t sure whether they belong to him, or to the House. It’s a series of small, ordinary scenes: a pair of mugs side by side in the sink; a voice humming a song he doesn’t know, just around the corner; hair spilling across his pillow like poppy petals. A life that isn’t lonely, a house that isn’t haunted.
