Chapter 4: The Morning After

The first thing she was aware of was the light.

It came through the curtains in long pale strips and landed across the bed with the kind of quiet that meant the world had continued turning overnight regardless of what had happened in it.

The second thing she was aware of was that she was still in her wedding dress.

Clarissa lay completely still for a moment. Eyes open. Staring at a ceiling that was not her ceiling while the events of yesterday assembled themselves slowly in her mind like pieces of something broken being laid out one by one.

The altar.

Charles.

The reception.

The champagne.

Then his voice at the door. So quiet she had been almost completely under by then, hovering at the very edge of sleep.

Some things are more real than you know.

She sat up.

Too fast. The room tilted and she pressed her fingers to her temple and waited for it to steady. Her mouth was dry. Her eyes felt swollen. The wedding dress was creased beyond saving, ivory lace twisted around her like something that refused to let yesterday go.

She looked down at herself and felt something between a laugh and a sob rise and settle in her chest without becoming either.

Then she raised her fingers slowly to her lips.

She remembered.

Not the champagne blur that had swallowed most of the night. This she remembered with a clarity that was almost cruel. Leaning into him. The warmth of his mouth. The way his hands had tightened at her waist for one devastating moment before he pulled back.

I will not be something you regret in the morning.

She dropped her hand.

She was sitting in yesterday’s wedding dress touching her mouth thinking about Charles Richard and she needed to stop that immediately.

She got up and went to the shower and stood under it for a long time with her hands flat against the tile and let the heat work through the champagne and the grief and the memory of a pair of hands that had been steady and warm and certain in a way she was not going to think about anymore.

She thought about Luca instead.

She waited for the familiar weight of it. That deep ache she had carried since she was twenty two.

It came.

But different this morning. Less like drowning. More like something that had already, without asking her permission, begun to change shape.

She wasn’t sure how she felt about that either.

She found Charles at a table near the window of the hotel restaurant.

Already dressed. Dark suit. White shirt. Not a single sign on him that yesterday had been anything other than a moderately busy Tuesday. He had coffee and a newspaper and the composed stillness of a man who existed at a different temperature to everyone around him.

He looked up when she approached.

Something moved through his expression. Brief. Controlled. Gone.

“Sit down,” he said. “Have coffee.”

She sat. Poured a cup and wrapped both hands around it and looked at him.

He looked back.

“How are you feeling,” he said.

“Like I slept in a wedding dress.”

That almost-movement at the corner of his mouth again. “You should eat.”

She looked at him across the table. At the newspaper he hadn’t gone back to. At the coffee cup he was holding with both hands. At the complete composure of a man who was apparently entirely unbothered by the fact that last night had happened.

“Charles,” she said.

“Mm.”

“Last night.” She held his gaze steadily. “Before you left. What you said.” A breath. “Did you mean it.”

He looked at her for a moment.

Then he tilted his head very slightly.

“What you did last night,” he said quietly. “Did you mean it.”

The air went out of her completely.

She felt the heat climb her neck before she could stop it and she looked down at her coffee cup and picked it up and set it down again and did several things with her hands that accomplished nothing.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“Don’t you.”

“I had a lot of champagne last night. I barely remember anything clearly.”

“Is that right.”

His voice was perfectly even. Not mocking. Not pressing. Just sitting with the words and letting them do what they were going to do.

She looked up at him.

He was watching her with those dark steady eyes and the absolute patience of a man who had all the time in the world and knew exactly what she was doing and was going to let her do it anyway.

Her jaw tightened slightly.

“I really don’t remember,” she said.

“Alright,” he said simply.

The single most infuriating word she had ever heard.

She opened her mouth.

Closed it.

Opened it again. “What is that supposed to—”

“Eat something.” He picked up his newspaper. “We leave for the house in an hour.”

She stared at the side of his newspaper.

At the complete unbothered composure of a man who had just dismantled her entirely with four words and a look and was now apparently reading the business section.

She reached for the menu.

Her hands were not entirely steady.

She was not going to think about why.

The waiter appeared and she ordered without looking at the menu properly and when the waiter left she looked up and found the newspaper had lowered by exactly two inches.

Just enough.

Just enough for her to see his eyes above the paper’s edge.

Watching her.

With an expression that had nothing to do with obligation or duty or saving a family name.

The newspaper came back up immediately.

Clarissa looked down at the table.

Her fingers found her lips without her permission.

She pressed them flat against the tablecloth instead and said nothing and told herself the feeling currently living in her chest was simply the aftermath of a very long and complicated yesterday.

She almost believed it.