One Night in the Dark

"Vivienne?" Caleb said from the bed, and his voice was slurred. "Is that you?”

I stood with my back against the door in the pitch dark, and my heart was pounding so loudly I was sure he could hear it. The silver feathers of the mask brushed my cheek every time I breathed. My hand was still on the door handle, and I knew I could still turn around and leave, and every good thing I had ever been told about myself was begging me to do it.

I didn't answer.

"Come here," he said. "Please. I don't feel right."

I crossed to the bed. I didn't decide to. My legs just went.

When I sat down, he found my arm in the dark and ran his hand up it until he touched my face. His fingers stopped at the edge of the mask, and I stopped breathing. I was sure he was going to pull it off and see me, and I couldn't tell whether I was more afraid of that or hoping for it.

He didn't pull it off. He only moved his thumb slowly along my jaw.

"You're shaking," he said.

I shook my head.

"If you don't want this, tell me. I'll stop. Just say no."

He meant it. Even like that, burning and half gone, he meant it, and that was the worst part, because it let me pretend for one more second that this was a real thing between two real people instead of a theft. He had said her name. He thought I was her. Whatever I did in this room, I would be doing it to a man who didn't know who was touching him, and no yes he gave me could count, because he didn't know what he was saying yes to.

That was the thought that should have stopped me. It didn't. It only slowed me down.

He pulled me against his chest and his arms came around me, and his face pressed into my hair above the mask. "I shouldn't have said it like that," he murmured. I understood he was still talking to her, apologizing to her through me, and I should have hated it, and instead I stored every word like a beggar. "Tell her I'm sorry. Tell her I didn't mean it the way it came out."

I lay there with my ear over his heart and let a man hold someone he thought was someone else, and I have never done anything more wrong or wanted anything more.

Then he turned his face and found my mouth in the dark, and it wasn't a question anymore.

I would like to say that I stopped it, I didn't. I kissed him back with seven years of everything I had never said, and I felt his hands shake as they found the zip of my dress and failed at it, and I reached behind me and undid it myself. I will remember that part for the rest of my life, that I undid it myself. 

After that the dark did the rest of it. Heat and breath, his fever burning against my skin, his mouth at my throat, my palms flat on a chest I had drawn a hundred times from memory and drawn wrong every time. He was careful with me. Even lost, even burning, he was careful, and that was the cruelest thing about him and the kindest, because it made it so easy to forget what I was. It hurt, sharp and brief, and he went completely still and whispered, "Did I hurt you?" to a woman he thought was somebody else, and I shook my head against his neck and held on.

I kept every sound I made pressed into his shoulder so he wouldn't hear my voice. When it was over I cried without moving, so that he couldn't feel it.

He held me afterward like I might vanish, and I let him.

The fever kept climbing. I could feel it in the way his skin burned against mine, and when he began to shiver I remembered the cloth I had soaked in cold water in his bathroom. I slipped out of his arms, and he made a sound of protest and caught at my wrist.

"Stay."

"I'm here," I said, and the two words came out in my own voice, low, almost a whisper, and I froze with the cloth in my hand. But his eyes were closed, and he only settled, like a child who has been told the thing he needed to hear.

I pressed the cold cloth to his forehead and his throat and wiped the sweat from his neck. I held his hand when the shivering got bad. All night, in the dark, with the mask still tied over my face, I answered him every time he stirred. 

I'm here. I'm here. It was the cruelest lie I had ever told, and I told it tenderly, and every time I told it I meant it.

He never said her name again. Near dawn, half waking, he gripped my hand and said, muddled and quiet, "You always stay. Only you stay." I don't know if he meant Vivienne. I don't know if he meant the girl at dinner who touched his arm, or the girl on the back stairs he never asked questions, or nobody at all. I only know it was the first thing he said all night that didn't hurt, and that I had no right to it.

The window turned gray slowly. When I could see the shapes of the furniture, I slid my hand out of his an inch at a time. He made a small sound in his sleep and reached for the place where I had been, and my throat closed.

I found my dress and my shoes by feel and pushed my hair back into its pins. I untied the silver mask and set it on the dresser, feathers down, like a bird that had flown into the wrong window. The little moon was still on my wrist under my sleeve. He had told me not to take it off, and I hadn't, and I stood there wondering which of us was keeping that promise for the wrong reason.

Then I stood for a long moment looking at him in the gray light, his face turned into the pillow, his hair a mess, one arm open on the sheet where I'd been. He looked young. He looked like the boy on the back stairs who had never asked me a single question.

I could never undo this night, and I already knew I would go back to it for the rest of my life. Both things were true, and I carried them to the door and turned the handle.

Light from the corridor fell across the floor. I had one foot over the threshold when his voice came from the bed behind me

, low and hoarse and completely, horribly clear.

"Elise.”