by CD Reiss
She pressed my palm to her cheek. “I am. I finally figured out where you were.”
“Took you long enough.”
“Disappearing takes time.”
“I know. And being dead.”
“I’m not dead.” She sipped her espresso. “So when Margie came home and saw… it was bad, but I wasn’t choking on my own vomit. The idea was to tell you where to meet us. Peter was more scared of prison than anything, and he had plans for it, just in case. So Margie was going to tell Peter he’d killed me so he’d disappear, then you and I would meet up and just kind of lay low until we were sure he was gone. But she couldn’t get him on the phone, and when she called you…”
“He was there.”
“She had to choose between your story and his.”
“His was the right choice.”
“Obviously, but then you went off and…” She rolled her finger in a circle.
“I’m… uh.” I ran my fingers through my hair as if trying to comb out my embarrassment. I rarely thought about how I killed a man.
“Thank you,” she said. “Knowing he’s gone, I feel safer.”
“How did you find out it was me?”
“Deduction. And Margie. Who got it out of Daddy two months ago.”
“Does he know where you are?”
“He knows I’m alive, but not where. No one knows but Margie. She gets a real kick out of lying to my father. And there’s something mothering about her. She’s a nurturer. Like she wants to make up for the way our parents are.” She bit her lip. “I have to think about that more. But anyway, we figured the best way to do this was slowly. Use their emotional distance to our advantage. So we—mostly she—moved money in small bits and I just kept traveling until I used the new passport and I was gone.” She slapped her hands together as if getting dust off them. “No more Carrie. She never had a chance.” A rueful grin stretched across her face. “But Marie can be anything she wants.”
“What does she want to be?”
“Yours.”
“That’s it?”
“For now, that’s enough.”
My apartment was two blocks from the plaza. I’d paid cash in British pounds for one room with a balcony and private bath.
I carried her over the threshold like a smitten groom and kicked the door closed. She straightened her legs and I let her get her feet under her. I put her bag on the chair while she smoothed her dress and looked at the bed.
“Little bird?” I stepped back to give her room. “Don’t look like that. We’re going to take our time.”
“I know.”
When she looked back at me, I expected to see nerves or doubt. Maybe guilt for the reasonable notion that we weren’t going to tumble into bed.
Instead, she smiled and faced the ceiling with her eyes closed and her arms out. “I just want to hug the world!”
Then she leapt forward and hugged me instead, and I forgot I was ugly and scarred. I was made of what I saw, and with her, all I knew was beauty.
Epilogue
SIENA, ITALY - 2000
The hardest thing I ever did—harder than disappearing and staying that way, harder than being away from my family, harder than starting my education from scratch as Marie Laramy-Jefferson—was learning Italian. I had no talent for language, and though I could read and write pretty fluently, Gabriel laughed when I spoke it and told me my accent was just left of Chef Boyardee.
After a few weeks in Venice, we’d found the alley where we had been attacked. Gabriel stood on the cobblestones looking down at where he had been cut. He looked up at the flower boxes and balconies under the slash of blue sky. Finally, he put his hands in his pockets and looked at me.
“I should feel something,” he said with a shrug.
“There are no shoulds with feelings.”
“Good.” He nodded with satisfaction. “Little bird?”
“Yes?”
“Do you miss your family?”
“Do you miss your mother?”
“Yes. But I get to call her sometimes.”
“I miss them,” I said. “But I’m okay.”
He put his arm around me, and we left that alley behind us.
After that, we’d felt free to make a plan. We discussed moving to the UK to avoid the language barrier and decided to take the slow route north. Once we landed in Siena, we fell in love with our lives. The slow evening walks. The church bells. The Palio horse race around the Piazza del Campo that blew rich red dust over everything. The mild winter and blazing hot summer. The people gave Gabriel a hard time about his scars in a way that was good-humored and out in the open. He wasn’t regarded with suspicion or derision, and I felt strongly that that was a luxury he was entitled to.
Before the year was out, we decided to get married. We’d be Gabriel and Marie Jefferson. Married in a tiny ceremony in Chiesa di San Martino. We were named after a boulevard to the east of USC where the groom had almost been mowed down by the bride’s Cognitive professor. The six-lane boundary between our prelude and our story.
We both wanted family at the wedding. His mother knew he was somewhere, but not where. Some of my family knew where, but only Daddy and Margie knew why.
We weren’t dead to anyone, but we were unavailable indefinitely.
On the one hand, that made us free. On the other hand, we had to cling to each other as if we were the only things holding each other steady in a storm of loneliness and isolation.
In the years since I found him, he became everything to me. I trusted him. He was gentle. He was kind. He made love to me with a reverence that was both honest and restrained.
I remembered his commanding voice when we were together in college. The way he’d told me how to move, where he wanted me, how to please myself in a way that pleased him. When Peter came along, I’d thought surrender was the best part of sex, so my husband turned it into the worst part. He took what I wanted and perverted it.
Gabriel knew that. He knew I trusted him, but he didn’t offer the commanding voice again. I knew what he had in him, so I waited.
His journey to regain the dominance he’d once had was as long as my journey to trust myself enough to submit to it.
We didn’t get a fancy hotel for our wedding night. I was a student and he was a freelance music teacher and musician. We had neither the excuse nor the need to show off.
The ceremony was small. Almost nonexistent. A few neighbors came for the mass. A Scottish couple drifted in. We did all the traditional things, said all the old-fashioned words. I wore an off-white lace dress and pinned a square of lace to my hair. He looked gorgeous in his tux and bow tie. I couldn’t believe I’d landed such a beautiful man.
That night, after wine and dinner, we stumbled into our little apartment, laughing about something or other. Probably my accent or his inability to keep his bow tie straight.
But as I was leaning my hand on the wall to balance myself so I could pull off a heel, his voice came from across the room. Four words cut the space between us like a knife.
“Take it all off.”
I stood there with a white shoe dangling from my fingers by the heel, and he stood at the foot of the bed, as unequivocal as his tone. As straight as his demand.
“Gabriel?”
“You’ve asked me to be the way I was, and I wasn’t ready because I knew you weren’t. But now you’re mine, so if there’s a reason you can’t take your clothes off right now, say it. If you don’t want that man back, for any reason, tell me. Otherwise, this is going to be a lot more fun if you obey.”
Not petulant or doubting, not even compassionate. He was in charge. I could refuse, but if I didn’t, I was his to command.
I tried not to smile. I was happy he was ready to be fully himself. But mostly, I was happy for me.
“Um, I can’t…” I turned around, putting my back to him.
He laid his hands on my neck and, with deliberation, quietly pulled down the zipper
“I have plans.” He pulled op
en the back of my dress and ran his thumb down my spine.
“What kind of plans?”
“Something I was going to do our second night in Venice.” He stepped away.
I pushed off the shoulders the dress and let it drop to the wood floor, naked except for white stockings and panties.
“Turn around,” he said from behind me in that singular, no-nonsense tone.
When I turned on the ball of my foot, my nipples got hard. His jacket was on, but he’d removed the tie and unbuttoned his shirt. He came close, and when I tried to embrace him, he gently moved my arms to my sides.
“Don’t move until I tell you to.” He undid his belt and pulled it through the loops.
When the belt clanked, I swallowed hard. Fists clenched at my sides.
I didn’t know if I was ready for the belt.
No. I was sure I wasn’t.
“Gabriel…”
He tossed the belt on the chair. A useless thing he didn’t need anymore.
I breathed out all the tension. I could trust him.
“Yes?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“You doing okay?” He caressed my cheek, I tilted my head to meet the cup of his palm.
“Very okay.”
“Good. Now lie on the bed.”
We’d made love almost every night since we were reunited, but he seemed so different. Not a stranger, but someone I didn’t know, or had forgotten, and when he stood over me and looked at my naked body as if he wanted to devour it, my skin tingled for his hunger.
“Lie back and open your legs for me.”
The insistence wasn’t on the command, but on who I was opening my legs for. Him.
I fell back and as I lifted my legs, he pulled my knees apart, inspecting what I offered before putting my feet apart on the mattress. He opened the top drawer of the dresser and took out two loops of spare cello strings would into a circle.
Sitting on the corner of the bed, he kissed my ankle then tied the string around it.
“I’ve been thinking for months about how I’m going to play you.” He tied a knot and strung me to the footboard. “I’ve planned every moment. But if you’re uncomfortable or you don’t feel safe, you can tell me.” He ran his hand inside my leg, over my core and down the other side, landing at the free ankle. “Even if you don’t, I’ll know.”
“You’re not him.”
Having tied the other ankle down, he stood above me and took his jacket off.
“No. Because you’re going to like this.”
He undressed, taking his time while I tingled with arousal. He needed to pick up the pace. My body wanted to be touched so badly that when he kneeled at the foot of the bed my back arched to get closer to him.
“Patience,” he said, kissing the inside of my ankle. “Patience.” My calves, the tender insides of my thigh, he kissed up my belly and sucked my nipples one after the other until my legs pulled against the cords that held me.
“Patience.” He wove his mouth down me and between my legs, where I was aching for his touch. His tongue gently probed and found where I was sensitive and swollen. Resisting the binds on my legs grounded me as he brought me to an orgasm that lasted longer than I could hold my breath, clutching his hair in my fists.
“You’re magnificent,” he said, wiping his chin.
“I can barely breathe.”
He untied me and rubbed the indents in the skin of my ankles.
“Are you ready to spend your first night as my wife getting bossed around some more?”
“Yes, please.”
“You like it?”
“With you.”
“Good. Kneel with your feet under you. Hands on your knees, facing the wall.”
I did as he asked. Behind me, something creaked, but before I could look around, he came in front and placed the dresser mirror at the head of the bed. At first I filled the frame, then he adjusted it so I was half cut off by the edge.
In the mirror, he opened the closet door, where a full-length mirror was nailed to the inside.
“What do you see?” he said.
“My back and half my front.”
He put his face next to mine and spoke through the reflection. “Perfect.”
I brought my arm up and around his neck, but again he put it back down on my thigh. He reached around me, placing his hands between my closed knees.
“Open up for me. Let me see you.”
Before I could do it myself, he’d pulled my knees apart, and between the exposure of the mirrors and the force of his hands, a bolt of heat exploded between my legs.
“Not yet.” He smiled as his fingertips grazed inside my thighs while his other hand stroked my nipples. “Don’t come until I say.”
“Okay.”
Gently, he slid his finger along my seam, teasing my body with his touch. “You were always a work of art. Today you became my work of art.”
He stood. In the mirror, I saw him go to the dresser and pick up a little jar from the drawer. He unscrewed the top and kneeled behind me again, laying his hand on my back.
“I’ve wanted to do this for so long. It was the only thing I planned to do before the attack that I never stopped wanting.” He drew his finger down the length of my back, leaving something cold and viscous behind. “It was unfinished business. But I couldn’t.” His hand went away and came back on the other side. “I’ve had this in the drawer for months and nothing was stopping me. You would have let me do it.” He kneeled on the floor so he could get to the lowest part of my back. “But the longer I waited, the bigger it got. More important than a bedroom game.” He screwed the cap back on the jar. “I couldn’t mark you until you were mine completely.”
When he stepped away, I saw my back in the closet mirror. He’d painted two black curves, one on each side of my back. An S and the reverse of the same shape.
He’d made me into a cello.
“The left one’s a little too high,” he said to my reflection.
“Next time.”
He turned away from the mirror to reply. “Next time.”
Kneeling before me on the bed, he pulled me to him, lowering me onto his erection.
In one mirror, my body was an instrument for him to play. In the other, my body was wrapped around his, guiding and protecting us.
Both could be true.
There, in Siena, we decided to make a life, and I decided what I wanted to do with mine.
We bought an apartment and settled in. My husband composed under a pen name and taught music at Accademia Musicale Chigiana while I studied undergraduate philosophy at University of Siena.
He didn’t cover his appearance with more than a patch, ever, and he rarely wore it when we were alone together. Some mornings, when I got up first, I’d stare at his peaceful face in the Mediterranean light and wonder at the beauty of each scar. How the skin had healed over his wounds and left a mark to remind me of the miracle of his survival.
In the years that passed, I never stopped being grateful for those scars. I couldn’t imagine loving him without them.
On the morning of my graduation, I came out of the bathroom, dressed and ready to go. I pulled my blue gown off the hanger and stepped into it.
“Do you have the cap?” he asked, looking around nervously. He was perfect in an ash-gray three-piece suit he’d had tailored in Milan, with the usual patch over his eye. I thought it made him look dashing and dramatic. He thought it made him easier for strangers to talk to. We were both right.
“On the bed.” I wrestled with the gown to find the zipper.
“Hang on,” he said, getting on one knee before me. He took the zipper head and stood as he pulled it up to my neck, and he kissed me before he let it go.
“Thank you.”
“You look…” He stepped back to see me from head to toe. “Brilliant. Wait. You need your con lode stole.”
“Next to the cap.”
He plucked the thin yellow stole off the bed and draped it over my ne
ck, smoothing the satin flat against me. “Better.”
“I feel bad about this.” I touched the honorary sash.
Gabriel and I had been over this a hundred times. Because Marie had no educational history, I’d had to build one. I’d taken night classes that didn’t require a previous transcript and got letters of recommendation from teachers who thought I was some kind of genius. Gabriel said the fact that—as Carrie Drazen—I’d already learned most of the coursework at USC was mitigated by the years I’d have to spend starting over.
“Was your application to grad school dependent on anything you’d learned before?”
“No, but—”
“And are you now totally caught up?” He adjusted the collar under the robe. “You’re starting grad studies with the same education as everyone else?”
“I am.”
“And did you not have to ace a bunch of exams in a foreign language?”
“I’ve had advantages.”
“You have.” He laid his hands on each side of my jaw, resting his thumbs on my cheeks. I felt the callous on his left thumb. “And you’re going to use them to help people who don’t have those advantages, right?”
“So?”
“So can you just enjoy your accomplishments?”
“For you.” I turned my face to kiss his palm. “Because it makes you happy.”
“It does. Seeing you do what you want with your life makes me happy.”
“I wish you could too. We should—”
He kissed me before I could suggest all the things I had before. He could go incognito again. Make records. Do shows. Something to fulfill his dreams.
He’d rejected it all so many times. But I thought I could wear him down. At least force him to express some kind of disillusionment. He never did.
“I’m your husband and I’m making music,” he said. “That’s what I love doing. In that order.”
Maybe I’d already found the place I thought his disappointments were lurking and found contentment instead.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
He took his hands off my face and picked up his cello case. “I’m sure. Playing in the orchestra behind you while you graduate? It’s exactly what I want to be doing.” He held out his hand. “Grab your cap.”
