by Kallysten
“I hope you like frittata,” he said as he started to whisk the eggs. “I should have asked a while ago, but is there anything you don’t like, food wise?”
When I shook my head, it was an answer to both his question and the reply he was avoiding.
“So, he runs away, and you change the subject,” I said with an exaggerated sigh. “Not much better, you know.”
He didn’t reply and continued to work, slicing green onions before throwing them in with the eggs. A few quick swirls of the whisk, and now he was removing a bunch of fresh spinach from the fridge. That hadn’t been there the last time I’d looked for food. He’d just come back from vacation, and when I’d seen him earlier, he’d mentioned unpacking… Talk about being everywhere at once!
The spinach went in, then diced fish—salmon, I thought it was. I watched it all with interest. I’m not a great cook, but I can manage. If you’d given me a recipe, I could have made that frittata. But where Stephen needed little more than five minutes from the moment he cracked the first egg to the moment he poured the mixture into a pan, I’d probably have taken three times as long. He could have gone on one of those timed cooking shows on TV and never had to look at the clock.
“You’re good at this,” I said as he slid the pan in the oven. “Cooking, I mean. How come? You don’t cook much for him, do you?”
And yes, yet again I was drawing things back to Morgan. I just couldn’t seem to help it.
“Not for Mr. Ward, no,” Stephen said, clearing out the utensils he’d used. “I took lessons over the years. And I’ve been doing my own taste tests for a while. It’s nice to have another subject to experiment on.”
At that last part, he graced me with a rare smile. I returned it automatically.
“Well, so far I’ve enjoyed your experiments,” I said. “And I can’t wait to try this one.”
“Salad to go with it?” he offered. “How about dessert?”
“Yes, to the salad, but I’m going to skip dessert. With all the delicious things you cook for me, it won’t be long before I can’t fit into my jeans anymore, and it’s not like I can go buy larger ones.”
The salad was taking form right in front of me. He even made the vinaigrette from scratch.
“If you have nothing to wear,” he said with a laugh barely hidden in his voice, “I’m sure Mr. Ward could get a store to come visit. They might even give you a private runway show down in the main salon.”
I had no trouble imagining Morgan doing that. And I’d lie if I said the idea wasn’t at least a little bit intriguing. I’d had fun with the shoe shopping, after all. But still…
“Don’t you dare go and mention that to him,” I said, mock-scowling. “My clothes are just fine. I don’t need to leave with a dozen suitcases.”
Although maybe a second one… Morgan had brought me just the one suitcase and a limited selection of clothes. I didn’t mind using the laundry room, but what if I was still here when the season changed and my clothes became too warm? Maybe then a little bit of shopping wouldn’t be too bad, would it?
And judging from Stephen’s knowing smile, my train of thoughts was as discreet as a commuter train coming into a station at rush hour. He didn’t comment, however, and only said, “If you’ll head into the dining room, the salad is ready and the frittata won’t take very long.”
My legs suddenly turned to lead. I hadn’t consciously decided anything until now, but the thought of eating in that room, with all the memories it carried—false memories, at that—was unbearable.
“I think I’ll eat here,” I said, tapping the counter with my fingertips. “That’s what I did when I was on my own.”
Stephen’s smile disappeared, of course, and while he didn’t give me a reprobating look, it was right there in the way he said my name, and it annoyed the hell out of me.
“Miss Angelina—”
“No,” I cut in. “Don’t bother. I don’t intend to eat in that room. Not ever again.”
With a stiff back and steely eyes, he considered me before asking, “May I inquire as to why?”
I hadn’t planned to tell him, but the way he looked at me like I was a spoiled brat throwing a temper tantrum only compounded my annoyance. I wanted to see his countenance crack, much like I’d done to Morgan earlier. I was just tired of these men acting like they knew better and I was a child who ought to do as she was told. So, in my calmest voice, I said, “Because Morgan and I had sex on the table last night, and it did not end particularly well, so I’d just as well avoid that room, if it’s all the same to you.”
His expression became… very interesting. If you ever saw one of those cartoons where a character’s eyes become wider than their entire face, I think you’ve got a pretty good approximation of what he looked like. Still, I couldn’t quite tell what that expression meant. Surprise? Shock? Outrage that we might have defiled priceless furniture? After a couple of seconds, my amusement faded and I shrugged my shoulders, now a little uncomfortable.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” I said. “It didn’t actually happen. It was just a mind trip. But I’m still not eating in there.”
Stephen blinked, and his eyes returned to their proper size.
“A mind trip,” he repeated, pulling two plates from the cupboard. “Right.”
He divided the salad between the two plates and pushed one in front of me. Cutlery was next, then napkins, and fresh rolls from a paper bag on the back counter. He grabbed two tall glasses from another cupboard but seemed to change his mind and retrieved wine glasses instead. Soon, he was sitting at the island across from me, and taking a sip of red wine before he started on his salad.
He’d always been careful to keep clear boundaries between us, so I can’t say I wasn’t taken aback by this sudden change of heart. Did it mean I could push my luck a little?
“Did he ever do that to you?” I asked in between two bites of salad, feigning nonchalance.
“Have sex with me on the dining room table? No, definitely not.”
I almost choked on my food.
“Was that a joke?” I said, still coughing a little. “You just made a joke. So you do have a sense of humor.”
He raised one eyebrow at me.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize my sense of humor was in question.”
“You’re always so…” I caught myself gesturing with my fork and tried to remember my manners. “Proper,” I finished.
“Thank you. I try. And if I may point this out, you raised the topic of sex over lunch, not I.”
“I did, yes. Poor manners on my part. I apologize.”
He took a few bites before replying.
“No apologies necessary. And to answer your question, no, he never entered my mind. Or however that works.”
That was interesting, seeing how Morgan had done it to me three times in two weeks, without ever hesitating as far as I could tell. I’d have thought he might do it to other people just as easily, including Stephen.
“But you do know about it,” I prodded.
“I do, yes.” After a few seconds, keeping his eyes on the few pieces of lettuce left on his plate, he added, “He did it to my wife. Before we were married. I asked him to, actually.”
Each part of that statement came haltingly, as though he was deciding how much to tell me even as he said it. And what he said, of course, wasn’t nearly enough.
“You did?” I stared at him, my last forkful of salad forgotten for a moment. “Why would you do that?”
When he stood abruptly, I was sure I had offended him somehow. It was a private matter, after all, and I had no right to ask that kind of question to a man that, when you got down to it, I barely knew. I was about to apologize when, pulling a wallet from inside his jacket, he opened it and showed me the picture insert.
“This is her the year we met. We were sophomores in college. Love at first sight.”
Inside the plastic sleeve, the picture was all but pristine despite the fact that it might be more t
han twenty or thirty years old as far I could guess. It showed a young woman, standing in front of a nondescript wall, smiling brightly at the camera.
Her complexion was maybe a little lighter than Stephen’s, her long hair in a multitude of tiny braids that looked like they might have taken forever to weave. She wore jeans and a simple t-shirt, and while she had the look of someone responsible enough to babysit a gaggle of unruly children, there was a twinkle in her eye that said she might eat ice cream at midnight with them, too.
“She’s beautiful,” I offered when Stephen pocketed the wallet again.
“She was, yes.”
He turned his back on me, and I couldn’t help but think checking on the frittata was just an excuse, even if he did pull it from the oven.
“Beauty and brains,” he continued as he inverted the frittata onto a serving plate. “She got a full-ride scholarship. First person in her family to graduate from high school, never mind go to college. She wanted to be a doctor.”
I was afraid that, if I said anything, he’d stop talking, so I kept quiet. Soon, he set the frittata on the counter between us, cut into six pieces like a pie. When I raised my plate, he used the knife to slide a wedge onto it, then a second one onto his own. He picked up his story after sitting down again, talking in between bites and sips of wine.
“By junior year, we were engaged, but we’d agreed we’d wait to get married until we graduated. And then she started losing ground. She’d overextended herself with too many classes on top of a part-time job. I was busy with my own classes, and by the time I realized what was going on, she was addicted. She didn’t have much money, but whatever she did have went into drugs. One day… I noticed she wasn’t wearing her engagement ring anymore. She said she’d lost it. After a bit of prodding, I realized she’d sold it. It had been a family heirloom. Not worth all that much money, but still priceless. When I confronted her, she tried to deny everything. It all started to unravel. I loved her so much, but I didn’t know how to help her when she wouldn’t even admit she had a problem. This was when my grandmother told me about her employers. About them being vampires, I mean. She thought Mr. Ward might be able to help. She brought me here, had me talk to him. I wasn’t even sure I believed her. I was just desperate.”
I could easily believe that. I’d never known anyone who was addicted to more than cigarettes, so I can’t pretend I knew how he felt, but even after all this time had passed I could hear the pain in his voice.
“Did he help?” I asked quietly when he’d been silent for a few seconds, lost in the contemplation of his half-eaten frittata.
I’d already finished mine, managing to realize it was delicious even when I was so caught in Stephen’s story. I helped myself to a second slice while he picked up his story.
“He did, yes. He was very fond of my grandmother. He did it for her, I think, even though he wasn’t happy she’d told me about the vampire thing. He talked to me for a long time. Asked me about myself, but mostly about Ruby, about what she was like, even about her family. Then he came to campus with me. I was scared, so scared because he hadn’t really explained what he’d do. But I was even more scared that he wouldn’t be able to help. When he sat with her, she was sure he was some kind of doctor or shrink. But he didn’t talk to her. Instead, he gave her a mind trip, as you called it.”
What had that looked like, to Stephen, as he stood on the outside of that very special intervention? How long had it even lasted? I didn’t voice either question, and instead asked, “What did he show her?”
Blinking, Stephen seemed to emerge from his thoughts to look at me. He shrugged. “I have no idea. I asked him, and he said it was up to her to tell me or not. And she didn’t want to tell me. But whatever she saw, when she came out of it, she was sobbing, and begging us to help her get clean. It broke my heart. Especially since I knew it’d be a long road ahead of us. But he wasn’t done. He compelled her. Just a few words, and she never craved drugs again. She stayed clean from that day onward. She never even had so much as a glass of wine.”
Even as he said those last words, he refilled his glass and mine. I picked it up and held it aloft.
“He saved her life,” I said.
Stephen clinked his glass against mine.
“He did.”
His voice didn’t sound so gravelly anymore after he’d taken another sip of wine. The ghost of a smile flickered on his lips. He was still looking in my direction, but I had a feeling it wasn’t me he was seeing.
“Gave her a chance to fulfill her dreams. She became a doctor. She took care of her parents. She raised a wonderful daughter.”
“She married you.”
He shook his head, and now his gaze truly was focused on me.
“What I did… asking Mr. Ward’s help… I didn’t do that for myself.”
His voice took on a pleading quality. He wanted me to believe him. There was no issue there.
“I know,” I said with a smile. “I can tell how much you love her.”
He held my gaze as if to make sure I did believe him, then returned to his food. He didn’t speak again until he’d finished and started to put things away.
“She had a good life,” he said then. The pain was back in his voice. “That’s one of the last things she told me before she passed away.”
I didn’t know what to answer to that. ‘I’m sorry’ felt entirely inadequate. Standing, I took my plate to the dishwasher, and once I’d put it away, I rested a hand on Stephen’s arm. He gave me a nod and a little smile.
I stepped away again but only to go back to my stool. The conversation wasn’t over.
“Stephen?” I hated to push now, but I had to. There was a point behind all of this, and I wanted to get it. “This morning when I was asking about your grandmother, you didn’t want to talk. Why are you telling me all this now?”
He sat down again. There wasn’t much left in the wine bottle; he only refilled his glass.
“It’s been years since Mr. Ward had anyone here,” he said. “His birthday party? He’d never done anything like that for as long as I’ve worked with him. Let alone two parties in just two weeks.”
Given Morgan’s attitude, starting from the first glimpse I’d had of him, standing away from his guests rather than in the middle of them, I could easily believe that much. But it still didn’t explain anything.
“What does that have to do with you telling me about your wife?”
“When this all started, you were forced to be here… but it’s more than that now, isn’t it? That mind trip in there…” He gestured at the door behind me, the one that opened onto the dining room. “I like to think I know him. He wouldn’t have forced you to do something you didn’t want. Not even in a mind trip.”
That, too, I could easily believe, even if I didn’t want to think about it.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“He cares about you—”
“You don’t know that,” I interrupted. “I don’t know that.”
It was already too easy to delude myself; I didn’t need Stephen adding to it.
“He does,” Stephen insisted. “He let you in, Angelina. I haven’t seen him do that in twenty years.”
Without thinking, I slid off the stool. Part of me wanted to leave so I wouldn’t have to listen to this anymore, but that’d have made me a hypocrite, wouldn’t it?
“But he doesn’t! I told you, he doesn’t talk to me. He walks away in the middle of conversations.”
Stephen shook his head.
“And you’re not hearing me,” he said more loudly. “He hasn’t had conversations that weren’t work-related or directed at a member of his family in twenty years. Even half a conversation is pretty amazing if you ask me.”
Stephen was doing something truly awful to me. He was giving me hope. But I didn’t want more hope, did I? I was already foolishly hoping Morgan would realize I had meant every word I’d said to him, when he’d made it clear he didn’t believe me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and my words came out a little choked up. “I still don’t get what that has to do with your wife.”
“I didn’t tell you because of my wife.”
I’d never heard him speak so softly. Not ‘softly’ as in the loudness of his voice, although it was very quiet too, but rather his tone. I imagined that might have been the voice he used to sing lullabies to his daughter when she was a child, or to his granddaughters now.
“I told you so you’d know he’s a good man,” he continued. “Even if he won’t finish a conversation, he is a good man. He’s worth hanging on to.”
“Well, it’s not like I have much of a choice,” I said, troubled.
I still wasn’t sure why he was telling me this. Why did he care what I thought of Morgan?
“But you will have that choice, sooner or later.”
As far as I was concerned, I didn’t know that for certain, but I didn’t argue the point.
I went back to the library, my head still heavy and buzzing from everything Stephen had told me. He wanted me to know Morgan was a good man, he’d said. The thing was, I already believed that. I’d even told Morgan I thought he was a good man. But Morgan had denied it, and Stephen had thought it necessary to tell me a very personal—and I assumed painful—story to prove it to me.
What was I missing? What piece of information didn’t I have that could make me doubt he was a good man?
I didn’t get a chance to ask Morgan: he wasn’t in his office, nor did he come back all afternoon while I remained in the library. I thought about asking Stephen when I had dinner with him that evening, but while he didn’t protest (much) when I insisted on helping and preparing the salad, I hesitated about pushing his goodwill and making him return to his previous stance about sharing information with me. In the end, I didn’t ask.
I spent a little longer in the library that evening, but Morgan didn’t come back. I even went up to the sun room, telling myself that I’d often found him there, but he was nowhere to be seen. I felt more than a little lonely when I went to bed that night. And I did regret antagonizing Morgan.
