The Fall of Troy

by Dr. Rebecca Sharp

  But Troy was here and that was the problem.

  “What are you going to do when we leave? You can’t take her with you,” she insisted, and it made me want to smack the presumption right from her mouth. I could do whatever the fuck I wanted with what was mine, my body raged. My heart pumped faster, not with beats but with the word ‘mine.’

  Mine. Troian. La mienne.

  “Does she know about Amélie?”

  Like darts, my eyes flew to hers and pinned her. “This is fine,” I clipped and held the paper back out to her. “Make copies for next week.”

  Giselle didn’t fight me. Troy would have; she would have stayed and demanded answers because she was ma petite battante.

  I hadn’t told her about Amélie. Not in full. Not in truth. What I had told her led her to believe either one of two options: that Amélie had died or that our relationship had ended. I guess, technically, neither of those were all false—or all true.

  The police insisted that any live person would have turned up by now and I’d already contacted my lawyer to have everything prepared to end the legal façade that was all that remained of our marriage. But I knew the truth. I knew Amélie was still out there and I knew she would be back when it suited her.

  I snarled when there was another knock at my door. “What?”

  Jack peered inside. “Everything okay?”

  “Fine. Just working.”

  My fist clenched when he stepped inside, not closing the door but with no intention of leaving either.

  “You seem different lately, Léo. Still angry… but a different kind of angry.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged and sat down in the chair in front of my desk—the chair that I’d feasted on Troy last week. Her legs had been draped over the armrests. Her gorgeous pink cunt spread wide for my mouth and tongue. I shifted in my seat. It didn’t get any easier to go without her. Without losing myself in her body. In her mind…

  “You used to be angry because of what you didn’t know what you had or what you lost. Now, it seems like you know what you want… and you’re angry because you can’t have it.”

  “Says who?” I crossed my arms.

  He raised an eyebrow and then laughed. “I have no idea. You tell me.”

  “Maybe next time.” I tapped my pencil on the desk. “Is there something that you needed?”

  He sighed. “No. Not really. You know we’re friends, right?”

  I nodded curtly.

  “I just… I see a change in you. I mean, the anger is still there, but there’s more. And there hasn’t been more for a long time.” That’s because there wasn’t her. “Are you sure something hasn’t happened? With Amélie?”

  My eyes squinted at him. “Why would something have happened with Amélie?”

  “I don’t know. I just thought maybe you heard something or a new clue appeared out of nowhere. I mean, your shirts are no longer wrinkled.”

  Because Troy bought a small steamer and carted it around with her—to my apartment, to my office—and ironed my shirts. I accused her of just wanting to see me without my shirt on; she agreed.

  “You’re civil to your students.” Christ. When was not being an asshole a crime? “And I know you’re working on your piece again… I stopped by a few times last week. You weren’t here, but I saw some of the sketches you did on your desk. Amazing, Léo. Seriously, amazing.”

  It was only amazing because he didn’t recognize them as one of my students.

  Mercifully.

  “I thought maybe you heard something,” he continued. “That there was closure or that—” he waved his hands in the air, “she contacted you or something.”

  The familiar suffocation around my heart began again. Blackness. Anger. It blotted out everything.

  “But then I come in here and you have that same rabid-looking rage boiling just beneath the surface, so I have no idea what is going on. And that concerns me.”

  “No. Nothing,” I clipped. Now leave.

  “Have you… met someone? The woman in the drawings, maybe?” My eyes narrowed on him and it felt like I’d given him answers to questions he hadn’t asked. “Is she upset because of the situation with Amélie? Have you told her about Amélie?”

  No. But I was sure Troy would be more than upset if she knew the truth.

  “I’m fine and no one is upset.” If I had any shred of hope that what Troy and I had could continue, I needed to tell her about Amélie. But I didn’t have that hope because she was my student, and I lived half a world away. And fuck if I knew how to talk to her about this. I didn’t want to taint her with my past. With my failings.

  “Léo.” He spoke to me like I was a goddamn child. “Amélie consumed your life from the day that you met her. She was more important to you than the air you breathed, the art you created, your family, your friends. And she knew that and used it against you. Even though she disappeared, I hope you’re not letting the ghost of her haunt whatever happiness you’ve found. She doesn’t deserve it.” He sighed.

  The words were on the tip of my tongue—the ones that would lash him into a million pieces for reminding me how pathetic I was for her. But they didn’t have a chance to come out because his phone buzzed and he stood, waving at me like I don’t want to beat the shit out of him, and heading for the door.

  This time, I followed him to the hall. My door was going to be locked for the rest of the day. And when it was time for Troy to be done with class, I’d lock her in here too.

  Or not.

  My body tensed like it was preparing for an assault. The hairs on my neck pricked up as I turned away from Jack who was too busy on the phone heading back to his office that he missed the small, stunned figure standing a few feet down the hall in the other direction.

  I didn’t need to ask. She’d heard everything.

  I wondered if this had been her face when she walked in on her father. Pain. Disbelief. Her eyes drowning in complete and utter betrayal. She looked so small… so fragile. Deceivingly so. It’s why I fucked her to the brink of sanity because I wanted to see if she could take it.

  She could… and she always craved more.

  But right now, I felt the opposite. I wanted to hold her—to pull her into my arms and tell her the fucking truth that she was the only thing that mattered.

  But I couldn’t. Because we were in the hall.

  I couldn’t go to her. I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t kiss her until she believed me that Amélie was in my life as a prison, not a person.

  “Who is she?”

  The knife into my heart was the strength in her voice. It didn’t stutter. It didn’t waver. It was flat and unemotional. Only the worse kinds of injuries sound like they don’t hurt at all.

  “Who. Is. Amélie?”

  I ran a hand through my hair, frantically trying to figure out a way to get her into the office. Somewhere private. Anywhere private where we could have this conversation because we couldn’t have it here. I didn’t want to answer her. I wanted to tell her that I fucking loved her first. I wanted to apologize for demanding she lay all her secrets… all her insecurities… before me and not sharing my own.

  I didn’t get what I wanted. Especially when it came to her.

  I met her stare, daring her to come at me—to take this elsewhere even though I knew she wouldn’t.

  “My wife.”

  “My wife.”

  This was what dying felt like.

  Everything slowed unbearably. Like in the movies, I was watching my own death scene. Léo’s answer was an arrow made of razor-sharp words shot straight through my heart, shattering the world and the dreams around me… the dreams I was in the process of fortifying.

  The out-of-body me laughed at how pathetic I was. I’d just come from the Registrar’s office. I’d just spent the last half an hour going over the details and submitting my application to study abroad at l’École des Beaux Arts, praying that it was accepted.

  That was the worst part, wasn
’t it?

  When dreams and reality built around you at a steady pace where you don’t see it happening… where you don’t see how far you’ve come, how much you have, until it’s shattered. Gone.

  ‘My wife.’

  Léo had a wife.

  He had a wife and he’d fucked me.

  I wasn’t just his student. I was the other woman. The adulterer.

  I was the thing that came between a marriage and left a little girl with nothing to cling to except her insecurities. At least Léo didn’t have kids. Or did he?

  Nine months ago, I hadn’t been trying to kill myself. But now, what else could I call falling for Léo except a suicide mission for my heart?

  Air wasn’t making it into my lungs. There was no oxygen in this hall. In this building. My arms reached blindly for the wall—for anything to support me.

  I had to get out of here.

  Hall. I think he was calling my name. Stairs. People. They were staring at me.

  Surroundings passed like a flip-book comic until I ran out of pages.

  A firm grip around my arm yanked me back. He’d come for me. And spun me around. He’d caught me.

  I shook my head back and forth, the only protest I could manage in this stroke of speechless suffocation.

  “Miss Milanovic,” he growled into my face. “In my office. Now.”

  I gulped. Not only his words, but his grasp on my arm said I didn’t have a choice. I’d almost made it to the front door, I realized as he forced me to walk in front of him.

  I could practically hear the word ‘Shame’ echoing from the stares of other students that we passed. They probably thought he was going to break me like he’d threatened to do to Miss Clicker.

  If I could have, I would have told them I was already broken.

  As soon as we were inside, my back was up against the door and Léo’s dark eyes were scraping down the last, tattered defenses to my soul.

  “Do you think you can run from me, ma petite?” he said with a low voice. “I told you, you’re mine.”

  I hated how in the midst of him cracking my heart in two, my nipples pebbled and my core tingled as his possessiveness.

  No, Troian.

  “Apparently I’m not the only one.” My body tensed as I spoke.

  What do you do when you have nothing left? You fight and hope the outcome will end your misery one way or another.

  “And if you would let me explain instead of running away, you’d know that it doesn’t matter who she is because you’re the only one in my mind. In my blood.”

  He rolled his hips into me, almost preventing me from breathing, let alone moving. The thick ridge in his pants dug into my stomach. I hated how he was turned on right now. I loathed that I was turned on right now.

  “Then explain, Professor Baudin,” I said sweetly, like the night I served him at Rhymes, only this time, there were tears brimming in my eyes. “I happen to have no plans at the moment except to listen to your reason for having a wife and fucking your student at the same time.”

  My tone was like the Coca-Cola syrup concentrate: so incredibly sweet, yet so toxically corrosive it had to be transported with Hazardous Materials warning label on the truck.

  “Amélie was my wife.”

  And just like that, a small oxygen leak was let into the vacuum I’d been suffocating in.

  “She’s dead?”

  “No. Yes.” He cursed in French underneath his breath. “I don’t know.”

  “How do you not know? She was your wife.”

  “Because she disappeared, Troian.” I’d never seen so much anger in his face. It seemed like for sure his cells would explode with it any moment. “A year ago, she disappeared. I told her I wanted a divorce and we fought and the next day she was gone. No note and no trace. The police searched… they investigated… but they didn’t find anything.”

  Oh God.

  “After six months of no leads and no contact, they gave up and told me to move on.” He laughed bitterly. “Move on… How could I fucking move on? My wife disappeared. How could I file for divorce for someone who no longer existed? They won’t declare her dead. I can now only start to petition to end my marriage, and if the courts will sign off on it remains to be seen. There is the very real chance they won’t until there is proof she is dead or that she has been long enough, until she has been gone seven years, to warrant that declaration. So, you tell me,” rage dripped off of every word, “how the fuck am I supposed to move on?”

  “I don’t know. But I guess sleeping with a student was at the top of your list.” I winced as the words left my mouth. Cruel. But so was he.

  He hissed and reached for my throat, holding my face up to his.

  “You know what was at the top of my list? Drinking myself into an early grave.” His thumb brushed over the rapid stutter of my pulse. “Watching my world slowly crumble around me because I was living in the purgatory of not knowing—of never being free of my inadequacies, of never being free of her.”

  He pressed closer to me. Like he wanted to transfer the confession off of his chest by contact with mine.

  “What was not on my list was you, ma petite battante.” My little fighter. “What was not on my list was the war that you started inside of me—the one that wanted me to fight for more, to fight for feelings I never thought I’d have. What was not on my list was the battle to stay the desire that I have for you—the desire to bury myself in your sweet little body and never leave. To possess you. To let you defeat me… my anger… and show me mercy in your arms.”

  I couldn’t stop the pressure building inside of me. This is what happened around him. No matter what was happening in the world—in our worlds… In his presence, Léo became my world and I’d do anything to live there for just a little longer.

  “I told you the truth, Troian. When I spoke to you about your father—I was speaking about me, too. I did everything for her. I sacrificed my passion, my career, for her because she was my wife and I’d made a promise to put her before all else. She didn’t want my success, she only wanted her own. I didn’t want to see it, but when she left, I had no choice. She never fucking cared. She tried to sabotage my career. She cheated on me. And then she left, no doubt to pursue whatever she wanted for herself in that moment, leaving me in limbo—leaving me waiting on her.”

  His snarl was vicious. If he’d ever felt love for this woman, I could hear or see no trace of it.

  The painful truth was written in every strangled syllable. I felt it—Baudelaire’s melancholy—so purely in this moment. It was the kind of sadness that wrapped around you softly, almost comfortingly; it wrapped up your body and then over your face. And then you realized it was soft like cellophane, suffocating you in transparent tenderness.

  “So”—I licked my lips, feeling his dick swell at the small gesture—“l-let me get this straight. Technically, you are married. You technically have a wife but you don’t know where she is… but you’re still married. You didn’t tell me about her. Y-you didn’t tell me anything.” I shuddered, fighting my own battle between what was rational and what felt right.

  “Troian…”

  I was hurting. I felt like nothing. Expendable. Used. Just like I had my whole life. But then I felt him. In his words, his touch. I felt his desperation and fed off of it. He needed me. And I still needed him. He came after me. He risked it all to get me here to explain. And then he trapped me against the door because he’d fight to his last breath to never let me go.

  I should be pushing him away. I should be walking out the door. I should just leave the pieces of my heart for the scavengers. But due to all that, I never should have fallen in love with him.

  I lifted my head up higher, fighting the tears that threatened to give away how this was ripping me apart.

  “Tell me one thing, Léo,” I whispered. “What does that make me?”

  His full lips thinned. Time was regulated by his breathing—sped up by his inhale and then halted as he stared into my eyes
and held his breath like he held me hostage.

  “Celui que je deteste… celui que j’aime,” he rasped like the answer was costing him his very last breath. The one I loathe… the one I love. “My downfall.”

  Tears slipped down my cheeks. I wasn’t the only one.

  “Am I more than you bargained for yet, ma petite?”

  More than I bargained for. More than I battled for. More than I hoped for.

  He threw himself back from me, running his hand viciously through his hair, his jaw flexing rapidly.

  “I’ll give you the choice again, ma petite.” His hands gripped the edge of his desk like he needed to hold onto something so that he didn’t reach for me. “You can go… you should go.”

  I felt every twitch of pain that shuddered over his body.

  “You should run from me and never come back. My past… my problems… they are as deep and uncertain as the ocean. One day they will drown me and most assuredly will drown you, too.”

  If I stayed.

  “And even if you stay, I can’t promise to be more than I am because I’m not sure I know how to do that anymore. I can’t promise you what the future will look like. But what I can promise you, Troian, is that the only woman that will ever be in it is you—whether you are with me or not.”

  The door was my salvation. Keeping me upright. Stopping me from melting to the floor.

  “I’ve been fighting this battle, ma petite, but the truth is I lost the war the moment I touched you—the moment I claimed you. Like a disease, your fire, your smile infected my mind with the thought that I could have more, more than this purgatory, and it tainted my blood with the need for it.”

  Léo ducked his head. His knuckles turned white from his grip. My own tortured god. My own Prometheus. He’d given me fire—in my mind, in my heart. He’d given me something that he never should have and now, I saw the torture he was willing to face each and every day for it. How he felt about me would rip him apart from the inside out if I left. But he still gave me that choice.

  “What I can promise you is that if you stay, I will consume you. Your mind. Your body. I want it all. I’ll demand of you more than you can give. My past may hurt you more than you deserve. But, mon Dieu, I will love you… I promise you, ma petite, that I will love you like it was the only thing I was created to do.”