Page 31 of Lucky Night
Harpies, clawing at her.
When she recovered, she couldn’t deny what it meant.
She was in love.
It was a catastrophe!
All that summer and into the fall she was full of it—full to the ears. The sensation was intoxicating. Her behavior was ridiculous. She spent hours concocting gemlike texts and emails, and waiting in agony until he responded. He would travel for work, and she found herself googling the weather for whatever city he was in. Every sugary pop song was rich with meaning. She soared. She crashed and burned. She couldn’t come without wanting to shout it at him. She managed to restrain herself. Barely.
He is in my bones, she thought once, driving to see him, hands gripping the steering wheel. He is in my bones!
Ridiculous. Teenagerly. But true.
And all the while, the beloved? The object of her passionate devotion?
He didn’t have a clue.
All that scorching mental rigor, and he never saw it. True, she did everything she could to hide how she felt, because when she wasn’t exalted she was mortified. The first new man she sleeps with in ten years, and she immediately goes gaga? Real original. Way to go, hon.
Regardless, he didn’t know, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him. But it was torture to keep it bottled up. So she started writing again. Her abandoned dream, her young self’s obsession. She’d spent her childhood filling notebooks with stories, fairy tales, poems and plays. She was going to be A Writer. Then she gotto college and was refused a spot in an undergraduate fiction workshop. Such a minor thing. But she was so soft and eager—God, she was young! Too uncertain to withstand rejection, all too willing to accept any criticism as the unassailable truth about herself. She surveyed her sad scribblings, her lofty hopes, and was filled with shame. Hating herself for thinking that she might be good, that someday she might…
No. The world saidno.
And she listened.
But now, saturated with dangerous feelings, desperate for an outlet, she fell back into writing as if she’d never been away, picking up an idea she’d sketched out years ago. It was a teen romance, the perfect receptacle for her volcanic emotion, allowing her to reveal and conceal her own heart. Because it’s not quite true that Julian is all Nick—he’s her, too. She is both of her characters, two very different people falling in impossible, forbidden love.
Her love lasted eight months. Then she ended it. She decided, she changed. It sounds like a lie, like she’s deluding herself, she must love him still. But she doesn’t. Confident about so little, she is certain of this.
And henever knew. About her great love. How she turned it into books that changed her life. Then, how she triumphed over it. No, to him she was and still is pretty, pliant Mrs. Gryzb, the married woman he gets a kick out of secretly screwing.
She makes a face at herself in the mirror. He knows that name bugs her. The teasing about her books, too.Tell me about ghost jizz, har har.He loves to make her feel dumb about her big dumb bestsellers. Yes, she laughed at the time. But did he not notice how she was fidgeting around the room, how she couldn’t stop checking her phone? Even when she confessed what she was doing, he dismissed it.It’s fine. They’re doing their job.Yes, okay, probably, but did it not occur to him that she might need a little more reassurance than that?
He can be so obtuse sometimes.
Why haven’t they gotten the all clear? What is going on down there?
No. What is going on up here? Here is where the problem is. She means so little to him that he can’t be bothered to console her, he means so much to her that she has to hide her need for consolation. It’s not love, of course, that’s well and truly over. But it’s something, some power he has over her still.
Power. Of course. His power, which she gave him, which she has, historically, given to any man who’s shown the least bit of interest in or approval of her. Why did she listen to him—pity my poor testicles—when she could have left? Why did she trust him? Why do women trust men? When has that ever worked out?
No. Don’t generalize. This isn’t about Women and Men. It’s about him and her. And six years of so little importance that he hasn’t even bothered to keep track of them.
Oh, she’s tired.
She’s exhausted suddenly.
And she’s pissed off.
She slides the bathroom door open and steps out.
There she is! He’s refilling his glass. I opened the second bottle. Let’s—
Are you seriously not worried?
Worried?
Yes, Nick. Worried. About the total, she flings a hand at the smoke detector, lack of information about the fire?
