Page 23 of Rivals to Lovers
“Hello, E. J.,” she said softly, running her fingers over the coarse material.
“I love tapestries,” he said, still gazing up.
“I’m not rich enough to have an opinion on them,” she jabbed back, her tone light.
“No, look,” he said, glancing in both directions before flipping the corner of the art over. “Look at this chaos.”
The threads collided, woven in knots and bundles that barely reflected the order on the other side. There was beauty in the chaos, but also, she couldn’t help but feel too seen by the disorder. Her brain felt like that, competing for her lifeagainst someone she found intriguing while attempting to look respectable.
Suddenly, she heard a noise down the corridor, and Wes stepped back from the tapestry, dropping its corner. He gave her a guilty look and waved a hand to encourage her to follow him. They walked down another hallway until they came to the entry to the library. In the doorway, Mo held her breath. The space looked exactly as Morgan must have experienced it.
“No tapestries here. No paintings. I’m a little surprised,” Maureen said.
“The story goes that Morgan believed that libraries should have books as their primary decoration. Books inspired by other books, I guess,” Wes said.
Maureen turned, unable to stop her smile. “Sounds familiar.”
Wes turned back to the floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves while Mo continued to explore the room. A plaque above a rather ordinary desk near the window marked it asherdesk. Before reading it, she knew its importance. At this desk, history was made. Mo felt the warmth of the wood and took in the scratch marks on its surface. In a house of opulence, Morgan’s desk was simple. When she turned around, she noticed Wes watching her. “We can move on,” she said, blushing.
“When you’re ready.”
She took another deep breath and gave the desk one more thankful pat, grateful that Wes had returned to his perusal.
They climbed the stairs into the wing opposite from their rooms. They passed closed door after closed door. “I wonder whose rooms these were when E. J. lived here,” Mo said to break the silence. “Servants?”
“Probably. Or guests.”
“This whole place is so empty. It would make a great haunted house,” Mo said, without really meaning it. Though it was mostly empty, Estelle was so generous and open that it didn’t feel isolating. It must be awkward to live in a house with plaques on the walls, ready for public consumption.
“I like it,” he said. “But it’s fun to imagine it in its heyday. I can’t imagine going to one of E. J.’s parties, can you?”
They entered a ballroom that marked the halfway point between the wings. Soaring ceilings with a great dome above, crowned in stained glass. The midsummer sun struck everything in pinks and greens. Maureen could visualize this room in the late evening of a summer in the 1920s. After sunset, with the stained glass dimmed, breezes from the open window would dance with fingertips of candlelight from holders lining the wall. “I think I could imagine it, actually. She was famously extravagant. A modern, female Gatsby, except married. I bet Estelle has some stories.” The Great Depression wasn’t even a consideration at that point, not even an imagining on the bright spot that was the time after WWI and the flu pandemic of 1919. People ran wild, tossing their inhibitions to the wind in a way that wouldn’t be mirrored until the seventies.
Wes kicked a foot against the marble floor. “A little slippery. It would be hard to dance.” He ran a hand through his hair, and Mo watched its path a little too closely. She realized her attention and turned to watch her shadow on the wall, which also turned its head. She liked seeing Wes’s shadow next to hers, though they looked even closer together in shadow form.
Wes kept speaking, his tone musing. “I think she settled down after motherhood. It’s always amazing to me that shewroteThe Proud and the Lostbefore having Estelle. She said it was mainly based on—”
“Her fears of what would happen to her after motherhood,” Mo finished. She turned away, moving her shadow farther from his and examining the inset tapestries of flowers and trees on the wall as they talked. “I know. I read about it in college.”
“The fertility angle is interesting. I noticed that in your reading today. I hadn’t really thought about how she probably was pregnant at that party, timing-wise. Not that I have mapped out a literary character’s menstrual cycles or anything.”
“Oh, I did,” Mo said, then realized how weird it sounded. “It was for a paper for that class. A women’s studies/English crossover class where we talked about periods in literature. Uh, not like thematic interrelated years of writing, but actual menstrual periods.” She tried to catch his expression. She wasn’t trying to unsettle him purposely, but if that was a side effect, she’d take it.
His face gave away nothing, maddeningly. “That’s cool,” he said, sounding genuine. It annoyed her when men were put off by the existence of periods, as if women weren’t much more inconvenienced for six days a month, plus all the hormonal turmoil on either side of that. Maybe his interest was part of the agent persona. In her experience, an agent was good at selling a lot of things, including a feeling they wanted you to have about yourself. In this case, making her feel uncomfortable didn’t work into whatever four-dimensional chess he was playing.
“What novels did you read in the class?” As Wes asked, he sat on a bench on the far end of the ballroom. His body language invited her to join him, and after a second, she did.
“A lot of the classics.Little Women.Middlemarch.Pride and Prejudice.”
“It’s been a few years since I’ve read any of those, but I don’t actually remember any mention of periods.”
Mo laughed. “I know. The class focused on the erasure of natural body processes—periods, pregnancy, menopause—even in these texts heavily read by women. Sometimes these older books were so much about the mind of the woman, but they didn’t mention her body. At least not the normal mechanics of it.”
“It wasn’t considered genteel to talk about,” Wes said. She could smell him from his position, a citrusy, piney smell that could only be from cologne. Unless he naturally smelled that good, which would be royally unfair.
“Kind of like masturbation,” he added, jarring her from her thoughts, which had veered too close to his body anyway.
She choked on a laugh. “I mean, yes. Absolutely.”
