Page 27 of This Vicious Hunger
Leo is already at our usual table when I arrive for dinner, and he’s taken the liberty of ordering us a fresh pitcher of ice-cold lemonade. He pours as I sit, and I gulp down the glass in one go, tartness tightening my throat, before I say anything at all.
“Well, hello to you too,” Leo says.
I glare at him, irrational annoyance curling my lip. “Don’t you have anything better to do than criticise me, Leo?”
Leonardo’s lips thin and he draws his hands back towards himself on the table, where he presses them against his napkin. The normal clatter of the diners is so loud it feels as if my head might explode, and I rub at my forehead angrily.
“Are you unwell?”
I sigh and lean back in my chair. “Who knows,” I say. I certainly feel unwell. Everything is too bright, too loud. I miss the quiet, dreamlike darkness of the garden. “Could be. It’s been a long week. I feel rotten.”
Leonardo waits for my apology, and when he gets none he signals to the server that we’d like to order. An icy silence falls over the table, but I’m too tired to much care. I have a document to write up for Petaccia’s next tutorial—one I’ve been putting off for several days, but now thanks to my reduced garden hours I should be able to get it finished tonight. I’m just so damned tired. My whole body feels on the edge of collapse, mild aches and pains in every joint.
“Thora,” Leo says. “Hello?”
“Sorry, what?”
“I asked if you’d been to see the physician. Perhaps they can give you something.”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” I say, this time trying to warm my words with a smile. “I’ll be all right. I’m just tired, that’s all. And actuallystarving.” I feel like I’ve been hungry for days. Have I? I hadn’t noticed before. I felt fine until yesterday.
When the server returns to the table, it is with a platter of fresh salad, green leaves and tomatoes, soft, milky cheese, and herby vinaigrette. Thick slices of chicken gleam tenderly. I pick at the olives first and swallow two of them nearly whole in my hurry to eat. Did I skip lunch again? I actually can’t remember. It’s laughable how quickly I have forgotten the rules of propriety and society: four square meals a day, tea and juice and coffee, polite chatter over a meal.
“Thora,” Leonardo says.
“What?”
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asks. Concern has etched itself into the lines around his eyes and across his forehead. His glasses are slipping down his nose and he doesn’t even bother to push them back up. “You seem very distracted.”
“I’m just tired,” I insist.
Leonardo is silent again, but this time I pay attention to the silence, my stomach no longer screaming loud enough to drown it out. He’s hardly touched his food and he plays with the tines of his fork before opening and closing his mouth several times fruitlessly.
“Say it, Leo,” I say tiredly. “Whatever it is.”
“It’s nothing,” he says. “Well. Not nothing. Only…” He sighs, blowing warm lemon-scented air across the small table. He’s so different from Olea; he takes up so much more space, even though he doesn’t mean to, and he smells different. Although I’ve never been that close to her, she always has a fragrance. I notice it when she walks by the gate, or when we’re moving down the wall together, an earthy and yet somehow bitter floral scent. Like burnt coffee on a bed of wild roses.
“So, what is it?” I prompt. “Nothing, or something?”
“I’m worried about you. Is that so impossible to believe?”
“Nobody ever worries about me,” I scoff. “I’m fine.”
“Not even your father?” Leo knows what he’s doing, mentioning him. I can see in his face that he thinks he’s doing the right thing. Trying to get through to me. He meets my gaze steadily. My head thuds and my food squirms undigested in my belly. I don’t want to rise to the bait but I can’t help it.
“My father didn’t worry as long as I was following his rules. His rites, his Silence,” I say bitterly. The betrayal sits like ash on my tongue, dusty and drying. I’m not sure, as I say it, whether Ihave always felt this way, or if being here—seeing the life I could have had for longer if only he had asked—has made me change my mind.
Leo listens intently but doesn’t speak while I chew on the words that follow, although I can see he wants to. The frustration of the day threatens to overflow and I have to clench my fists. “Not that it matters, but he had a view of me, and it didn’t quite line up with the reality—but only because his view ofhimselfwas distorted. We were too alike, and too unlike everybody else.” I rub at my knuckles, remembering the lash of the whip the first time I dared suggest I might avoid marriage and take over the sepulchre. The idea that I was just like him scared my father more than anything else ever had. “He wanted me to be normal,” I say, “but he refused to relinquish me, kept me hanging on with a string of hope that he never would, which is what I thought I wanted. It’s why my marriage wasn’t finalised until he knew he was sick.”
“You didn’t know he was unwell?”
“No. He hid it from me until the end.” I bite back the angry tears that well, nipping at my lip until I draw the sobering blood. “So, no, Leo. My father didn’t worry.”
Leonardo is silent again, though he watches me intently. I see flickers of sympathy and empathy in his eyes.
“Well, Idoworry,” he says eventually. “Thora, I’m your friend. I’m going to be honest: I’m seeing something and—I’m praying I’m wrong. But it’s happening again.”
I blanch. “Excuse me?”
