17

Route 84, northbound

“Are you not eager to at least consider Kline’s proposal?”

I glanced over at Haas as he broke the thin silence between us. We were driving aimlessly along the unending ribbon of the highway, carving out into the distance where the horizon had no discernible edge. Proposal. “I don’t trust myself with that role,” I admitted. “Not anymore.”

Haas drove with one hand holding the wheel steady at eight o’clock and the other readied on the stick shift, lazily perched with inaction for the interminable stretch of flat land. “You sounded confident enough in the workshop the other day. What of it do you not trust?”

I gave a dry sniff and leaned my forehead against the passenger window. The chaparral blurred with the sagging barbed wire strung along stretches of the shoulder as we passed, and passed, and passed. “My sanity.”

“Sanity is a myth,” Haas said, smiling to himself.

I frowned. Carved against the impenetrable sky past the window, his profile stood against the lowering afternoon sun reaching red through heavy iron clouds. “Why are you so keen on getting me onstage again?”

“Would you like another dose?”

“Of what?”

“I believe I called it ‘paradise.’ ”

My heart fluttered. I stared at Haas for another moment. The engine heaved as he wrestled it into the next gear.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Haas dug into his pocket without looking away from the road and offered me his tooled tin case over the center console. “I can give you a full brick of it if you’d like, no charge.”

“Why are you trying to champion me, Felix?”

His jaw flexed briefly. The speedometer ticked up a few miles per hour. “Because it’s clear to me nobody has taken the proper care to stand up for you in a very long time. Do you want some or not?”

I stared at him for a moment before taking the kit. I pried it open to balance on my knees. There was an enamel straw inside, and a mirror under the sachet of powder. I poured out a slim line and nudged it into a neat row, and recalling parties from the Christopher Street days, I lined up the straw at my nose.

Because why not? Here we were, nowhere as far as the eye could see, and I had unearthed things for Haas I hadn’t let myself think about in years. It would be silly not to give myself the comfort.

“There you are,” Haas murmured. He kept the van impeccably straight in the road. I shut my eyes and tipped my head back, and I winced when I touched the edge of my nostril and felt a wet trickle of blood on my knuckle.

I put the kit back together and flipped down the passenger visor to peer at myself in the mirror. I swiped the blood away, just a jot of it from some weak blood vessel giving up, and examined myself before shutting the flap again.

Haas glanced at me when I passed the kit back, his eyes bright. “You are quite the fascination. I never would have guessed you came from such simple beginnings.”

I smiled bitterly through the windshield. “That’s very kind of you,” I said.

Haas rolled to a stop on the side of the road. The desert stretched around us, still and infinite. There was pointed intent in Haas’s eyes for a moment as he turned to look at me—but a wash of softness chased it away.

“I’m ‘kind’ to you,” he said gently, “because you deserve somebody in your corner who sees you as you really are. Not what you’re expected to be.” He placed one poised, warm hand high up on my thigh. “Where to next?” he asked.

I stared ahead at the road, where a hand-painted mile marker bleached numberless by the sun swayed in a stiff breeze. Wesley was the only other person who knew me to my cells, but this was…different. Somehow. This was pressing a handprint into snow that hadn’t yet been sullied by the slurry of dirt from the curb. This was a claim on a good, pure thing. Haas hadn’t known me at my lowest.

It was nice, to be seen as whole.

When I put one hand down to close gently around Haas’s fingers, I squeezed just firm enough to make sure he knew I meant it: “I’d like to take you home.”

Haas sped back toward Lake Sumner with his guarding touch on my leg. He parked at the rear end of the motel and wasted little time tugging me forward by the waist to kiss me across the gearshift.

“Shall we?” he asked against my jaw.

“That depends on what you mean by ‘we.’ ”

“You and I find ourselves in your room.” His hand roved easily along one garter strap. I leaned into him, puttied. “You let me help you clear your head.”

I probably said yes—the details hazed. He concocted a very good drug.

We hurried inside, and I was already unclipping my stockings as I tossed my key onto one of the beds. Haas locked the door and came up behind me to nose another heady kiss to the curve of my neck. He staggered forward, steering blind, and roved us over to the vanity.

My knees knocked gently against the front of the drawers. Haas rucked up my skirts and wrestled my shorts down to my ankles. “Up,” he panted, his hands firm around my elbows. A fresh current of awareness ran under my skin, white-hot, and punted sensation itself onto an entirely different plane. I was afire, all of me, and I wanted to obey Haas’s direction with desperate wonder.

He hoisted me up onto the table and went to his knees, pushing the chartreuse crush of my hem aside with one hand.

I clutched for his hair and the tight bundle of his fist holding my dress. When I looked down to behold him, the high holding me aloft to let reason only batter like mooring frantic against a storming dockside, I was watching bliss happen to some desperate body that could have been my own. What ecstasy, to be so unmade, to be treated like a tender animal that knew only the pleading scraping up my throat: Yes. More. Just there.

I pressed forward to Haas’s mouth. His brows twitched with concentration. He had removed his glasses at some point—tucked in his shirt pocket, they winked at me when one lens caught a flash of the gauzy light slicing in from a thin gap in the drawn curtains.

He stilled suddenly and huffed a misfire of a gasp against me. He pulled his mouth away with a gutted sound and groaned against my inner thigh.

“Wait,” I rasped. All of me was dancing, my nerves in a tizzy. I slid my hand up to dig my fingers into his hair at the root. Haas’s voice skipped and cracked. His breath was hot on my skin, muffling himself and shivering all over. I tightened my grip and spurred him between the shoulders with a nudge of my bare heel. “No, keep—I’m not—!” My head met the mirror behind me with a dull thud as I arced my neck backward.

“Here,” Haas growled, dragging two fingers along his tongue, and before I could ask what, the slick nudge of them entered me in tandem.

His touch was everywhere. When he staggered into a stand, his left hand closed gently around the sides of my neck—he hushed me softly when I made a tight sound at the pressure, pressing his mouth to the side of my face.

“There you are,” he panted, hoarse and airy. “Calm. Calm, Margaret.”

He held me, pinned and helpless. Haas’s hips pressed at the back of my bare thigh as he leaned in, crowding down into the space between our mouths. I felt the evidence of his release through his trousers.

I had rendered him that helpless.

Power ripped through me, ruby-red and violent. I possessed something of him now to have cracked him in half over his own fulcrum.

Devour.

I broke with a wounded cry at a soft squeeze of his fingertips at the cords of my neck. Haas hissed a sharp jag of German into the bend of my cheek.

The air was foggy as I came down again. Haas let go of my neck and opened the silver clamshell of his kit again, biting his lips around his teeth to pluck free a tight hand-roll and flick at his strike-lighter.

The first puff of smoke scored the air with a fetid burn, and he turned it to slip the end into my lips like I’d watched him do to Wesley.

I stared at him as I took a languorous mouthful in the unsettled sparkling of refraction. Haas was unstuck, his edges peeled up with frenetic hunger.

I had done that to him.

He took the cigarette back. His hands were trembling. The borders of my vision danced with Christmas lights. I shut my eyes and dissolved into breathless, giddy laughter.

I slid down from the vanity to stumble into the bathroom without another word. I ran the faucet and stripped down to my slip without feeling anything but the pleasant, persistent buzz zinging through my teeth and the backs of my eyes.

I was alone in my reflection. I stared at myself in the rattling hiss of the water.

Haas was lounging naked on the settee at the mirror when I came back out, tidied. His clothes were folded neatly on the foot of the bed and his shoes squared on the carpet. I sat beside the tidy little pile and felt absently at the fine linen of his shirt.

“You certainly know your way around,” I joked lightly. I looked up at him, latching my eyes to his in curious fondness. “Have you been married before, or are you just a quick study?”

“We should probably keep from walking on each other’s biscuits,” Haas murmured, offsetting the intensity of his voice with a playful smirk.

“Another idiom?”

“You’ll find I’m full of sayings that make little sense, to you.”

We shared a dry chuckle. A bird twittered from somewhere past the back screen door.

“Did you know,” Haas said, his voice tightened by a deep draw on his herby smoke, holding it in, “a thing that confounded me when I was first learning English is that the word ‘marital’ is not the same word as ‘martial.’ ”

I stared at his bare feet, his high arches and the elegant jutting of his ankles. “Was it.”

“Experienced in or inclined to war.”

I gave a tart sniff. “And to which of those does this apply?”

“Precisely.”

Another several heartbeats of unflinching staring ticked past.

“Are you in love with him?” I asked. My tone was sharper than I intended. Haas’s gaze softened. He took a draw that bent his cheeks, his mouth supple and easy.

“I’m deeply drawn to him,” he said, letting the smoke curl up aimlessly from his lips. “Your husband is very kind.”

“What am I to you, then? Masculinity insurance? A challenge?”

Are you happy, Margaret?

I glanced at the mirror behind Haas. Only myself and the lithe muscle of his shoulders easing into his spine looked back.

Haas regarded me steadily. “On the contrary. I’m drawn to you as well. Quite obviously, I would say.”

He watched me for another moment before rising to cross to the bed. He bent at the waist and combed his fingers through my hair before kissing me on the forehead.

“If I’m not a nuisance,” I asked, still staring at us in the mirror, “martial in what way?”

Haas leaned back to search my face. “How do you mean?”

“Marital. Martial. Which of them the war?”

“I’d no idea a philosopher’s heart lived alongside the thespian’s.”

“Only when I’m loaded.”

Haas drew his thumb over the shell of my ear. His hand still rested at the crown of my head as I looked up along the fine length of his body. “Why take up arms in the first place,” he mused, “if not to protect some sanctity of hearth and home? Of one life charted against another?”

“You have been married before,” I said plainly.

Haas gave me a very patient look, a forthright smile. “We were quite young. Certain truths, when they emerged, became untenable.”

“Like what?”

“We were misaligned, regarding the future I believed we deserved together,” he said. “She had no sense of compromise.”

Haas took one last slow drag, meditative, and felt the strands of my hair between his fingertips as though examining the luster of gilt thread in the sunlight.

“Your husband is avoiding me lately,” he said.

I chuckled. Wesley always got distracted with an opening approaching. I had no idea how I was even going to begin to tell him about Macbeth. “He’s in a mood. He’ll work himself out of it.”

Haas made a vague sound, tinged slightly with regret. “Whatever are we going to do when we have to return to the land of the living?”

I stood up and put a hand on Haas’s shoulder, rubbing it absently with my thumb before kissing him there lightly. “We don’t have to think about that right now.”

Haas peered at me as though unwilling to look away. I realized for the first time we had the same eye color, an impenetrable earthen brown.

“Are you truly going to do it?” he asked. He lifted his hand to one strap of my slip.

“What, the role?”

He said nothing, but his eyes flicked up to mine and held me there with the same bolted ferocity of his grip at the sides of my neck. Heavy and viscid through the haze of the drug, arousal welled in me again with a hard lurch.

“Of course I am,” I said, because I wanted to. I would. There was no other option. “Especially if you garnish me with a lot more of what’s making me feel so good right now.”

This was what I wanted.

“Good girl,” Haas murmured as he laved a kiss into the divot of my throat.

Don’t call me that—but no, too pedantic. I let it be.

Over his shoulder, the Lady looked on through the mirror.

The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures, she spoke in the distance of my mind. ’Tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil.

“On your back,” I breathed, turning to steer Haas to the foot of the bed. I faced away from the mirror, putting myself firmly in the present, and dragged my hem up past my naked waist. “Don’t shut your eyes. Look at me this time.”

---

◆ ◆ ◆

The next afternoon, Wesley was running a fencing call onstage with Kline in absentia. I hadn’t told him about the Lady yet, and I knew the longer I waited, the more I risked someone else starting a rumor that accidentally walked and talked into truth.

To his credit, despite his unannounced spats of absence and general (complete) lack of knowledge of the craft, Kline hadn’t let any inkling of the role change slip. They knew it was Macbeth, the men had already been recast, but there was no mention of who would be the Lady. We’re still running the numbers, Kline would snip whenever someone asked.

None of the other women particularly cared. They were still getting paid, regardless. But my nerves had ramped up—and I couldn’t tell if it was just the runoff of Haas’s product still knocking around in my system.

I had to tell Wesley. I watched him lunge and flèche and dart across the stage, the very picture of grace, and so badly wanted him to be proud of me.

If he didn’t believe I could do it, a part of my spirit would always doubt. I loved him as I loved myself.

Philia.

A hard clatter of metal on wood jolted me to the present.

Wesley had dropped his foil, rolled up his sleeves, and stalked across the stage to throw a mean right hook into poor Oliver Langham’s gut.

It happened so quickly I could hardly mark it. One instant they stood en garde, and the next they were struggling on the floor in a furious grapple.

“Wesley!” I abandoned the script I was secretly looking over at the back of the house and ran up onstage, where I got Wesley by the back of the collar and pulled. He stumbled backward, still clinging to Oliver’s sleeves, and I shook him by the scruff as one of the stagehands hurried over to haul Oliver backward, too.

“Wesley, stop it!” I snapped.

Spitting a jot of blood to the rust-red stage, Wesley rounded on me. Eyes wild, he pointed furiously at Oliver—he’d pinned the man so fiercely there was a broad, angry scrape across one cheek from the boards. “We have three weeks to pull the Scottish play from our asses,” he snarled, “none of these idiots can keep from being soaked drunk long enough to take a goddamn fight from start to finish, and none of this shit even matters, because we’re going to be performing it for fucking ghosts!”

Wesley’s voice flew up into the eaves and warbled several times in echo through the empty theater.

I closed my hand around his elbow and cast a hardened look at him. “Let’s take some air. Yeah?”

Wesley scowled. He raked a hand through his hair, shook his head, and wrapped an arm around my shoulders to skulk us both at a quick clip down the apron, through the aisles, and out to the dock.

Wesley helped me into the boat and pushed it roughly from its ropes before ripping the engine cord with a tension in his shoulders I knew better than to comment on. Instead of peering warily at his disquiet, I squinted into the harsh throw of sunlight against the water’s glassy surface.

When we reached the middle of the lake, Wesley cut the propeller and let out a heavy sigh. I turned to regard him again and took stock: his rumpled collar, his lower lip bleeding, his hair tumbled down out of its neat coif. He was staring at his dusty shoes as the water rippled in endless circles from the boat’s edges.

“Are you alright, Wes?”

He glowered up at me through his lashes beneath the draw of his brows. “Do I look alright?”

I pretended to appraise him. “The split lip looks terribly butch.”

He didn’t laugh. The light caught his gaze at an angle that made his irises fade almost completely into the whites of his eyes, leaving only the pinprick pupil in his gaze.

We floated for a while in the stillness. Wesley’s temper abated steadily—he scrubbed at his jaw with a flat hand and licked absently at the cut on his lip, testing its sting.

“I’m happy you’ve been spending more time with Felix,” he said after a spell, stilted and awkward and clearly trying to change the subject. He wasn’t looking at me.

I played along, prodding his knee saucily. Wesley shot me a piquant little grin that didn’t reach his eyes. “Truly, you’re night and day from when we arrived. Is that really what’s doing it?”

“You have him regularly enough,” I said, blushing despite myself. “You know how it goes.”

Wesley shrugged. “He likes you best.”

“Oh, I don’t—”

“It doesn’t bother me. God knows you deserve a good time. And I’m used to them coming and going.”

I raised my eyebrows and sniped a joke so bawdy it made Wesley laugh my favorite laugh: the one that caught his top lip just so, rollicking and hitching it up over one eyetooth. But it died more quickly than I’d hoped and left Wesley silent again, distant.

He leaned back in his seat and tipped his face up to the sky. His eyes were closed against the sun. “This role is hard for me, Jack,” he admitted. “It really is. I wish they hadn’t changed it.”

“What, you’ve forgotten it already?”

“I don’t— I can’t see anything but you…bleeding out in your dressing room when I’m playing him.”

I watched him without breathing for a brief spell.

“Kline offered me the Lady,” I finally said. “I said yes.”

Wesley stared at me for a long time, unblinking. The water knocked at the metal siding of the boat.

“Are you sure?” he asked, very gently.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure.”

“You said it just now, I’m doing much better. I trust myself, Wesley. I do.”

We stared at each other.

“Say something,” I said. “Please.”

“…I don’t want to be the asshole bothered by my wife having a career.”

“You aren’t. You’ve never been.”

“It gives me pause. Can you blame me? I wish it didn’t, but it does. Things are—they’re different now.”

“I know.” I angled for his eyes as he tore them away again, looking sourly into the water, and put a hand to his cheek to keep him with me. “Hey. Look at me. I know. Things are different now. I have medicine. I can manage this, and I’ll tell you the moment it feels bad again. If it even does.”

Wesley peeled my hand down from his face and held it in his lap. “Even the whiff of it, you let me know. Promise?”

“I promise.”

I leaned in and kissed him square on the forehead. Before sitting back, I thumbed the lipstick mark from his sweat-tacked brow.

Wesley searched my gaze for a moment before coming to sit beside me on the bench plank instead of the rudder seat. I wrapped an arm around his waist and tendered his head down to my shoulder, where he leaned into me and finally, truly settled.

“I’m sorry you had to see it,” I said.

Wesley sighed. “You’re too good of an actor, Jack. Damnably good. Congratulations.”

The breeze came occasionally to check on us like a nervous chaperone as we floated under the indiscriminate sun. Regardless of what came before, the ifs and should haves and wanted tos, we were together.