She’d climbed out of Falcon’s car wearing a sky-blue sweater and a pair of jeans, which I didn’t think much of until she’d turned and looked into my eyes. In that color, she so easily took my breath away. I’d convinced myself last night to just be her friend until she was ready for more, and I completely fucked it up. My heart wouldn’t let me keep my distance, and now she was pulling away. I could tell.
Then, to make matters worse, I left the room at a crucial time. It should’ve been me talking to her about her death, but I couldn’t face her if she saw me cry. Nothing in my past, in my century of life, haunted me as her death or the days that led to it did. Nothing I had ever witnessed compared to the suffering she endured, and nothing could make me speak of it. I would have to tell her eventually, but until that day, all she would know is what everyone else knew: nothing. We suffered. We survived. That is all. No one could fathom to what degree. Not even the most heinous of minds could comprehend it. Most people had forgotten what Morgana was best known for before Ara’s rise to power. People no longer remembered her as the most brutal and clever torturer in the monarchy, and though I was once intimate with her before I ever even knew Ara existed, it did not still her hand. She knew better than any man that the only way to make me suffer was to hurt those I love.
I was forced now to relive that nightmare every time Ara looked at me with hope in her eye. Every time she looked sad. Every time I sat in front of a fireplace and felt the heat of it on my human skin, or when I cut meat for dinner, or thought about sex. Thought about sex with her. And the medication wasn’t helping. For my own sake, even out on the ocean these last four-and-a-half months, I kept it up—took two pills every day and fought against the pulling tide of fogginess in my brain to concentrate while navigating a yacht with my son on it, but I wasn’t any better. I was still depressed, and I was starting to think it wasn’t chemical. It was circumstantial, and medicine just couldn’t fix that. Time couldn’t fix that. Only she could.
I saw her shadow as she came up the stairs and I quickly checked around my room to make sure it was clean, hoping she was headed in here. But the front door flew open then and I heard Harry’s busy end-of-day chatter. As much as I wanted to stay in here and wallow in my sadness, I wanted more to see my son reunite with his mother, so I got up off my bed and stood in the hallway, looking down on Ara as she turned and her eyes met Harry’s.
“Mom!” Harry threw his bag down and ran up the stairs. Ara stumbled back a bit with the force of his hug, but wasted no time wrapping her arms around him.
Emily and Vicki came into the entranceway to watch, and we all just waited, listening to them both softly crying in the silence of this big old house. The emotion swelled up around us all then, and I fought hard not to be overcome, but I just never thought I’d see her wrap him up in that loving embrace again, and no matter how different this Ara was from her former self, she could still love like no other. She still hugged Harry in exactly the same way she used to, and he was completely aware of that, closing his eyes and hugging her like she was the same woman that left us.
I walked down to the bottom step and pressed my hand to Ara’s waist, gesturing for her to sit. The others gave us a little alone time then, slinking off to different corners of the house, and I put my arm around my wife—the old Ara she was for this split second—while Harry sat on her knee with his arms around her neck.
“Are you back forever?” Harry asked. “Will you live here with us again?”
Ara clearly hadn’t thought of that. Neither had I, come to think of it.
“I can’t, Harry,” she said softly, sounding so much like her old self that I had to look away.
“Why not?”
“I…” She tried to look at me for the answer, but I wouldn’t give it to her. If she didn’t want to love me, she could damn well deal with the consequences of that herself. All of them. “You know how sometimes other kids’ parents live apart?”
Harry nodded, but he clearly saw the truth in her head then—that she just didn’t love me anymore—because he looked at me and placed his tiny hand on my shoulder sympathetically. I smiled, patting it to say I was okay.
“Did…?” Ara’s eyes went wide. “Did he read that on my mind?”
Harry nodded. “You don’t love my dad anymore,” he said, but the tears he’d been holding back broke through before he finished.
Ara clearly felt like a monster. She tried to hold on as Harry climbed into my lap, but he didn’t want her to. He pushed her away and I could tell that hurt her. A part of me didn’t really care.
“I’m sorry,” she said as much to me as to him.
With one arm around Harry, I gently patted her leg. “It’s okay, Ara. No one expects you to love me.”
“But she did before,” Harry wailed. “Why did she wake up broken?”
Ara just looked at her feet, the weight of all this dragging her face down.
“Harry, Mom and Dad still love each other,” I said. “It’s just in a different way now.”
“No.” He sat up and looked right at me, moving to touch my face, but I stopped him. If he’d seen the truth in her heart, I didn’t need to see it too. Hearing it every day was enough to cut me.
Ara stood up. “I have to go.”
“Don’t go, Mom!” Harry jumped up and grabbed her sleeve. “Don’t go yet.”
“I…” She looked at me, her brow woven with new lines where the agony inside her put about ten years on her otherwise youthful face. “I didn’t think you wanted me here now.”
“I do,” Harry said in a small voice, eyes on his feet.
Ara smiled and wiped her tears with the heel of her palm, trying to put all of this aside. “Hey, why don’t you show me your room—and some of your favorite things? We can talk about other stuff for now.”
Harry nodded, but wasn’t yet in the spirit. I could tell Ara was nervous about being around Harry when he could so easily see her thoughts, but hopefully all that would do is make her less prone to have those kinds of thoughts—the ones where she didn’t love me.
I got up off the stairs and went back to my room, closing the door so I could let my heart break in private.
Ara shut the adjoining door to Harry’s room and stood looking at me where I sat on my bed. Half of me wanted to put down my book and ask if there was something she wanted to say, but the other half just wanted her to go away. The awkward moment lingered for what felt like a full minute, until she sighed and looked away, making an obvious appraisal of my bedroom. As she stepped out from under the bookshelf above the doorway, her hand instinctively brushed along the columns of books surrounding its edge, giving it a little push.
“Cool,” she said, testing her theory in full. “It’s a door.”
“Yes,” I said dully.
“So Harry’s room is a hidden room?”
“Yes.”
“Was that deliberate or just how the house came?”
“We had it built to protect him if we’re ever attacked.”
“Attacked by whom?” She spun around, horrified.
I got up off the bed and shut the door leading onto the hallway. I could hear Emily and Mike laughing and talking in their bedroom—something they hadn’t done in months—which meant Ara could certainly hear them, and I didn’t want their happiness infecting Ara’s fragile status here.
She watched me, her eyes staying on me as I walked across the room to the fireplace and grabbed a chair for her to sit on. Then, thinking better of it, left it where it was and sat down, offering her the one across from me.
“Is it because of vampires?” she asked, sitting down opposite me in the dark, cold space.
“Yes,” I said finally. “What we… my brother is the king. If anyone were to…”
“I get it,” she said with a nod. She sat back then and looked at my bed—big enough for two—her eyes moving back to the bookshelf around Harry’s doorway and then to the window beside it. The curtains were spread wide apart still, letting in the moonlight, and for a moment, as she stared at it, I wondered if she remembered making love right there on that spot just a few Christmases ago.
“If I could make you remember,” I said, and her head snapped around to look at me, “would you want to?”
The flicker in her gaze destroyed all my hope. “No,” she said. Which meant this wasn’t the life she wanted. Even after our pleasant afternoon with Harry at the park and a warm dinner with good conversation.
“So what now then?” I asked, throwing the full weight of my affronted tone at her. “What’s your plan?”
“My plan?” she said.
“Like Harry said, are you going to live with us? Keep going to school? Get a boyfriend?”
Her jaw stiffened. I could see she was biting her tongue.
“Answer me, Ara! Because I can’t do this—”
“Do what?”
“This! All of this. I can’t be so casual with you when I’m dying inside.”
“Then don’t.” She stood up. “Harry is my son, and I will continue to see him, and where I live or what I do with my life will have no bearing on that.”
I hated her right then for being so bold, but I also felt great respect, seeing her stand so tall, so in control, like the queen she once was.
“If you pressure me, David, you’ll kill our friendship—”
“I know.” I sighed, burying my head in my hands. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re in pain.” She sat down on the arm of the chair beside me. “Anyone can see that. And I know you just want your wife back. I know you need to make her okay so you can be okay again”—she was spot on; again—“but please don’t push me away just because I don’t feel the way she did. She had a long time to get to know you and fall in love with you. At least give me that before you hate me, okay?”
I smiled into my hands, rolling my face up to look at her. I didn’t want to point out that, right now, she was more like my Ara than she ever had been before. I knew it would enrage her to hear that. Trouble was, she was so much like my Ara in so many ways that it was that personality trait stopping her from wanting to be like my Ara. I had to laugh. It was all I could do.
“You’ve lost your mind.” She stood up again.
I grabbed her hand, sobering myself. “Don’t go. Stay.”
She pulled her hand from mine. “Why?”
“Because I want us to be friends, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes today—said things I wish I hadn’t. I just want us to get back to a place where we can be in the same room without you hating me for trying to love you.”
She softened and a smile moved out across one side of her face. When she sat down in the chair across from me, my heart leaped around in my chest with joy, but I made a promise to myself to contain that and just be her friend tonight. And nothing more.