Perhaps the House hid her from him; perhaps she’s been here so many times, sweating and bleeding and breathing, that the land no longer greets her as a trespasser, but as a part of itself.
Arthur stumbles twice on the stairs. He pauses before the front door, panting, feeling desperate and helpless and hungry and profoundly annoyed, the way he always does around her.
She knocks again. He is aware that he shouldn’t answer it, that it will only make everything harder.
He answers it.
Opal is standing on his threshold, looking up at him with the same wary, weary expression she wore the first time he found her outside his gates. He has a maudlin impulse to memorize her: the canny silver of her eyes and the crooked front teeth, the lunar white of her skin and the startling black of her freckles, like constellations in negative. There are swollen red rings around each of her wrists, and two of the knuckles on her right hand are split.
Arthur shouldn’t reach for that hand. He shouldn’t turn it in his and run his thumb over the crusted ruin of her knuckles, thinking of Elizabeth Baine’s busted lip and feeling a swell of strange, possessive pride. He certainly shouldn’t bring the knuckles to his lips.
He hears a quick inhalation. Opal’s eyes are dark, uncertain. “Are you sober?”
“Yes.” He wonders if that’s true. He hasn’t had a drop of actual alcohol since the day Jasper broke in, but he feels weightless, unmoored from himself, and the lights have a fevered, splintered look he associates with cheap whiskey. The entire House feels alive around him, a presence that pulses beneath his bare feet.
Opal doesn’t look convinced. Her eyes flick to her hand, still held in his, then back to his face. Her chin lifts. “Are you going to kick me out again?”
It’s supposed to sound like a challenge, a mocking gauntlet, but there’s a roughness to her voice that Arthur doesn’t understand.
“I should,” he says, honestly, but he doesn’t let go of her hand. He reminds himself firmly that there’s no room for wishes or wants in his life, that every time he’s caved to his own childish desires it’s come at a terrible cost. That he has what he needs, and it’s enough.
It’s just that, sometimes, God help him, he wants more.
A tremor moves through Opal. He follows it down her arm, up to her face. In the split second before she looks away, he sees her unmasked. He sees her terror and desire and bitter disappointment, the particular desolation of a lonely person who thought, briefly, that they might not be. Already she is steeling herself against him, like a girl bracing against the cold.
This, Arthur finds, he cannot tolerate. His life so far has been nothing but a wound on hers. She wears the scars well—she’s made her life into an act of defiance, a laugh in the dark, a smile with bloodied teeth—but he refuses to add even one more.
He opens the door wide and pulls her inside.
I shouldn’t have come here, but I did. I shouldn’t go inside, but I do. The house is quiet tonight, and darker than I’ve ever seen it. No candles or lamps sit on the sills, no lights flicker to life overhead. Even the moonlight falling through the windows seems muted and obscure, a gaze averted.
Arthur reaches around me to shut the door and a last rush of perfume slides into the hallway. The vines on the house are blooming—I saw them when I climbed the steps, lavish cascades of flowers that turn the night thick and sweet. I always thought wisteria grew best on the riverbank, but maybe Starling House makes its own rules.
Arthur doesn’t step away when the door latches. We stand facing each other, unspeaking, letting everything between us—the confessions and recriminations, the lies and betrayals—slip away into the dark, until all that’s left is what comes next.
It’s not something I need. It’s something from that second, more dangerous list, the one I thought I burned eleven years ago. It’s something I want, and the knowledge makes me feel reckless and raw, a soft-bodied animal running too fast through the woods. It’s not cold, but I’m shivering.
Arthur tucks my hair behind my ear for the second time tonight, but now his hand lingers against the line of my jaw. He takes a step closer and the air between us turns thin and hot.
“May I kiss you, Opal?” The question is polite, restrained; his eyes are not.
I’ve never been shy about sex. It’s always been easy for me, a safely transactional exchange of needs, but a tremulous fragility overtakes me now. I can’t speak. I manage a shallow nod.
I’m expecting it to feel like it did before: a reckless collision, a thing that could only happen at the ragged edge of his self-restraint. But this time is different. This time Arthur kisses me with an awful, excruciating tenderness, like I’m spun sugar or fine crystal, like he has all the time in the world. It feels good. It feels dangerous. I want him suddenly to be less tender, to leave me with my lips split and my heart perfectly whole.
I’m shaking worse now, breathing too hard. Arthur’s chest touches mine and my entire body flinches away, as if I’m protecting some delicate instrument behind my breastbone.
Arthur pulls instantly back. “Did I hurt you?”
“No.” My voice is small and wretched.
“Do you—do you want to stop?”
“No,” I say, even more wretchedly.
Arthur pauses, studying me. I can’t meet his eyes. He touches his thumb to my lower lip, still so gentle I want to weep. “You asked me why I paid for Jasper’s tuition.”
“Because you didn’t want me to come back.”
“I lied.” He’s whispering now, his breath ghosting across my skin. “I did it so you wouldn’t have to come back. So that, if you came back, it would be because you wanted to.” Then, even softer, as if the words are coming from inside my own skull, “What do you want, Opal?”
“I want—” The truth is I want him and I’m scared of wanting him and ashamed of being scared. The truth is I’m a coward and a liar and a cold bastard, just like my mother, and in the end I will let him drown to save myself. I should cut and run right now, before it’s too late, before he finds out what kind of person I really am.
But I can’t seem to make myself move.
I close my eyes. Maybe there’s no difference between wanting and needing except in degree; maybe if you desire something badly enough, for long enough, it becomes a demand. “This,” I whisper. “I want this.”
Arthur’s hand slides to the back of my neck and the flat of his palm steadies me, pins me gently to the earth. “It’s alright.” He lowers his face until I can feel the rush of his breath on my lips. “I’ve got you, Opal.”
And I feel myself going under, sinking into the weight of his hand. My limbs go slow and heavy. I’m not shaking anymore.
I let him back me against the door. I let him touch me, his hands simultaneously rough and reverent. He lays his jaw along mine and speaks to me, and his voice is like that, too—the tone harsh, the words sweet. “It’s alright,” he says again, and “let me,” and once, raggedly, “fuck, Opal.”
I let him lay me down on the floor, the rug impossibly soft under the bare wings of my shoulder blades. I let him press into me so slowly I can’t breathe, can’t think, for wanting.
Arthur holds himself still, then, his body strung tight. “Are you sure—” he starts, but I’m suddenly, entirely sure, and tired of waiting.
“Christ on a bicycle,” I say, and shove him over, rolling until he’s beneath me, inside me, his hair a tangled black halo on the floor. His expression is stark and scraped raw, almost desperate; it’s the face of a starving man before a feast, holding on to his table manners only by the very tips of his fingers.
I imagine stamping on those fingers, one by one. I smile down at him, and I know by the hitch of his breath that it’s my real one: crooked and mean and just as hungry as he is.