She ordered a fresh espresso. He ordered a Scotch and smiled at her quite charmingly.
“It’s the middle of the day,” he said. “We’re on vacation, you and I. Have a real drink with me. Just one.”
“Champagne,” she amended to the waiter, who turned away with a brusque nod. “I am not on vacation, though.”
Drinking champagne with a stranger on the sidewalk of a Parisian café in broad daylight. This couldn’t lead anywhere good.
Oh, but it might, Sutton. Two drinks and you might be on your back with your legs in the air, Constantine Raffalo straining above you with a look of adoration in his eyes.
The doctors had told her the preoccupation with fantasy, with imagination, with sex, was a symptom of her disease. It helped with the writing, certainly, but sometimes, she wondered if that was all she was. A disease. Her ability to create, to evoke a scene, a scent, a feeling, was all part of the disordered chaos in her brain. They’d claimed it was something to do with serotonin reuptake, and the way it didn’t allow the neural pathways to connect properly, leaving her out in the cold with an overactive, obsessive imagination and a frightening sense of exhilaration, an inability to stop her mind and her thoughts from racing, to the point that she often felt the world was rushing headlong forward, the pedal all the way to the floor. Sometimes, when things were just about to turn very, very bad, she could actually feel the earth rotating on its axis beneath her feet.
Sutton knew she was only partially of this world; the day-to-day life of mankind, the commutes and the news and the seasons, time passing gently to mere mortals. When she was on the verge, she could tap into some sort of collective unconscious and see the truths of the universe.
Which, of course, to some—including her bitch of a doctor—made her textbook, bona fide, certifiably crazy.
So Sutton wrote. She felt better when she wrote. The doctor had once told her it was simply a method of controlling her psychosis, how she was able to corral the multitude of voices in her head by putting words on the page.
Sutton didn’t take this dark gift for granted for a second. She knew that if she didn’t have the outlet, hadn’t found a way to channel her inner demons, she’d be mumbling to herself as she shuffled along the side of the road, hair in greasy hanks, clothes tattered, her feet rubbed raw from too-small shoes found at the local junk store, her life shortened by her brain turning to Swiss cheese inside her skull.
Happily, there was a pill for that. She took them religiously. She’d brought a year’s supply with her. She didn’t plan to stay away quite that long, only long enough to assuage some of the guilt and give her tired mind some room to relax. Time to get Ethan fully out of her system.
Goodbye, Ethan.
She had no doubt that if she hadn’t been cursed with all the extra mental goodness, the words would be gone, too. Would she be happier without them? Would she be normal? Would she have had a cadre of girlfriends and they’d have wine and cheese parties and girls’ weekends and send their men off to play golf and talk about periods and breastfeeding and the latest innovations in diapers and swill champagne by the bucket at book club meetings?
Would she want that from her life? She thought not. She thought—and it was one of those wonderful lightning flashes of epiphany, the kind that leave you slightly breathless and perfectly content—that no, she wouldn’t like a normal life at all, thank you very much.
Besides, how do you trade a gift—Sutton always felt her writing ability was a gift, dark as its biological genesis may be, no doubts there—for sanity and normality? How? Wasn’t it a slap in God’s face? He’d made her in his image. Did that mean God was suffering from some sort of mental disorder, as well?
Feeling mildly sacrilegious and quite pleased with that thought progression, which had taken less than ten seconds, exactly enough to take a single sip of her champagne and cross her legs, she gave Constantine Raffalo a genuine smile. He was pleasant to look at; his teeth were white and straight when he smiled. She often wondered if she could judge a person solely by their teeth. An inversely proportional ten to one scale. The straighter and whiter (a ten) they were, the lower on the scale of trustworthiness they went. Straight, white teeth meant money spent to make them that way. Money meant coming from a world she hadn’t been familiar with.
Her own teeth suffered from an odd dentition, the canines eagerly pushing forward so her front four teeth lay back, flat against her lips. It would only have taken a retainer to fix, but there was no money in her childhood household for such luxuries. Ethan’s crooked front tooth...
The voice that lived in her head and called so many of the shots in her life said, Stop it. Engage. You’re drifting again.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
A plain Midwestern voice, now unaccented, spoke. “Ohio, originally.”
“Really? I thought you were British, or Parisian. Your French is quite cosmopolitan. And Raffalo...”
“I went to school here for a while. I’ve lived all over. My dad’s military, and of Greek descent. He was the one who saddled me with Constantine. No American kid should have more than two syllables in their name. It’s an open invitation to be a target.”
She could hear the various influences in his speech pattern. It was almost disconcerting. One minute American, then words laced with French, and some with straight-up British.
And military orthodontia. Her estimation of him rose a notch. Not a trust fund baby, then.
“Tell me your name,” he said, leaning forward slightly at the tiny table.
“Justine Holliday,” Sutton replied without missing a beat.
HELLO, MY NAME IS...
Justine Holliday.
It was the identity she’d set up for herself before fleeing.
Sutton had spent a great deal of time thinking about her escape. She’d had the week in the hospital—against her will, the idiots, she was quite fine, only looking at the bottle’s directions, it was a fluke the bottle had opened and the pills had gotten into her mouth, she’d only wanted a moment of bliss—to decide what she wanted to do with her life. Life after incarceration. A moment in her life marked forever. Before incarceration, and after incarceration. BI life was odd and unexplainable, with careers and husbands and babies. The pressures of being happy, happy, happy, oh, we’re so very happy, can’t you tell?
AI life was more manageable. It was just her. Abandoned, castoff, alone but not adrift, no, never adrift. She could be whomever she needed. Whomever her mind dictated at that moment.