“I don’t like tea. And if I remember, you also prefer wine to tea.”
“Not when I’m working, which is what I was doing.” I didn’t like the idea of being alone with him in my suite.
“That’s convenient. I’m actually here to talk to you about work.” I must have let my surprise show on my face, because he said, “Really, I am. We do have work to discuss.”
“What work could that be?”
“I mentioned that Emma’s commissioned me to make a book of your drawings when you are done?”
I nodded.
“I’d like to see the size of the paper you are using so I can prepare the leathers.”
It seemed a fairly harmless request, and I opened my arms to indicate the spread of paper around me. “Take your pick.”
Mathieu picked up one of my drawings and then another. “This is a very detailed chamber.”
“Yes, I saw it very clearly.”
“Your style has evolved so much. Your lines are even surer than they were before, and this is just a sketch. I’d love to see your paintings.”
I lowered my head and looked down at my hands to escape his eyes. My insides were roiling. Being alone with Mathieu wasn’t a good idea. I needed to get up and run, out of the room, out of the house, away from Millau. Away from Mathieu. Away from what I wanted. What I’d always wanted. What I couldn’t have. I couldn’t be the artist my mother was. Or have the man I loved by my side. I couldn’t find peace with my gift. I couldn’t save people from the secrets that gave them so much pain. I couldn’t stop being a victim of my own making.
Mathieu pulled the cork out of the wine and poured it. He handed me a crystal goblet. Taking it from him, I was careful not to let our hands touch. He held his glass up to make a toast. But he didn’t say anything, only clinked his glass with mine, and then he drank. As did I. The wine tasted of blackberries and coffee. A sensual, dark flavor that surprised me with its intensity.
“That’s delicious,” I said. Discussing the wine seemed a safe enough topic.
“I chose it from Emma’s extensive cellar. It’s quite amazing.”
“Have you ever been here before?”
“Not for a long time.”
“What a coincidence that you are here now.” I sipped the wine. “I wish you weren’t.”
He ignored my comment. “Delphine, I know that the little scene you set up in Paris was a fake. That you weren’t having an affair with that man I supposedly caught you with in the restaurant.”
I was stunned at the turn in the conversation. “I was seeing him. He was a fellow student. We fell in love. I was meeting him behind your back.”
Mathieu laughed. “You’re really a terrible liar. At first, I was so stunned and hurt. I believed you were cheating on me and that you’d betrayed me. But once you left Paris, something didn’t seem right. It was one thing for you to be with another man, but why leave Paris? School? Your family? I did some sleuthing, and I found the gentleman, who was happy to answer my questions for a bit more money than you had paid him. He confessed.”
“He did?”
“I wrote to you about it.”
He was looking at me, waiting for a response.
“I didn’t read your letters,” I whispered.
“I wrote so many. I even tried to write you a poem.”
“Did you? Have you started writing poetry again?”
“Only three lines, over and over. I can’t move past them. And I don’t even completely understand them.”
“Will you tell me?”
“Being with me, you kept me alive. Leaving, you killed me. Let me die with you rather than live without you.”
I understood the lines. Every word. “It’s beautiful.”
“No. It’s awkward and unfinished. But I . . .” He shook his head. “I need to know. Why did you create such an elaborate ruse? If you wanted to end things with me, why didn’t you just tell me to my face? And if you did want to end things, why are you still wearing my ring?”
What to tell him? I didn’t know. I hadn’t expected this confrontation.
Mathieu put his glass down, got up, and came to sit down beside me on the couch. He took my glass out of my hand, put it on the coffee table, and then leaned forward and kissed me.
I thought I had remembered what it felt like to be in Mathieu’s arms. But I’d forgotten so much. How his kisses lit little fires wherever they touched. Those flames now licking my lips, my forehead, my neck, each of my fingertips, the space where my collarbones joined, behind my ear, where my shoulder met my neck. I lost any ability to think clearly. All I knew was that I was with Mathieu, was smelling Mathieu, was tasting wine on his lips and inhaling his scent, was slipping and sliding into a place of velvet smoothness and honey thickness, as long, languorous waves of sensation took me and rocked me and stroked me. One by one, he removed pieces of my clothing, as I removed his, so that more and more of our bodies could touch, and more and more of our naked skin could press together, and my consciousness warned me less and less that this was dangerous, because danger didn’t matter anymore, only the delicious wantonness of being in his arms and having him in mine. Of feeling him all around me. Of taking him in. Of giving in. Of living out this dream that I had dreamed for the last six thousand days. This was my nighttime secret that I shared with no one. Mathieu reaching my innermost core. This was Mathieu, and as he touched me and I touched him, I remembered something else I’d forced myself to forget. He was more than the man I loved; he was the man for whom my body had been made, the man whose body had been made for mine. As if once there had been . . .
And then he began to whisper the story he’d told me the first time we’d been together like this.
“Once there was a single being, a complete whole, a man and a woman as one entity in paradise. As a punishment, they were cleaved apart. And for eternity forced to spend their lives trying to find their perfect puzzle other half. When you find your perfect puzzle other half, Delphine, it is blasphemy to walk way, to deny the pleasure that is due you. You can’t leave me again. It will kill me if you do. And I don’t want to die. I want to live. I want to live with you.”
And with that, with that one passionate whisper in the dark, with the rain beating on the windows and the wine on our lips and our bodies wet with our lust pressed together and the sheets dank beneath us . . . with that one plea, Mathieu ruined everything. He made me focus on the danger. Made me remember fully and with clarity that I was his poison. He couldn’t be with me. To do so was to invite his own demise. I could love him, but I could not be with him. To do so was to put the period at the end of his death sentence. I knew what had happened to the other men whom other daughters of La Lune had loved. It was too risky. My father had almost died for my mother. La Lune’s own lover had been killed. There was always a slim chance that we could fight the curse. But a greater chance that we could not.