بخش 6 فصل 10

Everywhere, Nowhere

1952–1968

X

It is only s@x.

At least, it starts that way.

He is a thing to be gotten out of her system.

She is a novelty to be enjoyed.

Addie half expects them to burn out in a single night, to waste whatever energy they’ve gathered in their years of spinning.

But two months later, he comes to find her again, steps out of nothing and back into her life, and she thinks about how strange it is, to see him against the reds and golds of autumn, the changing leaves, a charcoal scarf looped loose around his throat.

It is weeks until his next visit.

And then, only days.

So many years of solitary nights, hours of waiting, and hating, and hoping. Now he is there.

Still, Addie makes herself small promises in the space between his visits.

She will not linger in his arms.

She will not fall asleep beside him.

She will not feel anything but his lips on her skin, his hands tangled in hers, the weight of him against her.

Small promises, but ones she does not keep.

It is only s@x.

And then it is not.

“Dine with me,” Luc says as winter gives way to spring.

“Dance with me,” he says as a new year begins.

“Be with me,” he says, at last, as one decade slips into the next.

And one night Addie wakes in the dark to the soft pressure of his fingertips drawing patterns on her skin, and she is struck by the look in his eyes. No, not the look. The knowing.

It is the first time that she has woken up in bed with someone who hasn’t already forgotten her. The first time she’s heard her name again after the pause of sleep. The first time she hasn’t felt alone.

And something in her splinters.

Addie does not hate him anymore. Has not for a long time.

She does not know when the shift started, if it was a specific point in time, or, as Luc once warned her, the slow erosion of a coast.

All she knows is that she is tired, and he is the place she wants to rest.

And that, somehow, she is happy.

But it is not love.

Whenever Addie feels herself forgetting, she presses her ear to his bare chest and listens for the drum of life, the drawing of breath, and hears only the woods at night, the quiet hush of summer. A reminder that he is a lie, that his face and his flesh are simply a disguise.

That he is not human, and this is not love.