“Don’t fucking find me again,” I said. “From now on, I’ll never look you in the eyes.”
“Offer stands until morning,” he said.
I slammed the door to Grayson’s bedroom behind me. Could he hear the desperation in my voice? The fear trickling like a leaking dam?
This isn’t about Lottie anymore.
I’m too close to giving him all of myself when he doesn’t even want pieces. Fuck his money. Fuck the thing throbbing in my chest to stay close. I need to get out. I ran out of the wing, past his guards, down to the servants’ quarters.
Most everyone would be asleep at this time of night, and the very quarters themselves were dark and hushed. Only the humming sound of pipes.
Home.
Mildewy, cramped, home.
A tiny part of me felt…empty. Missing. I ached for black and gold, for bare walls and barer insides, and a looming, lonely presence that wandered its halls like a ghost.
I quickly shook my head. I pushed open the door to one of the girls’ dormitories. Early morning ocean air drifted in through cracks in the walls, salty and cold. In a few hours Grayson would leave for his trip.
It would end, this knotty, wrong thing between us.
Ellie’s straight, dark-brown hair was visible on one of the cot-like beds. I launched myself at her like I used to.
She gasped and I said, “Ellie belly, it’s me.” She froze, and didn’t grab my arms and tug me tighter like usual. “Ellie?”
“Shouldn’t you be sucking Grayson Crowne off?” she whispered.
I froze, then sat back. She slowly sat up, sitting against the iron bedpost.
“I thought you believed me?” I asked after a minute.
“That was before he threatened everyone in broad fucking daylight over you, before he punched his best friend because of you.” She narrowed her eyes on me.
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
It didn’t. He told me over and over again I was worth nothing.
“I’m not mad that you’re with him, Story. I don’t know how you managed to get Gray Crowne to fuck you when he doesn’t so much look in the direction of the maids. I just wish you weren’t so damn fake about it.”
“I didn’t—I wasn’t—we never…”
She rolled her eyes and slid back down into the small twin bed, pulling a plaid cotton duvet higher. I climbed off her bed, staring at Ellie a moment longer, at the home I’d built crumbling in my fingers.
It was nearly two in the morning, but Uncle was a night owl like me. We used to share hot chocolate at this hour and talk poetry or the weird things poets did. Like how Mary Shelley kept her husband’s heart in a locket, or Byron’s mistresses would send him pubic hair as a keepsake.
My uncle was fond of reminding me that we weren’t any less depraved back then; we just didn’t have the internet.
I tapped on his dark wood door. Maybe now I was back, things could return to normal and he would talk to me.
“Uncle?” The door was a feather’s distance ajar, so I pushed it with my finger, and it creaked open. “Uncle?” I said again.
My uncle was awake, and when he spotted me, he umped. “Story, my God, knock first.”
On the bed behind him were pill bottles of all kinds, and flashbacks to the last time I’d seen Uncle with so many temporarily seized me.
“I did,” I said, staring at the pills on the bed. “What’s going on?”
He exhaled. “I didn’t want to tell you like this.”