“Close your eyes,” I demand.
“Okay.”
He doesn’t close his eyes.
“Close them!”
“I did.”
(He didn’t.)
I need to rinse my hair, but he’s standing directly under the spray, giving me very little room to maneuver. I plant a hand on his chest and he’s immediately compliant, falling back. Nicholas’s skin is hot satin under my fingertips, responding to my touch with goose bumps and a quickening pulse. I want to sink my nails into the slightest bit of give his flesh offers, but right now every flinch, every step and turn and tilt conveys a primal message. He’s waiting for the signal that says Help yourself to whatever you want. Don’t be wasteful. Lick me up to the last drop.
To prevent myself from extending an invitation I’m too much of a chicken to deliver on, I keep my eyes shut while I rinse my hair, hand motionless against his chest to make sure he can’t come closer. When I open my eyes again, his gaze is flame, jaw white and set, and I imagine cracks running up the bone all the way to the top of his skull. Mist pearls in his lashes and brows, sweat cropping along the bridge of his nose and the hollows in his cheeks. He’s a ripple of heat and with one gesture from me he’ll gladly roast me alive. My heart goes tha-thump: a wild, winged creature in my rib cage. He looks like he’s about to lose it and I won’t lie, I’m a bit unnerved by what he might do.
It’s been twelve weeks since I’ve had sex. Twelve weeks for Nicholas, too, if he hasn’t been cheating on me.
The image of him sleeping with another woman and me catching him in the act doesn’t inspire the same victorious feeling that it once did. It throws a bucket of ice water over all of my pounding, light-headed need-you, take-me while liquid fury chases through my bloodstream, synapses shorting out. If I discover him cheating on me in a shopping mall parking lot I’m going to end up on the evening news. Stacy Mootispaw better stay out of my fiancé’s dress-code-prohibited khakis or she’s going to be putting her own teeth back into her mouth after I’ve kicked them out.
I can’t let myself think about him that way, with me or anyone else. It’s too dangerous and there are too many axes Leon left behind in the shed. If I conjure up memories of us in intimate positions, superimposing Stacy’s face over mine, I’ll black out and come to with holes smashed through all our walls.
I hurry up with my business, as if I can outrun these intrusive thoughts, and practically fall out of the shower while there are still suds in my hair. I dart a quick glance at Nicholas while grabbing my towel. He doesn’t speak a word, but he might as well have an accusing thought bubble above his head that says Coward.
Running feels like surrendering a dose of my power to him, but I embrace my cowardly ways and hotfoot it up to my bedroom to get dressed. By the time I’m calmed down enough to tiptoe back downstairs, Nicholas is on the couch and his hair’s already dry. It’s so incredibly upsetting, how quickly a man’s hair dries and looks perfectly fine.
“Look outside,” he tells me.
I peer out the window, and my heart soars when a cascade of snowflakes swirls by and sticks to the glass. They melt one by one. “Snow!”
It’s mid-November, but for me Christmas starts at the first snow. I get sparkly-eyed over the season, doing pirouettes around the house while I strew Hobby Lobby decorations left and right. I play all the classics on surround sound and set up the tree well before Thanksgiving. I’m that person on social media you absolutely hate because I say stuff like IT’S 224 DAYS UNTIL CHRISTMAS in May. All the festivities of Christmas, and the joy and magic of it, make me happy, so I tend to stretch it out for as long as possible.
I turn to see what he’s watching on TV, and do a double take. The television is turned off. He’s watching me in the black screen.
Something about the way his eyes are following me feels intimate, making my legs watery. I’m conscious of the way my arms swing when I move, and the way I walk. It’s similar to the way I sometimes move in dreams, where there’s inexplicable resistance. Almost like I’m trying to walk underwater.
I go to the drawing room because I want to see the snow through those three beautiful windows, but his big desk blocks me. He sees the change in my expression when I walk back into the living room.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
He doesn’t speak, but his gaze narrows. He’s got an ankle propped on his knee, fingertips drumming on the armrest of the couch.
Nothing.
It’s a self-appointed martyr’s answer. It ensures that the issue goes unresolved, and that I suffer all by myself. What do I get out of saying nothing?
“It’s just …” I sit down on the other armrest, out of touching range. “When you first showed me the house, one of the things I liked best were the windows in, uh … in there.” He calls it his office or his study and in my head I still call it the drawing room, because in a past life I was a duchess and I’ve never quite gotten over being reborn as a commoner in this age.
“I thought, wow, what a pretty view. You’d be able to see all the stars over the forest. I’d imagined putting an armchair right there, so I could sit and admire the view. I like that room. I’d put, I don’t know, maybe a nutcracker on the mantel or something. I don’t know.” I shrug to downplay it. I sound insane. A nutcracker? Really? These are my gripes? I’ve been hyperfocusing on such minuscule details.
I’m immediately embarrassed that I admitted this out loud and I’m about to never mind the whole thing when Nicholas stands and walks into the drawing room. Standing on the other side of his desk, he slides his hands into his pockets and stares at the windows like he’d never gotten a good look at the forest beyond them before. “You’re right,” he says. He angles his profile toward me. His eyes are the color of a silver fir. They’re fog and moonlight.
I’m not sure what part of my spiel he’s saying this in reference to, but I’ll take it. We fall into a pattern that is completely new but somehow already feels ingrained: We silently make dinner together and sit down in front of the television. We don’t switch it on. We eat in companionable silence as the snow falls steadily around us and darkness smothers the world.
Our cease-fire comes to an end, predictably, twenty minutes after dinner when he hears my phone buzz on the mantel. I don’t get up.
He glances at the mantel, then at me. It’s a long, considering look. “Not going to see what that is?”
“Nope.”
His suspicion is palpable, but I’m not mentally prepared to check my notifications. My heart is racing just knowing what it might be, and I have to give myself time to come down from the anxiety rush, bracing myself for bad news, before I brave a look.
One of the people I’ve secretly been in touch with about a job at a craft store I’d really, really like (and have already gotten my hopes up about) told me three days ago after I interviewed that she’d take three days to check my references and consider other applicants in the pool before emailing me with a decision. I’ve spent the day alternating between obsessively checking my phone (and my computer, in case for whatever reason the email doesn’t pop up on my phone) and pretending the Internet doesn’t exist. My nerves are shredded.