We each got a bottle. My aunt, Olivier, and Seraphine wandered off down the beach with one, Pascal and my father sat on the sand just a few feet from the mess that the servants were busily trying to clean up. Renaud went off for a walk by himself.
Which left me to my own devices. I decided to head up to the house and get a new shirt since mine was covered in red wine and gooey flan.
That’s when I came across my mother being consoled by my uncle.
There’s nothing out of the ordinary about any of this. It’s always my uncle who is the first to console anybody. But still, I stay silent as I pass by them, pausing when I’m out of sight. I don’t think they even know I’m around the corner, hidden by a marble statue near the sitting area.
“He knows,” my mother says between sobs. “Luddie, he knows.”
“Everything is fine, Eloise,” he says to her reassuringly, but I swear there’s a hint of tremor in his voice—very unlike him.
I peek around the corner of the statue and see him put his hand on my mother’s shoulder, but she swats him away. “No,” she says sharply, racked by another sob. “He knows and he’ll kill me. You know what he’s capable of.” She looks up at him with the wildest eyes I’ve ever seen. This might be one of the few times I’ve really seen fear on my mother’s face, and I don’t think I like it.
“You need to calm down, please. This is your anniversary—”
“It means nothing!” she yells.
My uncle shushes her, and my mother looks around, expecting to be seen. I quickly duck back before she has a chance to spot me. Not that I understand what I’m eavesdropping on, but it sounds important. A little too important. Probably something I need to walk away from.
So I do. I walk away just in time to hear my mother say softly, “We all know what he can do and will do. No one is safe. He holds grudges until he dies.”
She’s slurring her words, though. She’s drunk and she’s crazy, becoming more and more unhinged as I get older. I have no doubt she’s talking about my father, but when it comes to my family, the less I know and the less I’m involved, the better off I am. I didn’t just spend the last few months in Brussels trying to get an education so I couldn’t step away from this family and this god-awful business.
My mother obviously did something wrong. Maybe my uncle did, too, but that doesn’t seem likely. He’s too good for that. Perhaps it was a business deal gone south. Whatever it is, it’s not my concern. It can’t ever be.
I head upstairs through the sprawling interior to the third floor, where my bedroom is, and take off my shirt. Then, as I’m pulling out a clean one from my carry-on suitcase, I realize that I don’t owe anyone anything. I don’t have to get dressed, I don’t have to go back down. I have the bottle of Scotch with me, and that’s all that I need. I can finish the bottle, drift off to sleep, and see if I can get a flight out tomorrow, a day earlier than the one I have scheduled.
So I sit at the foot of the bed and proceed to drink straight from the bottle, wishing once again that I’d just stayed away. But the more I stay away, the more I have to ask myself, where am I staying? I’m twenty years old, and I have no fucking idea what I’m doing with my life. I just know what I’m trying to avoid.
I drink and I think about this, and I’m not sure how much time has gone past, but then I look up and see a figure passing in front of my door, the door I’d left halfway open.
It’s Seraphine.
I’ve barely said two words to her since I arrived yesterday.
There’s not much to say.
Everything I want to say can’t be put into words, and if it could, it would be inappropriate.
Just the sight of her makes something inside me unravel.
I can’t let that happen.
I have to stay intact. I have to avoid her.
And yet I get to my feet and walk unsteadily over to the door, leaning out of it in time to see her silhouette disappear into her room.
I quickly follow her, putting my arm out against her door just as she starts to close it.
“Jesus,” she swears as she jumps. “You startled me.”
“What are you doing?” I ask her.
“I was about to go to bed,” she says, looking me up and down. I’m shirtless, and her eyes trace over my bare skin with more care than she’d like to show. “And it seems so were you.”
“Have a drink with me,” I tell her, showing her the Scotch and pushing the door open even further. “Talk to me.”
Her eyes go wide. “Talk to you?” She sweeps her long hair over her shoulder and puts her hands on her hips. “Since when do we ever talk, Blaise? The last time we even spoke, you punched my ex-boyfriend in the face.”
“He deserved it. You know it.”
“It doesn’t matter. It was uncalled for. It made it all a bigger deal than it was. Had you not done that, no one outside the party would have known how humiliated I was. After you did that, all the tabloids reported on the story. Made you out to be a violent and crazy drunk, made me out to be some loser whose boyfriend cheated on her in front of everyone.”
“Jamillah,” I say.
“What?” Her brows knit together, eyes hard.
“Your alter ego.”
“She was my old self,” she clarifies. “And I regret ever telling you about her.”
“What else do you regret? I mean, now that we’re laying everything out.”
She takes a step toward me, her fingers curled around the edge of the door. “We’re not laying anything out. Don’t get it twisted. I think it’s time you go to your room.”
But I don’t move away. I lean in and whisper, “Do you regret kissing me back?”
“Get out.” Her voice trembles slightly.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell her, moving forward until I’m pressed up against her. She tries to push back, but I keep going until I’m inside and clear of the doorway.
I’m not sure what I’m doing, I just know we need to talk. Maybe not about everything, maybe there’s nothing to talk about on her end. But I hate this whole back-and-forth thing we have, the ignoring each other for months and months and then the forced conversation, the formalities we put up in front of everyone else when there is something so much more raging underneath. Perhaps all unbeknownst to her.
This is what I need to find out.
“What do you want?” she asks quietly. She doesn’t look scared, really, just wary.
I reach over and brush her bangs out of her eyes so I can see them more clearly. Perhaps now she looks scared. The fact that I touched her.
I then hold up the bottle, keeping it between us. “Just have a drink with me.”
She eyes it. “That’s probably a bad idea.”
“Not true. I only have good ideas.” I lift the bottle to my lips and take a swig. “Don’t tell me you don’t need it after tonight.”
“I think I’ve had enough wine,” she says in a feeble protest. Then she takes the bottle from me and turns, walking over to the window. I watch as she takes a long swig, doesn’t flinch even once. For a seventeen-year-old, she can handle her liquor phenomenally well. Can’t say the same for my mother.