“Who was that?” I asked casually as she finally slid into my car, humming to herself.
I already knew the answer, but I didn’t know how frankly Nimue would look over at me and say, “My boyfriend. That okay?”
No.
No.
It’s not okay and I’ve only just got you and you’re not even mine.
“I surmise it will have to be okay in order for me to keep seeing you?” I asked as I started the car.
Her teeth worried at her lower lip, and her frank expression was subsumed by something doubtful and dark.
“I don’t know, Merlin,” she said after a minute. “I just…I don’t know.”
For six weeks, I pretended not to care. I fucked the woman I’d loved across two lifetimes and tried not to care that during the day she was with a handsome quarterback; I folded her in my arms and pretended not to smell his youthful aftershave on the skin of her neck.
“I hate this,” she told me the night before her graduation. She was in my hotel room, sprawled over my chest in a warm, sated tangle of limbs and hair. We’d fucked so many times that my cock ached, but I didn’t care. I’d fuck her as many times as she’d let me.
“What do you hate, my little moon?”
She often teased me about my pet name for her—it was unusual and old-fashioned, to be sure. She had no idea exactly how old-fashioned it was. But she didn’t even blink at it tonight.
“I hate that I’m still with Jack when I only want to be with you. I hate how much I want you because it feels like I don’t even belong to myself anymore, not all the way. I hate that I feel like you’
re going to leave at any moment and then I’ll have nothing at all.”
I thought about that. It had never occurred to me that Nimue might consider me the flight risk, me the cavalier unattached one. How could it have? When I had known from the moment I was born that she would always, always give her body to another and then leave me to die?
It would be my life’s work to control information—to decide when and how to tell the truth, to choose which secrets would stay in the shadows and which would be brought into the light. But sadly, it was a gift that I couldn’t apply to myself. I was too close to it, maybe, still too bitter about what had happened between us before. Bitter that history was already repeating itself—goddamn Pelleas again—and bitter that I still loved this singing little sprite with her blue eyes and wide smile.
I should have told her the truth then. Everything, I should have told her everything, and especially what I should have told her was this:
I love you.
I love you and I won’t leave.
I’d rather die than leave you, and let me tell you about the time I did just that.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Instead, I said, “I don’t belong to myself all the way either. Even if I left, you’d have the biggest piece of me to hold on to. For eternity, little moon.”
And then we made love again, sore cock and all.
It ended the next day. The next night, really, at the lavish graduation party Vivienne threw for her little sister and the rest of Nimue’s graduating class. I don’t even remember why I attended now, except that Nimue wanted me there, and my protests felt weak in the face of her sweet pleadings.
I’ll just be the strange old man at the party full of young people.
Don’t be ridiculous, all the parents will be there.
That doesn’t make me feel better, you know.
But when have I ever truly refused her?
So I went to the party, knowing full well that we were still hiding from Vivienne, from everyone, and knowing that she’d be on her teenaged boyfriend’s arm. Knowing that I’d be consumed with jagged, helpless jealousy the entire night.
I was.
Even Nimue’s increasingly worried glances my way didn’t help. She kept trying to catch my eye, to brush against me in passing as I forced my way through idle small talk with some of Vivienne’s politically minded friends, but I couldn’t bear to actually look at her, actually feel her. Not with Pelleas’s claim so publicly marked.
