Archive of Our Own

19:00

“You need to relax, Nathalie.”

All at once, muscle memory at the sound of her first command: Nathalie emptying her lungs in one soft, shaking breath. Held for weeks now; the shift of her feet on the guest bed, opening herself up. Nothing more to hide, not anymore. 

She watches with bated feeling as Emilie snakes her hand up from her left shin, curling under to choke the junction of thigh and calf. A phantom throb in the hollow of her neck, calling for the same unbearable tenderness it knows of Emilie’s hands. Knowing how they can press and throttle, how long Nathalie can stand lightheadedness. How her ring is reserved for others, but it is Nathalie whose skin knows her thumb and middle finger best. Emilie leans far enough forward that her chiffon robe glides like a theater curtain against Nathalie’s overheated leg, leaving what is to come for the two of them only. 

Trained as Nathalie’s body is, muscle memory being the cruelest haunting, anticipation sparks at the first cool breeze across her naked center. 

In another lifetime, she tells the ceiling, relaxing was a challenge. A game to be won. A game Emilie, only Emilie, ever did win. Baring herself like this, meager offering that it is—but what now is there to give but sorrow and shame? Spread at Emilie’s mercy, Nathalie wonders what it is she sees, what it is she feels. 

“Stay like that.” 

Nathalie nods. The only action she has allowed herself for days, aside from sobbing or vomiting. Both silent, involuntary retches. 

A second finger prods and braces at her opening. Pleasureless for Emilie, but when will Nathalie’s body ever erase these cues, these reactions? Though she does not take her blurring eyes off the ceiling above them, Nathalie hopes Emilie is at least smiling. That scrap she would take.  

Emilie works her open, just enough for the first pill to nestle comfortably inside. Little resistance. Not after being ordered. The remaining three should be easy, she wants to say. Reassuring Emilie: Nathalie can make this easy. Nathalie can make this forgettable. 

But when her mouth drops open, words forming slow and hazy, Emilie’s fingers squeeze. 

“Shh, baby.”

What else is there to do but obey? 

Like soured saliva Nathalie’s words condense on the roof of her mouth and slide down her cheeks in rivulets, so she snaps her mouth shut and ignores the tremble of her lips. 

Emilie’s fingers relax, though the one inside stays still. Nathalie feels her heart begin to hammer. A body-wide pulse, as if the blood ready to molt for Emilie is rushing towards her, giving her proof, here, here. And when she doesn’t move or make a sound, Nathalie’s body bends itself to grasp for a cue, a line, anything at all—around her finger Nathalie tenses, once, just an eager once. The way they’d taken Nathalie’s blood pressure, the seal of plastic tight around her arm. Can Emilie feel her doing the same? 

Three heartbeats pass. 

And then, as if she’s settled, as if she’s ready, Emilie pushes in just an inch more. 

Involuntary gasp, Nathalie wants to promise—but her body betrays her the moment Emilie begins to slide out. Every emaciated curve of her knuckles, every ridge in her fingerprint makes its mark inside Nathalie as she flutters, quickly once, around her finger. 

Difficult not to clench her stomach, not to chase after Emilie’s touch and keep her. To not find pleasure when she plunges in again. Stilling, again. Silent, save for the echo of apologies and breath in Nathalie’s own head. Is she shaking? Is her breathing so loud? Crinkle of a blister pack. Her spine begs to arch.

Cutting through, Emilie’s melodic sigh. Not even words, and yet Nathalie clings to it, bored and tired though it sounds. The one she reserves as a warning. That you’ve not entertained her, not surprised her. The wiggle of a rabbit’s nose before it runs. 

The third, too quick. Pistoning, methodical, in and out and emptied and aching. Left suspended in the pause thereafter. Longer than before. Stretching like a sigh off Emilie’s lips. Nathalie swallows hard, the remnants of her early dinner, tepid consommé and painkillers, waiting in the wings of her throat. 

Emilie’s finger swipes along the inside of her right thigh and Nathalie goes still. Dead still.

She’s wet. How pathetic. 

Words and sick and soup struggle, so that Emilie is already shushing her by the time Nathalie’s groans form meaning. Emilie presses a kiss to the inside of her knee. A knuckle brushes where it shouldn’t, and Nathalie digs her nails into the sheets.

“Emilie, I’m—”

Nathalie’s shoulders jump to her ears as Emilie’s face floats into view, leaning over her to replace the light. Familiar training, Nathalie’s knee now bent against her chest: to hold and give and be taken. 

But Emilie hasn’t told her to touch, and Nathalie has nothing to give but repentance.

When Emilie speaks, her bottom lip catches on Nathalie’s top, overwhelming friction. “I know, Nathalie.” Words so softly spoken. Again the fingers at her knee anchor Nathalie as the room begins to spin. A sweetness coating her throat, Emilie’s perfume coaxing itself through her gag reflex. “Breathe with me,” she asks, deliberately slowing—one, two, Nathalie’s nod knocking noses and then Emilie’s kiss at the moment of penetration. Finger sinking slowly down to the last knuckle as Emilie hums against her lips, unheeding of how she struggles to stay still or how her chest jolts up to meet hers. 

Popping away, cork from bottle, Emilie licks at the spill of her lipstick in the corner of her mouth. Unconsciously, Nathalie mirrors, as if supping at wine Emilie has spit into her mouth. Sugar to mask the medicine of a covenant unbreakable, untenable.  

“You don’t have to make this hard on yourself.” 

A little further inside Emilie sinks. Bumping, notching, searching then finding, finally, the slight pinch that earns from Nathalie a moan, choked and needy. 

Satisfied, Emilie eases back, leaving Nathalie to lay alone with her humiliation. Obscene, obvious squelch of her finger exiting and the cold emptiness, cavernous and crushing. 

Following, always following, what else is there to do? Emilie ahead of her, Nathalie following the ghost trail of her body, propping herself up as Emilie kneels back on her haunches. The endless chase—until Emilie firmly presses a hand to Nathalie’s chest, fingers hard against her ribs. Faced with the distinct salty scent of herself she blushes. A scent soon to be changed, soon to be ruined. Nathalie’s defeat, settling to watch Emilie from on her elbows.

Emilie, who glows with the sun behind her. Suffusing through the diaphanous night robe. Edges gilt, casting a shadow over Nathalie, who swears she can feel it. Not unlike the way those who swear they feel the chill of a ghost in their house.

Emilie, who looks better than she has in months, if not years—vibrant, like spring breaking open through stubborn, hardpacked snow. Her eyes have clarity, a rosy tint to her cheeks and lips, and oh, oh her smile. A smile, at a time like this. 

“Now, we have an hour to kill. I suggest you stay still so it takes,” she says. How pretty her lips look formed around her words, words Nathalie hangs onto with white knuckles. She raps her fingers over Nathalie’s sternum, childish. “We wouldn’t want to do this again, would we?”

Even as she says it, her other hand rides the swell of Nathalie’s quadricep, the valley of muscle earned from all the miles away from here that she’s hiked, puked, and bled. Her thumb rubs soothing circles in the dip of her pelvis. 

Nathalie shakes her head, and the ember of sunset behind Emilie seems to burst and spill open, fork to yellow yolk, and become her. Luminance has always fit her, a light in the dark. Gabriel and Nathalie, moths to a flame, worshippers to stained glass saints. Different names for the same thing. 

“Good,” Emilie grins, before shimmying back and repositioning Nathalie’s legs to lay closed, then gliding off the bed. The sun tips its head back to gasp before drowning itself into night. Nothing left in this room worthy to shine on.

Laying back, Nathalie pulls the bedsheet over herself. Surgery completed. The bedpan under her a terrycloth towel, one that Emilie said she’d had the staff buy on special request. Just for her, just for this. She’d assured, with an air of charity, that it was nine hundred GSM. Nathalie knows from hosting guests that towels reserved for visitors fall five hundred less. 

She squeezes her eyes shut. By the end, how much of her blood will spill, grams per square meter? An hour. The mistake of her lifetime had been over in half that.

Emilie runs the ensuite’s tap until it’s warm and screeching. 

“How funny it is that the request is similar,” she muses, polishing her finger and examining it the way a chef admires their knife, freshly cleaned. Reflecting their own face back. “Gabriel would feed me in bed. Read me my cue lines from whatever show I was in at the time. He’d get me anything I wanted, really. It was the only time I never minded being still. The stiller I could make myself, the more promising it felt. Willing my body. Showing it I was worthy of a child.” 

She throws the cloth past the hamper and into the trash. Saunters back to Nathalie on the bed, ghosting the same hand up the column of her throat, fingering the gutter of her jaw, the dip behind Nathalie’s ear. With a gentle nudge, Emilie rolls her head to the side. What remaining tears that spill onto the bedspread bother neither woman. 

“And here you are now. Willing your body to reject.” Emilie’s thumb pets her cheek, holding her gaze for a few beats more before sliding her eyes down the length of her body, so, so still. Attention snagging briefly on her stomach and the rapid rising and falling of her chest as she makes her way back up.

Emilie breathes in deep, her exhaled sigh the night’s sweet overture. “I had him, and you have me.”

Nathalie wants to tell herself it’s a reminder, a promise. Too much common sense, however, to hold onto the hope for more than a second. Even as Emilie plants a kiss on her brow, her words so impossibly tender. 

“Now, my heart. Tell me when it begins to hurt.”

11:35

Two lines in parallel, colored dark pink with watercolor dread. 

Nathalie stands, mechanical movements of a body forming chrysalis—fastening her belt, zipping her fly and feeling every jagged tooth notching—very distant to her now. Watching in numb observance as the paper darkens with all the fluids left in her. An art she’s mastered, the art of watching: reticles in crossbows, bare strips of light through bedroom doors, husband and wife from across a room. 

This time, however, Nathalie’s skin crawls with the primal fear that something is on the other side staring back at her. 

A polite knock makes her jump out of her skin. 

“Miss?” 

When Nathalie moves her head, walls and toilet and mirror melt and blur together. Vertigo at eleven thousand meters. Bile bubbles readily in her throat, so she snaps shut her useless mouth. Returns her eyes to the only two lines unmoving, unchanging. He hand plays distantly at her left ribs. 

Improbable had been the word used. Improbable: not likely to be true. 

“Is everything all right?”

It’s improbable that you could ever carry a child. Said with the condescending condolences of doctors who already had their next patient in mind. Nathalie still remembers the palliative, consoling pats on her knobby knee. How the doctor, male, passed his thumb curiously over a freshly scarred and pockmarked snakebite on the side of her leg. Nathalie unblinking, unphased. Relieved, with the sense not to show it.

Improbable was the word she told herself an hour ago, consulting ten-point font on fragile paper with shaking hands in the Lhasa Gonggar International Airport bathroom stall. She’d been nauseated all day, anxiety and liters of water churning in her stomach like a storm. Faint lines denote inconclusive results. She whispered them under her breath, spell-casting them with her luggage as witness. Changing inconclusive with improbable. 

How ironic it all sounds now.

“May I get you some ginger ale, if it’s your stomach?”

Improbable: not likely to happen.

Another knock. Her vision ripples with the sound.

“Miss?”

Improbable: not likely to happen. 

Two lines, two words. “One moment,” Nathalie rasps, squeezing her eyes shut with a wince.

It’s improbable, based on the test we’ve run that she—

Run them again. 

Monsieur Agreste, we’ve been over this. There’s risks—any more MRI contrast can worsen her anemia—

Run the others. You’re missing something. 

That same sad, hiccuped sob. 

It isn’t… unheard of for patients to feel better if given rest and fresh air. There’s retreats I can refer you to in—

Swallowing, Nathalie can still picture the vein that popped in his neck, blue in the orange sunlight. How it convulsed all the way to his sunken temple. How the doctor—the only one they ever consulted—reeled back in his chair as Gabriel hooked his hands under the lip of the desk and shook it, legs lifting and slamming back down with a confetti of picture frames and papers. Papers with different dates, but all the same words. Improbable. Impossible. Terminal.

Improbable is a kind word for impossible. The symptom of cancerous impossible. Impossible is used when it is known—impossible with medicine—; impossible is a plea—impossible, so stop chasing, stop leaving—; impossibly tiny, the space of the airplane bathroom, the walls clasped like hands over her head, squeezing and squeezing and—

Successive knocks. Beating, now, on the door behind her. Impossible, the mirrored feeling: a pulse, a beating, forming from just beneath the surface of her stomach. Worm wriggling underneath apple flesh. 

“Miss, there are other passengers who need to use this restroom.”

A sign on Nathalie’s right reminds her not to flush feminine products. In front of her, a changing table. To the left, the heaving, gulping mouth of a woman she doesn’t recognize, framed by the tiny mirror. The purple half-moons dragging her eyes down reflect the bleary overhead fluorescence. Two months circling the drain with Gabriel, lost without their sun, and she’s paler than when she left. Cool-toned skin, anemic like something gutted, all her blood rerouted somewhere else. To something latent, a parasite more worthy than she. A forced rewiring. 

Another something out of Nathalie’s control.

Mumbling outside her door. “Go grab her husband—”

Nathalie rips the door open, wild-eyed only for the moment that the flight attendants are. When they blink, she’s composed, spine aligned with confidence. Thankful for how trained her body is.

“Ginger ale would be appreciated,” she says evenly, side-stepping out of the bathroom and out of their way. Looking down the barrel of the aisle, head held high, Nathalie disassociates her way to business class. A baby fights against the muffled, stale air with the best pitched cry it can muster. The small pack around her waist feels like a rock tethered, inert with the heavy promise to drown her. She walks with her hands behind her back, impressing the certainty of someone who has nothing to hide; the obedience of someone who walks willingly, hands tied with rope, into the water. Rope, rock, regrets and all. 

From a few steps away, she spots him in his usual position: shrunk into his seat, his head hung in one hand. As she takes her seat next to him, the seatbelt light dings. A bout of turbulence rattles the plane, making the baby a few rows back scream out. Both of their shoulders tense, visible annoyance etching their faces. 

“I’m sorry,” she says instinctively. For the noise, his discomfort, her absence. Everything else. 

“Flying private sounds better each and each time,” he grumbles and Nathalie nods, though she can recount all the arguments against it from Emilie. Too expensive, too dangerous. Too many more chances at their disposal for him to leave. Middle of day or dead of night. When asked for her thoughts, all Nathalie could compile was the singular fact that for as fast as they could leave, they could return. No delays, not like now. If anything were to—

A flight attendant deposits onto her tray a sparkling cup of ginger ale. Nathalie nods her thanks before sipping it, pretending not to notice Gabriel looking at her, or how the attendant hesitates at Gabriel’s ring—or is it Nathalie’s bare left hand, slightly shaking? Familiar slipping of her mind, of the seconds passing, both exiting stage left into unreality. 

“Are you feeling sick?”

On the side blind to him, her drink dribbles and curves down her chin as she drinks in even gulps. Finishing and smoothing out her napkin, she obliviously replies, “We haven’t exactly had a complete meal in a few days.”

While she feels his eyes bore into her lie, the baby’s wailing pitches to a shriek. From the corner of her eyes, she watches him open his mouth to press further, but, saving her, his chirping watch. He promptly covers it like a naughty bird, one that could talk and spill their secret. Nathalie is already facing him when his eyes catch hers. 

She nods, moving to unzip her pack, using her index finger to pretend to rifle through the contents, subtly obscuring the test before reaching in and punching out a single canary-yellow pill. Not many left. Some of the pack still caked in dirt. 

As some gesture of kindness, he trades her empty cup with his wine. Observing it, Nathalie wonders: what differentiates her from this, both ghosted with marks of his lips and fingerprints? Nothing substantial, she thinks, drinking from the same spot he did and swallowing her birth control. 

An object, at the end of the day. Some means to things he wants to end. 

When she hands back his cup, a faint smear of lipstick kisses the rim. He’s never commented on it, but he has to know. Maybe Emilie told him, laughing, always laughing, bird song laughter. Maybe it’s only worth commenting on when it colors Emilie’s lips. 

Backsliding into the liminal space between earth and heaven, the world and Emilie, Nathalie becomes obsolete in her seat while Gabriel fidgets with his ring. Too tight now to slide off or around his finger. Nervously rubbing it with his thumb like a lucky coin. From behind, like them, the ubiquitous mother tirelessly pleads for silence. 

The thought strikes her in a double-blow, all sound deafened under sudden tinnitus. Adrien, she thinks, Adrien was never like that. Placid, upturned face, sunflower to its sun, if he wasn’t smiling. Never crying, or at least, never for long. To see him so young again in her mind makes her breathless, staring vacantly, uncomprehending at the horizon clouds. Older now, he is, understanding how to take care of Emilie, that she’s sick—old enough to know, if Nathalie slips, that her mistake means—

“I always believe you’re smarter than wearing short sleeves on a long flight,” Gabriel grumbles, shifting out of his fur-lined jacket to pass it over the barrier. 

Nathalie turns her head, pausing in confusion before she arrives back in her body. Shivering all over, her foot tapping her heel against the ground by habit, one arm cutting against her soft stomach. 

“And yet you always surprise me,” he says. 

Nathalie huffs, unfurling to take his jacket and shimmying into it. “I didn’t realize we had been in abundance of laundry services.” She tugs her lips into a frown with effort; though it’s involuntary, the way the heat and smell of him—old cologne and salt, tinged faintly with cigarette smoke, perceptible only because she, the culprit, put it there—sweeps warmth over her. 

If only she never wore his jacket like this. Out in the field, now or years ago, lighting a cigarette just to anger him. If only he had never allowed it, this testing of boundaries between them. 

How quickly her life has devolved into a series of if-onlys. 

“Besides, it’s still very warm in Paris.”

“Still cold in the night,” he says quietly, a solemn correction. 

Hands unbearably empty, Nathalie reaches for her satchel, but stops mid-bend. Exhales hard her frustration. Thinks of reminding him that upon landing he still owes her a new tablet, but files the thought away for later. The cabin lights dim as she settles in with an old leather-bound planner, making a list of calls and meetings to be arranged when they’ve slipped back into their business lives. 

Which one is more the farce: the life spent chasing a cure, or the one designing clothes for people less important than Emilie? 

Beside her, Gabriel groans for the both of them. Their flight delayed since last night, and exhaustion has incurred interest with every hour off track. 

“You should get some rest,” she says to him, scheduling meaningless catch-ups with project managers, manufacturers, and lesser assistants. 

“You know I can’t sleep on planes,” he retorts. “I’ll wait until we land.”

She presses her lips into a line. He hadn’t slept last night in the airport, pacing and complaining and throwing up his hands when Emilie wouldn’t answer his calls. Before that, in the hotel for only one night, eating nothing but his sorrow on the bed. Her faring just as well, but productive at least: refilling his water, laying out his clothes, scribbling apologies to Emilie on hotel notepad paper and then throwing them away. Now, in the page margins, reminders for herself. Busy work, really, in an effort to not argue, not to think. Waiting out the clock for several minutes before she dares to turn her head. 

Watching him, Nathalie knows by the droop of his shoulders the moment he falls asleep. 

She flags down a passing attendant to request more wine. Blinks at the safety card, instructing her on how to navigate an emergency waterlanding. Served, she downs half the cup in one breath, wondering what flotation device one uses without hands, without eyes, without a mouth to scream for help.

22:55

Home, almost. In the wake of his anger: toppled luggage in a heap in front of baggage claim, wheels still spinning in the air; Nathalie’s blank stare, unchanged from when she’d missed their bags on the first rotation; a missed phone call and a dial tone like a flatline.

“Why are you up? No, Adrien—stop.” 

Nathalie can feel the grind of Gabriel’s teeth like her own aching joints. 

“What Emilie said was wrong. Why are you bothering her?” 

From her periphery, walking from stage right: father, mother, child. Belatedly, Nathalie recognizes the baby as the one who threw a fit half the flight. Worn out now by its own tantrum, kicking overripe pink legs pillowing out from its shorts. Thin sour taste in her mouth as she plainly sees which features were inherited from who. 

When Nathalie thinks of children, all she can picture is blond, blond, blond. 

“It’s not her job to tell you no. You’re meant to be taking care of her, and you’re keeping her up.” Gabriel yanks the handle of his luggage, which extends all at once like the crack of a whip. Nathalie is on his heels, the bulk of their recent failures in tow. “Put Emilie on.”

Rote argument. Hissing through teeth. Unintelligible high, sweet voice. So many children pass by them; Nathalie feels the knot in her stomach gnarl like thick undergrowth. Just like the bathroom, the walls are narrowing, her vision tunnelling. It isn’t until she gasps the stale outside air of concrete and gas that she realizes she’s having trouble breathing. 

“Nathalie?”

“Yes, sir.”

His frown deepens. “I said, Emilie says hello.”

“Yes.” Nathalie nods, swallowing. Gabriel looks at her as if she’s a stranger. Brows furrowed and hard, questioning eyes. “Tell her I said hello,” she adds, too quick, too nervous. Her smile feels thin and transparent. How does Emilie manage this, performing and lying? 

Gabriel does not repeat it; Emilie’s voice chirps something Nathalie cannot decipher. Her ear, once trained, now atrophied from a lack of conversations not meant for her. Two months of conversations between just the two of them. When Gabriel speaks to her, does Emilie feel the odd one out? The thought makes Nathalie feel terribly hollow.

“Nathalie isn’t feeling well,” says Gabriel instead.

Up snaps Nathalie’s head. “No! That’s not true,” she insists, looking at the phone and not Gabriel. “I’m tired. That’s all.”

Ignoring her. The little reassurance Nathalie takes of the act. Space reserved for Emilie and himself. Packing their things into the town car, listening to Gabriel’s voice from the backseat. “Get some rest, my love. I’ll see you at home.”

Projected like a film reel onto the rear window, Nathalie watches Paris unfold itself in familiar streets and alleys. No delays here—every winking stoplight has her chewing her lip or running the sharp edge of her unfiled thumbnail against the pad of her forefinger. Working theory: the farther they venture away, the harder they slingshot back to reality. A bad dream, a terrible hangover, something hopeful dispelled in the cold light of day. Left alone with idle failure. 

And how to measure the inertia of shame and guilt? Easy: Gabriel tamping down on her knee with a heavy hand. Hers finding his, briefly, thinking better of it. His half-laugh, depreciating and unimpressed, before pulling away completely.

Pulling into the circle drive, the first thing Nathalie checks is if the master bedroom lights are on—her eyes shutting in relief to see they’re dark.

Unloading their luggage, Nathalie’s mind is twelve hours in the future, planning how to slip out of the house unnoticed. Fabric samples to be picked up early. Closest physician’s office. When the lip of the bumper cuts into her stomach, she leans in harder, stretching inside the trunk to grab her satchel. Shouldn’t be more than an hour. If she stays up to work through her inbox, less to do tomorrow. 

Gabriel’s hand, heavy on the back of neck, makes her jump. Not for the first time are his fingers kissing the pulse of her throat. A part of her, even as she impresses a thin thankfulness, wants to remind him in hushed tones that this is not their domain, not even this courtyard—all of it is Emilie’s. 

In mental reply, she can hear his voice low in her ear, as it has been every night for nine weeks. Asking what, then, she makes of the atelier? Fingers tightening on her scruff. The smell of oil frying in her nose. 

But his kindness stops her. Massaging the pinched nerve of which she always complains—never verbally, but he knows by how she carries herself, rolls her head with a deep frown, stretching her arms behind her back. Forced smile now melting into something real, something she can’t control. 

“Get some sleep,” Gabriel says. “Don’t bother with an alarm for tomorrow.”

“I was actually thinking of getting an early start,” she admits, glancing up at his face, underlit red from the taillight. “Just a few e-mails, putting my notes in. I can have the staff bring breakfast up to you two.”

His knuckles dig into her skin. “Emilie said she would kill me if she saw you downstairs before noon.”

Laughing, more like a shaky exhale. “Oh. Well, then.” She slings her satchel over her shoulders, the cut of its strap replacing the weight of his hand as he lets it fall away. She closes the trunk, grabbing both luggage handles and squaring her shoulders. “I guess you’ll just have to keep her busy until then.”

A split second before the taillights switch off, she catches his frown. Looking at his shadow, she wonders if it’s the title. Hoarse in her mouth after two months of intimately learning the shape of his first name. Odd to her too, as if now that fact is a secret. 

She watches as he turns and walks up the stairs and into the house. By the time she has followed him up, it is only Placide holding the door open for her and the suitcases. No other footsteps but hers. Heard a door shut, didn’t she? Their bedroom, of course. He told her he would. He promised. 

Upstairs, curled in on herself, fingers clutching her bare stomach. An oyster with debris stuck in it. Forming, hardening, pearling. Something curable, something Nathalie can control. A cyst to be popped. The betrayal of a body—Emilie described it like that. Touching her own stomach the same way, a hunger yet to be sated, unfathomable starvation. She confessed to the occasional morbid daydream of disemboweling. Inspecting it with her hands to know exactly what made it lesser. Her, lesser. 

For the first time in months, alone on her double bed. Ache of her knees rubbing together, her back breezy and cold. Coming back and always forgetting the unbearable silence, saved only by the hum of air conditioning. No snoring, no puffs of breath on her neck. Instinctively making herself small enough to fit into a sleeping bag while giving someone else the most room. Smushing her pained face into her sheets, she thinks, stupid delusion of desires, that she can smell Emilie’s perfume. To want something so much that it comes true. 

To the same daydream, Nathalie lulls herself to sleep —learning from her mistake and ripping the organ out for good. 

20:30

“Can I confess something, Nathalie? It’s… well, more than a little embarrassing.”

Nathalie’s silence is taken as permission.

“It had been so long since I’d seen a positive test,” her Emilie is saying from the bathroom, popping open packets of sanitary pads. Another Emilie—Mallory, on screen—fingers the tip of a man’s knife with a gleam in her eye. Both women laugh. “I had this moment, so stupid, really, where I thought it was mine. Like you’d taken it, something like that.”

But Emilie’s was bright pink, capped and wrapped with a thin fabric bow. Ornately decorated to show off to her family. Before Nathalie, not yet living with the Agrestes, could warn her superstitiously about waiting eight, twelve weeks, Emilie was showing her elation up against the dining room wall. Whispering things that led her to the guest room; that led her here. 

“Yours was so red, though. So definitive. And on the first time, too!” Emilie sighs. “I couldn’t bear to look when we were starting out. Always made Gabriel do it. Once, right after I’d used it, I threw it across the room and it bounced off one of his designs. He was positively fuming.” She pauses, humming, as if replaying it in her mind before continuing. “I tried apologizing for the stain, but he’d already seen the results. Took me into his arms, kissed my head. Always how I knew it was another negative. He’s not the world’s best liar, as you know.”

Nathalie can picture it clearly, a stage play in her mind built from old photographs: Gabriel taking Emilie in his arms and comforting her in that cramped A-frame attic. Her, always dressed in their bedsheets, variably pinned into drafted designs because she always preferred walking around naked. In the corner, an unadorned mannequin watching.

Nathalie’s throat clogs. She pauses the movie, shaking her head.

“It wasn’t the first.” 

Emilie sticks her head out of the bathroom. “Hm?” 

“The test. That wasn’t the first I took.” 

Emilie leans against the doorframe. Looks down at the pad in her hands. “Did he know—?”

“No. I took it alone in the airport bathroom. I threw it away when it said… inconclusive.” 

Emilie turns, white silk shifting over her skin. “How lonely,” her voice echoes, against bathroom tile and Nathalie’s brain matter alike. “I’m sorry, Nathalie.” 

As if on command, Nathalie’s lip quivers. She shakes her head, both Emilies blurring in her vision. Some embarrassing whine escaping before she can stop it. The beginning of the end. Strawberry pores sprouting spikes, tenderizing her inside lining. Nathalie burrows into herself, pressing her hands to her stomach. 

Emilie is over her in a second, lifting her wretched head onto the pillow of her legs. Growing thinner by the day, Nathalie thinks, pushing the idea down as Emilie runs a hand down the length of her back in soothing sweeps. When the pain abates, she continues softly, circling with the tip of her finger a lone, protruding vertebrae, “I’m afraid this is just the beginning.”

“I can handle this myself,” Nathalie tries. Better convincingly said inside her head: what comes out is weak, vapid, falsified. Nathalie's hand reaches to find Emilie’s, just to selfishly hold it. What a waste of her time. For Emilie to hold her head in her lap like this. 

Sweet sound of Emilie’s tongue detaching from the roof of her mouth. Playful, pitying. “Aren’t you tired of doing everything yourself, my love?”

Her chest rotted sore with internal bruising from a week’s worth of nausea, Nathalie struggles to argue in the dip of Emilie’s thighs. Twisting, stilling, panting. Body and mind refusing the idea of forgiveness. 

“My world has shrunk to three rooms. Being in here feels almost like a vacation,” Emilie consoles when Nathalie relaxes a touch. Pressing a kiss to Nathalie’s desperate hand. “Breathe in through the nose.”

For the moment, ignoring her. Struggling, stuttering: “What about—about Adrien?” 

“He’s already tucked in, probably already asleep,” Emilie retorts. “Besides, how could I sit just a few steps away knowing you’re in pain?”

Nathalie sucks back air through her running nose and sits up. Tries to, at least, and falls short against Emilie’s shoulder. 

“You said… it’s less than the size of a strawberry.”

Emilie laughs airily. “No, grapes. And that’s not all you pass. Not after eleven weeks.” She combs her fingers through Nathalie’s hair. “We have a long night ahead of us.”

Nathalie pleads into the warmth of Emilie’s body. “This isn’t how… This isn’t how you should spend your time.”

Emilie hums, as if considering. “How do you suggest I spend it, then? Should I sit on my hands next to him? Pace around his atelier while he works? While he sketches me and worries about you?” 

The thought of Gabriel thinking, picturing, worrying. Something of his she has. A custom gown torn off, seams popping. A man obsessed, sketching in his notebook the faceless model in her mind taking shape, slowly, color and shape of the eyes and hair all wrong.

A cruel fist kneads at Nathalie’s organs. Her silence again taken for permission. 

“Or, is that it?” Emilie asks, a ribbon of hurt around her words. “You would rather him?”

Nathalie recoils, vehemently shaking her head. “No, that’s not it at all.”

“I thought you said you missed me,” Emilie pouts. 

“I did,” she affirms, sweating. “I do, Emilie.”

Emilie’s features melt into softness, a smile meant solely for her. Cupping the back of Nathalie’s head, bringing her brow to her lips, she whispers, “Can I admit something else? Equally embarrassing, I think.” 

Nathalie disguises a pain spike by nodding. 

“When you’re gone, sometimes I sleep here.”

Nathalie looks up, searching Emilie’s eyes and coming back reeling. 

“I’ll pretend to be you,” Emilie says, bashfully laughing. Like admitting to a crush. “Looking up at the ceiling from your bed. Watching the window. Studying your artifacts on the walls. Trying on your clothes, sometimes. I’m more than a little fond of that sweater of yours, the red wool one. I’m sorry if it smells like me.”

Through the haze of pain, she follows Emilie’s flitting phantom around her room. Gliding, dancing, sleeping. Sitting, worst of all, alone in her chair. Poised towards the window.

“Why…?”

Emilie looks briefly pained, her smile sad and slow. Something vital misunderstood. “You act like I haven’t missed you a day in my life.”

Nathalie shivers. Clammy with guilt. Fever incoming. Repentance on the horizon like a wall, she the speeding car.

Scratching behind Nathalie’s head, Emilie frowns, asking lightly, “We’ve given you a lonely room, haven’t we? I can see the appeal in leaving.” 

“You know that’s not why…” Nathalie tries, always failing on this familiar argument.  

“Of course, yes, you leave for me,” Emilie half-laughs. “Even though I want you two to stay. What paradoxes you work in, Nathalie.” Her eyes falling downcast, ironic smile. “Maybe one day you’ll persuade him. Right?”

Nathalie shrinks helplessly into Emilie’s embrace. Nothing more to be said. 

“I’ll go if you really want me to. I always wanted someone. So I assumed the same for you.”

Into the crook of her neck, Nathalie shakes her head. “Don’t go. Please.” Here, the perfume is vibrant and heady. 

“So, how did you know?” asks Emilie, guiding Nathalie’s arms to wrap around her waist. How perfectly do the swells of her muscles notch in the empty, guilty space under Emilie’s ribs. At this angle, Nathalie’s lips ghost along Emilie’s stomach. “So many tricks to getting pregnant,” she says, making Nathalie wince. “Or, was it a matter of quantity? Something inevitable, surely, after the fourth or fifth time?” 

“We don’t…” Nathalie starts and fails. Not every time we leave, she wants to explain, but what acceptable quantity is there? Once implies something special; a pattern, domestic. 

What to say of when she wakes with hands and shirt already skirted up to her waist, or when he swears into the nape of her neck that tomorrow he won’t get out of bed? That when he sobs it makes her sick, makes her skin crawl with derision and pity and fury. His self-hatred a reflection, an admittance of her failure. Wanting to wield against him the same discipline she holds against herself and always falling short, holding him instead and letting his hurt bleed into hers. Her job—to anticipate him, to make better—finally, for once in so many years, fulfilled as his tears stain her neck and she builds him up again. 

“It isn’t like you think,” Nathalie says quietly, undecidedly. 

With her left hand, Emilie lifts Nathalie’s chin. A princess with her little pet bird perched on her finger. Nathalie’s neck craned as if swallowing against the edge of a knife. 

“Correct me, then.”

06:00

In unrequited letters Nathalie sends to Emilie, dated sporadically and with various hotel letterheads, she explains: no matter where in the world or its place in time, she will wake before dawn. The cigarette brands change slightly in taste and stay incredibly cheap. Since their seminal trip, Mount Everest, like Adrien in their interim, has grown nearly two inches taller. In the city, passing a psychic’s storefront, Nathalie felt the feathery wrinkles of her palm light up. Maybe, like she had said so many years ago now, they were all frauds. Well meaning frauds, but frauds all the same. 

Words that are never written: cure, shrines, excavations, sickness, failure, hope, Gabriel.

I’m no literary pedantic like my sister, Emilie once said, fingering the frayed-yellow edge of a postcard that hadn’t come until the day before Gabriel and her returned, but those words are a little unnecessary, right?  I only mean, she said, softening the wolf in her words with fleeced apologetic tones, shuffling the papers that Nathalie wrote to her and tucking them in the first drawer of her vanity, good news wouldn’t come to me in a postcard, would it? Locking it with a key kept tied with wedding-white looping thread, a delicate makeshift bracelet. 

I’m sorry. You said you’d like it if—

I like the letters, Nathalie. Capturing her hands before they could hide behind her back. Cool key dangling carrot-like from a stick. I think you can paint me a better picture. 

Today, facing the dawn with bleary eyes, Nathalie’s recorded very little. Everything, from her word choice to the way her hesitant hand has punctuated unwritten sentences with unintentional periods on the page, ending them even before beginning, feels like incrimination. Stuttering around the obvious, and what should she write, anyway? That she hasn’t had a single original thought in weeks, that it’s Emilie’s own words that echo back in the chambers of her mind?

I know he’s there. It’s so different this time—I’ve never felt—come, put your hand here. Between my heartbeats, listen. Tell me you feel it. 

Between her own heart’s rhythm now, Nathalie ignores. And if it can be divined by touch alone, Nathalie thinks, it’s Gabriel who supports her sanity. His hand, most mornings, already finding the notch of her waist and trailing along silver sleeping scars littering her torso. Never indicating that he feels something, even as he palms at her stomach, at least not inside of her; inside of himself, however, something else. Whispering wished-threats against her neck: that the next morning, he won’t wake up; that his faith in them has fled.

And surely he’d know the feeling of something growing, swelling, pulling taut her stomach skin—but ribs are his obsession now. Impressing his sorrow into the shallow space between bones, his fingers finding the half-note keys and playing upon her own nervous refrain of anxiety and desire, inching further and further up so that by the time her mouth finally pops open to ask of him, to demand he hurry, one hand has abandoned her to undress. Her, still unmoving, then himself, obeying.

Always, Nathalie wondering as he enters if he can tell she’s slipped elsewhere. If when they’re breathing hot and heavy and sweating from heat, from an invisible sickness like a fever finally breaking, she not yet turned over to face him and his head is bowed against her neck, she has done her job correctly and he is elsewhere, too. 

Now, Nathalie curls over her empty page. Cold morning breeze licking at her exposed neck, cooling her hot, pinned-back scalp. Every thread of hair pulled back into a bun. Braiding, she has written before, is not a skill she can get better at. Inside, Gabriel is either asleep or pretending to be. Hours ago, she slipped out in only her pants and sports bra. Dull headache pounding and lips windchapped.  Ailments, she does not write, that keep her focused. Not something to take joy in anyway, these trips.

The headache is her fault because when she forces Gabriel to take dinner with her, she drowns her own with alcohol. Flushing away something more dense than guilt or fear or grief. Natural, when something is unwanted, to eliminate it humanely. She has seen it many times hunting animals, stalking prey families: a runt gets abandoned for survival or eaten; an egg sac desecrated for nutrients. So it isn’t worry that afflicts her when she strains her body, drinking more than she eats or hiking herself to exhaustion—it’s pride because a task is being taken care of. 

Starved of oxygen, a flame dies out. 

But when she coughs this morning, it isn’t clearing smoke that scorches her throat. The leap in her stomach and sour warning in her saliva have been knocking on her conscience for a week now, and she rises early, before Gabriel, to walk far enough out into their nowhere wasteland to acquaint her knuckles with her throat and flush out anything, everything. Make barren inside as their outside. 

Logically, the travesty of what it all suggests: her body built more worthy than Emilie’s? 

A second cough forces her forward, sending her postcards and pen flying. Dictated to crawl feebly forward by the sick pumping of her stomach, flowing up to the involuntary gurgle in her throat. Making it only a few hapless feet before she’s vomiting into the grass. Pushed to the point of heaving, squinting out sudden tears, an animalistic curve to her body as she surrenders to its whims. 

It, her body, or it, it, it—

She’s barely fixed her eyes on the mess she’s made of her hands when she hears Gabriel stumble out of the tent.  

“Nathalie…?”

But she’s shaking her head already. “I ate something expired last night, sir.” 

“We ate the same thing.” 

“No,” she spits, panting out the words. “I realized I hadn’t packed enough food, so I ate something in my bag from our last trip. I gave you the ration I knew was safe.” 

Back hunched, a sludge of last night’s dinner spewed a foot in front of her. Draped across shrubland and dripping from desert flowers like morning dew. Everything is shaking: the horizon, her body in the cold morning chill, her teeth against each other. 

Without looking up, she knows. Feels it by how the hairs at her nape prick. By the years of learning him, knowing how to follow without being told. 

The look in his eyes. The soft clay of fear forming into quiet understanding.

“Nathalie.”

When she swallows, she winces, her throat bile-raw. Righting herself back onto her haunches, spine articulating and creaking, she nods because it’s true. She nods because there’s nothing else to do. Slapping the dirt off of her hands, she continues demurely, “I’m fine.” Waver in her voice as her head grows light, too light. Sitting and still feeling the anxious need to throw up again. “I just need water, sir. That’s all.”

When she tries to stand, one hand pushing away from the earth, his hand pushes her back down, knees buckling. Around her shoulders he wraps his jacket. “Wait there.”

Nathalie listens to his steps, accompanied by the metallic jangle of his belt, the zip of his pants. How obscenely loud everything sounds. His returning footsteps and her knowing by how they fall that his anger is growing abscessed. 

She turns to face his canteen and reaches for it, but he is quicker, pulling it away as he crouches down next to her. “Hands,” he orders, not looking at her but rather the space where her hands should already be. 

She presents them the way Adrien does to Emilie once they’re done gardening. Burying seeds that he can’t believe will flower. Something he can’t see now, but Emilie promises him they’re working underground, little seedlings so excited to meet you. 

Unheeding of undigested chunks and clumps of dirt, he takes her left in his and pours water over and begins to scrub with what she recognizes is an old shirt of his. Working at his frown are words impacted, fragmented sentences. Finally, digging into her palm, he settles on, “You promised me, Nathalie. That this wouldn’t be a problem.”

Nathalie nods. “I know, sir. I’m current on everything, sir, I promise—”

His face distorts with something like repugnance. “Stop that.”

Nathalie looks away. Tries not to focus on the overwhelming smell of burnt wood ash and vomit. Undercut with slept-in cologne and sweat that makes her chest tight. Already, in the distant and sparse treeline, vultures wait, three in a row. 

“How do you feel now?”

“I’m fine, sir.” Then, quieter: “Gabriel.”

“No headache?” he asks, switching to her right hand. “Cramping?”

When she shakes her head, his body splits into two. She feels a pulse like a clot popping at her temple. She shuts her eyes, sighing. “No. Nothing like that.”

He squeezes her hand hard, effectively drawing her attention back to him. “When was your last period?”

Her voice turns sour. “Gabriel, I always miss my cycle when we travel.”

“When?” 

Nathalie steels herself. “Two months ago. Before we—”

Gabriel’s knees crack from the force at which he jumps up. He tears into the tent, ignoring the distinct sound of a seam ripping, and Nathalie does as told. Stays planted as he trips, swearing, over their sleeping bag. 

How tiny his anger makes it seem, their makeshift apartment. How improbable it is to sleep under it every night in the foreground of a landscape that defeats them at every turn. Playing house: bedroom and dining room and closet and atelier in disparate corners. By their bed, two worn sleeping bags zipped as one, two phones with the same background. 

No, similar: hers is of Emilie and Adrien. 

She stays still as he re-emerges, breathing heavily and white-knuckling the only possession that’s truly hers. 

He throws her satchel to her, both of them watching as it bounces off her right thigh and spills old maps and pens. The journal she hasn’t written in since the first time, with the three of them. Everything but the one thing he wants to see. 

“Show me.”

Unzipping her satchel and procuring from it her smaller personal pack, she takes out a three month pack. Unfolds it and forgets to feel embarrassed as she displays that all but five of the days are punched out, save for a line of white pills in each month. 

Snatching it from her, he walks back, beginning to pace.

“I stop them when we travel,” Nathalie tries, like fumbling in the dark. 

He continues to stare, and it comes to Nathalie dimly that Emilie never would have touched these. Her, who wanted above all else. 

“The white ones are sugar pills,” she explains. “I’ve been irregular since we first… left. Our diet and exercise here isn’t exactly the same. And the back and forth…”

His turn to nod, indicating for her to stop talking. He looks at how his jacket swallows her, the thinness of her wrists and how much tighter she needs to cinch her belt. Can only stand it for a moment until he looks away, a muscle in his jaw popping. Fifteen miles hiked yesterday, and ten the day before. Exhaustion droops his jaded eyes, even as he squints against the sunrise. 

Finally he turns, flicking the packet down against the dirt. “And I should trust you that these were truly taken.” 

Nathalie cringes, balling her hands into fists on her lap. She can still picture, the same way he can, the day they figured out Emilie was flushing her medicine. Shouldn’t I get a say on if I want to take them? 

“I would like you to, yes.” 

Deflating, he drops back down at her side, rubbing his palm against his forehead. Working out more than the deep set wrinkles. 

“I want you to be honest with me, Nathalie.” Lips pressed to his hand, he looks away. At her sick, the land that stretches around them in all disappointing directions. “Have you been feeling ill this whole trip?”

“No, sir,” she lies. “Only the… usual.”

Blinking. Turning over something in his head. Understanding her meaning. Later and later nights, him pulling her, half-asleep, from the campfire’s edge into the tent more than once. Calling her unthoughtful, careless, and her disagreeing, voice hoarse and smoke-cracked. Anything to feel that warmth. Complaining as he unbuttoned her blouse that she could have self-immolated, and for what? Treading old ground? There was nothing here. There is never anything anywhere that could help them. These excursions, exercises in futility. 

“Leaving is always a little harder on you,” he finally says and she does not disagree. If leaving Emilie is difficult for her, for him it’s the returning. Time is flipping their hurt—their departure flight is in a few days. Queer expression flitting over his brows and eyes before he turns to look at her. “Was that still the case for you last time?”

Nathalie lowers her eyes the way a guilty dog hangs its head. “Of course it was.”

“We couldn’t stay,” he says, as if crushing a dream that she does not have, has not ever had. Childish, idiotic. Pregnant as a way to keep him home—acid jumps violently in her throat, causing her to wince. “And I know you’d be intelligent enough to take care of this. If it were true.”

Nathalie nods. Not meeting his eyes.

But his knuckle alighting under chin forces her head to tip up. Him her whole world now. Thumb pressing into her skin, the morning continues to rise behind his head. Silvering strands catching fire, the creases of his newly-formed frown lines cutting harsh blue shadows. Though she can smell the stench of her own breath, he brings her closer, pinning her in place. 

“You know what time it would be, correct?”

Not a question, not truly, but still she nods. Obeying as a sign of trust, of truth. “Yes.”

He holds her there in his grasp, running his eyes over her face. His breath exhales in short, harsh puffs through his nose and hits her cheeks, making her lashes flinch. His face has gone red, but he doesn’t speak in anger. 

“I was fine alone that night. When… I didn’t need—” Gabriel cuts himself off with a grimace, the memory stuck like grit in his teeth. “You came to me.”

The price she pays, her lie for his. Body softening, just a touch, as her free hand, as always, finds his. 

Her free hand, as always, finds his. Smiling in the face of his lie. “I know.”

21:00

Perched like a bird on Emilie’s finger and she couldn’t bring herself to sing.

The toilet is clogging with new viscera. Wastebasket consuming its first kill of the night. The fogged mirror returns the face of a woman that disgusts her. A footprint in red, smeared across the floor. 

“Nathalie.”

Emilie’s knocks have turned off-beat, no longer persistent. The taps keep hissing. Steam condenses on the sides of Nathalie’s overwarm cheeks, makes the room feel like light has been replaced by viscous, vermillion water. Every breath gulping thick air.  

“It isn’t like I don’t remember how things were,” Emilie’s small voice calls from behind the door. Slammed shut, the echo of Nathalie’s mistake still ringing in their ears. 

Nathalie switches the temperature to cold and splashes her face until she’s swallowing successive gasps. 

“Way back when,” Emilie continues. “How new everything was. Traveling. Our relationship.” Quieter, then: “You.” 

With a soft hand towel, Nathalie wipes at her face. Presses into her eyes hard enough to get briefly lost in the bursting colors beneath her eyelids. 

“It isn’t like that,” Nathalie says, shaking her head to no one. “That was—This is…”

“Is what, love?”

Nathalie exhales hard. Tears come now relentlessly. Emilie’s kindness like a knife. And how horrible for Nathalie to picture it, to wish she’d finally put an end to it, strike up two ribs from the bottom. 

A funny sort of laugh comes through the fog. “Are you suggesting Gabriel’s tastes have changed?”

In an effort to throw the towel into the hamper, Nathalie slips on her own blood and lurches, catching and holding onto the porcelain top of the toilet.

“Nathalie—?”

“Do you think these trips are fun?” Nathalie barks. Petulant, angry, caught. Saved only by the fact, surprising to them both, that her bathroom door locks. Clutching her feverish head in one hand, four degrees over normal, she collapses onto the toilet, tenting her elbows on her legs. “What do you think we do, Emilie? Do you think he ever forgets? Do you think that for any moment, it isn’t about you? It’s you in the tent, always. When we’re talking, when we’re not. It’s never not about you.”

Emilie’s turn to be silent. 

Nathalie opens a wet, guilty mouth. Closes it, and then opens it again. One day, she’ll learn the precision of saying nothing. 

“We don’t kiss.”

Pathetic excuse. Emilie falls quiet. Cramps roll Nathalie in waves. Her lungs stick, a plastic water bottle drank to its last drop with greedy urgency, popping back open emptied.

Finally: “How unexpectedly romantic of you, Nathalie.”

“Emilie—”

“He has trouble looking at me,” she says slowly. “But oh, how thankful I am that you two don’t kiss.”

“It’s not…” Nathalie starts, struggling to breathe, “An intimate thing.”

Emilie pauses. “Do you think the same for Gabriel?”

Nathalie lifts her head, staring blankly in front of her at the bath tile. Gabriel? Who calls for Emilie at night? Who smiles even when Nathalie speaks of her? Gabriel, who will punch his knuckles bloody, begging another dead-end cave, another abandoned shrine for something, anything? 

“When it comes to sex,” Emilie says, “you’re the more… utilitarian one.”

Nathalie sighs, a sobbed thing. A damp warmth blooms underneath her and she grimaces. Unnatural, relentless clotted stream. Standing up, the walls and tiles lag in her vision, her head lolling without weight. Something clatters to the ground when she reaches for a new pad. “I don’t understand,” she says, sitting back down to replace her soaked-through pad. The wings of her brief’s gusset are soiled. How old is she again? 

“You’ll do what is asked,” Emilie explains. The doorknob jiggles once. Nathalie thinks of Emilie’s thin wrist bones popping just to turn it. “But what is he asking?” 

Nathalie’s heart skips painfully. Arrhythmic memories—one stitch-scarred quilt drenched terribly in grease and smoke. His wrist so close to her face, indented with her bite. Lifting her hips, the exact angle to—Nathalie; yes, hurry; could you say…? 

Nathalie flushes to buy her time, sending more of her blood into the bowels of the house. When she tries to stand, she finds instead that she’s laid her forehead against the cold marble countertop, arms crossed over her head. “Nothing. He misses you,” she ekes out through her scorched throat. “And he hates himself for it. For everything.”

“He misses me as if I’m already dead,” Emilie returns quickly, and Nathalie instinctively bristles at the word. “But I’m not. Not yet. So, are those your words or his?”

“I know, Emilie,” Nathalie grits out. “I’m the one laying down for him.” 

The toilet stops churning. As if full and sated, the house falls still. 

“Do you think that’s noble of you?” 

Nathalie presses her lips into a line. The doorknob jiggles again, like a hand giving up. 

“How selfless of you, truly. Giving yourself to a grieving man. Lest what,” Emilie laughs again, “he slams the tent door in your face? Easier to handle, is he, when he’s taken care of?”

From underneath the makeshift shelter of her arms, Nathalie can see the smatter of her blood, her newly painted toes. How to explain why she did it. Too frightened to run the math on the mistake now, playing all on imaginary numbers, half-lies. To say what, she loved it, that it’s a full blown affair? Suspended somewhere in between it all. On seesawing scales, his and her love for Emilie. 

Silence smothers the air. Nathalie thinks she’s almost fallen asleep when Emilie speaks up again, her words dream-like and sad. Voice close against the door as if she’s leaning on it, one hand tracing the embossing. 

Then, tinkling against the gold trim, the familiar sound of a key finding its notch, a question to its answer. 

“Do you even like it, Nathalie?”

06:30

The morning has borne witness in a single, unerring slant of light to the utter evacuation of Nathalie’s stomach. Each breath is clipped by a gag, forcing her spine to curve violently over the toilet. Epileptic convulsions like a dog throwing up its dinner. 

Someone else’s hand, unseen and uncaring, controls her body now, contorting her limbs to clench and release, clench and release. Her lungs screaming and stuttering for air that isn’t rancid with her own vile sick. Relentless, the thought of standing and opening the window, panting in her mind for the last two hours—if only her legs could obey, could muster enough strength to help relieve her. Every time she tries to command her body to stand, however, the failed shuffling of her legs only cause renewed shuddering.

Everything now in waves: lucidity, bile, shivers. 

Turning to heave into the crook of her left elbow, she blindly gropes for the lever and lets her mind bliss out, listening to the whirling flush she’s become accustomed to. Sucks in the scent of remnant laundry soap as a palette cleanser in measured breaths. Think of wins, checkmarks on her task list: last night, how Gabriel kept their promise. No atelier lights, no anger ouroboros. 

Her mind then turns to thoughts of tilled earth, weeds pulled, fertility. How fine she was in the field, polishing off the last of grain alcohol with their last meal with ease. Back when that one morning was a fluke, a bad meal. 

Everything blooms in Emilie’s garden, she thought once. Marveling at her rosebushes and rhododendrons and lilies. The vines of ivy that creep slowly up the wall to Nathalie’s bathroom, always taking stock of how the house has changed while they were away. She thinks of something crawling through her, pushing its way out through her body, a wrecked and improbable thing. Not viable, she thinks, blinking away tears. A seed swept away by the wind. Rejected, rejected, rejected. 

Weary and exhausted, she pushes herself up, every rigid joint from her feet to her hands crackling like gravel under shoes. She wilts towards the sink, using the marble countertop as a handrail to bring herself into view for the first time that morning; waking up nauseated and running to the bathroom, she’d puked for half an hour in the pre-dawn dark. 

The woman with her panicked, dumb mouth in the airplane has followed her home. Staring at her now for answers. In the absence of, Nathalie runs the tap and doesn’t treat herself to warm water as she splashes her pale, vacuous face until it’s numb. She wipes her tongue along her teeth as she prepares her toothbrush, adding an extra dollop of peppermint when her throat jumps at the feeling of her ruined mouth. 

Later, when she spits, she hopes there’s blood. 

Add another task, add two: she opens the window, then walks on unsure feet to her closet. Blazer, button-down, purple slacks, all stitched and monogrammed by a hand that she can feel undressed, a hand she could distinguish blindly from a thousand others. Incisors, canines. With her own hand, she lays each article in its place on her bed, left to right. Smoothing them, making them in order; something, one thing, she can control. Pressed and perfect. 

She turns. In the corner, her suitcase, standing at attention. More ready for her than she is of it. How to keep a secret in a house full of eyes and only a guest room to guard herself? Bicuspids, left and right. All the way back to Emilie, the test was a weight against her stomach.

Throw it in the trash and she risks the staff noticing. Her stomach twists: how eager they were once word got out that Emilie was flushing her pills; every trash bag a clue for a story they were piecing together well before Gabriel or herself. 

Nathalie walks back to the bathroom. Thinks of keeping it stashed in her luggage, packed away in her closet like a monster under her bed. How many times will she pull it out, just to remember? On her knees in the dark. The urge to snap it in her hands, a quick dissolution. Left molars, right molars. Looking out the window and across the lawn, she watches Emilie’s flowers sway in uniform waves. 

She could bury it. 

If she times it right, the dead of night, no one will catch her. Out of her mind and six feet deep. Tongue, pressing back into her throat. No chance of Emilie seeing. No chance of her frail hands ruined with Nathalie’s waste, her legs failing to take her farther than the top of the stairs. Nathalie cringes at the thought of Emilie falling, biting down on the head of her toothbrush. Gabriel catching her, holding her, his wife reviled and struggling against him, her, the broken trust, all of them chained to a truth Nathalie is avoiding, a truth Emilie would be clutching in her fists. 

Everything blooms in—

Nathalie gags, spitting up in the sink. 

No blood.

As soon as she toes into her right heel, Nathalie hears laughter behind the bedroom door. A quick shush and another giggle, lighter in tone. 

Nathalie, dampening the sound with her pinky fingers, carefully and swiftly closes her suitcase on her bed. Smoothing out the front of her blazer with one hand, the other her hair, she pads evenly towards the door on the balls of her feet. Eyes cast down to focus, her mind picking up words from the other side. 

… awake?

Guess we’ll find out. 

Emilie’s voice. The inevitability of this moment rushing up like a brackish tide. Underneath her sweater fingernail tracks throb, a heart under the floorboards. Self-respect smeared on her like bubbled paint on gnarled wood, watery and thin and crackling. All of it could be over in a single minute if she’s lucky. Swift execution, clean kill. Hope in a bear trap: gnaw off her own leg, or wait to bleed out? 

Steeling herself, blowing out a breath and impressing impassivity, Nathalie swings open the door. 

Adrien tumbles in instantly, grazing Nathalie’s foot as she jumps out of his way, letting the door slip out of her hand to watch Adrien perform a flawless row of somersaults. Unfurling, legs and limbs splayed out in the band of daylight across her rug, he bursts into a peal of laughter. 

In stereo, when Emilie joins in. The door propped open by her wheelchair. 

“I guess we weren’t quick enough,” Emilie says to him, putting her head in her hands. Throwing a pout to Nathalie, she continues, “You have to wake up before the sun to catch Nathalie.” 

Nathalie’s cheeks wash with more anxious spit. Weightless feeling like falling fluttering her stomach. She looks away, at Adrien, sitting up amongst dust motes, then the floor, which has no answers. Knowing if she wasn’t holding a lie, she’d have the privilege to look at Emilie. 

“Good morning, Nathalie!” Adrien calls, scuttling under into her line of sight. “Have you eaten yet?” 

As if on cue, the smell of breakfast wafts up from downstairs and hits her nose all at once: thick, greased fat that gags her throat on command and toast like hot, burnt metal. 

“I can go grab you a plate,” he says, then looking brightly at Emilie. “Can I, maman?”

“Ah, no, it’s all right, Adrien.” Nathalie interjects, trying on a smile. “I’ll wait until lunch.” 

“Well,” Emilie says, though Nathalie convenes only with the floor. “We just thought we’d stop by and see if our little explorer needed anything.” 

Nathalie hums something non-definitive.  

“You said you wanted to wake her up,” Adrien whispers, barely concealing a giggle. 

His soft voice is like a kid’s plastic shovel glutting her heart, a terrible carving. Around everything but that which needs to be. If Emilie had woken her up, hand pressed to her cheek—the sweet illusion of time, of another life, all of it felt in the first few moments of waking up next to someone. 

Nathalie knows it well. 

“Hey now,” Emilie mock-grumbles. “You’re giving away all of my secrets.” 

“I’m fine, thank you.” Nathalie begins to put her hands behind her back, but jolts as Emilie takes one in hers. 

“Are you feeling alright?” she asks, giving a tentative squeeze. She’s cold to the touch, gloveless in the dead of winter. “You look a little pale this morning.” Creak of her seat as she shifts. “Adrien, go grab—”

Nathalie’s head snaps up, eyes finding Emilie’s before she’s fully prepared. “I’m fine,” she assures. “It’s jet lag.” 

In her chair, custom built, Emilie is so much frailer than she remembers. Always like this: months spent remembering her, copying that memory to make new daydreams, ways to fall asleep, the wife of Gabriel who is not Nathalie, not when—

“How are you feeling?” Nathalie ventures, sneaking glances at the hemline of her ornate slip, feathered lace skimming her ankles. The baby-hemmed strap that gaps at her collarbone. 

“Well, how do I look?” asks Emilie, tilting her head just right so her curls spill over her thinning shoulder. 

“Good,” she says, because she can’t say healthy. 

“Maman looks beautiful,” Adrien chimes. “She looks pretty every day.” 

Emilie giggles. “Well, Nathalie? Do you agree?”

Nathalie clears her throat around a growing blush. “Yes,” she says, looking away. Involuntary small smile. “Of course,” she adds, because it’s the truth. Despite it all. Adjusting her glasses, she asks, “Can I get you anything? Gabriel mentioned you might need something. I have a few errands—”

“Wait a second,” Emilie says, tugging Nathalie down. Her pout deepens to a frown, her concern into a groan. “Don’t tell me you were going downstairs. Didn’t Gabriel tell you?” 

Nathalie’s heartbeat quickens at the open door, his name said so loud in her bedroom. Natural aversion. 

“No, no, I still have to unpack,” she dismisses. “But Gabriel… He needed me to—there’s some meetings I’ve failed to schedule in time, so I have to make a few phone calls and sort that out.” 

Emilie, still holding her hand, slides her curiosity back to Adrien, who on the arm of the chair is holding his chin. 

“A business doesn’t run itself,” Nathalie says automatically. Meeting briefly Emilie’s eyes. Sliding then to her ball-jointed legs poised in her chair. The ringed hand that holds Adrien’s. 

“Oh, we’ve fared alright, haven’t we?” she asks Adrien, who emphatically agrees. Only knowing that his world, Emilie, continues spinning. 

“What you can do for us is sit for a moment, tell us a story.” Bringing Nathalie’s knuckles to her cheek, Emilie nuzzles into the fingers. Something in her eyes swimming that topples Nathalie completely. “Let me get a look at you.”

Nathalie’s agreement comes in the form of acquiescence, letting herself be back to her bed. Sitting down next to her suitcase, she folds her hands on her lap. Looking quickly at the sun, feeling the burn-in of Emilie’s silhouette on her retinas as she settles in it like a drop into the ocean golden. Smiling, running her hands through Adrien’s hair, laughing. Light all around them. 

What does Emilie tell him, Nathalie wonders? Last night, when Gabriel phoned, did he for a moment hope? In the few steps between his mother’s bed and the phone, does he forgive his father? Nathalie sets her jaw. Someone surely has told him that news like that doesn’t come over postcard or phone. Someone surely has taught him better, more intelligently. Not to stop hoping, just to hide it better. 

For the most part, Nathalie thinks, he’s gotten better. 

“Maman said you’ve seen Mount Everest.”

Nathalie blinks back into the moment, surprised to find Adrien’s attention already trained on her. Shaded like a duckling under Emilie’s wing. 

Behind him, Emilie winks, finger to her smile. Secret keeping. 

“Yes,” Nathalie says to Emilie, then continuing, addressing Adrien. “Once.”

Adrien beams. “That’s the one that looks like a mom holding a baby. We read a book on it.”

“Ah, that’s a different mountain. I believe you’re thinking of Ama Dablam. Mother’s necklace, in Nepalese.”

Emilie wraps her arms around him, nuzzling his tallow-yellow hair. “Exactly like the visage.” 

Though blushing, Adrien peers up at Nathalie with eyes sparkling. “Do you think I could climb it?”

Nathalie opens her mouth, words unsure, but Emilie kisses his head, squeezing him tight. “I think you could do anything.”

The conversation falters and Nathalie’s smile feels too tight across her face as she watches Emilie blow raspberries onto Adrien’s cheeks, who, through his laughter, peeks at Nathalie’s suitcase. Impossible, implausible that he could suspect, much less know. All the same, onto the bed Nathalie slides her left hand, rolling her fingers into a fist. If he notices this, his reaction is a smile, like a dog rolling over. Vulnerable exposed belly. As if Nathalie’s the one who has ever measured his worth with a single glance. 

“Adrien,” Emilie says abruptly, pulling away to brush his hair back behind his ears. “Why don’t you wait for me in your room?” She leans down to whisper something in his ear that makes him brighten again, excitedly turning to cup his hand to her ear, bouncing on his feet, both of them then erupting into a fit of giggles. She pats his back, fingertip light, and it’s only an awkward smile that Adrien gives Nathalie before turning and leaving the two of them alone. 

Nathalie relaxes her hand, but Emilie stays quiet, looking around the room. 

“What was—?”

“Hm?” Emilie’s nonchalance breaks into a smile. She waves her hand dismissively. “Just an inside joke we have. It’s—oh, nevermind. Had to be here, I suppose,” she says, rolling her bottom lip between her teeth. 

Nathalie nods, letting the words pass through her hollow frame. 

Across Emilie’s features, a sad, guilty expression passes. Picking an imaginary speck off her dress, she continues, voice unsure. “I shouldn’t have told him to look forward to—”

It hits Nathalie: Adrien’s sly, expectant glances. She deflates pathetically into her hands. “I’m sorry. I completely forgot.” 

“No, no, Nathalie,” Emilie soothes. “It’s not exactly in your job description.” With a sigh, her comforting hand comes to rest on Nathalie’s knee. “Besides, the whole idea has just given Gabriel an excuse to shirk his responsibilities.”

Nathalie says nothing. Which came first, her covering, or him making a mistake? To know her boss, his failings, and to cover preemptively. Where to place the blame? 

“At any rate,” Emilie assures, “I think he’ll forget all about it if you have dinner with us this week. It’s all he’s been excited about really.”

Nathalie’s head pops up. “I could tell Gabriel to—”

Emilie scoffs, ironic smile playing on her lips. “I’ve yet to see your power of persuasion work on him, Nathalie. Or he’s as stubborn as you are,” she says, her laugh curdling into a cough. 

Nathalie bristles, clutching at her slacks. “Emilie? Are you sure—?”

Emilie dabs at her mouth with her wrist. “I’m fine.”

“Have you been having fits often? How long do they last?”

“Nathalie,” Emilie croaks. Exasperation colors her pallid pallor in patches of pink. “Can you just be still? For me?”

Finally, a command. Pretending not to hear the rasp of her breaths, Nathalie nods. Under Emilie’s gaze, she relaxes. A white flag surrendering, putting her hands up.

The morning light sears her tired eyes, but bathes Emilie in a warm glow. As she composes herself, combing her hair with the fine ivory picks of her fingers, gold falls like so much fairy dust onto Nathalie’s floor. “You’ll work yourself to death, I swear it. Here I thought if Gabriel told you to stay down, you would. You even ruined my surprise.”

Nathalie perks up. Thread of meaning in Emilie’s words catching in Nathalie’s body. Thread to eye or hook to mouth, she’s captured all the same. 

“... I could try again. If you want me to.”

Emilie looks up curiously, fingers dancing and shedding shimmering strands. She smiles and Nathalie tracks the movement. Months away have atrophied the apt to read Emilie; if it’s real or false, she doesn’t know. The ache in her chest, only the false hope she still feels the same—that much can Nathalie say is real. 

She nods, and Nathalie follows the cue. 

Nathalie slips out of her heels and lays back. Closes her eyes. Silent moments pass, only the sound of her own breathing. Peeking when she hears Emilie’s wheelchair squeak. 

As if lifted by the air, maybe with it, a lightness everywhere—in her hair with her curls swirling up, lithe body shaded beneath her silks and the sun—she rises from her chair. Even her lips, too, flicking up in one corner. 

A mirrored reaction in Nathalie: her hands, first, reaching out in front of her. Emilie suddenly too far away, a dream-like distance. Fear, then worry: “Emilie, don’t push—”

Yourself, she means, but it’s Nathalie who is thrown back into the mattress before she can blink. Emilie shaking with a laugh, her legs splayed doll-like over Nathalie’s lap. Cupping her face to bring theirs together. “Good morning, Nathalie.” The magic of her words fanning over her cheeks. 

“Good morning, Emilie.” The want to touch her, feel her close, her overworking lungs like butterfly wings between her arms enclosed around her. The command to touch not yet given. 

Emilie pushes back her bangs, nails scraping scalp. Over and over and over. Nathalie lay boneless on the bed, eyes steadily growing heavy. Feeling the hours of lost sleep and the heavenly capitulation. 

“Mm. I missed this face.” Fingers circling along her temples, touching softly under her eyes. “Are you sure you don’t want to sleep a little longer?” 

If she did, which is the dream? Is this real, or will she wake back in the tent? 

Nathalie rolls her over head to nose at Emilie’s wrist, her pulse point drenched in amber musk. A smile so involuntary that it feels debased. “What a waste of my time.” 

Emilie hums, tilting her head and allowing light to spill over her neck. Pale purple shadows in the curtain of her hair. “Sleep when you’re dead, is that it?”

Nathalie swallows hard as Emilie’s hand falls to thumb at her lip. Ring cool against her skin. “Maybe.”

Halation backlighting Emilie as she seems to think something over. Her right hand takes control of Nathalie’s jaw, cupping it and Nathalie lets her point her face away while Emilie’s left hand tugs at her shirt collar. “No sunburn this time.” A finger, cold as ice melting down Nathalie’s neck. Dripping into, then under the first button of her now-undone blouse. Chest flushed, then cooled with her hand skimming the top of her breasts. “No scratches, either.”

Pressed into the bed, Nathalie watches from the corner of her eyes. “What are you…?”

“Taking stock.”

Nathalie’s laugh is a punched-out exhale as another button pops, then the next. Small, obscene sound of Emilie’s nails clicking against mother-of-pearl. 

“I haven’t seen you in months,” says Emilie with a little wonder. “Gabriel has seen you every day. Nearly every day for seven years.”

So much vanilla warming the air. Nathalie, voyeuristically outside of herself. In Emilie’s place, not for the first time. What does she see? If in two months, Emilie has changed, paled, withered—what can she tell of Nathalie? With Emilie’s weight on her lap, Nathalie feels see-through. 

“How can we ever make that even, my love?” 

“I’m here now,” Nathalie offers. Pausing when Emilie caresses the curve of her plain white bra. Just enough pressure to reassure, to remind. Bravery in Nathalie’s left hand, stretching it to brush a knuckle across Emilie’s knee. “I’m—”

“Mine?” 

“Yours.”

Emilie rewards her with her eyes, her face brightening with a smile. A cue taken, the right line said. Emilie’s left hand gently squeezes and Nathalie’s eyes flutter. 

“Promise?”

“Always,” Nathalie sighs. Always, for her, a devotional word.

Emilie laughs, all breath. Briefly, Nathalie’s eyes close when Emilie’s wedding ring, cold to the touch and turning looser every day, shocks her bare skin. “Always…?”

Nathalie’s face goes hot. Her eyes dart away, towards the window, the light that burns her. “Always, madame,” replies Nathalie, feeling small in her skin, in Emilie’s hands like this. 

“Last time, you came home with so many cuts and bruises.” Emilie’s fingers glide over rib swells, light enough to make Nathalie squirm. Thanking her unearned luck, Emilie does not pass over the ribs that still feel tender. “Remember when—?”

But Nathalie is already nodding, eyes closed. The trouble of arriving in the daytime: Adrien always waiting, always on the tips of his toes in observation. Of his father, his mood; of Nathalie, her reticence. Last time, he’d knocked on her door and she’d braced herself for the worst, his resentment coming to a head—in his hands, no blame. Instead, a package of bandages, saying he saw a cut on her wrist. Though it had been long healed, she offered her arm to be fixed. 

“Looks as if you two hardly worked at all.”

“We did,” protests Nathalie. Ten miles, twenty in a day; shrines, rumors, back alleys. “I took better care—”

Two of Emilie’s fingers shift out from under Nathalie’s cheek and alight on her lips. Nathalie stops. 

“He likes to feel useful,” Emilie explains. Another button down, only two left. “Adrien, I mean.” A strange thrumming in Nathalie’s stomach, now bared to the navel. Her throat jumps. Slight stinging in her eyes. A heartbeat unlike hers, not nearly as strong. Moth-like: fluttering and eating away at what it shouldn’t. Nathalie realizes she’s panting as the cool slip of Emilie’s hand trails down.

No way for her to tell. Nothing to take stock of, no bump or kicking, but still Nathalie waits for the knife. Pins through her arms and legs like insect parts under the omniscient eyes of Emilie. Down, down, and her stomach flips—

“But he wouldn’t be looking here, would he?” 

Emilie’s attention, her hands, flit to grasp Nathalie’s right forearm, raising it as she cocks her head to examine the unmarred skin. One of her hands massages down, pulling taut Nathalie’s skin; one stays at her wrist, thumb poised over the junction of tendons and veins. 

Freed but still held to the bed, Nathalie rolls her head to look up at Emilie. Watching, obedient, as she presses her thumbnail—frail, filed, brittle—between two veins and flicks down. Nathalie hisses: a match struck, fire in her bloodstream; on the inside of her wrist, a papercut-thin wound. Barely an inch. 

Nathalie sits up as Emilie takes the weeping red flesh to her lips, kissing it better. Eyes gleaming. “Now you have something to give him.” She rolls her lip between teeth. “Goodness knows we have enough bandages.”

“And you?” Nathalie asks, just to see Emilie smirk. “What can I give you?”

“I’m sure you had plenty of time to think about it,” Emilie responds, voice tempting like the edge of a cliff. “How much time do you have to show me?”

Nathalie holds the light stem of her head between her hands with all the grace of a worshipper begging for alms. Looking over her face, taking her in as Emilie is always meant to be. Utterly, wholly, committing it all to memory. Nathalie brushes her thumb over a missing freckle, the one she’s kissed innumerably, and her throat constricts. 

A flower without the light she deserves, all of her days in the sun limited to chunks of light that slide over the second floor, sundial slow. Chasing it from one end to the other, from their room to hers. Doesn’t she deserve more—more than what Nathalie has given her, ever more than what Nathalie could give? 

“Nathalie?” Emilie mouths. The action makes their lips brush. Sweet taste of iron.

Nathalie tilts her head, so, so ready to capture the part of her lips with hers, to test the give and taste of her skin with her teeth—but, conscious of her breath and the morning that somehow existed before Emilie, moves to press a kiss on Emilie’s cheek. Hard to pull herself away, brushing her nose downward. The lived-in scent of her perfume calls for nips at her jaw; the way Emilie sighs spurring Nathalie further, lapping at the streams of veins, savoring the taste of perfume and throb of blood. Alive, alive, alive. 

The sweet, delicious sinking of her hips on Nathalie’s. A weakness, exploited: Nathalie’s right arm slings around Emilie’s waist—disappearing by the day—and pulls her close; every time they find themselves here, pressing a little closer, a little harder, the new push and pull of their bodies. Submission, to say she’s Emilie’s with every moan elicited, every jump in her heartbeat that sings under her teeth. 

Does she still have the half-moons on her thigh; does she still need—?

“Nathalie!”

Nathalie tears herself away. Her heart, she realizes, is pounding. Blood rush deafens her hearing, but Emilie’s face needs no words: she looks vacant, almost frightened. Renewed on her tongue, the taste of copper. 

“You’re shaking,” Emilie states. Studying Nathalie’s face as if behind it, no one is home. 

And she is—obvious to the both of them as Nathalie retreats. “Oh.” Obliquely recognizing, without feeling, that as she unclutches her left hand from Emilie’s robe to touch her face, what she feels are tears, still falling. Out of body, third person spectator, her eyes fall on a deep crested imprint of teeth marking the pale column of Emilie’s throat. Busted blood vessels blooming violets and poppies just above her garden green. Charmeuse marred and wrinkled at the left shoulder, matching the white-knuckle ache in her hand. 

She shakes her head as if disbelieving herself, the situation. When Nathalie untangles her right hand from Emilie’s hair, she follows as if caught in it. Strange, disgusting urge in Nathalie to shake her off. 

“Look at me,” Emilie entreats, leaning forward as Nathalie leans away, shrinking in on herself, ignoring the command. Shoulders stiff, hands restless on the bed as if they’d kissed chastely and nothing more. She can’t even hide the wavering of her apology, quiet though it is. 

“What happened, Nathalie?”

Nathalie closes her eyes, letting out a sigh. Her throat too constricted for words. 

Hand beneath her chin now, lifting it up. Pink-orange light through her eyelids. “Well, this isn’t just jet lag,” huffs Emilie. “I think you can admit that much to me."

Nathalie opens her eyes, meeting Emilie's with intensity. Tears pooling on Emilie’s hand cupping her cheek.

Tenderly, Emilie drops her voice. “Out there—Did something happen between you and—”

“No!” Nathalie exclaims, shooting up, hoping that Emilie does not mind the hand that comes to prop her up, just above the small of her back. “No, I mean… not between us.” She chews on her lip, screwing up her face before relaxing and continuing. “He’s getting worse.”

Emilie hums, understanding and sad. Posture softening, her other hand now coming to rest on Nathalie’s other cheek. In her hold like this, Nathalie feels like she could be uprooted. Flower bulb to rotted roots.

“He won’t eat,” Nathalie says, exasperated and blinking through cool, stale tears clinging to her lashes. Knowing that with each word, what is growing inside of her makes none of this better. Something weaned from conception on blame, guilt, and grief. “He works himself sick. Angry, always, if I can get him to speak more than two words.”

“And when you can,” Emilie says, “Do you remind him? That I don’t want this?”

Nathalie holds onto her harder, silent. 

“Look at you,” Emilie says. Pleads. “You can’t possibly want this.”

What to say of her want? Quantifying something intangible, the impossible. When Nathalie thinks of what she wants, she thinks of Emilie, seven years younger. Sharing a tent, a dream, their breaths. A family, more than anything. 

And the alternative? 

Holding Emilie close. Head to collarbone. How garish her hands look, too large for Emilie’s waifish frame.

“I want you to live,” Nathalie says quietly. Tear intonated. Gasping a little on the words. “I want what you want.” 

“That’s not that I want, love.” Emilie pets her hair. “We’ve talked about this. For Gabriel’s sake, put it aside. 

“It was difficult to get him out of his bed most days.”

“I guess I wouldn’t know about that,” Emilie says. “He didn’t come to bed last night.”

Shock separates Nathalie from reality. A disarming slap, leaving her reeling. But last night, the atelier light—

“What?” 

Emilie shrugs, her pout genuine but unbothered. “It’s all right. It comes to a point where you have to stop expecting. Fool me twice, and all that.”

Nathalie reels with something akin to emotional dismemberment. An unmaking. 

“No need,” Emilie says, hand clasped over Nathalie’s to stay her. Disappointment in the thin press of her lips, childish hurt in her eyes. 

Realizing she’s poised to stand, Nathalie relaxes again. What miswiring in her turns her key, lodged deep into her back now, to him, after everything? 

“Much rather you waste your breath with me,” Emilie says, swiping a finger through spit shining on her neck. “Should have crawled in bed with you instead last night.” 

Nathalie hates the way her mind spins the image of crawl. 

Emilie shifts off of Nathalie’s lap, pulling away at Nathalie’s touch like spiderlings kiting in the wind, and settles back into her chair. All of her looking unchanged and Nathalie feeling gored. 

“Speaking of—” Emilie motions towards Nathalie’s forgotten luggage. “Let’s clear all of this away. I can’t say I love looking at the reminder.” She leans forward and unlatches the suitcase, automatically picking out soiled field shirts before Nathalie can stop her. 

“I can do this,” Nathalie says, pulling one of the handles towards her. 

But Emilie’s hand is already reaching for another pile. Having to lean farther in her seat. “It’s really not a problem,” Emilie dismisses. Hand precariously hovering over her small pack, tucked tightly into one corner. 

Nathalie shakes her head. “You shouldn’t—”

“I’m not an invalid,” Emilie says, hooking her fingers into the lip of the suitcase and pulling it towards her torso. More clothes she piles onto her lap. “Let me at least give these clothes to the laundry staff.” She wrinkles her nose with a grimace. “Your suitcase is beginning to reek, darling. You need to look after your smoking.”

Nathalie tightens her grip on the handle, but relinquishes control. She is not in the position to make demands.  “I know,” she says, or apologizes. “It’s… stressful.” 

Emilie’s lips quirk. Folding a grimy shirt with too much care. “The leaving, or the staying?” 

Nathalie blinks. “I don’t—”

“Would you stop if I asked you to? The smoking, I mean.” She folds a pair of athletic pants.  Passes over the pack again for a sports bra. “You’ve given me the answer for the other. What would be harder: choosing to stay, or choosing to quit?” She shrugs her shoulders. “Both a form of quitting, I suppose.”

She reaches for another article of clothing, but Nathalie grabs her wrist. Loose, but enough to make Emilie look up. 

“Emilie,” Nathalie starts, shaking her head and suddenly feeling out of her depth. In no position to make demands, only pleas. “You know… You know that I miss you.”

“Leaving never seems so difficult,” Emilie mumbles. “Only coming back.”

Nathalie doubles down. “That’s not true,” She gives Emilie’s hand a light squeeze. “Not for me. You know that.”

A pause. Emilie’s tired little lungs breathing for the both of them. Nathalie, selfishly living off her grains of hourglass sands. 

“Do I?”

Both of them dead still in the light as they look at each other. In Emilie’s place, not for the first time. What does she see? If in two months, Emilie has changed, paled, withered—what can she tell of Nathalie? The truth, maybe. Deeper than recent wounds or the seams under her hands. 

“Your eyes,” Emilie questions, darting between them both. Her own turning glassy, a small crease forming between her brows. Her laugh, without mirth, breaking through like the sun through clouds. “They look like Gabriel’s.”

Nathalie’s stomach churns a new wave of nausea.

She opens her mouth to ask what she means, but lets Emilie’s hand slip away instead. Reclaimed, Emilie presses a beautiful frown against her fingers. When she sniffs, Nathalie feels something inside her tear open, an unending fissure she wishes would devour her whole. 

She's the same, she wants to lie. Always and forever and still hers. 

But when she opens her mouth, Emilie’s left hand is raised. She sighs, soft and wet and sad, her gaze returning to the only thing left inside Nathalie’s suitcase. She clears her throat. “We should probably wash this for next time, too, right?” 

Nathalie snatches it from underneath Emilie’s hand.

“I’ll take care of this.” 

“Nathalie,” she huffs, cheeks still rosy with a held-back cry. “Wherever you stash your cigarettes, it’ll stink.” She turns up her palm. Ring catching the light. “I don’t want Adrien finding them. He’s sneakier than you think.”

Nathalie guards it on her lap. 

“Nathalie—”

The next moments are over as soon as they’ve begun. Emilie, always a little faster. The catch of wristbones like a necklace clasp, a handcuff connecting. Nathalie jerks her hands away and Emilie catches the mouth of it, three fingers sunk inside but she’s leaning forward and Nathalie reacts, kicking out her foot and forcing her to brake. Crunch of metal against plastic, agonizing groan and then silence. 

Nathalie’s heel, pushing Emilie away. 

Nathalie is staring blankly at a piece broken off from her footplate when Emilie finally speaks. 

“If you want lunch sent up, you know how.”

She wheels herself to the bedroom doors, opening them as Nathalie trails a few meters behind, head thick with a headache and dumb with apologies. And then she’s gone. Doors closed, curtains drawn, lights out. 

With her back turned against the frame, Nathalie slides down the doors until she’s sitting, cradling her head in her hands. Alone in the audience.

From across the room, her phone chirps with the reminder to call her physician. 

21:00

Delirious with pain, teetering on the edge of her immaculately made bed. Emilie’s hands are never idle this evening: fussing over unkempt sheets, pillows too flat, the towels uncomfortably rucked. Unrelenting cramps forcing Nathalie to hunch forward over her quavering legs. Heel to floor, heel to floor. Breathing, nose then mouth. Scented steam billowing out from the ensuite, waves and waves of Emilie’s warm vanilla ushered in from the bath’s hot-hissing roar. 

Earlier, Emilie behind her on the bed, brushing back her hair with sweet tones, giggling then: Do you remember taking me to lamaze? Everyone thought we were— Kiss to her shoulder as Nathalie whined through teeth so locked she heard them crack in every anteroom of her mind. Crying out, nose then mouth. To think you were going to go through this alone.

“Nathalie, darling?” 

Call and response, Nathalie opens her eyes. Lucidity spun out now, a loose spool: the whole room pulled up by invisible strings and stirred. Everything at once absurd and unreal. Lost in the current, her listless body snagging on something Nathalie can’t see. 

“Careful, careful!” Safety, for a moment. Hands propping up her shoulders. “That’s it. Can you look at me? Nathalie?”

Slow reality. Eyes opening again just to fall, flutter, fight to stay steady on Emilie. 

“The bath’s almost done. It’ll help with the pain and the…” Sad smile on her pinched face. Beautiful pout. “Well, the pain. Just a few more—”

Something welling up urgently. Last call for help before drowning. Nathalie’s voice, snot-clogged and her cheeks salt-burned. Apologies, banked from Adrien’s. Dropping them along with tears into Emilie’s hands, one after one after one. Wiping away tears with thumbs she’s seen wielding pairing knives, cutting out apple cores, pits of cherries, stone fruit guilt in the pit of her stomach. This pain a slow, awful shucking. 

“Breathe—”

Nonsense, to think Emilie controls her agony. Deceitful, traitorous, selfish. Nathalie’s action, coupled with inaction: never dissuading him, like Emilie trusts. But she—on repeat, skipping, rewinding in Nathalie’s mind. His voice, distorted in similar anguish. But she’s so small, Nathalie. To listen to her struggle to breathe until she wakes up gasping—

A knock on the door breaks them apart. Barely perceptible, almost missed under the sound of the bath. 

“Maman?”

Emilie’s on her feet in an instant, soft footfalls until the happy lilt of her voice greeting Adrien. Click-shut of the door behind her. Small conversation, words disconnected in Nathalie’s mind. 

From the hallway, a pause that makes Nathalie’s throat leap. Crossing her arms over her head, bent between her legs. Crash landing into the sound of Adrien’s sobbing, Emilie’s soothing.

Nathalie is fine, baby. 

I told you, maman—

I know, Adrien, I know. But she’s okay. She’ll be at breakfast tomorrow, I promise. Okay?

His words pitched and unruly against hers so smooth, her promises enveloping. Underscored by screeching taps. Absently, Nathalie watches candle-red wax trickle down into the hollow of her left ankle. Too much, even if she closes her eyes: Adrien there with Emilie’s moue and her eyes pleading. The way he watches Emilie’s every movement and to be the receiver of such attention, such unconditional love. All of it, like his eyes sliding from Emilie to Nathalie across the dinner table—all of it trained on Nathalie, even for a moment—

Evacuation measures. Finds herself shuffling unevenly towards the veil of steam pouring out from the bathroom. Banging her elbow against the door, her foot against the jamb. Floaters fizzling and popping in her vision, breath hard to catch now as she gulps in lungfuls of humid sweet air, thick and soapy and slithering down her throat. 

To the sound of water overflowing, tile-slapping, Nathalie loses consciousness. 

M 15:35

Barely past the sterile white lights and glass doors, Nathalie’s sucking smoke by the lungful. Ruthless, patronizing echo in her ear: You should weigh the risks of smoking while pregnant. Patting a glossy pamphlet as if she didn’t know, hadn’t the first clue. Limit stress being their one pointless piece of advice to avoid miscarriage while you think it over. 

Seven days to do so. Mandatory, no acceleration. Not for circumstances that Nathalie kept close to her vest. The doctor, shaking her head as she wiped and cleaned the wand that had Nathalie dissociating on crepey-white sheets. The doctor, refusing to move out of frame from the ultrasound. Testing Nathalie’s stubbornness, she supposes. If she really could go the whole appointment without looking. 

Eyes downcast, she makes her way to where the town car is parked as instructed in the far corner of the lot. Heels polished and tapping against the blacktop. Metronomic. They sound the same in any hallway, she’d thought, bracing as Gabriel called her while she was led to a set of stirrups. Lying, unexpected manufacturing delay, and staring down the nurse who spoke without being spoken to. Nodding, thanking, end call. 

What a ploy—they could show any ultrasound from any woman for the sake of smoke and mirrors and the sanctity of thinking about your options. Many of them has she thought. Some of them planned. Some of them contemplated. Ideation. What does termination mean in the context of a job that is her life, or her life her job? Terminating a pregnancy, clinical. Terminating her position, hard to detangle at night as she undresses tailored clothes from her employer, into a bed whose sheets she never bought, in the room of a house she doesn’t own.

Routine now, her hand raising to cover her stomach, heel pushing in.

In her periphery, Placide signs a question to which in reply Nathalie nods. Stamps out her cigarette, rolling around the acrid, ashen taste in her mouth with a frown. Not the smoke that bothers her, but the repugnant sentence that finally made Nathalie look at the doctor, nearly spying the negative of the overgrowth in her system.

We wouldn’t be able to grant an acceleration in this circumstance. 

Nathalie presses the home button on her phone. A message from Gabriel to which she reads, does not absorb, then mechanically replies. Swiping, exiting, staring. 

Not given your general good health and this being your first child. 

Her background, from years ago, Emilie and Adrien.

T 12:00

Keeping time with their daylight sonata—on Emilie's quick, unpredictable hand dancing across the keys, Nathalie writes confidently, without thinking. Ink lines stretching with nearly-indistinguishable cursive intonations. A smattering of pointless dates, written and smeared by her left hand: three days from her first positive. One day from prognosis. Nine weeks from conception. Nine weeks since the smell of oil violated her bottom desk drawer. Nine weeks since she’s eyed the atelier couch. Nine weeks since—

Sudden shift, like a marble-white staircase falling away after each ascending step. Then it’s Adrien picking up her pieces: clumsily, earnestly, every longshot half-note clattering dead. Him, with his open-faced awe, beaming up at Emilie as she played for the whole house. The ghost of her falling vaporous through his room, down the stairs and through the atelier doors’ stopgap. 

Off-rhythm as Nathalie follows, floundering. To be sure she never missed a day but that morning, she thinks, before they left. Obfuscated mark in her mind like so many migraine mirages: herself in her bathroom, or bedroom, or just before they left, somewhere surely standing with the pill tucked on her tongue. Never has she before missed a day. Then again, Nathalie amends, Gabriel saw it as clear as her, the punch-gutted hole where it must have been. 

His stylus slashes through something wrong, and above, laughter erupts like applause, or is it applause like laughter—?

Turning over her page, Nathalie stands, adjusts her blazer, and walks around the length of her desk with her tongue stuffed in the back of her mouth. Movement mechanical, head pneumatic. Teeth clenched. Feeling two pairs of eyes on her as she walks out of the atelier and into the foyer, pressing her back against the door as it closes. 

Emilie and Adrien pause and pluck, reticent, hesitant like the start of an overture, and it isn’t until Nathalie steps onto the stairs that they start again, together, so that every step of hers is a hammer to their piano string. Metronome clicking of her heels, ticking hands of a skull-white watch face. 

Saliva washing over her cheeks and aggravation over her body. You should be resting, Nathalie wants to remind Emilie and chastise Adrien from the far end of the hall. Eviscerating, embarrassing anger swelling up. Weeds in the well, fighting through cracks in the stones. That Nathalie would be okay with this, all of it: Adrien, Gabriel, Emilie. Knocked off kilter, all of Emilie’s plans. 

As if she herself had forgotten what she whispered with tear-ruddy cheeks, the vulnerable clicking her throat as she swallowed, laughed, blushed because she could hardly speak. Nathalie’s hands taken in hers. Buzzing, light-headed sensation as Emilie talked, giving shape and weight and color to someone unborn, as if they’d died long ago but Emilie remembered every intimate detail. Adrien, Adrien, Adrien. Thumbs pressing in across the meat of her palms. Ducking her head to Nathalie’s shoulder, knees bumping against each other. Very low voice, asking almost timidly into the hollow of her throat what Nathalie’s plans were. After, after, after. Lips brushing, funny little laugh when Nathalie jumped. Three becoming four. From then on, Emilie, wordlessly coaxing out the want inside. 

Harder on you to leave, he’d said. Staying becoming much worse, a different hell. Crushing her hands into fists, Nathalie argues. With Gabriel. With the sound of Emilie’s wheelchair, her coughing fits. The sound of Adrien tapping her frail back—too delicate, too light to do anything at all—and of Emilie’s wheezed apologies. Where, Nathalie has asked and asks now and will always ask, did this life fit in with her original vision? When, the disbelief that Nathalie could make it better. Pull off the impossible twice. False promises. Four now becoming three. 

But the words flush down along with her breakfast and salted water and anti-nausea medicine and birth control.

Washing out her mouth, she swirls around water and the bitter question of who, between the two of them, circled the pain first. Who, between her and him, is to blame? Who, between Nathalie and Gabriel, owns now more of her body?

Her reflection returns no answers. Leans in with her, index finger pulling on the pliant, bruised flesh of her left cheek. Scared of something underneath, a worm burrowed into the apple of her eye. Your eyes have changed. More like his. Bloodshot, matching red veins. Unnaturally glassy, she relents, like the veil thrown over his. When she leans back, Nathalie wonders with surging dread—surging  stupidity—if they really have changed. 

Hands at her side, Nathalie returns to the atelier, their self-imposed purgatory. Emilie’s soft-spilling heaven seeping through their open edges. Sonorous waves floating, crashing, easing away. Missing notes, embarrassed laughter. Agitation with every dropped key, building anxiety. Nathalie’s eyes are neither on Gabriel or the couch or Emilie’s portrait, only her discarded notes. 

Scribbles out the timeline. 

Six days left.

W 17:00

Nathalie pulls at her cuff under the table. Disguising her discomfort as she slides a knuckle under her sleeve to dig at a freshly-applied bandage. Plastic sucking at the soft and irritated skin. Dry cotton catching ridges of cracked blood. Very diligent is he, this time around.

“Is it not good?”

Eyes flicking up, Nathalie checks her posture, her face, setting her shoulders straight. “It’s fine, Adrien.”

Adrien frowns at her plate, his body deflating as he looks at Emilie’s. His own utensils going slack in his hands. 

“It’s just… you haven’t eaten yet.”

In his bowl only, sauce pools where food once was. Between Nathalie and Emilie’s, there have been ten full bites total. As if ashamed, he chews on his lip, staring at his plate. Head ducked down. 

Nathalie’s eyes go wide for a second. “Oh, yes, the food.” She takes up her fork, quickly spearing and eating a cubed potato, pushing around the mealy texture with her tongue. Forcing herself not to gag as she nods her head. Swallows, then says, “I’m a little tired tonight. I’m sorry.”

Beside her, Emilie hums. Chin resting on her right hand, her left bouncing her fork between her fingers. Wagging a half-bit potato; like a wand, like the truth. Nathalie knows the trick of hers: every item on her plate is cut into pieces, and every tiny piece in every tiny pile has a tiny bite. 

“It’s hard to come back to this food,” Emilie says, frowning at Adrien. “It’s as if you had cake every day, and then had to eat plain bread. I’m sure Nathalie misses those—oh, what were they?” She turns to squint at Nathalie, biting her lip in thought. “Those dumplings, what was in them? The ones I made myself sick eating?”

At this, Adrien perks up. 

“Buffalo,” Nathalie replies. 

Adrien’s face screws up, his button nose wrinkling just like Emilie’s. He cloaks his disgust with a laugh. “You ate—?”

“I promise, it was delicious!” Emilie insists, leaning forward with sparkling eyes. “I ate so many, your papa wouldn’t even kiss me. What’d I call it, Nathalie—going into a ‘momo coma’?” She giggles. Takes the tines of her fork between her teeth before dropping it back to her plate. Chewing for longer than she needs: mush, easy to swallow. “There’s all sorts of fun things around the world. Yak, sheep—”

Rations. Instant packets. Emilie’s fingers, now on top of her thigh and squeezing hard. “E-eel,” Nathalie continues quietly, but still on cue. 

He looks at Nathalie, then back to his plate. Small smile, a little light. “Maybe… we could eat it together. Some day.”

Too-dry food cements into paste in Nathalie’s throat. But Emilie is glowing, dabbing her mouth and nodding her head. 

“Of course. One day, baby. In the meantime, if we ask very nicely,” she instructs, batting her lashes at Nathalie, head tilted on her shoulder, “Nathalie can bring some home to us next time.”

The spark in Adrien’s eyes blows out. Her words against his birthday candles.

“Okay,” he says, abandoning his fork and food. Mustering his most grateful smile. “Thank you, Nathalie,” he says before hanging his head. 

Whereas Nathalie falters, fork falling, Emilie is already reaching for him. 

“You know Nathalie helps papa,” she says, brushing lightly his ring finger. Pulling away when Adrien keeps his head lowered. “It isn’t as if she has a choice, baby. Right, Nathalie?”

Nathalie gives her answer to her plate, her food formless and tasteless staring back at her. 

“She would love to stay,” Emilie continues, taking Nathalie’s hand in hers. Marble-smooth and cold. Nathalie runs her thumb over Emilie’s, whose grip then loosens. “But she would get in trouble, which Nathalie is far too careful to do.” Emilie angles her head to give Nathalie a wink. “And if papa let her go, we wouldn’t see her anymore.” 

“But you said…” 

“I said…?” Emilie tries with levity. 

“You said you missed…” starts Adrien, his face flickering oddly, as if he were pantomiming anger but not brave enough to show it. “ You said that you wished…” 

Adrien huffs, shoving himself away from the table with enough force to make his dinnerware clatter together. Knives against glass and glass toppling over his plate. His face babbles silently with tears but he doesn’t make a sound himself, doesn’t move to bury them away as he turns and bolts for the foyer, his cheeks growing ruddier every time Emilie calls after him. Putting all of his weight to throw open the dining room doors, he trips backwards on his heels, hitting his head on the back of a chair when he cranes his neck.

In the doorway, Gabriel. His shadow cuts across Adrien and the space between Emilie and Nathalie. Eyes narrowing at one, then the other.

When Adrien moves into his line of sight, he jumps, recoiling his arm from the doorknob. 

“Adrien? What are you doing?”

 Adrien flounders for words as he watches Gabriel take note of everyone’s unfinished plates. Anger igniting his father’s face, halting everything.

“Emilie came down for you,” he says through teeth. Tea-kettle tremble in his peremptory voice. “What did I tell you?” Gabriel points to Emilie, but Adrien does not look. “Do you see how tired she is? What did I say?”

Adrien’s hands grip the sides of his pants. “T-that I could hurt Maman—”

Emilie’s already wheeled around the table, taking Adrien into her arms. Soothing out the worry in his small forehead with her hand. “No, no, baby. I’m not at all hurt.” She kisses his cheek, loud and smacking. “Papa worries too much about maman.”

Caging Adrien safely, Emilie looks up into Gabriel’s face, all sweetness and care. “On the contrary, it’s Adrien who isn’t feeling well. Something about the food upset his stomach.” She leans down to whisper in his ear, patting his back before he side-steps Gabriel, who leans away from him as if repelled, and disappears out of frame. 

In the following silence, anger begins to whistle. Both parents trained to listen for the closing of his door before speaking again. 

Nathalie pushes food around on her plate. Nothing but footsteps running in her ears.

TH, F, Sat

Smear frames, her life in perpetual motion. Each day assuming a visage of herself. Act like this, talk like that. Hands behind back. Every hour, cognizant of her breath, her stomach, her stock of mouthwash. Declining lunches, then dinners. Cavernous ache emanating from low in her torso, decently pleasurable. Still preferable to the alternative. Carved, never bloated. 

Idle hands invite the devil. Every morning, Nathalie descends to the atelier, feeling with each step Emilie’s eyes on her. Bedroom door always open now. Only a feeling—Nathalie can’t bring herself to lift her head and confirm. In her mind, a mess of wires and IVs obfuscate Emilie’s face. Once, with trepidation, hazarding looking Emilie’s way—finding only Adrien smiling at her, Emilie drooped on his shoulder, a book slack in their held hands. 

All the same, missing her. Every hour, thinking about her, latent longing. Missed time, and missing more day by day. Missing someone though they’re just above. The type of cowardice Nathalie once spurned.

She’s not the first woman to hate herself. To make mistakes. It feels nothing special. 

The other day, she mistook a letter key for a bug underneath her desk, crushing it with her heel. Dusted the pieces into her cupped hand and caught from over his podium his sheepish, apologetic stare. Glaring as he explained that a replacement tablet had been ordered already.

At night, a small lick of satisfaction as by lamplight on her bed Nathalie pores over itineraries, where to go next. Mouthwash. Water. Pills. Alcohol. 

How to fix everything.

Sun 

Nathalie’s room has turned inside out, affects strewn like all her meals and fluids for the past week. Closet gored and trailing from the corner where her suitcase is tucked away. Maps, pens, books, pamphlets, journals. Even her desk and bed turned have been over, drawers and sheets opened and bare. 

Everything found except what she’s looking for. She’d touched it, just yesterday, still making sure it was real—

A knock at her door makes her jump out of her skin.

By cadence alone, Nathalie knows it’s Emilie’s hand. 

Now, as she did then, looking down the aisle with prideful dread. Almost made it out, hadn’t she? Swept it under the rug? Metaphorical, though as she crosses to the door, she kicks items underneath her desk and bed. Penance somewhere, ready to be coaxed out. 

Exhaling, Nathalie opens the door. 

Emilie sits with her arms crossed, a frown dimpling her cheeks. 

“I promise you Nathalie won’t be upset,” she’s explaining to Adrien, who has made himself very small and quiet in the doorframe. Both of his hands are tucked behind his back. Emilie spares a look at Nathalie, head to toe. “But you’ve clearly given her a fright and owe her an apology.” She reaches out and rubs the back of his neck. Adrien breaks his stance and procures from his back Nathalie’s pack. 

Nathalie’s breath stalls, visually checking—it’s zipped up.

“I’m sorry,” Nathalie can hear him say distantly. Then, Emilie’s voice, just as soft, explaining something about passport and couldn’t leave.

Nathalie kneels, but Adrien struggles still to meet her eyes. 

“It’s alright, Adrien. I’m sorry I didn’t bring something back for you.” Nathalie places her hand over her bag, but does not take. She feels the spine of the test under her palm. “Next time, I promise.”

Adrien’s eyebrows tilt up. Eyes flitting from her to Emilie, obviously impressing something left unsaid. “But, maman…. Nathalie is… is…”

Fear resonating down every vein in Nathalie. Bones, muscles, joints, all stiffening. 

Emilie looks confused for a split second, before dismissing whatever thought is clouding his face. 

“Nathalie is completely fine,” she consoles, ruffling his hair. Long now, long enough that Gabriel told her to schedule a haircut as soon as possible. “Goodness, you’ve worried so much this time.” Emilie spares a quick, pitying look down at Nathalie before returning her attention to Adrien. “Just where did you get your imagination, hm?”

Adrien surveys his shoes long enough to make Nathalie and Emilie lock eyes— but before Emilie can speak, Adrien is murmuring apologies against Nathalie’s sweater, his arms tight around her neck and body heavy against hers. 

Her travel pack is safe in her right hand, which limps around his little body. The other stabilizes herself on Emilie’s knee.

“It’s alright,” she reassures Adrien. Throat tight, impassive nod. “I understand.”

With patient grace, Emilie takes Nathalie’s left hand and guides it to Adrien’s opposite shoulder, tucking him into her hug. His grip around Nathalie tightens, his nonsensical words brightened. 

For the first time since arriving back home, Nathalie realizes just how much he’s grown. How little he must have been when they left him to take care of Emilie. He, just like his mother, with prominent bird-boned shoulder blades and bright eyes. 

“You’re okay,” Emilie says slowly, “right, Nathalie?”

Nathalie hums with an involuntary hitch at the end. Looking away at the dying day drowning out the foyer, stairs, bedrooms. Everything blurring together. Blinking rapidly and nothing clearing. Hard to decipher or for Nathalie to care about anything else at all as Emilie’s hand pets her head. Over and over and over. 

M 12:00

Perfect noon light hits the windows of the mansion with stunning halation, making the front windows transform into a glittering marquee. 

Sun a spotlight above, Nathalie climbs the steps one at a time. Controlled. Head down. In her breast pocket, a blister pack of four absolutions. Each pill pouch perforated like the dotted lines she’d given her signature on. Her life, she thinks, a series of signing her name away for meager gains.

Eight to twelve hours of heavy bleeding and intense cramps. Preferred, but not needed: hot compresses, pain killers, someone to hold her hair, her hand. Somewhere safe, they insisted, twice-asked due to Nathalie’s delay in responding, his bleak misunderstanding. If your home isn’t safe, we can perform the procedure here. By then, another cigarette lit in her hand, pills pocketed. The guest bedroom is no less safe, no less dangerous than four flimsy canvas walls.

Crossing under the proscenium arch into the cool, shadowed foyer, a stranger to midday sun, it only takes two echoing clacks of her heels for the atelier’s doors to swing open in unison. With power, with a close-lipped smile, with Emilie’s arms outstretched and cashmere-socked feet slapping against the tile.

Registering seconds too late, Emilie, nymph that she is, has already slung her arms around Nathalie’s neck, pulling her under into the seafoam tide of her blond waves. Twirling them both now, giggling into the side of Nathalie’s neck while she wonders what her hands are for, which of Emilie’s shores to rest on as she’s dragged in the whirlpool of limbs and laughter and Emilie’s body pressed so impossibly close. Her seaweed feet tangling perfectly with Nathalie’s.

“Emilie, you’re walking—”

Riding the inertia of her excitement, Emile reels back far enough to call for action—catching her at the waist, Nathalie’s left foot slams down to brace them both while one of Emilie’s lifts, just because it can. Nathalie’s mouth opens again, but Emilie makes better use of it than words: bringing Nathalie down to her waters and parting her open, one shared breath before Nathalie’s clutching at Emilie’s hip, the taste of grapes spilling ripe onto her tongue. 

A second set of footsteps. Timid, measured, stopped. 

Scarcely before Emilie’s teeth have left her bottom lip do Nathalie’s eyes flick up and meet Gabriel’s. 

Still gray waters. 

“There he is!” Emilie cheers his way with her head thrown upside down before lifting back to Nathalie, cheekily whispering: “His timing, as usual, could use some work.”

Emilie hoists herself up to lean against Nathalie, whose body crosses wires. Two conflicting commands but one lead around her neck: stand straight, hold Emilie. Where to, how to look? At Gabriel, tie loose and wrinkled, with no answers but the skeleton of a grapevine in his hands. Chewing on her tongue, Nathalie imagines she tastes the oil of his fingers, just underneath Emilie’s kiss. 

“I—” Nathalie huffs, impressing an earnest smile. Taking her in, as if for the first time, head to toe. A certain tightness knotted in her chest, seeing her play in the movement of her body again. “I take it you’re feeling better. When I left, I thought you were still asleep.”

Emilie brushes Nathalie’s nose once. “It’s not often I get to surprise you. Where did you run off to, anyhow?”

“You need to sit down, Emilie,” says Gabriel. “You nearly slipped on the runway—”

Half-turning, Emilie frowns. “Nathalie says I look just fine.” Turning, again. “Right, Nathalie?”

She wobbles a little in Nathalie’s grasp, switching weight between legs. 

To Gabriel, Nathalie starts tentatively: “She said she’s—”

Gabriel throws out his arm, a vein popping in his neck as he gestures wildly. “She jumped off the fifth step while you were gone. Barreled into my office and—” 

“And we had such an awful time dancing and feeding each other grapes. Cross my heart, Gabriel dear, I won’t let it happen again.” For effect, she briefly drops a hand to pantomime the action. Nathalie notices a thread looped around Emilie’s ring, adding friction where it slides off too easily. “Should I buy you a new tie, too?”

To the ground Gabriel throws the empty stem. Runs a shaking hand through his slow-silvering hair to play off his blushing. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

From Emilie, an exaggerated sigh, body wilting. “I could be a whole host of emotions, and here I thought we could all be happy. It’s almost as if he doesn’t want me to celebrate.”

The house takes a breath while Emilie hums, wavering in Nathalie’s loose hold.

“Celebrate?” asks Nathalie. Indifferent as Emilie’s fingers find the nape of her neck and the small hairs she’s missed pinning. “Did something… happen? Sir?”

Conspiratorial smile playing on Emilie’s lips. Since when had they color this ripe, in bloom? She lowers her voice with a tilt of her head. Warm, bare hands trailing down to wrap around Nathalie’s elbows, pulling her in close. As if they’re organizing a surprise party, and Nathalie’s forgotten the trick up her sleeve. Always up to Emilie to save the show.

“Sir?” Emilie arches a brow. “I don’t think you’re working right now.”

Nathalie looks down, past Emilie’s dove-colored silk dress. The floors on the first floor are unlike the second: completely unscuffed.  “I’m… not sure I understand, Emilie.”

She misses the expression, but not how Emilie’s hands squeeze around her arms. “Maybe it would be easier if you led this, love?”

“Led what?” 

“Well, the…,” she trails off. Taking a beat, then two for effect. “Oh. Here I was, so sure…” 

Before Nathalie’s mind can catch up, a cool, calm hand coaxes her chin up, up, up. Perched on fingertips. Emilie shakes her head, searching Nathalie’s face. Coming up empty, then asking, “He doesn’t…?” 

Her turn now to shake her head, though her lip begins to tremble. Skin separating from muscle, muscle from bone, bone from her frame. Resonance; light-headed; a struggle to keep her voice even and the space she takes up in this house is welled with apologia and grief. Emilie’s hand stirring ripples in it. Two words form and falter on her lips. Spasming a little, as if tied to ventriloquist strings. You know. 

“Oh,” Emilie breathes. Face screwing up as if she’s been pinched. “Nathalie.”

She can picture the test in Emilie’s hands. Devoid of scent or slick or shame, anything that distinguishes it as it truly is. Disgusting. Display screen-burned with what can’t be buried now. Nathalie’s eyes flood and mercifully blur the mental picture of what Emilie’s face must have been. 

She breathes in measures, tries to grow her spine solid and straight—but still, always dipping her head like this whenever Emilie’s just a hair’s breadth away. “Emilie,” she warns, or begs, or cries. Too small of a voice to tell. Heat in her stare, even as Emilie defers to Gabriel. 

“I suppose that’s Nathalie for you,” she titters. Eyeing Nathalie as if giving a compliment. Through her silk, the cut of her hipbone grating Nathalie’s. 

Nathalie, imploring through a dry throat: “Sir—”

“In this case, I sincerely hope you aren’t working.” On Emilie’s face, a funny smile. “The implications alone…” 

Nathalie, flatlined, presses her lips together.

Gabriel sighs, all teeth, pressing a palm to his eyebrow. “Emilie, I think you’re exhausting yourself. You’re at risk of fainting, if you’ve forgotten.” He starts for Emilie with heavy steps, raising an arm. “I think we could, at the least, continue this conversation upstairs—”

Emilie waltzes around to hold Nathalie from behind, effectively stopping him in his tracks. 

Hostage in Emilie’s embrace, Nathalie and Gabriel lock eyes and do not move. Small, teasing breaths against her neck, just over the collar. Hands slithering around to her front, hot and low on her stomach. 

“The longer you wait, love,” Emilie whispers, “the harder it is to tell the truth.”

“About what,” Gabriel growls. A direct cue for Nathalie’s mouth to wash with saliva. For her nails, hands fisted, to break skin. 

A slow unveiling: working at her blazer’s button, Emilie’s two fingers and thumb.

“Nathalie is pregnant, Gabriel.”

Gabriel says nothing, as if Emilie had continued on in her play, saying nothing of importance. As if he recognizes this scene by rote: Emilie presenting Nathalie with her hands undressing and fingers drumming, toying, flittering the way one does over hors d'oeuvre, while Nathalie steels herself for Gabriel’s reaction. Hands, breath, eyes.  

If he feels anything at all, it is not apparent through his expression. Schooled indifference.

“I think she’s gone and had the first ultrasound without you, darling. Am I right?” asks Emilie.

Nathalie nods. 

“Is running out on us a recent habit, Nathalie?” he asks rhetorically, his joke failing on delivery. 

“I was taking care of it,” Nathalie says between clenched teeth. All the context in her venomous eyes. Order fulfilled. 

“Taking care of something that had already been taken care of, as I understand.”

“So,” Emilie begins, voice like a dream in Nathalie’s ear, “you did know?”

“I knew only what Nathalie told me,” he says to his wife, his smile fighting back a sneer. 

Nathalie huffs, taking a step forward. “You knew when—”

Emilie hugs Nathalie tighter, binding her close. “Now, now, you two. These things happen, don’t they? Hm? Careful what you wish for, and all that” Her fingers play at Nathalie’s waist. “How should we arrange the rest, my love? Your schedule is always so busy, but the car is hardly outfitted for a wheelchair. It’s difficult enough getting down the stairs. Most days, I mean,” she half-laughs. To Nathalie’s shoulder, she presses a peck. “We can’t let Nathalie go through this alone.”

“I have the pill,” Nathalie says. Shutting her eyes and shuddering her breath. “Pills. That’s where I was today.” 

“Those only work up to a certain date; and even then, there’s no guarantee. Help me with my math?” Emilie traces the band of Nathalie’s trousers. Walks her fingers to untuck her sweater. Right hand lifting the veil, showing her off. Framing what only Nathalie can’t address. A magician’s touch with the wand and the hat, the saw and the woman. A palm, sweeter than her own, sweeping over her stomach, her wedding ring brushing skin smoothed by ultrasound gel. “You two left nine weeks ago. And your last period?”

Nathalie lets out a sigh. Shaking, shallow. “I don’t know. For some time now, I haven’t been… regular.” Sucks in through her teeth when cold, ivory fingers soothe new scratch marks, not there the last time Emilie undressed her. Irritated, scratched in imperfect, intersecting lines beaded maroon. Dimly, she hears Gabriel call her name. With what emotion, she can’t, won’t place. 

“You have to look after yourself, Nathalie,” murmurs Emilie. “Half it, then. Two weeks, plus nine. Do I have that right?” 

Biting her lip, Nathalie hazards opening her eyes. 

Gabriel is staring at her, trying to tell her what she already knows. 

“Yes,” she lies.

“Eleven weeks. About the size of a cluster of grapes.” Against the slope of her shoulder, Emilie continues, “You’re almost through a whole trimester. How lucky.” Nathalie watches Gabriel’s attention slide back to his wife. In sickness and in health, they say, and he has taken unto himself her pale complexion. “How many first trimesters did we have before Adrien?”

Adrien. Nathalie’s heart painfully skips over a beat, owning the absence. She turns, looking wide-eyed up the stairs towards his room. In her mind, he waits at the top of the stairs; in Emilie’s hold, she twists. 

“Emilie, your voice,” she hisses. 

Performance done, lines said, Emilie’s hands and hips abandon Nathalie. She takes a step back. “Adrien is with Chloé right now.”

Nathalie’s shoulders relax. Tense, still, with the penalty of forgetting. “I’m sorry. I just thought…”

“Here I thought you knew our schedules by heart.” With her hands clasped, Emilie coyly shrugs her shoulders. “Well, understandably, you’ve had other things on your mind.” 

“I only thought he didn't need to know.”

“He absolutely will not,” Gabriel adds, voice raised, splotchy red anger bringing back color to his face. “There’s nothing anyway to tell—”

Emilie, ignoring him beatifically, smiles at Nathalie before brushing back the dyed part of her fringe. Hand wafting down to cup her cheek. “When were you planning on taking the pills, Nathalie?”

“Today,” Nathalie admits to the floor. “It only takes a few hours. I-I thought I’d take it overnight and…”

“And what,” Gabriel growls. “Return to work tomorrow like nothing happened?”

To this, Nathalie says nothing. Feels the anxious gnawing of uselessness, herself cooped up in bed when anything she does can be done by mindless rote. E-mails, filing, client calling. Again, Nathalie curses Gabriel’s blind-rage impulsivity. 

“And have you been feeling ill recently?” asks Emilie. “Nausea, I mean? Temperature? Odd cravings?”

The questions take Nathalie off guard. Her eyebrows knit together. 

Emilie leans in again, patience overflowing. “It’s so hard on the body. You’ll be bedridden for at least a day, most likely two. I think we can grant you a few off, if you’ll let us. You and I could both use the rest.” To her cheek, a kiss. To Gabriel, as she makes for the stairs, a playful wink. “Just what the doctor ordered, right, Gabriel?” Making for the stairs, she waves her hand. “Well, I’ll let you three discuss.”

Gabriel’s quick on her wake, though not fast enough: Emilie makes it to the fifth step before she crumples to her left against the railing, shoulder blades popping like wings as she doubles over to catch her breath. From a few steps below Gabriel clumsily lunges for her right hand limp at her side. 

“Emilie,” he entreats, safe from one level lower and bringing her hand to his lips. “I told you, we can—”

Like spume to water the air is her friend—as Emilie spins to look down upon her husband, her hair spins in golden rivulets splashing against the cool granite cut of her face. 

“Let go.”

To her he still clings like a man scrambling on slippery ocean rocks. She tilts her hand in warning.

“What is it, my love?” she sings, siren-sweet. “Do you not trust me?”

And at once, Gabriel lets go. Hand recoiling, but she keeps hers raised like the promise of a slap. Retribution not given. White noise bubbles in Nathalie’s head like drowning. Gabriel drops down a half-step. 

By the time he’s thrown out his hand again, he catches only her ghost. From two steps up, Emilie’s winged blades shake with a laugh to Nathalie, a sob to Gabriel. Buoyant on the landing, she indulges in a few long swimming strides to the bedroom door, slipping inside without looking back. 

Only Gabriel will, Nathalie knows, and her body braces. Back straight, eyes fixed to meet his first. The mark of self-respecting mistakes: to know what she’s done and the way she’s ruined all of this for him. Holding her breath and counting on the current to pull her under. When Nathalie thinks of resolution, truth, it’s never chest-loosening, never freeing. It’s gasping for an audience of broken mannequins, shards of glass that scatter moonlight. It’s the relaxing of a fist. A stilling of hips.

But it isn’t the Gabriel of that night who turns to face her. Not the disgraced husband or hopeful fiancé or the young man glimpsed only in faded pictures. No. 

In a second, passing as quick as the eye of a storm, a whole conversation spins between him, the tiny black square of oblivion Nathalie stands unmoving upon promising to swallow her. 

Who stares back at her, looking hollow eyed and haunted, is a father. 

With measured steps, Gabriel—designer, husband, man—walks to his island alone and closes shut the outside world.

Nathalie blinks insipidly ahead, awaiting an order that doesn’t come. Around her stomach the tensile thread threatening fingernail-seared seams on her skin tightens in two directions—whose shore to land on? Nathalie grabs at her stomach, pink flesh puckering underneath. In her head like an airplane movie: Emilie turning over the test in her hands, looking for the ribbon; looking and knowing better and looking anyway. Nathalie hears the shake of turbulence, a baby’s wailing. 

Like treading water she walks towards the atelier.

The real way to apologize: speak when spoken to. Forgo predisposition or meditated apologies. Again a receptacle for his emotions; his words into her, facts out of her. Hands on the door she pushes to no avail. Again, digging the balls of her feet into her heels until she feels a slight give. Enough to remember, as she eases away to breath and watches the door follow her the scant half-inch to settle back in its frame, that the door does not have a lock. That on the other side, his hands pressing above hers, Gabriel must be standing to keep her out. 

Nathalie, with a degree of calm that shocks her, lets her weight fall back, her hands surrendering to her side. Spine straightening, prickling. A freefall sort of anger, nowhere to direct it. Exiting to her room, she pretends not to hear the only lock in the house turning. 

On her bed, spotlight seeping in now through her window, it’s easy to let the minutes turn into probable hours. She flinches only with her lashes when Gabriel’s tirade begins. Lightning on the horizon, she feels the shattering of her glasstop desk before she hears it. Toppled mannequins rolling like thunder. When he tires himself out, she strains to listen for the safety of birds after heavy rainfall, but Emilie’s voice does not call for either one of them. Only Nathalie’s own breathing. Someone else’s heartbeat. 

From the foyer, surely amongst the ghost mist of Emilie’s perfume: “Maman?” 

No reply. A remaining echo in the deafening silence that he can’t decipher, but Nathalie knows the look on Adrien’s face all the same. Eyes all at once sad and curious and cautiously, brutally optimistic. Noticing without knowing a tense dissipation of something he was not a part of. Still-charged ions in the air. Balling his hands into fists. Nervous blinking. Never something Nathalie can face. Even now, though she sits alone—not alone—her eyes slam shut.

“Nathalie?”

She folds in on herself. Someone’s door creaks open and Nathalie goes very still. Stops breathing. Stops thinking. 

“... Papa?”

21:15

Do you have a safe place to perform this procedure? 

Head thick, thoughts slow, Nathalie comes to with a groan. Grimacing, her throat raw and aching. Dull, deep throbbing between her eyes. Still teetering on the edge of consciousness, Nathalie squints at her knees. Two pale hills peaking over foamy red waters. Something like a plum-fat leech clinging to the inside of her leg. 

Far away from her body now. Not here, but some other day. Globs of jam spread across buttered bread. Adrien’s empty plate. Emilie’s hands, always holding both the bread and the knife. 

Same elegant hand, swirling with steam, rising from beneath the surface. Cupping the scarlet steeped water in her palm and splashing small, warm waves across Nathalie’s bare décolletage. Involuntary hiss—how cold her skin, though inside Nathalie feels overheated, overwrought, over-wrung. Looking down the path of goosebumps, her eyes crack open a little more. Registering glossy dark clots feeding at the seam between body and water, so many ants to honey. 

Her heartbeat quickens, slow-fast like running in a dream. Pulling herself into a ball, hard to find her limbs in cloudy, unclear water. Hard to catch her breath, swallowing clumsy mouthfuls of hot, perfumed air. Stale taste of iron infiltrating clove. Clogging at the back of her throat, spitting up panic. Again, again, again.

“Easy, love. Breathe.”

Head wilting forward, Nathalie tries matching her pace with the thumb petting her cheek. Fails, turning her head to suppress a whine into Emilie’s palm. Deep breaths soothing themselves into sniffles. Quiet. 

“Just like that. Good.”

A safe place…?

Peeking down, more and more matter floats to the water’s surface. Nathalie’s stomach lurches though there’s nothing more to give. Been around blood, yes—animalistic, clean kills, field dressed. This, a messy abattoir; this, from her. 

“I almost didn’t want to wake you,” Emilie says, almost as sleep-thick as Nathalie feels. 

“I fell…?” asks Nathalie, lips brushing the inside of Emilie’s hand as she lifts it away. 

“A little. And, well, asleep. You’re alright, though.” 

Nathalie works her jaw, wincing as the whole left side of her face feels bruised. Before this—yes. She sighs. Swallows. Rests her forehead on her knees. Adrien in the hallway. Wanting to get away. To anywhere, to Emilie’s scent, so strong in the bath. Water slipping underneath her feet.

Is there someone at home that can help you? 

“Is the temperature okay?” 

Nathalie nods. Lets Emilie massage a knuckle down her neck and the slope of her right shoulder. “Is Adrien okay?” she asks after a few moments. 

“He’s all right now,” Emilie says, walking her fingers back up to her nape. “A little worried, sweetheart that he is. Sometimes I fear I gave him too big of a heart.” She sighs, a little wistfully, like something settled up for the millionth time. “If your pancakes tomorrow are shaped like stars or hearts, it was all his idea.” Around one finger, Emilie wraps wispy, errant strands of hair, tugging gently. “He really cares about you. Not even Gabriel gets a customized breakfast,” she giggles.

Gabriel, who Nathalie has to fight with to eat before expeditions. Gabriel, who hasn’t taken a meal at the dining table in years. Gabriel, whose body has changed and withered and wrinkled as if taking on, all at once, all the years Emilie won’t see. Where to put your other half’s unlived life, your unspent love? 

Light as broken pen ink her blood swims past in wispy streams. Offal threaded along like jewels on string. Nathalie reaches out her left hand, scooping into her palm the slurry of her. Not exactly true, not exactly her, though into her it had built a temporary home. Molted cicada shells, broken chrysalises. Her body readily accepting, changing, scaffolding so easily something for his creation. Willing my body. Showing it I was worthy of a child. Shredded tissue swirling in her hand, primordial soup of a caterpillar melted in their cocoon. Parts of her, him, it. Tears spring to Nathalie’s eyes, spilling over like heavy rainfall. 

Like the house soon abandoned by Emilie, what will become of the space inside of her? A garden uprooted, what else could grow? 

“We can stay here until it passes.”

Nathalie raises her head, looking blearily at Emilie, who is turned towards a box on the counter. Nathalie follows to what possesses her: a plain blue box no bigger than for a watch, tied with a ribbon.  

“The embryo,” she clarifies soberly. “Though we still have some time until you pass it.” 

Nathalie feels sick again. How will they discern it from any of the other viscera she wonders, waterfalling the bathwater from her hand. Too young for bones, too soft but anything but slime pink skin baubled and vein bruised, bubbled in a sac. Not much more than that when birthed, clinging and needy and sheltering. Too young for hair, blond, blond, blond—

“You’ll know,” Emilie says, interrupting Nathalie’s spiral. Winged by the light behind her, her face shadows with a frown. “I can promise you that much.”

Nathalie looks back at her hand, stained red and holding still a stubborn fat fleck of refuse. Closing shut her hand she paints her fingertips red as she squeezes her nails into her palm; faux eyes dotted by the overhead lights spreading apart, morbid stress toy breaking open and popping. 

“We should refresh the water,” Emilie says. “Lift the drain for me.”

Nathalie nods and feels her way to the stopper, drawing her legs tight against herself as the water begins to drain, leaving her soaked and shivering. Watching with a grimace as chunks circle the drain and clog it in waves before getting sucked into the plumbing. Will it be like that, she wonders distantly, when it is birthed and disposed of? Pomegranate seed mash struggling to be eaten by the house, bloodsick and gorged as it is; or will it be as easy as flushing a goldfish down the toilet? 

When the last bit of water leaves Nathalie’s feet uncovered, Emilie attends to the taps, one finger testing the water before turning to ask, “Does that feel alright?”

Nathalie nods, taking for a moment relief at how the fresh, hot water cleanses her. Specks and splatter of herself under the faucet splashing away. The water fills up clear before being slowly dyed pink; completely red by the time it stops at her shoulders. 

Emilie twists in place, stretching up her arms with a delighted little sigh. Nathalie watches in rapture as Emilie plays in the joy of her body, so long since Nathalie has seen these lines in her body—the svelte muscled valley between her shoulders, long column of her throat tilting, push of her full hips as she likes—and arrested is she in her bath that Emilie, peering coyly over her shoulder, bursts into laughter. The tone as teasing as it was so many years ago; a bird through mineshaft dark. 

“My, my, Nathalie,” she says, “you could almost convince me this was all immaculate.”

Nathalie looks away, blushing. 

“Help me unzip?”

Nathalie looks at her hands, fingers still stained. 

“Don’t worry,” Emilie says, smirking. “I know you’ll be careful.” Her left hand lifts. Her forefinger curls, pointing up. 

And Nathalie, old-trick obedient, follows. 

Raising herself to kneeling, she turns to face Emilie. Holding a breath, she reaches for the zipper. Fingers outstretched as Emilie arches her back bow-like and beautiful. Swell of her pushed against the silk, but Nathalie focuses on not spilling a drop of blood on it. Unzipping and revealing inches of her spine before Emilie shifts and Nathalie instinctively stops.

Emilie turns her head and Nathalie leans in to listen. Both of their breaths meeting at the bare skin of Emilie’s shoulder. 

“And my hair?”

Nathalie’s eyes flutter, so many old memories welling up as she nods, raising her hand to swipe a line across Emilie’s neck to gently sweep her curls over the other shoulder. Pain for a moment abating to pleasure as Emilie whispers a praise. 

Emilie’s eyes linger on Nathalie’s open mouth. Her gaze so eclectic and palpable that Nathalie feels her mouth water, her tongue waiting to lick at lips not her own. Breath run ragged, a groan comes out as a whine. Embarrassing only in the second before Emilie smiles. Pleased. 

“But it’s not,” she whispers into Nathalie’s open want, “is it?”

When Nathalie’s eyes flick up, Emilie is already looking at her. 

“Immaculate, I mean.” Emilie almost looking sorry to say it. Rising from the sill of the bath and standing, poised as if in performance, she slips her middle fingers under the straps of her snow-white négligée and undresses, slowly, unheeding of the errant drops of blood that slide like candlewax from where Nathalie moved her hair now catching the light like fire. Watery they run to stain her nightgown but Emilie is one step ahead, already having dropped it to her feet by the time they lick the dimples of her lower back. 

Emilie turns. Bright excitement over her when she sees Nathalie still kneeling and a second too slow in removing her eyes from where they were fixed. 

“So, tell me,” she asks, walking back to where she had been sitting and holding out her hand. Neither woman surprised at how quickly Nathalie, so trained, reaches up to hold it, supporting her as she steps into the bath. One leg pale and lithe sinking into the opaque water like a knife into a jam jar. Nathalie feels a cold sweat form over her skin, a protest stuck in her mouth that Emilie quiets as she assumes a position both of them know so well.

Emilie’s hand comes to rest on the back of Nathalie’s head, fingertips scratching lightly the shell of her ear as she tips her face, looking up past the long blade of Emilie’s body to listen as she speaks. 

“Which time was it, love?”

Nathalie trembles, feeling the truth coming from her in streams down her thighs. 

00:00

He’s made a murder of the night.

Glass scatters like so much starlight across the checked atelier floor. Every nebulous black square sparkling in the moon a tiny oblivion waiting to swallow Nathalie whole like desperate mouths to ringed fingers. 

She looks on awash in shock. Or, she distantly wonders, is it the knowing better, a complete impassivity? A lesson finally learned? Difficult to discern as she drops the mangled remains of her tablet, the cracked screen tumbling carelessly over its keyboard, keys punched out like rotted teeth. Wires exposed like copper gore. Though she can’t see it in the shadowed dark, the wall beside her, she knows, kinship-like, must be sporting a fresh bruise.

From the window, her eyes calmly track the moonlight to his dead-still body curled up into the crook of the recessed couch, outlined in silver like a crime scene victim. 

And who is he, she thinks, to call himself the victim?

Succumbing to an anger she’s felt for days building like a tsunami, her body tensing at her desk with every sigh, every slammed bedroom door, every tear he’s wiped away when he thinks she isn’t looking. Knocking on her door when she should have been planning and packing to talk over work, pacing in her bedroom. Forcing apologies from her that she’s already given for mistakes so minor. Her typing away on her tablet while he gazes at the picture on her mantle. The three of them, a lifetime ago. Clutching it so hard she can hear the glass creak under his grip. 

Though she walks slowly with even-keeled breaths, arms elevated slightly at her sides to maintain balance, every crunch underneath her heels is felt in her throat. A guttural stop of her breath, somewhere between a gasp and a gag. 

That he’s implicated her every step—every toe to heel a new chance for her to fall and shred her skin, wear an armor of fragile, waiting glass—does not concern him. When she reaches him, when the white noise of his destruction cuts off just above his ear, he does not react. Still like a sinner sleeping in between pews. 

Between them and the silence, the house settles. 

“Is this how you want to act?” she asks. Words somewhat familiar, borrowed from him but directed to Adrien when he was so much smaller. “Sir?”

Gabriel doesn’t respond. His shadow lay unmoving. In her body, tension builds, easily finding its footing in the last rungs of her forgiveness. 

“Do you feel better?” Her lips twitch with a sneer. “Tire yourself out enough to sleep?”

A beat, then two. 

“I was trying,” comes his reply at last, voice wrath-graveled and rough. He clears his throat before continuing, though it makes no difference. “What time is—?”

“Go,” she says, then just as quickly amending it with a softness she does not feel. “I’ll clean this up.”

He still does not shift from his cocoon. Sour smell wafting up to her wrinkled nose like something burnt. Something that pricks her skin, an omen she can’t read. 

“Sir.”

“It’s no use,” Gabriel’s voice comes calmly. Exasperated, exonerated. “She’s not there, Nathalie.”

Nathalie pauses, furrowing her brow. “The bedroom light was still on,” she tries, half-lying. Coming down after her shower, Nathalie saw it click off as she stepped out of the guest bedroom. Blind hope in her chest that they lay together: Gabriel going to her for absolution, and Emilie giving it, open-armed and forgiving. Forgetting their rote arguments, the threats and promises. The two of them putting off, for just a moment, the next two months. “There’s still time to—”

“No,” Gabriel croaks, shadow shrinking. Muffled voice cannibalizing in its grief. “That’s not her.” 

Nathalie’s stomach drops. Her world off-kilter; the night sky under her feet and her head left spinning. 

“Meaning what, exactly, sir?” 

“That’s not her,” he spits, stirring finally, agitation cutting into his voice. His hand slams down against the seat to prop himself up. Eyes trained on her but not truly seeing; voice clear but directionless. “That’s not Emilie.” 

The wire-ends he so masterfully toys with inside her, forgiveness and castigation, spark her over with anger. Her fingers flex and tense, her body floating with latent disgust. Bring herself back to reality by force: the need to grab his shirt, contort his neck and yank his face to look into hers, hard-set with blame—to force his failures into action, if only he could stop pleasuring himself with his own anguish. 

“Have you lost your mind?” hisses Nathalie, disgusted. Looking down at him, pitiful and worm-like. “What doesn’t Emilie do for you, to deserve this behavior?” Her name sounds echoed, like a hymn obscenely shouted into the rafters. 

Gabriel scoffs. “I think you overestimate your insight into these things.”

Behind her glasses, Nathalie’s eyes seem to vibrate. 

“She’s your wife, sir. You say you miss her—”

“Nathalie, go.” His voice is grave-deep. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

“If you can’t even look at her—”

Throwing out his arm from his cover, Gabriel’s hand wraps around her ankle in an effort to force her away. Nathalie kicks blindly to swat him away, but his hold only tightens—on one backswing she overcorrects, hopping on her other foot too far forward. Heel slamming down on tile as her toes swipe through nothing, only air, Nathalie tumbles over the lip of the couch and crashes into the stage chest-first, impacting her left set of ribs while her left hand cushions further damage; her right hand occupied by Gabriel’s, twisting her body at an odd angle as Nathalie catches her breath. Shaking, swallowing down her nerves but resentment refluxing in her throat.

“Sorry,” he mutters and Nathalie hums. Accepting, indifferent. From his grasp she pulls back her hand, feeling snake-bitten and buzzing with the adrenaline like venom. “You didn’t get hurt, did you?” he asks, shuffling up, and Nathalie turns away, feeling his stare boring into her shoulder. 

Rubbing her hands together absentmindedly, she casts a look around the nest of glass that surrounds them, dusting the runway in front of her. Passing her thumb over her palm, she thinks of how easily they could have been shredded. Hands vital to her, work and suitcases and hunting, the way legs are to Emilie. She frowns. Shakes her head to no one. Maybe they should have been hurt, marred, rendered as they are. Useless. As she sits she folds them in her lap, reflexively curling back into fists like wilted hospital flowers. 

Above. does not concern him. Upstairs, Emilie sleeps, unaware, but if she heard, if she came down, saw the glass and Nathalie over Gabriel, in the middle of his mess—

The anger breaks like dawn. Emilie hasn’t used the stairs in months. 

The last time Nathalie planted kisses on her inner thigh, Emilie instructed her to bite. Later, sweat beading on Nathalie's face, delirious with overwrought lust as she added another finger, jerking her own hips as if there’d been anything for Emilie to take—the moment she felt Emilie start to flutter, she told her to grab harder. Harder. Harder, she grit, and Nathalie whined into her sweat-slick neck as her right hand squeezed flesh. 

When they both pulled away, Nathalie was shaking. Emilie stoic, her frail chest rapidly rising and falling the only indication of the last two hours. Sunlight shining over her hair, the last of its sheen luminescent like a specter. Streams of wispy strands framing her face. 

Nathalie’s fingernails unsheathing from her skin, plucked one half moon crescent at a time. One hand slick with come, the other with blood. 

I suppose that answers that, Emilie had laughed. Breathy, wrecked, cracking at the end. Nathalie was selfish enough to believe it was her doing. 

“That can’t be her. You don’t know, you don’t—” 

Nathalie realizes by his wavering tenor that he’s crying. “She can’t even breathe properly when she sleeps,” he sigh-hiccups, as if taking on his wife’s pain. “I watch her until she stops.” Finger rubbing underneath his nose, like checking a baby’s breath. “And she wakes up gasping, god, Nathalie—”

“It would still be prudent,” Nathalie interrupts. “It’ll be too long until we’re back. Think about how she feels. Think about her.”

“Don’t make me,” he says, asks, pleads. Hiding his eyes in his right hand like a mask. 

Nathalie looks sideways, studying the glint of his ring. Immutable fact. Comforting to her: despite everything. through this, anything. When they touch her, in spite of. Pleasure in teething it off. A tease, never any bite: the pulse of his ring finger in her mouth before he huffs. Dark smile. Blue flame. Taking it in hers. 

“In sickness and health,” she offers, vow-like.

“Emilie married a poor man,” he replies slowly, “but that’s not who she loves.”

Nathalie opens her mouth to argue but what sticks on her tongue is not words, but a scent. Nostalgic like a recovered memory, premonition faded—brined salt and matchstick flames, the package that arrived shortly after their return sunbaked in her hands, striking hot in her nose. How Gabriel snatched it from her hands before dismissing her to check in on Emilie. Looking down at his makeshift cot, her eyes now adjusted, Nathalie tries to make sense of random patches of words and symbols neatly knit into squares. She moves her left hand to brush her knuckles over the fabric. Cotton. Painted acrylic lettering. Seams she drags her fingers over imprecise and amateur.

When Nathalie raises her head again, she can almost see him, here in their dark. Hair wild and his frame so withered. The man Emilie did fall for. 

“Of course she does,” says Nathalie softly. As if not to startle the ghost beside her. 

He seizes, breaking out into a fresh fit of tears. His hand drops to clutch at his quilt. “That’s not who can save her,” he chokes out. 

Nathalie turns to him completely, leaning into his world of hurt. Night flying moths to twilight-blooming flowers. “I think so.”

“Why don’t you go to her. She’d take either one of us.”

“She needs you.”

“You’d be better…” he tries, sniffling. “You can handle…”

Nathalie passes over his lap to gather his other hand, but the sudden strangled catch of his breath makes them both jolt back. Hurriedly he bunches the quilt over his stomach, his body going rigid in a way familiar; a way that makes her blush. His left hand is paralytic in hers. 

“Oh,” she shakes out. 

“I’m disgusting,” Gabriel says between teeth, and she does not make a sound as he clamps down harder around her knuckles. “More than. I’m vile, Nathalie—” 

“No, no—”

“You’ve seen her. How small she is. I can’t even sleep next to her without worrying about her asphyxiating. She can’t—And I’m.”

Sick twist of Nathalie’s stomach, binding like a knot. Somewhere between elation and initiation. Something, finally, to be resolved. Light at the end of the barrel still smoking. She swallows back her better judgement. 

“Is that the only reason you won’t, sir?”

He remains quiet and Nathalie knows, the way she knows most everything about him, that he isn’t listening. He’s receded, buried into the solitude of his mind. Again, she tries, with all the trepidation of a cryptkeeper clearing the webs away from rain-rotted stone angels.

“Gabriel?”

His name so much more natural leaving her mouth than she feels it has the right to be. 

His tomb unlocking in the way he squeezes her hand. The stone rolling away and she, standing, briefly bared to the watching moonlight, squeezes back as she turns to lower herself on his lap. Knees knocking awkwardly against the shallow back of the couch. The sad-stale warmth of him radiating, a weak pulse of his cologne’s death notes and a version of him she never met. Still inside, she thinks, cupping his cheek with her left hand. Still here, within reach. 

“Look at me,” she orders gently. “Tell me.” 

Gabriel lifts his eyes, the shadow-struck veil of his face lifting into lightness. A glint in his eyes like the sun on brackish water. Too proud to say yes. Too mournful to say no and she, who can see the best in him. 

“Just this once,” she resolves. To herself, to him, the painting and the light around them.  

He gives not a nod, not a shake. Tilting, however, his head into her palm.

Decided, then. 

Nathalie feels the wavering jump in his throat as she works two fingers into the knot of his cravat, gently prying it loose. Strictly tied like a noose, he shudders a sigh when it falls away from him; replacing fabric with her warm fingers, she traces where, though silk, an indentation slashes across the hollow of his throat. A million mornings flash behind her eyes, closing them for a moment, envisioning how he would have to tilt his head up—the sorrowful look in his glassy, half-dead eyes—to perform penitence, turning his flesh purple and mind hazy, dizzy, just like hers, as he bound himself so tightly. Tight enough to measure every swallow, every breath, every heartbeat that he is afforded and Emilie is not. 

All of it, punishment and pleasure, means to ends that remain unseen. Only felt, always felt. 

She slides her hands down his shoulders and slips them underneath his lapels and when she leans back, he follows. Allows her to peel the sweat-damp suit jacket from him, the clammy heat of him escaping and leaving him trembling by the time Nathalie has folded and laid it lengthwise on the floor behind him, adding order to the chaos. Eliciting then a nervous laugh from him when she does the same with his shirt. Asking of Nathalie her intentions, her still fully dressed. Feeling him hard as they maneuver together, unraveling him. 

Why surprised? Who does he think has taught her the art of undressing? How to finger rolled-silk straps and let a dress fall perfectly to the floor? A body meant to be unadorned. A body whose hands undressed Nathalie with ease, with all the care of peeling the rind of an orange. Whole and intact and leaving the body underneath, plump and ripe and ready to be devoured with the slight edge of her teeth. 

Not so long ago—never feels more than a dream away—did Emilie position Nathalie’s legs over his, a consummation that felt whole, devouring, promising. Wedded hands overlain on the paring knife that split her virginity in two. 

“You,” he prompts. So quietly, so softly she misses it, only understanding when his hands finger her blazer’s button and she swats him away. 

The only guilty hands should be hers. 

With juvenile nervousness, she climbs off his lap to remove her jacket, pants, and underwear. She should move faster, more efficiently, but the darkness conspires with her buttons and clasps and she has to brace a hand against him to step out of her briefs, leg by leg. 

That her fingers touch a soaked-through spot doesn’t surprise her, only the amount. If she could smell the imprint of his wallowed-in sweat, can he smell—?

Shaking a little now as he wraps his hand around her left wrist. Acutely aware of the way her heart slams like a bird against a window, repeatedly, stupidly, inanely. He shifts, moving away to grant her room before he presses her down into the bed he lies in, the one he’s made for himself. Her bed now, too, as he skates a hesitant hand up the back of her thigh, syncopated breaths becoming syncopated thoughts: this is not the palliative limbo of a tent, with the light pressing in on them from all sides. 

This is home, the one they can’t stop leaving: and if not leaving, shielding themselves into another makeshift apartment, something theirs—the atelier, with her eyes, always above, always watching. 

Something clicks for Gabriel and not Nathalie as he grasps her leg, middle finger and thumb pinching her knee. Pushing it up to her chest as his knee comes down against the bench, adjusting himself over her. A familiar heat settling at her core, heavy and wanting. Dressmaker that he is, nimbly guiding threads through needle eyes, tailor’s hands as precise on her as one of his pieces, Nathalie still breathes through her teeth. 

“Relax, Nathalie.”

In the dark she nods. To no one, to herself. Bites back a groan as he earns his success, unspooling her with one finger and then two. Pulling out, the awful, sinking moment where her body, wet and parted and trained, throbs unbearably and she has to push away the thought that she enjoys this. No, just his need, her solution; his begging, her usefulness. Nothing more. Open mouthed panic at the thought, head thrown sideways into the scent of grease and salt as he, his thumb, his length work her over. 

Most times, it’s like this: slow to start, with her shoulders still tensed next to her ears. All of his consideration focused on his entrance, the initial threading. Sometimes with her hand guiding him, her fingertips to his flushed-hot skin as he lifts her hips. Little pinch inside that she swallows down; a breath from him like painful relief. 

Years ago, the first time, Emilie’s lilting voice instructing her that it would get easier. Taking him, taking care of him. Clear in Nathalie’s ear as he sets his rhythm. Testing her for himself, inconsiderate. Always giving her more than she can handle. For both of them, the stunning rush of a challenge.

Tonight, however, hip against hip, Gabriel stops. Mounting pressure, him pulsing inside, stuck, unmoving. In the silence, wide-eyed, Nathalie realizes the one panting is her. 

“Nathalie?”

Something dripping in her name. A question. Concern that more than sets her on edge. Disgust coloring her unseen blush. His shadow she turns to face, her wild-eyed expression catching on nothing. The same for her foot as she hooks it around his lower back. 

“Yes,” she breathes. Digging in her heel to usher him on. “Hurry.”

“Wait, Nathalie.” Her name, agonizing sound. Feels herself floating a little, fierce blood rush deafening his words if from far away. Alighting on her cheek his hand, like coaxing gentleness from a wild animal. 

“Could you… perhaps say…” Words cut off by a frustrated groan that she feels planted in her stomach. The itch of request, her to fill it. Already her body accommodates him—what else does he need? 

Before she can speak, he’s shifting out of her, hand abandoning her face. His name coming out and his response, pushing back inside with force. Gagging herself with her teeth and tongue. 

Thrusting into the receptacle of her body. At once, as always, housing the best parts of Gabriel and Emilie, the pieces she keeps of them if they ever need it, if they ever need her. Always Gabriel who searches, who takes, and takes, and drives into her with a desperation to find it—filled with him now, the Gabriel who was and the Gabriel who is, the part of Emilie in her that remains untouched, unused, unnecessary—

What’s left is this. No boss without a secretary; no secretary without her boss. 

As if reading her mind, he seizes her hips at both sides and lifts her up. Angling her. 

“No,” she whispers when she wants to hiss. Shaking her head imperceptibly in the dark as she tries to shift her hips down again. 

If he’s taken the hint or is too spun out on his own wishes, Nathalie isn’t sure; but with a hand pressing over her stomach, he shoves her harder into the couch. So hard she can feel the bones in her hips pinch skin, over and over and over. 

Something of a challenge. What she doesn’t say is bitten back and mixes with the iron in her mouth. 

His right hand works under her turtleneck and, at this angle, can he count her ribs? Her rapid heartbeats? He doesn’t stop until he’s rucked her sweater up to her chest, right hand massaging her breast. 

Louder now, the wet slick sound of her own pleasure. Louder than their breaths or his curses. Though it’s her fault, her who stains his faded teenage shirts with what spills out every time he reels back from her, she wants to tell him to be quiet. Go slow, even though the tick of his watch counts down every second that he’s not with her. 

Inside her, a fluttering like so many moths’ wings. A rushing warmth that sharpens her teeth: she bites down on the flesh of his wrist. A spritz of hot sand summers and vanilla wet her tongue. A violent panic of nostalgia floods and wells inside her, makes the night blurry and sad again. Emilie’s perfume. 

Gabriel chokes on a groan and his rhythm stutters, clumsily bottoming out as if there’s more she could give him. He finally collapses onto Nathalie’s chest, both of them silent and ragged in breath. Swallowing air, exhaling in tandem. Nathalie again untethered, but she closes her eyes when his left hand combs through her ruined fringe. Right hand still cupping her breast. Over her sweater, she lays her left hand over his, pressing over her heart. 

The house stirs but doesn’t wake. Still the night crashes in through velvet curtains, the house lights and then cowering backstage. Watching as they redress, handing each other clothes like bashful adolescents. Nothing has been solved, still their stage ruinous. 

Re-pinning her hair and adjusting her fringe, Nathalie says simply from their spot on the couch, “You should go. While there’s still time.” 

Yet Gabriel stalls, his rigid posture radiating to her a palpable anxiety. She stands abruptly, clutching and then yanking on the quilt under him. 

“Gabriel,” she grits, angrier than she means. Promise in the deal, her side upheld. Slowly leaking out of her like her patience. 

Taking his cue, Gabriel stands—but this time, when his Caravaggio eyes turn to her, Nathalie busies herself. With weightless, unfeeling hands, she begins to fold the quilt, all of its muck-greased seams and fabrics roughened by decades of care plucking at her heart. Downcast and in glances she watches him slowly make his way to the door, opening it methodically—pushing in, handle turned quietly, opening quickly, without hesitation so as to avoid making any noise. Holding his hand against it like a throat. His profile turns to her and she looks away, stepping to cover herself in the shadow. Between them, the light so loud and luminous. 

“Earlier, Emilie…” he starts, but Nathalie, back turned, stops him.

“Go, sir.” 

Obeying, he exits. 

She attends to the atelier, restores it to what glory is left of it. Keeping her eyes down as she clears the floor, counts the hours and weighs if it’s worth sleeping now before their flight. Finds herself sitting in her chair with his folded blanket on her lap and her bent over it, head laid on top. 

Nathalie runs her tongue across her teeth, caressing every ridge, sucking and swallowing Emilie’s perfume in little desperate gulps. 

Though he’s returned to her, taken his rightful place above Nathalie and beside Emilie, Gabriel’s thoughts match hers again, she’s sure of it. Crawling into bed with Emilie now, the same one Nathalie made that day. Fluffed pillows for her back strung like beads. Starched linens that Adrien apologized for wrinkling, too blinded by his excitement to see Emilie awake. Not today. Previous day. Nathalie smooths out her quivering lip. How they all run together now. Mind returning, Gabriel touching Emilie as if she’s already—

With a coroner’s hand, fingers running the length of her body in slow, soft motions. Nose pressed to her neck: her facing away because he wasn’t expected. Not at this hour, not when they’re leaving, not after they fought. Nathalie thinks she feels, deep in the pit of her stomach, when he breathes in that scent. How it’ll coat their lungs until the end of time. 

Nathalie should have reminded him to prop a pillow between her thighs. Warm the pearl-bones of her legs, rubbed raw by restless, sickly sleep. Less and less skin there, day by day, for Nathalie to take between her teeth, testing authenticity. His legs between Emilie’s, better yet, with a hand over her knee to keep her still, next to him. Able to feel her sigh rattling past her ribs and into his, frail back against his chest. In her chair, Nathalie squeezes her legs together. Involuntary mind sticking on him. Does this sometimes to her, muscle memory he swears, and keeps talking as Nathalie watches daylight knock on the walls of their tent. 

Legs split, body present. Mind far, very far away from him. 

00:01

It’s not the story she tells.

The key to telling a good story, Emilie once said backstage, lipstick reapplied, attention and stage lights still rippling in goosebumps down her arms and legs, is to tell it all wrong.

From behind, gently parting Nathalie’s hair like curtains, Emilie noses at the exposed skin, flushed and wet and wanting. “Fucking in tents was never my favorite. The only right angle you can get is a pain in your knees.”

Wincing, Nathalie bites her cheek. Though, out of all the choices—fucking, having sex, making love—she supposes it’s the most suitable. Non-committal. Nothing taken, nothing made. When Emilie speaks of sleeping with Nathalie, which is it that she uses?

“Were you on top,” she asks lightly, “or was he?”

“I was on my back.”

Though the bath has been refilled twice, the house taking long lungful pulls of Nathalie’s tripe, the steam is only for effect—Nathalie, still feverish, struggles with a dull shuddering. A slight shake in her knees and clatter of her teeth. When Emilie runs a cool finger down the length of her spine, Nathalie pictures ice melting over her back. Like ice cream over fingers; Adrien’s in the summer when Emilie has the kitchen staff whip up a homemade batch. Nathalie’s, too, when both of them run in from the garden to request a second bowl and Emilie is already rolling up Nathalie’s sleeve for her, admiring her strength from traveling.

“Tell me that he at least made you a bed of pillows. Doubled over the sleeping bag was our trick. Does he do that still?”

Nathalie shakes her head.

Emilie laughs, disbelieving. “That you don’t have back pain is a miracle, then.”

Nathalie stays still.

“You know,” Emilie starts, snaking her hand around to Nathalie’s stomach. The backs of her knuckles brushing inner thigh. “I’m not asking you to forget. There’s no wrong answers here.”

It sounds like a try again.

“It was dark,” Nathalie insists. “It was quick. We didn’t say anything.”

“Nothing at all?” Emilie asks. “I expected… he always wants me to tell him…” She trails off, humming in thought.

“I went to him,” Nathalie remarks. Taking blame.

“Is that how it always is?” asks Emilie. “A fit to be tied? A way to get him out of bed, as you said?” Emilie huffs and the sensation against her neck makes Nathalie jump. “He’s more considerate than that, darling.”

“It’s not about—” Nathalie stops herself, the willpower to rehash their earlier argument drained along with her gore. “You asked, Emilie. I’m telling you.”

Nathalie can feel Emilie’s smile on the slope of her shoulder. “I know. It’s just… you make him sound cruel.” Emilie kisses a protruding vertebrae. Nathalie tries to forget the anatomy of her body, the name of the bone that Emilie teeths. “He’s a list of things, but never cruel.”

Nathalie thinks of Gabriel in his made up dark, voice so quiet and undemanding. Would you… perhaps say…? Nathalie thinks of Emilie in her effervescent light, watching over Adrien as Gabriel raises his temper, his voice, his hand.

“He can be,” says Nathalie softly into her knees.

“Short-sighted, unkind, uncaring, maybe,” Emilie says. “But I don’t think those traits are specific to him. What is it—‘it takes two’?”

Groaning, Nathalie hides her face.

“Either you enjoy it, or it means nothing.” Emilie’s fingers underneath the water pluck gently at the scars turning keloid. Strumming them, articulating them like lace-weaved strings. “But if it’s nothing, Nathalie, then why do I doubt that?” Pulling away, her voice distorts as if coming from the end of a hallway in a dream. “Look at me, Nathalie. Please.”

An order like hurry is; like come, put your hand here is; like slower, Gabriel, it’s her first—

Nathalie unfurls like a tea flower in rooibos–red water, leaning back and hanging her head on the wire frame of Emilie’s collarbone. Emilie raises her hand from the bath to gently nudge Nathalie’s chin up, leaning down to capture her lips in a kiss. Slow, deliberate in her smacking. Shallow breaths deliberate against Nathalie’s over-bitten lips and her overwarm cheeks. Graceful enough to let Nathalie look at her without words or sound, content to be admired—grinning, giggling, even, as she reads something Nathalie feels is obvious in her eyes.

“Goodness, Nathalie,” Emilie says, shaking her head so that their noses brush. “I thought I’d lost you.”

Nathalie’s eyes sting anew as she begins to deny again, but Emilie shushes her in whispers. “Do you remember the last time we…?”

Overeager, Nathalie nods. Her hands underneath the water going back to their home on Emilie’s thighs, dogged and wayward, her five right fingers nocking into familiar grooves.

“Good girl,” Emilie says, flashing her teeth in a smile.

“I remember everything,” Nathalie admits quickly, hoping it might something, anything. “All of it. Everything, Emilie.”

Emilie’s other hand alights on Nathalie’s cheek. Staying her, locking her in this position. Greedy is the overflow drain as clots cling to be sucked and swallowed, but Nathalie feels egregious in her hunger. “I remember when it was only us,” she says, unabashed in how Emilie watches tears fall. Nathalie’s hands grip Emilie’s thighs harder—enough to feel, enough to later miss. “When I thought how I felt towards you was…”

“Mm. You were more than a little obvious.”

“When you first kissed me,” Nathalie continues, as if running out of time to convince. “When you slept with me in my tent. When you told me Adrien’s name.”

Emilie wipes away Nathalie’s tears. “Seems like a lifetime ago.”

“But it wasn’t. It doesn’t have to be. There’s still time,” Nathalie says adamantly. Pushing the balls of her feet against the bath to press into Emilie. Mustering all of her strength to plead. Looking deeply into the eyes of a woman fleeting. Rabbit running, hiding, burrowing and Nathalie close behind but never fast enough. Death’s winter chill hazing her edges and starvation setting in like a plague, a proxy disease laying waste to them both.

“How am I supposed to do this?” asks Nathalie desperately, sucking in successive breaths.

“It’s almost over—”

Nathalie shakes her head, cheeks blushing in anger. “No, your family.” Thinking of Gabriel and Adrien with a rising fear; the stretch of years and how long and useless they will seem without Emilie. “They need you. I need you. You said the four of us, remember? You said—”

“I remember,” Emilie solemnly replies.

“I can’t do it without you.”

Small, confused sort of laugh. “But you will, Nathalie.”

Last resort, in her hands a diamond flush. “Emilie, I—”

“Shh,” Emilie soothes, smoothing back hairs. “I know.”

Something curdles in her gut, deep and irrevocable. Nathalie’s eyes go wide and unfocused. “N-no, I—I’m—” Brows furrowing, she tries to commandeer her body to her whims again, but ownership is not yet hers again. Foreign need building rapidly in her center to push. Sitting up and rushing forward, water splashing around her and over the lip of the tub, she clenches her jaw tight enough to hear the echo of her teeth squeaking together. A cramp rippling through like a handsaw on her lower stomach. Choking her of breath—one, two, three, four, five—before releasing her, dizzied and sweating.

“Breathe, baby.”

A simple, “I can’t,” is all Nathalie can manage before the cycle repeats. Bubbling sickness rising up alongside the need. She squeezes her eyes shut.

“Don’t be dramatic,” Emilie mockingly chides, shifting to hold Nathalie under her knees. “Your body is meant for this. Keep pushing. It’ll be over in a moment.”

Nathalie chews her lip. Hot, free-flowing sob wetting her face. Emilie’s perfume faint amongst the slurry of Nathalie’s waste. When she’s finally flushed it all out, what will be left of her? No more the receptacle of something shared with Gabriel; of no use to Emilie, losing her against unstoppable time; victim to failing Adrien, only once for it to count forever.

As she pushes, something inside her popping like nacre pearls, she wonders in the split second between full and empty: what will be left of her?

Nathalie exhales long and slow. Sniffles on the inhale, everything so unsure and raw.

“Okay,” Emilie breathes. “Okay. It’s done, love. Do you want to see?”

Eyes still shut, Nathalie’s mind prepares her: a clump of cells like vomit on a wasteland thousands of kilometers away. Like a night full of glassy stars.

“No.”

She listens to the sound of the drain gasping open and gurgling. Emilie’s hands moving in the water, cupping, rising. A waterfall then droplets scarcely falling. “Keep your eyes closed, then,” says Emilie, stepping out one leg at a time. “I’ll be right back.”

When Nathalie counts four full steps, she opens her eyes.

Walking naked, her gait as always sure and postured—princess-perfect with her feet gliding over an invisible tightrope—Emilie is luminous in the bathroom light. Watercolor-red droplets radiant off her body like rubies, each uncaring step scattering them onto the marble white floor. Bits of Nathalie all over the picked-petal softness of her. Blank sick feeling in Nathalie to see her so violently covered. Hitting the artery when Nathalie had meant for the heart; unclean, clumsy with her aim.

But it’s Emilie’s domain. This room gifted to Nathalie, this house, all of its bones and muscle. Her feet paint bloodied arcs on the tiles as she makes her way to the box on the counter. Crossing over Nathalie’s own smeared print from earlier like a mark in the sand for something treasured buried. Stopping before the counter, hands still cupped, goosebumps rippling from arms to shins in order to warm her. Always like this, Nathalie thinks: rainstorms in London, monsoons in Tibet, her always reveling in the wild and wet. No bigger thrill to her back then than to drink in the electricity of dark clouds heavy over the horizon, ringed hand touching lightly the nape of her neck, and asking with a smile how much time they had. To go; farther; left.

Pithy parts cooling in a puddle at Emilie’s bare feet. Halo from the vanity lights warming the crown of her head.

Reverently she peers into her hands as if it’s her reflection cast back. With all the gentle care in her hunched back, her subtly parted lips, her gold-rimed lashes. “Did you ever wonder what he or she might look like?”

Trembling in the cold of the tub, Nathalie shakes her head.

Emilie presses her lips together, eyebrows upturning. Rolling something over with her thumb, but Nathalie looks away. “Gabriel had some ideas. Actually, we agreed on a few things,” she laughs, clicking her tongue like something ironic; falling then silent and sad. “Well, we don’t have to talk about it.” Into the open faced box she lowers her hands, like returning a bird to the worms.

Nathalie furrows her brow. Gabriel had…? The could-have-been swirl and stick at her feet along with the clots as the remainder of the water is swallowed. What he would think of. What traits of her, of him… The ideas flicker and sputter like lighting a fire in the rain. Fade like a failed polaroid of the past.

Emilie, as if a Tiffany’s clerk, takes care of the present.

“Look at that. We match now.”

Nathalie lifts her head to return to Emilie, who stands emphatically gleaming at her watery reflection in the otherwise fogged mirror. twirling a strand of dyed pink hair around her blood-slick finger. Lipstick smearing at the corners of her dimpled smile—but no, Nathalie struggles to think—not her shade. Nathalie’s shade, on Gabriel’s cup.

Letting go of the coil, Emilie watches with curiosity as her blond curls tumble and paint one another red. Addressing Nathalie's reflection, she says, “Do you mind?”

Lightheaded, Nathalie swings her head to deny but she sways instead, unstable in her fever and frenzy. Pulsating pain behind her eyes, bile scorching her throat, an exhaustion replacing marrow—everything hitting her all at once like a wave returning to her, hapless amongst the ocean rocks.

“Oh, Nathalie—let me,” Emilie coos, at the bath’s edge in an instant, sitting with her knee to toe poised out as she returns her hands into Nathalie’s mess and drains the water. Stretching up to grab the shower head, she taps Nathalie’s knee with her free hand. “Lay your head down. I’ve got you. Just relax.”

To it all, Nathalie succumbs.

Emilie shields Nathalie’s forehead as she lathers in her own shampoo, the scrape of her nails against her scalp a delightful pain; all but putty in Emilie’s hold as she rinses to condition her hair. Following the rainfall she travels down Nathalie’s back, rubbing over every new knot formed under her skin. Hands gentle as she moves around to the front, prying Nathalie open, just a touch, to rinse her chest and stomach. Careful around Nathalie’s scratch marks; even more so when she delicately passes over what still bleeds freely. Nathalie expects a smell—something soured, something rotten, something like proof to her crime—but around her, everything is Emilie. Slathering soap along her legs and paying attention to cleansing her feet.

A knuckle comes to brush along her brow. “Let me see your face, darling.”

Looking up, Nathalie watches as Emilie warms her hand under the water. Taking then into her palm Nathalie’s cheek, giggling when Nathalie sighs. With her thumb, she begins to rub deep circles into Nathalie’s eyebrow, hitting exactly a nerve flooded with a cluster of pain.

“Please don’t leave,” Nathalie begs. Truly begs, with everything unnamable left in her. Knowing the absurdity in her one demand.

“Awful thing to ask, isn't it?” Emilie’s thumb drops to Nathalie’s lips, damply parting in response before Emilie pushes in enough for Nathalie to bite, nodding. “You can see why I stopped,” she says, pulling her hand away and standing, returning the shower head to its place and angling it away from Nathalie.

“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” Nathalie says as if it still needs saying.

“I know,” Emilie replies, stepping back into the bath to crouch before Nathalie, who pushes back to give Emilie room. Her back hitting porcelain as Emilie crowds her, caging her between her two outstretched arms. Swirls of steam capering off of Emilie’s body, the heat of her a gentle blanket as she leans closer. Soap-scent combined, chests meeting, foreheads together. Nothing but this moment and the shroud of her hair all over Nathalie.

“Like you said—you’re all mine,” Emilie whispers. “Isn’t that right?”

“Always,” Nathalie says quickly. “Yes.”

“Yes…?”

Against it all, Nathalie smiles. Levity, at a time like this. Like laughing in the pews.

“Yes, madame.”

Tentative, slow, all too needy, Nathalie offers herself, tipping up her head. Almost imperceptible, Emilie’s gasp. Enough to brush their top lips. Nathalie’s mouth twitches, aches, longs. She presses her knuckles harshly against the tub to stop herself. Beneath them, Emilie’s bone-pale knee parts the rivulets of blood. A river returning to the source, the mouth, the delta.

Emilie tilts her head. Nose brushing cheek. “So, Nathalie,” and oh how Nathalie has missed that exact lilt of her name, “show me.”

And she does, parting legs and lips. Following Emilie’s lead, careful with her hands as they alight on Emilie’s waist, pulling her onto her lap. At the pressure, Nathalie gasps, oxygen swiftly taken by Emilie’s tongue, and Nathalie giving, always giving.

For the first time in years, the grief floe melts. Right into Emilie’s palms—holding face, bundles of hair, the spit that jumps beneath the skin of her throat and threads into Emilie. Passivity in Nathalie’s mouth as penance—her body, Emilie’s domain. Now bereft and bare, she fills herself with Emilie, Emilie, Emilie.

“Let me be the first to tell you,” Emilie pants, smiling down from above. Pleasure mixing with pain, something building inside Nathalie like a gun cocking.
“I love you, Nathalie.” 

??:??

Beached, she wakes. 

Laying cold and very still, her hand already sticking out into a pool of morning light, Nathalie grasps at the sheets unrumpled next to her. Smoothed over as if returned to the reality Nathalie knows best—empty guest beds and a hotel room chill over her.

Closing her eyes, she can almost hear Emilie. Padding softly, fussing over the towels, humming to herself. All of it a dreamlike tinnitus in her head. Constantly ringing, always her. When Nathalie stops breathing, only for a moment—two, three—Emilie’s ghost seems to grow louder. Words almost formed with clarity; the touch of her hand along her spine before dipping down between her legs, reveling in the—

Nathalie bolts upright, already five steps stumbled into the bath before she feels a warm gush flood her pad and stain her briefs. Shucking them off in the cold dark, she plops down on the toilet and draws up her knees to hang her head on them. Her body, as if a machine suddenly switched on, remembers deep in her stomach to twinge with cramps. Twisting and kneading as she lets body bleed freely. Eyes closed in order not to see the bath, the mirror, the box. 

The box. Another headache beats behind her eyes.

Still, a raw sort of relief clotting up the pain. Like white blood cells to the wound, a numb sense of accomplishment rushes up to tamp down grief and punishment. For it all to be over. Solved for and erased—multiplied by herself, she’s the same as she began. Same amount of toes and fingers and eyes, not multiplied by two. Only herself returned. Another her, watching herself helpless from inside, asking, echoing. To her toes bare on the checkered tiles she asks: she changed at all?

Ripping off the pad and adding to the wastebasket beside her, so full of Nathalie already, she grabs an opened packet from the sanitary box on the counter and silently thanks Emilie, once again, for making this easier. Her hand reaches up to finger the grooves of her braid, still perfectly intact.

Back in the bedroom, faint amnion ambience, the light all over her like viscous water and her blithely blinking, staring at everything and recognizing nothing. Dust motes drifting away from her like fruit flies off rot. Vultures to her blood weeping. To the water she returns, drowning face down into the bed and suffocating herself in the smell of sweat and gore and tears. Filial familiarity. If she deludes herself, bringing the pillow to her chest, a fake flotation device, she can buoy herself in Emilie’s perfumed presence. 

Like this, she drifts back from the innumerable noon. 

When the roulette of light has switched again from dark to white, blurry to unbearably clear, he finds her like this. 

Her mistake, Nathalie knows, for missing his knock, the precise weight of it. “Come in,” she rasps, half-in and half-out of the water. Speaking of, when’s the last time she’s had any?

The door clicks open and she watches dully as the butler’s cart wheels itself inside. Expecting seafoam, a nymph. 

Instead, finding someone similarly beached. His suntanned hands, the monogrammed cufflinks, the penitent, self-loathing scowl and downtrodden eyes wading a solitary storm—

Nathalie rolls over before he sees her, clutching tightly the pillow to her seizing heart. The sound of it so obvious as Gabriel comes to a stop, wheels and breathing and action. Though her back is turned to him, the attenuation is too strong; all the nights spent with him running hands down her vertebrae like prayers on a rosary have trained her for this, his eyes roaming down the same path. He’s standing, she envisions, silent and sentinel-like by the door. Awkward changing of the guard, Emilie to him. What does he think of the scent of her crime scene everywhere, her rumpled clothes, her braid the best it’s ever been? 

She doesn’t ask. He doesn’t tell. 

The moment stretches on so long that she understands the challenge. Wants to garble a yell at him, bark that he should stop wasting time. Glutton that he is for it. Warn him, maybe, that he shouldn’t come closer. Plead, but to decide for what would take more energy than she has. The space between her legs and the edge of the bed drafts unbearably cold. 

He draws in a breath. “Ah, well. Are you…?”

Nathalie thinks. Nods. Feels two heartbeats pass before he tries again. 

“The flowers,” he shakes out, “are from Adrien.”

He taps his fingers twice on the dinnerware. Mentally settling something up. Nathalie doesn’t let out a breath until the door shuts behind him.
When she next inhales, it’s a mouthful of still hot bread chased by faint vanilla; a hint of something tart-sweet hitting the back of her throat. But what makes her mouth water most of all, has her throwing open the covers, is the scent of fresh coffee. 

Her body remembers selfishness and growls, low and needing.  Abandoning the pillow she shuffles, propping herself up, every joint punctuating with a pop as she sits on the edge of the bed, assessing her next move. She grunts, both grateful and mad that he left the cart out of reach. Hint of a smile creeping as she lifts, pawing at her cavernous stomach as if it needs comforting. She waddles forward, bracing herself on the cool silver rails for support.

A mug still steaming catches her eye first. She brings it to her lips, tasting acrid normalcy in sips. Sighing, hot and bitter breath, Nathalie surveys the rest of her breakfast: laid out on dinnerware usually reserved for guests is an array of breads, butters, light-colored jams that Nathalie’s eyes pass over with glassy indifference, a few crumbles of salted minced sausage piled onto a small serving dish. The showstopper, Emilie was right: in the center of the display, lovingly crafted, the sun and crescent moon and stars, pancake art warm and waiting for the thick syrup next to it. Guarded by three plucked buttercups in a little vase. At its base, a tented letter that Nathalie picks up immediately. 

Rest day, on us, the card reads in Emilie’s script. Gel pen heart still wet and sparkling. Nestled nearby between the pancakes and note, a tiny ramekin holding two baby-pink pills. Obvious as she takes one, dry-swallowing and wincing, to be iron supplements. Nathalie makes a mental note to take her birth control that is tucked away in her vanity drawer. A fresh pack.
Hunger flips eagerly to nausea, persistent headache throbbing at her temples. With her hand she tears off a piece of a star shaped pancake, taking the triangle into her mouth before she sees it, tastes it—congealing on her tongue like a chemical reaction. Hidden on the layer beneath, a smear of cherry-red jam that clots just like, sticks just like—

Nathalie slams her coffee down and raises her hands to cover her gagging mouth. Forces herself to keep it down, both options unbearable: to spit it up onto the platter that will be returned, or to throw up into the bathroom she’s not ready yet to face. Only food, she reminds herself, her racing heart. Licking it from her teeth with a frown, she marvels at the unfamiliar taste. Seeds slotting into her teeth, popping open when she bites into caramelized richness amongst the berry taste. She burns it all away with a quick gulp of coffee, dabbing at her mouth with her wrist. Evening her breath and heartbeat before turning away. Irreconcilable urge to burrow back into the sheets smelling and tasting only of Emilie. 

What stops her is the floor. 

Shed hair glitters on the rugs, the patches of bare wood, leading a trail into the bathroom tile like so much shattered glass. Tinsel-white in the light as Nathalie walks by, so many strands surrounding her. Nerves standing on end like casting the flashlight out into the nowhere-night and finding countless pairs of eyes staring up from the ground. Nathalie drags a hand down her face. To be scared of hair. Losing her mind, maybe. Collects herself, then a few strands, tucking it without thinking into her sleep shirt pocket. 

Remembers in flashes Emilie combing through her hair with the tines of her hands, a constant shedding. Had not noticed the severity last night because Nathalie was selfish in her own pain. A family’s worth under one roof, work undone, and to focus on herself? Disgust replaces relief and accomplishment. Reflexively, she reaches into the opposite pocket for her phone, her tablet, but Nathalie only finds herself. Herself and the ache in her mind and her hands, restless and weary and bereft of any task to take her mind off of the inevitable.

Defeated, Nathalie sinks onto the bed. Sitting straight up and then falling back, laying in the thick stripe of daylight that shines from half-opened curtains. Squinting hard, breathing in recycled air, blushing in the heat. Everything blurry and easy to remember. Absently, the hand not bathed in light comes to rest on her stomach. Raising up her shirt slowly. Soured cream scent of ointment applied with her fingertips to Nathalie’s marks. Emilie smiling and humming a little into Nathalie’s knee. Do you remember doing this for me? Fine silk hair tickling Nathalie’s leg. Said you hated the swell but I swear you couldn’t keep your hands off me in the end.

Headache thrumming low in her stomach. Only her heartbeat now. No one to hold her here on this cold end of the bed. Secretary without her boss. Worshipper without her altar. 

Last night, however—

Alone, drenched and full and mind so far away in the bath. Nathalie’s eyes focused on the last few hours lacquering the ceramic tub in blood-washed strata. Tree rings showing history, tannin rings on Emilie’s teacups. Her failings, a heart cleaved in two, a body she’d given up like something borrowed and something blue. With her thumb, Nathalie smeared a downward line through her blood. 

“Don’t worry about that,” Emilie said comfortingly. “I’ll clean that up.”

Nathalie turning, vision spinning dreamlike. “Please let me do it. I’ll be fine by tomorrow.”

Emilie shook her head, holding open a bright white towel like a pair of wings Nathalie was missing. “I keep telling you, you’ll be dead tired. And I can’t exactly have the maids interrupt your recuperation.” She motioned for Nathalie to stand. “Now, will you please not make warming this towel a waste?” 

Standing and going to her, nearly collapsing over the lip of the bath and into her arms. Waterlogged body teetering uneasily; an animal brought to the ocean surface too fast. Everything inside her decompressed and rearranged, leaving Nathalie a pliable mess in Emilie’s hands. Leaning into her touch as Emilie pressed the hot steam into her cheeks, her drooping eyes. 

Sweet twittering of her giggle before she gave Nathalie a peck. “Such extreme measures I have to take just to pamper you.”

Emilie busied herself with Nathalie’s hair, brushing and sectioning it into three parts. Weaving her hand through a section and tugging tenderly, just enough to elicit from Nathalie a small gasp. “No wonder you always complain of a headache,” Emilie says, releasing to rub Nathalie’s temples. “Your bun is way too tight. Just looking at it makes me want to ruin it.”
Though she doesn’t ask, Nathalie still thanks her after Emilie finishes braiding her hair. 

Finishing up, ointment applied and Emilie still knelt below Nathalie, she helped her step into a new pair of briefs, pad already applied. Emilie took the towel from around her shoulders and Nathalie cringed at the obvious stain she left, but Emilie paid no mind as she folded it as neatly as Adrien’s baby clothes, with as much care as she had given Nathalie’s soiled shirts a week ago. When Emilie pressed the bloodied cloth to her stomach, Nathalie spoke up. 

“Is that a new slip?”

Emilie looked curiously down at herself, her gown as pristine as it was before everything. As if never touched, never fouled. Snickering then, placing the towel on the counter next to her box. “No sense in dirtying two, is there?” 

Fixated on the pure white silk, Nathalie jumped when Emilie took her hand, fingers interlocking like a promise. Leading her out of the bathroom, flicking off the lights as they exited into the bedroom. Guiding Nathalie under the sheets and into her arms. 

Perfume still bright on the inside of Emilie’s wrists, where hot blood still pumped with every heartbeat. Alive, alive, alive. Flower to the sun, Nathalie turned to breathe in deep amber and sweet spliced fruit. Emilie’s fingertips brushing back pools of dew, the wet blades of her baby hairs. So many mornings spent similar to this: waking in crepuscular guilt, silent and oppressive and unspoken in the tent. Forgiveness in the way Gabriel hands her a cigarette and how she accepts the flick of his lighter. 

Then, everything said, flushed down the drain. Easy calm feeling of successful confessional, the thick incense of Emilie and Nathalie’s head heavy on the pillow. Light blue day breaking; again on the window it knocks. 

“What will you do next time, my heart?”

Nathalie’s eyes slowly opened. On the edge of sleep, her leash yanked back.

“Next time?” she asked, confused still in the face of Emilie’s imperceptible nod. Stomach fluttering as the meaning catches on, eyes going wide. “This was a once in a lifetime mistake, Emilie,” she started, blood reversing from her legs to her face. “I don’t—”

“No, no.” Emilie moved in closer, bringing their faces together. Below, making Nathalie’s breath catch, the subtle parting of Emilie’s legs. Nathalie instinctively offering hers to cushion Emilie’s knees. Delightful, unbearable entwining. “Next time you sleep with Gabriel.”

Nathalie bristled. The sharp gasp of air, body seizing, before succumbing to drowning. “What?”

Eyes lowered, Emilie delineated her hand down from Nathalie’s neck to her collarbone, tracing the hard, hollow half-moon. “You with your backup plans. Always betting on contingencies.” Tipping up her head, shallow breath, eyes meeting Nathalie’s. Confused, sad. “Why inside?”

The awkward angle of her thighs invited an irregular gush from between that made Nathalie shudder. Embarrassingly familiar warmth. Tight closing of her eyes to get her story straight. Closing the curtains. Words forming and failing. Habits, domesticity in their feeble play house in dozens of middle-of-nowheres. Sense of normalcy: husband and wife, finishing together. 

Emilie continued over her sternum, fingers dancing in the playful way one hesitates over an array of desserts before popping them in their mouth. 

“Here,” she said in a low voice, allowing with eyelashes fluttering Nathalie to envision her words, her meaning. “If the angle is right.” Lower, lower, to her branded belly. Subtle pop of her wrist as she changes her hand’s direction, palm pressing in. “Here, easily. Once, right?” Yes, Nathalie frowned. The first time. Indulgently messy, Nathalie painted and marked.

Emilie rolled out Nathalie’s bottom lip. Brushing lightly the slick-smooth inside flesh. “Here, of course.” Over her own lips, a playful smile. “But, I suppose that raises the question of your pleasure?” Letting go, lip slapping against fear-dried teeth. Cupping her cheek as if preparing for a kiss. “So, Nathalie. Why?”

“In the tent—”

Ankle hooking over Nathalie’s, locking her. Foot forcing him down, inside. 

“But you weren’t in the tent.”

“How…” Nathalie started, body flotsam as anxiety dragged her, deadweight, as Emilie stared on, serene as a lake. “You knew?”

“Oh, Nathalie.” Thumb petting cheek. Half-hearted smile, like delivering bittersweet news. “You’ve gotten worse at lying. But I appreciated the show.”

Like gulping water before drowning, Nathalie sputtered: “I did it so—”

“You’re obviously gifted. More fertile than most. Certainly me,” Emilie laughed, all breath. “How will you prevent this? Next time? After I’m—”

Nathalie’s lip trembled, face screwing up painfully. “Wherever you say,” she warbled out. Wherever Emilie said, Nathalie would enforce. Her presence, her sacred rules always there: touch me as she wants. 

Emilie sighing, disappointed. Leg slipping out, bone hitting bone. “That’s not what I asked.”

Nathalie chasing her through tousled sheets and linens, keeping the distance short. Please, wait. But from the beginning, it had all been said, hadn’t it? 

Impeded, Nathalie curled in on herself. Aftershock contractions rocking her. Shivers licking at her skin. Jaw clenching and teeth creaking. Everything again in waves: exhaustion, fear, forgiveness. Through the haze she blinked, unable to let Emilie fade from her sight as much as she was unable to keep her eyes open. 

The moment she was carried out from shore, she jerks awake, looking up with blatant, unerring hope that Emilie is still there. Still running her hands through Nathalie’s hair. Still looking at her—

Yes; just like that. Just as she was. Again, cuddled up next to her. 

Keep looking, she thought, even as Emilie’s smirk turned into a laugh and Nathalie stayed quiet. Her audience of one. 

Neither could Nathalie stop her hand from reaching out—hand running from Emilie’s elbow to waist to the thinly roped muscles of her back. Lost at sea and clutching her sinking boat. 

“I’m sorry,” she said, and then repeated. Even as she moved closer into the driftwood frame of Emilie’s sunken chest. Even as her eyes rolled shut. Even as Emilie’s somnolent shushing turned rhythmic, sea-like. Forgiveness as inevitable, unending, unearned as a wave pushed back against the sand. 

Everything returning to Emilie’s shores.

Nathalie wakes when the sunlight has ripened to golden and honey-spun. Night already waiting in the shadows of the drapes and the distant preparation of dinner by the staff. Her uneaten breakfast not yet taken away, collecting dust. Nathalie sighs, thankful no one saw her passed out across her bed: hand still to her stomach and a pocketful of hair. 

This time, when Nathalie sits up, there’s a finality in the blood rushing out of her. Behind her, out of the corner of her eyes, she spies how the bathroom catches through its window the last dying light. Calling to her like the end of all tunnels, the end of everything. 

Towards it she walks. Rope, rock, regrets and all. 

Crossing over the threshold and looking in the mirror first. Seeing the woman left: sunken eyes slightly downturned, her anemic face brilliantly framed by Emilie’s braid. The same, though a process has occurred. Apprehensive hand touching lightly the bruise blooming under her skin. Dark and wavering as a blood blister and doesn’t it make sense, she asks herself, pushing in and disappointed in her body’s resilience to push back. All bruises are, red weeping floe like water under glaciers. Trapped unless the ice is punctured, pierced, permitted to leak. 

Shifting her weight, she thinks she can feel the cotton flooding anew. Red foam sprayed between her thighs. 

Herself and her reflection turn away to observe the damage. Blood smell, thick as fresh paint, gurgling up from the drains, the toilet, the sink. Wondering for a moment if earlier, Gabriel could scent it; his quick departure. No water puddles on the floor, no striations in the bath, no box atop her sink. Last night alive only in its odor, the most potent sense of all memory-keeping.

Incensed by the viscera, heady with her thoughts, Nathalie drifts between the two worlds. Waking from nightmares and being thankful they were untrue—waking from last night and still missing Emilie’s touch. Unmoored, she’s the only one here, wading in the middle of it all. 

A thought striking her with arrow-swift precision—with no proof around her, had last night happened? Easy enough to hurt herself, to have braided her hair in desperation. Not the first woman to hate herself. 

Aren’t you tired of doing everything yourself, my love?

Nathalie tears into the nearest drawer, rummaging for the ointment Emilie applied to her marks, now muted in their anger. Another drawer, and then the last, turning up nothing but bobby pins and extra toothpaste. She checks again, dropping harshly to her knees to peer underneath the sink, this time for her birth control. Turning up with only her hands, shaking and directionless. Closing the cabinet door, her eyes catch on the wastebasket. The last thing discarded was her last pad—

What sits on top is Emilie’s slip. 

With a curator’s hands, gloved only in their guilt, she gingerly picks up Emilie’s dress. Weightless like a feather, formless like a wave’s whitecaps. Proof that doesn’t make sense, doesn’t add up—Nathalie had been awestruck at its purity, the perfect state of her dress, her body. Reaching for the zipper and her laugh ironic, as if what anointed Nathalie couldn’t touch Emilie. Oil against water, blood against holy water. 

What Nathalie spreads her hands over is a murder. Smattering of smudged droplets, all in gradients of bright crimson to liver-red vermillion. Arcs of splatters across her lace-lined bust, the tiny butterfly that lay between her breasts. Handprints that perfectly fit Nathalie’s thumbprint whorls. Shutting her eyes, Nathalie recounts the dreams: Emilie on the lip of the bath; Emilie looking at her through the mirror; Emilie thumbing off her dress. No blood on her shores, Nathalie the only casualty. 

Continuing with tears freshly streaming, Nathalie passes her hand down to the shapeless hips. Where Emilie had arched her back, the healthy swell of her filling out the seams. Shedding off where her thighs would stretch the fabric are stains of dirt and grass. Four fingers fanning off, imprinted like the wings of a bird on clear window glass. Smaller, more lithe. Deliberate versus desperate. Where had this come from, when had she…?

Adrien’s laugh breaks through like a bell. 

Looking up, Nathalie realizes the bathroom window is propped open. Moving as if on strings, she lifts herself to her knees, then to standing, walking with dread towards the window; prisoner to the cliff edge. 

Out on the lawn, a scene serene in an evening like any other: wheelchair abandoned a few feet away on the stone path, Emilie sits sideways on the grass, propped up by her arm and her legs together at the knees and ankles. Her neck flowerstem thin as she tilts her head in laughter, her hair billowing like dandelion seeds in the wind. Smile radiant and rivaling her sun as she watches Adrien prance starry-eyed around a new tree planted in their garden. 

Nathalie squints, her vision getting ever worse: palmate leaves off branches heavily leaden with drooping, ripe figs. Adrien tears one off with care, his little hand stained with pulp and juice, and hands it to Emilie, who is ready with a knife to pare it in two, passing the other half back to him. 

In Nathalie’s throat, the jam from breakfast sticks like fingers, like bile, like him. 

Collapsing back on her heels and onto the tiles, Nathalie hyperventilates. The bathroom yawns over her and the ceiling stretches away. She stuffs the dress to her mouth to stifle her sob. Sucking greedily Emilie’s remaining scent, the proof of yesterday. Something tears and it might be her, inside; the gown, at its seams; roots through a cardboard box. 

Opening her eyes with bleary consciousness, that’s when she spots it. Gleaming like silver moonlight. Reaching into the trash, Nathalie pulls out her birth control. Runs her thumbs over the punched out foils, all ninety days. Emptied like their future.  Broken like a promise. 

Regret sharpens into resentment. 

Flushed, just like her pills. Audience of the atelier, of their tent when Nathalie looks at her phone, all hours of the night. Planning, curating, calculating. 

What will you do when…?

A knock at the bedroom door. Emilie’s timing, Adrien’s timidness. 

To find her, wallowing in her pity, clutching something as ruined as she. Head popping up from cleansing the silk with tears when the intruder invites themselves in. To find her, surrounded by her shredded light and fabric nostalgic, her ruinous and savage mood. 

Every step of his an implication.