“We’ll ask Jon. He knows all the science stuff.”
“You’re a lawyer. You know how to make up stuff that sounds right.”
“Light refraction,” he said solemnly. “Caused by the whosiwhatsit interacting with the thingamajig in a synaptic reaction.”
“That’s total nonsense. Good enough.” They’d dropped to holding hands, and it felt pretty damn natural. Even more for him to pull her under his arm, guide her hand under his coat so she could settle her palm on his waist and he could put his around her shoulders. She laid her head on his chest.
They followed the boardwalk to the screened gazebo overlooking the marsh. It was a hushed place, a couple white herons fishing gracefully among the waters, the silence punctuated by the occasional sawing cricket or chirping note of a frog.
“Let’s just sit here,” she whispered. “We can listen and watch.”
He shed his coat, put it over her shoulders, then took a seat in the Adirondack chair. Guiding her onto his knee, he let her lean back against his body, put her head next to his. The marsh grasses rippled back and forth, like conversations. Seed motes floated through the air. The heron stepped with stately slowness through the water, watching for fish.
“Do you have a quiet place like this, Ben? A place where everything makes sense?”
He’d been stroking her hair, carefully removing barrette and pins until it tumbled to her shoulders and he could comb through it, follow the line of her narrow shoulder blades. He could answer her question with more lawyer bullshit, things that sounded right, were somewhat true, but this was the first step. He wasn’t going to be a chickenhearted bastard anymore.
“The St. Louis cemetery,” he said, with effort. “I used to go there as a kid, at night. I still go there to think. If you sit on top of one of the bigger vaults, you can see most of the place. There’s a sense of peace there, of problems set aside.”
“Well, yeah. Everyone there is dead.”
He tugged her hair, though he couldn’t help a smile. He turned his head enough so they were eye to eye. Hers had a soft gleam of tired humor. “Brat,” he said.
“Do you find it…when you do a scene?”
“You tell me. I think you already know the answer.”
She pressed her lips together. “When I was watching you that night at Surreal—the first time—I saw it. You could have been in the middle of an empty desert, because it was just you and those three women. You were focused on finding the true root of their submission, and when you got them into subspace, you were right there with them, in a similar…Domspace, where everything made sense, their very lives, every movement, every breath, in your hand.”
She nodded out to the marsh. “When I come here, for comfort, wisdom, or to be nothing for a little while, I imagine being held in God’s hand. But the other night, when you took me over, Mastered me so completely, it was one and the same. I was held inside of you, because you had that same strength I sense here. I was nothing, in every good sense of the word, because it also felt like everything.”
She gave a slight smile then, laced with tears. “How many times I imagined you holding me just like this, so I could lean against you, and you wouldn’t give way.” She looked at him then. “Tell me more about the cemetery. Will you take me there sometime?”
He had to clear his throat to answer. “Yeah. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.” He thought about the cemetery, what would interest her. “There’s one particular vault with a statue of a child on it. Just a small thing, nothing extravagant, but the face is soft, innocent, worn down from age. The vault says ‘closed forever’, because when the child died, the parents were too heartbroken to have it used again. Since the last family member died some time ago, I took over the maintenance fee for it.”
“Why? Other than the fact you’re a good guy.”
He should have known she’d ask. No cowards here, right? He shrugged, looked out over the marsh. “Not so good. I did it because I envy that kid for being wanted that much, even though she was here for only three months.”
He could feel her gaze on him, so he turned his face back to her, ran a knuckle along her cheek, kept talking. “When you’re there at night, the statues remind you of silent angels, all white and gray. There’s a guy who comes and plays a sax to his friend, and it’s some of the best sax playing I’ve ever heard. But I don’t go to him and ask him why he plays. Because in that place you whisper your secrets to those silent statues. To the angels of death.”
“I wouldn’t mind being one of those statues,” she said. “All bathed in shadows, whites and grays, hearing you whisper your heart and secrets to me.”
“My secrets might make your concrete feathers stand on end.”
She wasn’t smiling. Those brown eyes met his. “When you go to the cemetery, does it help? Help you deal with what you lost?”
Or what he never had. “Yeah, it does.”
“Tell me how. Please?” She sighed, closed her eyes. “Jeremy died, but I lost him long ago. Just the same way we lost our parents. Not through death. Death is different, because it’s over. No chance to hope, or to have hope crushed. Sometimes you can romanticize a dead person as time passes, or maybe remember some of the better things. When it came to you…I set myself up for loss there, I know it, so I don’t blame you for what you can’t give me. But I thought…maybe you could tell me how to deal with all of it.”
It was hard to let
