Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [73]
“Have fun?” she said as he took a sip.
Jack tried to assess her tone. Was she disapproving, pissed, being ironic, or trying for casually adult? He came to the conclusion that it didn’t matter. Sitting beside her made him realize how foolish his brief stab of fear had been; he’d never be like those former acquaintances of his, not as long as he had Alli. “She’s yours, Jack, for better or for worse,” Annika had said last night.
“Did you?” he said at length.
She took back the mug of tea he offered her. “I didn’t even have to put my ear to the wall.” When he looked over at her, she added mischievously, “I heard everything.”
His face drained of blood. “I’m sorry you heard anything.”
“I didn’t.” She laughed. “But now I know what the two of you did.” Leaning over, she sniffed him. “Besides, you smell like a rutting animal.”
“Charming.”
She shrugged, utterly unconcerned. “Hey, we’re all animals when you come right down to it.”
“So you don’t disapprove?”
“Would you care?”
He considered for only an instant. “Yes, I think I would.”
She looked surprised, or perhaps a better word would be amused. “Thank you.”
Jack took the tea back from her. He was feeling both the warmth and the caffeine.
Watching him sip what was left of the tea, she said, “Now I want to hear all about the visit from Emma.”
Alli was the only one who believed that Emma had returned, or hadn’t actually gone away, he’d given up trying to figure out which. It was a relief being able to confide this aspect of his life, which was both eerie and joyous.
“And then you’ll tell me everything, right?”
Her face screwed up in a quizzical look. “About what?”
“You know about what, about what happened to you when you were with Morgan Herr.”
With the mention of her abductor’s name her expression changed subtly. Perhaps he was the only one who would have noticed, and a wave of regret washed over him, because the last thing he wanted was to alienate her. But he was trusting Annika now, trusting what she had said to him last night: “She wants to tell you.”
Alli cocked her head to one side, a bad sign, he knew. “Are you proposing a quid pro quo?”
“I’m asking—”
“Like a politician? Is that what you are now?”
“Forget it.” He closed his eyes. “I don’t want to know.”
“Why not?” Her voice changed suddenly, grown deeper and darker, as if with an adult’s disappointments and loss. “Why wouldn’t you?”
“It’s too late, it’s over, there’s nothing in the past except tears.”
The little sound she made caused him to look over, to see that she was crying, the tears overflowing her lids and rolling down her cheeks.
“Don’t take her away from me, I already miss her too much.”
“I’m not taking anything away from you,” he said as he gathered her into his arms, “least of all Emma.”
But it wasn’t just Emma she meant, he was certain of that, she was also saying, Don’t take away my chance to tell you. And now he knew for a certainty that Annika had been right. So he recounted word for word—a quirk of his dyslexic brain—his conversation with Emma last night, and when he was finished, she said: “Is it true what she said about you and Sharon?”
He nodded. “We were just fooling ourselves. There’s nothing left, because there was nothing to begin with, nothing but sex.”
“ ‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,’ ” Alli said, quoting Yeats, one of the poets she’d learned to love from Emma. “Emma always said everything that’s born holds the seeds of its own destruction.”
And Jack thought again of dissolution, of how being an Outsider, of hiding in the shadows, observing without yourself being observed, was its own form of dissolution long before the advent of death.
“Did Emma say that or did Morgan Herr?”
“I know you don’t want to hear this,” Alli said, pulling away, “but they both did.”
Jack felt a shiver run through him, as if Herr had somehow managed to walk over his grave. “Did Emma get her philosophy from him?”
Alli shook her head. “No, but on some level they were both nihilists. I don’t think Emma ever saw the point in life, and I know he didn’t.