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Nov. 7th, 2011 at 8:40 PM
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When Colin leaves, Gretchen feels her world stop. It begins again with a new rotation. A reality, now, where staircases retreat into themselves, and people forget what it feels like to ascend.
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He disappears, but it is clumsy. Like a child, he leaves crumbs for others to follow.
No one does.
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In a city that is not all that far away, Colin falls in love again. The greatest shield, love is. The greatest lie, that thing which can never be defined, which he only gives as a name to the other things. He loves her, he says into this fresh, strange beauty’s ear. Has loved her for so long, has waited for her and her strong thighs. Her hardness chastises him. Because she is, likely, stronger than him. Colder. Driven by brilliance, so unlike him.
It’s his personality that gets him in so much trouble, Colin realizes. He tells her this over strong coffee, a drink that has been thickened with Irish whiskey newly made illegal. There is an irresponsible hunger that consumes him. A hunger that denudes and deflowers, a recklessness that makes him bite lips and flip up skirts and scrape long fingers across nubile skin.
“Desire,” he says, handsome and smug when he steals a drag from the girl’s cigarette, “is all I ever am.”
“You sound spoiled to me, hun. An’ selfish.” Bored, she takes her cigarette back, disliking the way he seems to sulk.
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In Connecticut, Gretchen is waiting, abandoned, because, she thinks, she has forced herself to be so. She has undone the clasps of her collar, her naked throat a column, a shining pillar, a caryatid bearing up the heavens. Her body seems smaller, her shoulders narrower, out of her evening dress. Her hair slides loose, and she brushes it slowly, her eyes elsewhere.
Knoxley stands in the doorway, tall and crooked with his weight leaning towards his good hip. “I am happy you stayed,” he tells her.
“Are you sure?” She answers and does not look at him.