before
Two things happened that trip. Well, more than two in retrospect, but at the time, these were the only two I marked. The first happened early on, as the train rocked and swayed across the hilly uplands of southern Poland. Colchester sat across the table from Morgan and me, talking in a low, charming voice to her as they played cards. He was nothing but honest and courteous and gently funny, and after growing up among the most sophisticated men in the country, his direct openness and unselfconsciousness seemed to utterly disarm her. It was the first time I’d ever seen Morgan blush, playing cards with Colchester. I’d seen her perched on countless men and women’s laps, drinking, snorting, smoking, I’d seen her caught in lies that would drive a nun to madness, and always her ivory cheeks remained untouched.
But now, fully clothed and sober and behaved, she blushed under his attention.
This is what you wanted, I reminded myself and my brittle heart. Seeing them together, watching them together. Making sure you realize this little infatuation with Colchester must stop.
But it was still too much, even with that reminder, and I leaned my head back to feign sleep so I didn’t have to watch them any longer. And as is usually the case with me, feigned sleep turned into real sleep, the motion of the train pulling me into unconsciousness though Morgan’s arm jostled mine at regular intervals as she dealt and re-dealt the cards. I wasn’t sure how long I slept, but I woke up in the stilted, regressive way that only happens in cars and on planes and trains, my consciousness stirring and then resting, and then stirring again. Finally, I became aware of a sharp pain on my arm, the cold, hard window against my forehead, the noise of the drinks cart rattling down the aisle, Morgan’s quiet snores next to my ear. I opened my eyes to find that Colchester had moved chairs, so he no longer sat across from Morgan, but was now across from me, and I could feel the place where our boots touched under the table.
And he was touching me.
He’d reached across the table and pressed his fingertips against the exposed bruise on my bicep, and there they lingered, rough and warm. The bruise had darkened from a florid crimson to a deep purple overnight, and the change in color seemed to fascinate him.
“Examining your handiwork?” I asked dryly. Sleep made my voice lower and more breathless than normal, and when he lifted his gaze from my arm to my face, I saw how wide and blown his pupils were, how ruddy his lower lip was from being pulled between his teeth.
“Does it hurt?” he asked.
“Only when assholes poke at it.”
He pressed against it again and I sucked in a breath, but I didn’t knock his hand away. I didn’t know why I didn’t, because it did hurt and I hated him and I hated the sensations that clawed their way up from the base of my spine as he did it.
“Do you like hurting people?” I asked, trying to cover up the feelings skittering their way across my skin.
He ran his fingers along the edges of the bruise, making small circles and larger ones, sometimes with one finger and sometimes with all of them. Soft, brushing touches. Caresses. I sighed, despite myself. It was gratifying to have such tender flesh touched so tenderly. “Does that feel good?” Colchester asked, with a kind of reverence in his voice.
I should have lied. But I didn’t.
“Yes.”
“I’ve never thought about hurting people the way I think about hurting you,” he said slowly.
“Because you hate me?”
He looked startled by that. “Hate? Why would I hate you?”
I blinked at him.
He tilted his head, his touch still on my arm. “Do you hate me?”
And maybe I should have lied here too, but I didn’t. “Yes.”
He nodded, as if he already expected that answer, and then he pulled back, his fingers leaving my arm. I felt a stab of remorse, felt the lack of his touch like a burn. And I glanced away from him, needing to look at something else, anything else, and then I saw the flutter of Morgan’s eyelashes and I knew she’d been watching us as she pretended to sleep. She’d seen the whole thing.
Well, good, I thought. It was just as well she knew I hated him—maybe that would encourage her to keep flirting with him and my stupid, masochistic plan could carry on. After all, it was impossible to feel things for someone when they were fucking your sister, right?
The second thing happened three days later. I’d woken up in my room early that morning—military habits died hard, even on vacation—and my body had been tangled up with that of a Czech girl’s. After Katka had climbed on top of me and rode me a final time, she’d left and I treated myself to a long shower. While I was toweling off, I heard a thump from the wall I shared with Morgan’s room, and then a second thump followed by a woman’s cry and a very male groan.
“Again?” I said indignantly. Out loud. Even though I was alone.
Since the moment we checked into the hotel, she and Colchester had been going at it like they were shooting the next Logan O’Toole porn flick over there. I mean, I certainly hadn’t slept alone since I got to Prague, but at least I left my room now and then. Ate some kolaches. Stared at the castle and smoked cigarettes. Prague things. I’d barely seen them once since we got here, though I’d heard them plenty.
Cursing them and also cursing myself for caring, I got dressed and decided to go to Wenceslas Square for breakfast and more kolaches. Anything to pass the time until the bars opened and I could drink and fuck my way out of thinking about Colchester again. But as I was sipping my coffee and watching people mill around with their shopping bags and cameras, I got a text from Morgan: Let’s do dinner somewhere nice tonight. Not one of those trashy clubs you like so much.
I frowned. I don’t go to trashy clubs. I waited a moment before asking, Is your fuck-buddy coming too?
Yes, MAXEN is coming, she texted. I think it would be a little rude not to invite him, don’t you?
I think you two are past the point of rudeness, judging from the sounds coming through the wall.
A pause on her end. Then: A of all, fuck you. B of all, we’ll see you at seven at the Holy Ghost Church on Široká, it’s by the Kafka monument. Try not to dress like a frat boy.
Oh, fuck her.
Same to you, I typed back.
And then I tossed my phone onto the cafe table with a heavy sigh. As awful as it was to listen to Colchester and Morgan through the wall, I knew it would be a thousand times more awful to see them crawling all over each other in public.
This is what you wanted, I reminded myself. This is what’s necessary. And then I threw some money on the table, pulled on my light wool coat and strolled out into the fog, smoking and walking until I found my way to the Charles bridge, where I could lean out over the river and watch the water run under the stained stone arches.
This is what you wanted, the river whispered. This is what had to happen.
The river was right.
That night, I stood under a statue of Franz Kafka sitting on the shoulders of an empty suit and watched Colchester and Morgan walk towards me, fog swirling around their legs, the street lamps casting haloes of gold around their sable-haired heads. They were walking arm in arm, Colchester guiding Morgan around the buckles in the cobblestones, and they didn’t see me at first, their heads bent together as they talked. They looked like a matched set, tall and beautiful, black-haired with green eyes.
I should have noticed it then, I suppose. I should have known. But who would have guessed that? Of all the things?
Finally, they reached me, and up close, I could see how closely Colchester’s pea coat fit his frame, how much stubble had grown on his jaw over the last three days, how the fog clung to him like he was a highwayman in an English poem, and I hated every stupid beat of my stupid knotted heart. I hated how I wondered what that rough jaw would feel like against my own, against my stomach. I hated how I would never know how warm his skin would be if I slipped my hands under his coat and ran my palms up his chest.
But I still wasn’t prepared for what happened next. When Colchester saw me, a grin stretched across his face, a grin that nearly knocked the breath out of me. For a minute, I thought I’d never seen him smile like that—big and pleased and dimpled—and then I remembered that I had, once. When I lay in the forest on my back and he stood over me with his foot on my wrist.
Before I could think about that any more, however, he was talking. “Well, look at you,” he said, laughter curling the edges of his words. “Damn.”
Colchester’s words panicked me. I glanced down at my flat-fronted slacks and dress shoes, at the shawl-neck sweater I wore over a button-down and tie, at the Burberry watch on my wrist.
“What?” I asked, trying to smooth out any wrinkles that might have cropped up since I’d had the hotel press my clothes. “Did I get something on me?” I spun in a circle like a dog, anxious that I’d ruined my favorite pair of Hugo Boss dress pants.
“No, no,” Colchester said, his voice still warmly amused. “Just…you look like such a preppy rich boy right now.”
“Didn’t you know?” Morgan said, leaning against his arm as she gestured to me. “Embry is a preppy rich boy. His mother is the fearsome Vivienne Moore. He went to an all-boys boarding school and then to Yale.” She leaned in even closer to Colchester, as if about to divulge a terrible secret. “He even rowed crew there,” she said in a stage whisper. “Embry is basically a Ralph Lauren ad come to life.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “No more than you are, darling sister.”
“I prefer to think of myself more as a Chanel ad. Dior, maybe.”
Colchester’s eyebrows pulled together just the tiniest bit as he watched our exchange. “Moore, I had no idea about your mother. Or your…background.”
Honestly, this made me a little impatient. Indignant even. “You know no one gives a shit about that here,” I told him, meaning the Army. Carpathia. “Not even a little bit.”
“Of course not,” he agreed, but there was a distance to his agreement and he remained distant as we walked down to the restaurant and sat for our dinner. He remained distant as we ate. And as Morgan reached for the bill and paid for all three of us, his distance crystallized into something else. Self-consciousness maybe. A feeling of embarrassment he couldn’t quite rationalize away, perhaps. And for the first time, I began to wonder about Colchester’s background. The clothes he wore were nice—but off-the-rack nice, clearly purchased on a soldier’s salary. I knew he’d gone to college, but had he gone on a scholarship? Taken out loans? Had he grown up in the suburbs? The city? The country? Suddenly, I burned to know. I burned to know it all. What kind of childhood made a man like Colchester, so serious and self-assured at twenty-three? What had he dreamed of at night, where had he wanted to go? Was he there now? Was he still dreaming of it?
After dinner, Morgan insisted we go for cocktails in some plush bar with private rooms, and so a couple hours later, it was just the three of us in a small blue room with two soft couches, the front of the room lined with a balcony that overlooked a dance floor. An eight-piece was playing pop standards converted into Viennese waltzes, and dancing couples filled the floor below us. I ordered myself a glass of straight gin in anticipation of having to watch Colchester and Morgan dance.
But that didn’t happen. After about fifteen minutes, Morgan started looking green and clammy, clutching at her stomach.
“Bad schnitzel?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.
She glared at me. “I don’t feel well,” she said delicately. Well, as delicately as anyone can when they’ve eaten bad schnitzel. “Excuse me.”
She rushed out of our private cove to find the bathroom, leaving Colchester and me alone together, sitting in silence and watching the dancers.
The knot in my chest felt alive and pulsing. This was the first time we’d been truly alone, just the two of us, and suddenly everything about him seemed more. The stubble thicker, the eyes greener, the large hands cradling his scotch glass even larger.
I drained the gin and signaled the waiter for another.
A few minutes passed like this, me power-sipping gin and Colchester holding his scotch, and then he said quietly, “I wish I knew how to dance.”
This surprised me. Not that he didn’t know, but that he wanted to. “Why on earth would you want that?”
He shrugged and rubbed his forehead with his thumb, looking a little sheepish. “I guess it just seems like the kind of thing a man should know how to do.” He turned to look at me. “Do you know how to dance?”
Was he kidding?
“I think I learned how to dance before I learned how to ride a bike. Morgan and I were Mother’s favorite political props—the sooner she could doll us up in formal clothes and show off how well-bred we were, the better.” I thought of those endless nights at Mother’s events, which grew more and more tedious the older and better-looking I got. By the time I was fifteen, women weren’t asking for dances out of motherly adoration any longer, and I’d go home with blisters on my feet and tiny bruises on my ass where all the Mrs. Robinsons had pinched me.
I threw back the rest of the gin and stood up. What the hell. “Come on,” I said, holding out my arms. “I’ll show you.”
He bit his lip once, blinked. And then he stood up, setting his glass aside and stepping close to me.
“It’s probably easiest if I lead first,” I told him. “Until you get a feel for it.”
“Okay,” he said, a little uncertainly. “I’m not sure what that means.”
“It means I’m the man right now, and you’re the woman. And since this is a waltz, pretend you have a ball gown and you just found out your husband is sleeping with the nanny.”
He laughed, his teeth looking extraordinarily white in the dim blue light of the room. I took one of those large, rough hands and put it on my shoulder, and then slid my own past his ribs so that it rested just below his shoulder blade. Then I took his other hand and held it, keeping our arms extended.
“Viennese waltzes are not the easiest place to start,” I apologized. “Just think of it like a drill. A sequence. One, two, three, one, two, three. Slow, quick, quick. Slow, quick, quick.”
The band had struck into a waltzed-up version of Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose.”
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, when I realized what song they were playing. “As if Batman Forever wasn’t bad enough, Seal had to go and record this song.”
More white teeth from Colchester as he laughed at my joke, more knotting of my cherry-stem heart.
“Okay,” I said. “What we’re about to do is called a box, except it swivels in the Viennese waltz, which is not boxey at all, but just follow the way I turn. We step together twice and then pause—my feet crossed and yours together—and then step together twice and pause again—now with your feet crossed and mine together. Yes, just like that.”
Colchester was a quick learner. He grasped the steps easily, responded to my pressure on his back and hand readily. The only problem was that he had no sense of the music. Like, at all.
“Okay,” I said, trying not to laugh. “You know how we do the slow, quick, quick? The music does that too. You’re supposed to do it at the same time.”
He frowned. “I am.”
Fuck, but his hand felt so big in mine, the other so heavy on my shoulder. It made it hard to concentrate. “You’re not, I promise. It’s okay, I know it’s a lot to remember. Three whole steps, after all.”
That full mouth twisted. “It’s six, in total.”
“Now,” I said, ignoring him, “you add in the posture and the vertical motion. We are going to rise and fall as we move and also” —God, I don’t know why I did it, except it had to be the gin— “tuck our hips in as our shoulders lean out.” And I yanked his hips into mine.
His breath left him and his hand tightened in mine. “This is how we’re supposed to dance?” he asked. There was something in his voice, something shaky.
Shaky, uncertain Colchester felt like a victory to me, and I seized my ground like a victor. “This is how we hold each other. Now we move. One, two, three…slow, quick, quick. Yes, that’s right.”
“This is hard.”
I almost made a joke, but I stopped myself when I saw his face. He looked puzzled, a little fretful, confusion and concentration marring that perfect forehead. He wasn’t used to being bad at things.
So instead of joking, I took pity on him. “Forget the steps for a moment,” I said. “It’s about space. About presence and void. I’m taking my space and you’re yielding, my presence filling your void. It’s a chase, but it’s also a balance. Think of it like a chessboard, like boxing, even. I move into the openings you leave, even as you move away. The chase begins again. Taking, moving, taking, moving.”
“But it’s not like chess,” Colchester said. His feet were moving a little better then, his upper body less stiff. “There’s no real winner.”
“The dance is the winner,” I said.
He gave me a skeptical look.
“That sounds like a stale answer, but it’s true,” I insisted. “No matter how hard we worked or how elegantly we danced, we’d merely be spinning demented circles if we did it without a partner. But together, we create something worth watching.”
The music faded, but Colchester’s hand didn’t move away from mine. He kept stepping, his lip between his teeth and his eyes on our feet. He wanted to get it perfect, exactly right, which was so like him.
The band started into a waltz cover of Etta James’s “At Last,” and I resumed leading him again, trying to poke down the part of me that thrilled at having another three minutes of his body close to mine.
We’d danced for about thirty seconds without talking when he said, “You know when I saw you tonight, I thought of Sebastian Flyte from Brideshead Revisited.”
It was my turn to frown. “Because you’re fucking my sister?”
He laughed. “Well, I suppose that comparison is inevitable, but no. Because you look so wealthy and princely in these clothes. Because you switch between brooding and charming so fast I can’t keep track of which version of you I’m talking to. Just like Sebastian.”
“Oh. I thought it was the teddy bear I carried everywhere.”
He smiled, and I felt his hips brush against mine. I hardened at the thought of his cock so close to mine, that all it would take was one accidental step to bring our groins all the way together…
He was apparently oblivious to my carnal thoughts, and he kept talking, his voice low in my ear as we step-quick-quick-ed our way around the small room. “But I thought of something else. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Have you read it?”
“Yes.”
“The little prince in the book is so wise but so sad. Has so much to offer this world and yet he can’t stop pining for the one he loves.”
Colchester looked right into my eyes and I couldn’t look away.
His voice didn’t get quieter but it got deeper. “And it seemed so perfect. You are a little prince, Embry Moore, in every way I can imagine. Rich and spoiled, like Sebastian…and yet dreamy and sad, like the little prince from Saint-Exupery’s book.”
Little prince.
It should sound diminishing, condescending, and yet when he said it…I don’t know, it felt like an honor. A compliment. It felt right, like it was my true name and had been my true name all along, simply waiting to be discovered.
“Little prince,” I repeated, tasting the words on my tongue.
“And what a prince you are.”
I looked sharply at him, expecting to see that he was teasing me, but there was no trace of humor in his face. Only seriousness and honesty and—
“I leave for thirty minutes and you two turn into a ballroom dancing how-to video?”
We both stopped moving at the sound of Morgan’s voice, and I could feel my anger at her like a living thing, climbing onto my shoulders and ready to launch itself at her. But before I could speak or move or anything, she was next to us, physically pressing us apart. “I’m ready to go back to the hotel,” she said, very regally for someone who’d just had bad schnitzel. She dropped some euros onto the table before she slipped her arm through Colchester’s. And gallant man that he was, he let her, and did it with a smile, and thus whatever had just unfolded between us was closed back up.
Except as we walked into our hotel lobby, as I peeled away from the happy couple to spend a couple lonely hours at the hotel bar, Colchester turned to me and said, “Goodnight, little prince,” with that rare smile I only saw if he was dancing with me or hurting me.
And I shivered.
And shivered and shivered, no matter how many drinks I drank to warm me up, no matter how hot I turned up the water in my shower, and when I finally gave in to the itchiness, the hate, and the memory of his body pressed against mine, when I finally closed my eyes and began fucking my fist and imagining it was Colchester’s large, rough hand instead of my own, well…I shivered then too.
