The Misadventures of the Heart and Soul

 

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Beginning

It was one of those nights when you found yourself staring down at a pot of boiling water, wondering just how excruciatingly painful it would be to stick your hand into it. There’s a similar curiosity when one drives across a bridge with a penetrable hanger or a weak trestle, feeling the seductive tug of one arm to turn sharply off the side. As the heat teases you and strokes your cheeks, you contemplate this curiosity.

 

    The inevitable next thought is one of self-analysis, sometimes critical:

 

“What the fuck is wrong with me?”

    But then again, the mind is often made hungry for data, constantly presenting hypotheses throughout the day, most of them never getting to any kind of experimentation or conclusion.

 

    The fire underneath the pot chuffs gently in the night, as if to remind Anaïs of its quiet power. Or perhaps to remind her that the water is almost ready for her rigid pasta. Either way, Anaïs can only breathe in, using the heat as one would a humidifier, clearing out what remained of her tears from earlier. The dark-haired woman stood under the lone kitchen light, yellowing her skin and making the white froth of the boiling water appear brighter. Under the unforgiving light, she looked aged, but not at all old. The two are, of course, not the same thing. Old is a state of being after much experience and much time has passed, showing truly through a new born glint in one’s eye. When one ages, it does not matter how old the individual is; one can age over the course of a long marriage, or after one night of realization etching the relentless wrinkles into your worried brow, and pulling the dark weights under your eyes down as if to cruelly keep your eyes open to the truth.

 

    The ominous hum of the garage door being opened finally shakes Anaïs awake. She frantically grabs the box of linguine  and wipes uselessly at whatever red was left around her eyes with the insides of her wrists. She could hear a tiny boy’s laugh echoing down the hall, her darling Guillaime, talking to his dark and serious father, who answered him with his own loud cough of a laugh.

    As they approached the kitchen doorway, Anaïs looked away, beginning to hum a quiet tune, whether to appear natural or to calm herself wasn’t certain.

    Their footsteps were in sync, as father and son, heavy with light, long strides with short, rustling their winter jackets as they hung them up, talking, discussing together. Laughing.

    Anaïs watched her fingers spread the hard linguine, circling like a crown in the boiling water. They hovered there for only a moment, as if in angry retaliation to her husband and son’s closeness, before removing them and pressing them into the cool safety of her apron.

    When her boys came in, she had turned her back to them, as if to busy herself over the sink, when in reality she was submerging her hot hands in the cool water.

    “What’s on the menu, maman?” The sound of the swivel chair clattered squeaked as Guillaime hopped on.

    With the greatest of efforts, Anaïs managed to mutter linguine with lemon and mushroom. This seemed to satisfy her little boy because he continues to squeak as he turned, though his father darkly added,

    “Linguine, huh?” Her weathered husband sat beside his son, adjusting his glasses. “Didn’t we have that two nights ago?”

    The question wasn’t unkind, but that’s what Anaïs hated about it. It removed any sort of care. She almost yearned for her narrow-eyed, frowning husband to have the decency to at least seem angered by the consistency of her cooking. But he seemed so incredibly blase and carefree--even adding a half smile to a normally neutral, thin-lipped face--that she wanted to throw the pot of hot water into his face, just to get some kind of reaction from him. But she takes a breath and remembers that she has already put the linguine in the water.

    She manages to turn around to face him and turn off the heat with a smart click.

    “Yes, with shrimp and red sauce, not lemon and mushroom,” she clarified with a smile of her own.

    He nodded and grunted, reaching for the newspaper, as Guillaime begins to relay the special bits of the circus his father took him to.

    Pieces of Anaïs heart and soul were in whatever her blue-eyed son described, hanging on every magical word and allowing herself to be transported to the event, seeing the dressed up elephants, and the brave women in metal cages with motorcyclists surrounding her, smiling through the whole thing.

    But the other broken parts were still left to be cleaned up, and Anaïs knew that she couldn’t keep brushing the pieces aside forever. She could only mend so many cuts. Those other broken parts wondered if the elephants knew that they were being enslaved and controlled by the circus owners, or whether those brave women really felt their smiles or if it was to distract them from the shake in their knees and the fear locked in their throats.

 

    Those broken parts forced her eyes to flicker toward her husband, only to have them meet hers with full force.

    And it took all the strength in the fiber of her bones to brush those parts away again and to keep herself smiling for her only son, and hold the burning tears for later.




One week prior...
 

The air was always cold on the East Coast in the fall. It smelled like snow, the promise of the inevitably long winter so characteristic in the north. It was the kind of air that didn’t just cut through you but wrapped around you with the intention of stealing your warmth away, carrying it back to the lonely sea. No local lingered in such weather more than they found necessary. Maybe take a walk with the dog on the beach some other time. Postpone mailing that package to Grandma living in the Keyes. Those leaves in the backyard can be raked when it’s a little bit warmer outside.

It wasn’t just the air’s doing, but the clouds. The thick rolls of grey cotton that blocked out the sun. Not necessarily unsightly, but not as inviting as the sun that most knew was capable of greatness. The sun meant light for novel gardens, warmth for the people, and UV rays for young tanning. Clouds that may harbor a possible storm don’t seem nearly as attractive.

Connecticut was accustomed to harsh winters and its chilly weather, so locals did their best to take advantage of it with recreational jogging in the early mornings or kayaking along the river before it’s frozen. But of all activities to do in the late fall after all the leaves have fallen and all that’s left is to wait for the snow to find purchase in the air, there were the rare occasions that someone would sit willingly outside in such weather. While there was a handful of peculiar individuals who did so for a very wide spectrum of reasons—all personal—one dark-haired man with a build that had withstood time sat in a fold-out chair on his back porch. He wrote with a flimsy notebook on his lap, it bending to the hill of his thigh. His thin lips grew chapped and the edges of his ears filled with the desperate flush of warmth. A seat-side table sat obediently beside him, as did the dining room furniture watching him from inside, behind the sliding glass door. In his thick but insufficient maroon knitted sweater, he wrote with a smudgy pen in the cold, losing daylight as the evening grew closer. Aside from pinching fatigue from his melting brown eyes behind his reading glasses, he did nothing else, as if frozen by the night’s chill so common on the coast. A woman watched him from inside, studying him closely as he did his work.

###

Many a time had Anaïs gone out with a drink—alcoholic, depending on the time of day—and gazed upon the profile of a tired and persistent soul, intelligent but stubborn. He would never acknowledge her, always fully immersed in whatever he was doing. She would place a comforting hand on his shoulder, feeling the weight of responsibility and pride there. As she watched him right then she noticed how that weight had pulled everything about his being downwards into more of a slouch. As age and time are wont to do, Christophe’s limbs and stature had curled like the crinkled edges of a dry leaf. As the seasons passed, his body had become more fragile, his outlook more bent. But at age forty-one, he still got up every morning beside her without so much as a groan of disgruntled fatigue, and faced the comfortable life he had created with her.

Anaïs had always been assured of Christophe’s love shown through all of his support and efforts. When Christophe didn’t answer her every time she tried to help, her sensitive heart would grow stronger for him with confidence, perhaps to fight off the dull ache of hurt. She would press a kiss to his stubbled cheek with the edges of her mouth upturned, leave some encouraging words, and let him alone. And even after all his time working, Christophe always found enough time and energy to bury his lips in her dark hair as a thank you after a meal, or play cards with Guillaume before tucking him in.

Christophe was the strongest man Anaïs had ever known.

Marriage does strange things to all kinds of people and circumstances.

    As with most long-lasting couples, marriage did peculiar things to Christophe and Anaïs Bessette. They did as most couples did in modern day America and settled down, after two years of dating, three years of living together and one year of perpetual terror at the inescapable question, “So when are you going to be engaged?”

After surviving that year together, they knew that the time was right. Christophe had known that it was appropriate for him to ask and Anaïs knew that—for quite some time, actually—she wanted a family. And who better with than the man who had made her laugh for two years, cry for three, and supported her with a shared hatred for that intrusive question for that miserable, uncertain year.

Anaïs knew she could expect blissful security in Christophe, a Literature teacher during the week, and a casual writer on the weekends. A father to a healthy son full time.

As their fifteen-year anniversary loomed over the horizon, private but imminent, Anaïs reflected upon these things about her husband over the preceding weeks. Lost in her weekend routine of receiving a string of semi-meaningful phone calls, reading to kill time until the defeat of sleep, and cooking meals for the two boys in her life, she watched her husband. Between checking on their ten-year-old son, Guillaume, and slicing tomatoes, she observed Christophe through the sliding glass door that led to the backyard veranda. While Anaïs had always been an affectionate soul that watched over her family and friends with typical but earnest motherly love, her grey eyes stared over her gold-framed glasses at his weathered shoulders and maddened dark locks. He sat facing away from their Cape Cod-styled house, his feet locked firmly with the ground as if a protector of a fortress. He had always been a proud man, having come from modest living, gruff and at times intolerant, more so as time passed.

Christophe often sat outside, whether it was sunny and picturesque or clouded and sinister. Anaïs wasn’t sure what he was reading that day. He could have been grading papers or doing taxes, but if either were true, Anaïs knew she would have caught him harrumphing and scratching at the back of his neck.

“No no, Guill, don’t go bother your father right now,” Anaïs called out gently. Their son had stepped right in front of her gaze, the shape of his dark head comically similar to his father’s.

“What about the circus?” Guillaume asked, looking back with serious, blue eyes. “It’s leaving next week.”

“Ask him after dinner when he’s not busy, how about that?” Anaïs suggested. She slid her neglected sliced tomatoes to the side with her kitchen knife.

She didn’t need to look up again to know that Guillaume reluctantly accepted that, turning away to return to his precious and raucous television in the other room. Anaïs found herself smiling, feeling a warmth in her chest as her eyes followed Guillaume’s back that adopted an identical hunch to his father’s. She wiped her hands of the tomatoes’ flesh and juices, smile faltering when she looked at Christophe outside. His chin rested in his palm, faced down at something in his lap. She sighed worriedly, unable to help herself from wanting to go to his aid every time he shut himself out like some backwards pet dog punishing itself before any crime.

 

“Chris?” she slid the glass door open with the customary drink in her hand. A scotch. “You’ve been out here for almost two hours.”

Christophe sniffled, thick eyebrows drawn together in thought, smudgy pen scratching insistently on the paper. Anaïs never expected an answer, obviously, but it always made her sensitive heart grow smaller in a flicker of doubt before returning to normal.

“Dinner will be ready in fifteen,” she said, placing the drink on the side table next to his elbow. She had to resist the urge to touch that knitted maroon-covered elbow.

He grunted noncommittally, that being more of a response than usual. Anaïs couldn’t help but smile sheepishly at her husband’s typical behavior.

“Come inside soon,” she suggested, leaning in to kiss that textured surface she loved so much. Doing so, his vigorous writing caught her eye. He was not grading papers, and was definitely not doing his taxes.

“Chris, are you writing again?” Anaïs realized she sounded a bit more excited than necessary but she was surprised to find her husband returning to an exhausted hobby. He had always had trouble finishing his works. They either ended up scrapped in his trash bin or not very good at all.

“Is it a story?” she asked, tilting her head to get a better look.

As if finally realizing he was not alone, nor was the world he had built in his mind real, Christophe stopped writing.

“It’s not all that exciting,” Christophe grumbled, almost looking embarrassed as he flipped his notebook closed. “Just writing little things.”

Anaïs laughed, hitting his shoulder. “What are you being all shy for? Is it like a diary that I’m not allowed to read?”

“Not nearly as sordid.” He got up from his chair and kissed her hairline, easily a head taller than her. “Or private.”

“Then tell me.” She chuckled and moved her hair to her other shoulder, tying it loosely.

He snatched up his drink to take a swig before opening the glass door.

“Tell you what?” he threw over his shoulder, stepping inside. “That I’ve got a great idea and am working on the next bestseller?”

“Just what you’re writing about would do.” Anaïs felt snuffed, but brushed it off with the cold. She closed the glass door behind her and returned to the kitchen.

Christophe grumbled about having only a few ideas, none of which would pull through and before Anaïs could press him for more, Guillaume came running in from the other room.

“Dad, can we go to the circus tomorrow?”

“Guill, what did I say about asking after dinner?” Anaïs cut in over the kitchen counter. She took the sliced tomatoes and brushed them in with the rest of the food. Fettuccine glided in the boiling water in ribbons while the heavy skillet cradled the many vegetables and chicken in the cream Alfredo sauce. A family favorite.

Guillaume looked guilty but defiant, not meeting his father’s eyes but standing in front of him and waiting for an answer. Anaïs knew he got his impatience from his father, too.

“Hm? The circus? What’s at the circus?” Christophe’s words cut, but it was clear from the notable and sudden softness in his eyes that they were not meant to bruise his son.

“Motorcycles,” Guillaume replied with rivaling seriousness. But at ten years old—almost eleven—he had not yet learned the art of disguise. His lips twitched to keep back a grin only effortless for children. “Acrobats. Animals. Clowns. The usual.”

“Are you going to pay for it?” Christophe seemed to barter.

“No, Dad. I’m a minor.”

Anaïs smiled at the sound of Christophe’s rare, punctuated laugh, looking up in time to catch her son’s unbridled smile.

“All right, you win.” Christophe pat his son’s shoulder as he sat down, clearly proud of his wit, and Guillaume swelled in return with a similar sentiment. “Check the times for me and I’ll pay.”

Guillaume obediently—but not without a smug kind of enthusiasm—left the kitchen to do just that.

Anaïs stopped tending to the pots of food, catching Christophe grunting in amusement to himself about the silliness of circuses.

“Didn’t know kids even wanted to go to those anymore,” he added, working on his drink. “But Guill always was a strange one.”

“Hm, just like his father,” Anaïs chuckled.

Christophe took a pause to raise an eyebrow at her before looking back down at his notebook with the same look of resistant laughter. Anaïs could see it in the tightness of the lines around his thin lips.

“Well, he should be so lucky to end up like me,” Christophe said while turning open his notebook, drink in hand and eyebrows furrowed. “With someone like you,” he tagged on.

    Anaïs continued to prepare the food, each plate steaming, it warming her face to almost a fever as she placed it on the table. She would have convinced herself as such if not for the fact that she found herself smiling, too. Once she called Guillaume in for dinner, she swiftly kissed Christophe’s head, inhaling the scent that has remained the same for all those years, and raked her fingers through his still-lush hair. Christophe blinked up at Anaïs, frowning in confusion, but she did not feel like explaining. It never took much to please her, and as intelligent as Christophe was, he often didn’t understand people or how to interact with them at all.

 

As the glorious smells of food wafted around her like a perfume, Guillaume chattered about the circus, Christophe grunted back in his sardonic way, Anaïs couldn’t help but notice how Christophe’s hand rested ostensibly casual on top of his notebook. To her, it seemed a bit strange, rigid, and protective. By the time Christophe and Guillaume had finished their meals, she had lost her appetite and her food had gone cold.

###

When Christophe finally shut the room light off and came to bed, Anaïs was on her seventh try at page sixty-six of a thriller she had picked up from the New Arrivals section at the library she worked. Just to try something new. The news blaring on the TV didn’t help. But she was more distracted by a feeling of ill will unfamiliar to her cloud of thoughts. After dinner, Anaïs did everything she could to feel comfortable, washing her face, getting in sleep clothes. Reading was her usual go-to. And now she was stuck rotating the proverbial image of a gun hovering over a police officer’s face in her head. It was only dispersed when Christophe’s side of the bed dipped under his weight. She turned to her husband to comment on how she didn’t think thrillers were for her, only to see Christophe’s reading glasses back on. He was reading a book. non-fiction by the looks of it, a sobering book design with an interesting title. His notebook sat under it in his lap. The gentle simmer in her stomach from earlier returned. The same feeling that made her lose her appetite and continued to distract her then like the beginnings of a toothache.

“Cadavers?” She wrinkled her nose at him. “You’re reading about cadavers, now?”

    “Just some research.” He shifted his weight and furrowed his brow deeply as if to keep the his glasses in place.

    “Research, are you thinking of becoming a mortician?” Though Anais knew the teasing didn’t suit her, she wished he would at least smile.

    “Research for the manuscript,” he replied, scribbling into his notebook. “Just working with some ideas.”

    “What are you thinking of writing about, exactly?”

    Anais leaned over to look at what he was writing, only to have the inside of Christophe’s elbow block her view.

    “I told you, I only have some ideas.” Christophe’s eyes had grown dark again. Anais hated when they did, because not only did they resist her so vehemently, but shrouded her in that all-too familiar chill of loneliness.

“Well, why don’t you bounce some off with me.” Anais reached over Christophe’s elbow. “Readers read.”

Not only is the notebook torn from her reach, but she’s met, full-force, by Christophe’s unforgiving glare, one so aggressive and silencing that it always surprised Anais that her husband wasn’t a veteran of some unholy war.

“Enough,” he said quietly. “I don’t need a second opinion.”

    “Don’t be like that,” she chuckled weakly, sinking back to her place. “Was just curious.”

    Christophe didn’t answer, and Anais opened up her book, a rash flushing her throat as she attempted to lose herself in the words. But the thriller had not become any more compelling, nor the TV any less banal.

 

    It was several hours after Anais had shut off the light on her side of the bed when her husband followed suit, clicking off the television’s dim blue light to leave them in darkness. Despite the tension, Anais felt the weight of her husband’s warm arm wrap gently around her waist, pulling her back in the slightest.

    “Desole,” he muttered awkwardly into her dark hair.

    A sigh escaped Anais and she couldn’t help the swell of warmth behind her collarbone, spreading through to her extremities. It was her turn to say nothing.

 

    That night, he made love to her, leaving only the ghostly sighs to cling to the walls  in the dark bedroom after they both were asleep.








 

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Intro-Meeting

Meeting

 

   Conrade Arnett was most suddenly and precariously born as Sylvie Arnett’s first and only son. His birth was aided by a farmhand’s wife in a barn in the outskirts of some obscure village in Southern France. He, in the future, would not look back at this event kindly, if at all. He would insist that he remembered everything about the nature of his birth. He would say with disdain that he could feel his entire self being rejected from his mother’s womb, his riotous and shameless cries as an infant inspired by a mutual hatred between himself and his mother.

   Sylvie would buffer all of this, gently smiling at Conrade’s harsh words like they were mere flower petals being tossed forcefully at her face; laughably harmless yet invasive enough to inspire the protective desire to shut her eyes. Sylvie would insist that Conrade’s birth was a miracle. A blessing. Something that could have gone terribly wrong but amounted to the healthy, screaming bundle in her arms that she would treasure forever. Sylvie would continue to passionately refer to that day as “le jour que mon compattisant Dieu m’a parlé,” or roughly translated: “the day that my merciful God spoke to me.”

    Sylvie had always been a hopeful romantic, always believing in a happy ending, believing that all who did wrong would be punished before the light of their lives were gone, and that something in the natural world would take their bodies and cleanse them. And the more she realized how that alienated her from her son as years passed, the more she prayed that he would one day understand, one day believe in good things and their rewards. Sylvie’s attitude toward her removed son was only encouraged by the events prior to his birth.

 

At age twenty-two, Sylvie lost her parents, her only family, during the German occupation of Provence. Her mother to tuberculosis contracted during her services at the hospital as a nurse’s aid, and her father following his wife from a stroke soon after. They had been the proudest people Sylvie had ever known. While others found their deaths to be unfortunate and useless, Sylvie held her chin up high to show her parents that she too could be as proud as they had been. She learned the meaning of value that day. The value of living the life desired. The value of dying for a purpose. The value of seizing the day, before it was too late when no body, not even any divine figure, could do anything to save you.

As Sylvie continued on her own, an adult yet hardly feeling so, the world changed around her. The changes involved everyone, and Sylvie was always the one to take a step back and look at things from an outside perspective, seeing the positive more easily than most. She believed in a better time, in an era of universal struggle and destruction. Sylvie was seen as but a naïve child [, an idealistic fool girl, a joke without a laugh.] Since Sylvie spent most of her time surrounded by debating, prophesizing, and mourning older men bitter with age while working in the village’s humblest of bars, her opinions were often discounted and ignored. But that did not discourage Sylvie. Nothing did, it seemed. Provence was under German rule, but she still greeted every customer with a warm and honest smile. Sylvie’s smile was unbiased. It was foolishly trusting. It was heartbreaking.

In August 1944, every inhabitant of Provence released a sigh of relief when the Allied armies breached the barriers the Germans had created on the shore of Sainte-Maxime. The Côte d'Azur was awash with the Allied armies and all of Southern France had been set free by the time she had met Konrad Fisher.

   Konrad Fisher was a British soldier: one of the many who had bravely fought for Provence’s freedom, Sylvie thought. He had come in to the bar she worked at with his unit. They had all been riotous drunks save for him. Sylvie remembered this fact very vividly. She hadn’t blamed his fellow soldiers for their behavior; the soldiers had been set free, too, in their own way. They were expressing their success. Their joy. Their relief.

He had not mingled with the natives or the soldiers of other divisions, or talk to anyone for that matter. He had been a very quiet, shy drunk, unassuming and modest. He hadn’t asserted himself to the many young and foolish French girls who craved for something new and exciting, or simply wanted to return the favor in the one way they knew how.

Sylvie had always believed in love at first sight, but her beliefs had only been solidified by Konrad, a twenty-something, tall, handsome soldier who had a face that seemed far too young to be one of a soldier in a war that consumed the world. The men in his unit had labeled him the Baby, even by those who were younger than him. He had a somewhat long face with hollow cheeks that Sylvie imagined had once been filled with something plump and round. He still had vestiges of his youth in the fullness of his cheeks when he smiled, which had been a rare sight, but Sylvie had caught every one. Even the ones that had not been directed at her.

 

When they first spoke, she had gone outside during her break to smoke a cigarette, frowning around the Gitanes Maïs she had bummed from her patriotic boss who had paid for one round of drinks in honor of the Southern France liberation. Having wanted to escape the somewhat overwhelming and oppressively ecstatic atmosphere inside the bar, Sylvie had dreaded going back inside to ask for a light. Before she could have made a decision, Konrad had appeared beside her, smiling, though his eyes did not greet hers. He had silently brought out his matches, stepping toward her to light her cigarette, the light glow of the flame flickering over his attractive yet worn features in the fading sunlight. She had graciously thanked him, watching him closely as he lit his own hand rolled cigarette. Seeing her curiosity, he had hesitantly tilted his lit cigarette toward her, as if not sure himself as to what Sylvie’s inquisitive eyes asked of him.

Sylvie had blinked, slowly reaching out to take the other cigarette with a strange yet innate delicateness as if it had to be handled like butterfly wings. She had studied the second cigarette, twirling it between her fingertips, wondering what musky scent would stick to them and if it would smell anything like what she was smoking. She had resisted the urge to bring it to her nose and memorize the smell and make a comparison. Sylvie remembered she had shrugged and handed it back, her young self foolishly feigning nonchalance toward another country’s cigarette and to Konrad himself. But she would always laugh at her past self trying so hard to be aloof when it had been so clear by the way her eyes had traced over the strong lines of Konrad’s face with shameless interest that she couldn’t pretend to be disinterested with any amount of effort.

As the sun set back into the horizon’s embrace, Sylvie had her cigarette, relishing the familiar and masculine taste, somehow feeling a bit like a soldier herself, especially in Konrad’s presence. Konrad stood beside her, looking so trained and prepared, despite the whole purpose of having a cigarette: to relax. Sylvie had always thought that smoking cigarettes was a civilian comfort, and when the soldiers got to have such things during the war, for a little while, they were home and they were real people again. Even if it was jarringly clear that they were so far from the safe arms of their homes, any moment of silence alone with just one cigarette was the smell of a heated bar with the closest of friends, and the taste of a lover’s kiss who impatiently waited for her man to come home safely. Home.

Sylvie had asked him if his cigarette tasted like home without thinking, never expecting herself to ask or for him to answer. But he had turned to her and laughed, simultaneously embarrassing and delighting her. His smile had been contagious, right from the very start.

Oui,” he had answered with what Sylvie had thought was impressive French pronunciation in addition to that divine smile. “Elle goûte comme la maison.

Sylvie had been unreasonably pleased at both Konrad’s handling of her country’s language and how their sentiments were alike. It had spurred her desire to talk to Konrad, especially after learning he had become quite proficient in speaking French as a student before he had ever known about war. It had been obvious that Konrad’s English accent hid underneath all his perfect French dialogue. But Sylvie had enjoyed that in listening to him speak, which even during a conversation, had been very seldom. She had clung to every rare word, it ringing oddly in her ears with the tone of familiarity and the enunciation something slightly off. Sylvie had learned many things talking to him, from how to say certain things in English to how the sky could be so blue. Sylvie had thought Konrad was a genius, which embarrassed him terribly, but Sylvie had longed to know more. She had all but begged Konrad to tell her more about anything at all, to grace her with all the things Konrad knew but wouldn’t say on his own whim. She had been entranced by him.

“You look so young,” she had commented later that night. She had touched his boyish face as if to validate his youth, wondering if her tobacco-stained fingertips would leave the scent lingering on his skin.

“Yes,” he had agreed, hesitating before meeting her eyes. His round eyes were a passive indigo, contrasting with Sylvie’s narrow and earthy brown ones. “Do you hate it? Would you prefer a proud man of his country who finds strength in bloodshed instead of weakness?”

She would always remember the naïve disbelief she had seen in his expression when she laughed and wrapped her arms around his firm neck.

“Only killers find strength in bloodshed. And only cowards are killers. You are no coward, Konrad.”

“How do you know that I am not a coward?” Konrad had asked with juvenile curiosity, looking almost ready to recoil at Sylvie’s closeness to him. “We have only just met.”

“I know.” Sylvie had tilted her head to look up at Konrad, wirey forearms resting on his abused shoulders. “I just know.”

Sylvie had so easily interpreted Konrad and his behavior during their encounter. His removal from celebration had not been because of shyness, it had been because of guilt. Konrad’s aversion to laughing and joining his mates had not been reticence; it had been distracted thoughts that had left him in doubt of his worth. Konrad had told Sylvie things about himself, like his dislike of confrontation and his passivity in times of crisis; enough to tell Sylvie that Konrad could never be a killer, no matter how hard he had trained to be the best soldier he could be. Sylvie knew that most soldiers saw themselves as protectors or defenders to justify their actions during war. She had realized somewhere during their conversation that Konrad had never made the distinction between protector and killer. Bravery and cowardice. Honesty and falsehood. And the lack of solidarity frightened him. If he did not know himself, what else did he have?

Sylvie had never been a fool, however. She had understood that her personal analysis of what Konrad might have been going through was very possibly incorrect. She had understood that it could have just been an imaginative creation of her own thoughts.  But she had intuition. And though she had not mentioned any of the things she thought of him, she acted upon them hoping to reassure Konrad in the only way a practical stranger like her could.

And with an easy and earnest smile answered by Konrad’s unsure and elusive one, their lips met. In the muggy heat that was only levied by the cool night air that tasted of childhood summers abundant with young and ignorant love for life and liberation, they had experienced something that they both could surmise with their own individual experience and knowledge as falling in love.

 

An older, wiser yet still romantic Sylvie would retell this story of Konrad and her meeting to anyone who looked even remotely intrigued. She would even tell the farmhand’s wife with gentle and listless words while her son screeched for attention in her arms on the fateful day of his birth. Though her adolescent son would criticize her for years for naming him after “some soldier who had fucked her like a dog and left her without any word of his existence after,” Sylvie would continue to insist that it was a good strong name, that her son should bear it proudly, and most of all, that Konrad was a good man, no matter what her son said.

Annoyed and obedient, Conrade would accept this and not change his name, not even after his mother’s death. Especially after his mother’s death. Conrade would even fulfill his mother’s dying wish and devote his entire life to realizing his dreams, whatever that may come to mean to him. Whether Conrade liked it or not, his mother would become a guiding force on his path to becoming the man that would show his true strength as not only a man, but as a person that belonged in the world.

Though he was born most suddenly and precariously as Sylvie Arnett’s first and only son, aided by a farmhand’s wife in a barn in the outskirts of some obscure village in Southern France, his life would begin a week after he turns ten years old. That is the day he meets Gabrielle Addison; the greatest inspiration Conrade ever has the misfortune of crossing paths with.

He would never forget the day in the heavy wood of his home, Carcassonne, in late September.

###

Conrade stood in the clearing, looking up at the bright blue sky, wreathed with autumn. A smile played on his lips, as if uncertain. He slowly began to turn, his arms unfolding and fanning out as he picked up speed. The faster he turned, the wider his grin grew, the heavier his arms felt. His fingertips felt cold. He started to splutter and hum like a machine, chuckles escaping him in the process. He clenched his eyes shut and imagined turning fast and hard enough to fly through the air, disarming the very trees that surrounded him. He could see the trees rustle and lean away from his sheer force, the sound of a thousand small shores lined with crashing waves deafening his engine lips.

As he started to lose his sense of balance, he opened his eyes to a world unknown to him. Conrade laughed, unsure at what exactly, as his eyes struggled to focus. His body wobbled and his head rocked in time with the new world’s movement. And with a happy thump, he let gravity pull him into a hug on a bed of nature’s crinkling, aged confetti. He lifted an arm to disturb the rippling pool of sky above him, reveling in the ability to manipulate what he believed to be the world. At ten years old, anything he saw around him was the world, and nothing more. Hearing a voice in the distance reminded him gently that there was a lot outside of the world that he didn’t see. But it wasn’t that there was more world, there were just other worlds, manipulated by others. There was the woodcutter’s world in the woods thick with memory, there was the nice granny’s world filled with pies and wrinkled smiles towards town, and of course his own world in the clearing. The mechanics of these worlds were unclear, but nobody was asking and Conrade certainly didn’t care to pick apart the world to understand it.

At the sound of rustling coupled with a small singing voice, Conrade finally swung his legs over himself to lurch his torso up off the ground. The sudden motion apparently startled the visitor, a gasp escaping her.

T’es qui?” Conrade asked, squinting one eye more than the other to study the intruder.  

The girl in the dress didn’t answer. Conrade noted how much dirt had splattered on the once-white dress while she scratched at her leg, it clearly been abused by branches.

Ouf, t’es laide, huh?” he added, unable to keep from sneering at his own insult. When the girl didn’t say anything, Conrade assumed she was stupid in addition to ugly.

Conrade got to his feet, then noticing the book in the girl’s dirty hands. He wondered how she could possibly read without getting the pages filthy, too, and whether her mother had taught her anything. Washing hands, treating things with respect, presenting yourself well: these were all basics that Conrade could see that the strange girl had very obviously overlooked. As if realizing his criticism, she took a step back and glared at him, wary of Conrade taking away her treasure.

Fiche-moi le camp!” she suddenly shouted, waving her free hand. “Go! Go away! Fiche-moi la paix!

Conrade instinctively flinched at the noise emitted by the supposedly foreign girl’s mouth, insulted by how she treated him like a monster of some kind that lacked basic morality.

As most young boys do at the face of adversity, Conrade shouted right back with ten times the force. Projectile obscenities shot out of his mouth, the novelty of their taboo still bittersweet with a sprinkle of guilt. And he could tell that she felt them, too, when she clenched her jaw and twisted her lips painfully to keep from breaking. But even as Conrade told her to go away because, “it was his spot, he was there first,” she did not move an inch.

“I can be here if I want,” she claimed, clutching her book to her chest as a priest would his bible. “Je peux aller où je le voudrais.

Conrade didn’t know or speak the language, but by the sound of it, he could surmise she was speaking English, and that the mud princess must have been from England. And by the look of her jutting lower lip and air of entitlement, she wasn’t going anywhere soon.

Seeing the fruitless nature of the argument, Conrade chose to be the bigger man, and walk away. He gave the filthy girl no response as he trudged away in a bit of a huff, his mother’s voice in his head saying, “Tu as mon grand, Conrade. Donc toujours agir comme mon grand.

He growled in frustration, kicking up twigs and branches blindly in his path. He weaved through the spaces left between the many trees that met at the toes of their roots and intertwined canopy fingers above, framing the way. His legs knew the way home, leaving his mind and heart working overtime. He tried to understand and forgive, as most people would do anything to eradicate the parasitic nature of anger, guilt, and hurt. The carefully arranged curtains of fallen trees and the remains of bright green villages amongst pillows of various warm colors scattered to and from his clearing, ended up being the only comfort as he hardened out of ire at the nerve of that girl. And all girls. When they didn’t know anything about anything at all.

 

M’apprend’ l’anglais.”

Conrade’s demand to be taught English was full of conviction only possible in fools and boys his age.

The woodcutter, having once been to many faraway places when his face was not creased by time, was touched by Conrade’s fervor to learn. He, of course, misread Conrade’s passion and newfound vendetta. Leading the modest life alone in his cabin with nothing but the wood, its inhabitants and the memory of Her, he reveled in youth and its promising ambition.

Conrade visited the woodcutter often, his cabin being on the way home from his clearing. Conrade looked forward to hearing the woodcutter’s stories just as much as the woodcutter needed someone to help him remember. He knew the woodcutter liked talking about girls in his stories, which never made sense to Conrade when the myths knitted into his scars were so much more riveting. But with pained politeness, he would tolerate the flowery bits. It was always a small joy to see the woodcutter’s leather-bound face cradled by his thick, wiry fur reveal the wide quarry filled with tobacco soaked stones that made up a grin. Conrade only got to really see the gaps in his teeth when he talked about Her.

“More beautiful than life,” he would always say in a French he seemed to have haphazardly strung together himself over the years. “If She had been life, the world would have been lit with immortal light.”

Even when the woodcutter creaked and grumbled his way through dust towards his bookshelf, Conrade didn’t feel bad not listening to him get lost, following after the wanderer on the side of the road that was his mind, back to Her. Conrade already had Her face memorized. The woodcutter had spoken of Her enough times, making it virtually impossible for Conrade to forget that she had dark hair “as long and as straight as sanded ebony,” round, separated eyes “filled with caramel toffee,” and a rare smile that was “more beautiful than life.”

Conrade, even at a young age, had to admit that the woodcutter made Her sound like a lady he would not mind meeting. Because aside from those three main things, other details about the woman were inconsistent and changeable. One week She would have the shape of “the ripest pear in any orchard of Alcinous,” the next, the hobo-chic, emaciated skeleton wrapped in only diamond cold skin, “a vagabond rich with life and a single cigarette, but nothing more.” Her height, weight, attitude, and behavior would circle through a spectrum of possibilities in his imagination, but Her long, ebony hair, round, caramel fish-eyes, and rare smile remained threaded in the knots of his mind.

Looking at the near-empty cabin with only the necessary furniture that the woodcutter himself had lovingly made (a few of them constructed right before Conrade’s eyes over a cup of wine and a story), Conrade’s thoughts, however occupied by the English mud princess he had met earlier, inevitably scampered to catch up with the woodcutter’s mind on Her. He did not listen but still heard all of what the woodcutter spoke about, looking at the lone chair carved out of a tree stump he liked to think reflected the woodcutter’s age. When the woodcutter finally sat in it, he and the wood groaned, becoming one tree filled with mysteries unknown to the normal man. Conrade felt fortunate to hear such things from the woodcutter. He sat, as usual, on the dusty floor in front of him, looking at what he had brought back from the bookshelf. He had in his hands a fragile collection of parchment yellowed with age and the soil of nature’s breath protected by a blue, leather bind. Conrade could hear the woodcutter talking about how She used to read English poems to him when he was sick from what might have been the Spanish Flu. Conrade nodded and grumbled an assent, more set on looking at what the woodcutter’s equally worn hands were holding.

The woodcutter went on with that distant look, having never really looked at Conrade in the eye when he spoke. Conrade had noticed long ago that although the woodcutter always looked off somewhere or out the window whenever he talked about Her, his eyes were not faded at all with age or the cruelty of blindness. Conrade had always admired the sharp apertures of his dark eyes, measuring perfectly the stroke of his axe. The woodcutter snorted faintly when he explained how the English poems were terrible but only she could make them come alive. In turn, she had made him all better—so he said—just by reading him English poems, and so solidifying his appreciation for English.

Ah, ma minette,” he sighed with that incorrigible, sad grin. “Ma douce minette.

She didn’t even have a name. Upon asking one evening, the woodcutter had moaned in a throe of seeming passion or pain, tossing his dark mane back to howl through his tears.

Son nom!” he had crooned, having scared young Conrade with his open sobbing. “Ah, non, Conrade, pas parler de son nom!”

Ever since the woodcutter had fallen apart before him, Conrade, young and frightened, had made certain never to bring up Her name again. At first, Conrade had believed that the memory of Her name had been too painful for the woodcutter to say or even think without touching some dark part of him. But as time passed, it became clearer to Conrade that the woodcutter’s memory would go and never return if he did not continue to remind himself of things. The woodcutter would forget Conrade if he did not stop by for even a day, get lost in the woods if he did not travel the path to town often enough. While most felt bad for the strange, lonely man in the woods, Conrade thought the woodcutter had always looked quite happy sitting outside his cabin on the same log, every day, taking a break from cutting wood. To be lost in a fruitful life passed, endlessly recounting the beauty of those days in place of realizing the truth of the now; that didn’t seem so bad to Conrade. The woodcutter liked remembering and Conrade liked hearing it, because regardless of what kind of story he told, he could tell the woodcutter believed it. And if he believed it, who was to say it didn’t happen?

To eradicate misunderstanding, Conrade explained that he did not want to learn English to help anyone but himself. If anything, he hoped to make a certain someone sick with defeat under the fire of her own country’s comrades. Having been taught the basics of right and wrong, by extension being well-acquainted with the tightness of guilt in the chest, Conrade expected the woodcutter’s face to change with a twist from reminiscent joy to disapproving confusion. But he was interested to find that Her grin remained, and he dipped his head a few times in agreement, handing Conrade the mess of papers assuredly. Though a part of Conrade felt that the woodcutter’s nodding condoned his actions and released him from the binds of guilt, a second wiser and less realized part of him could surmise a deeper purpose. That purpose revealing that the woodcutter knew much more than he let on about not just the worlds that Conrade had not yet seen or learned about, but also facts about Conrade and inhabitants of his own world as well.

Unsettled, Conrade distracted himself easily by opening the old book binding, taking care to keep the loose leaves in the haphazard pile they came. The pages’ edges and corners were not kept in any semblance of uniform, each one acting as an abstract border for the page on top of it. It was clear that the woodcutter revisited the chaotic pile often, perhaps to fill the gaps in his memory with the fragments of pages time had mercilessly left. Some had written lines with a small and spidery hand, others with typed text, many with both married forcibly on the page.

Conrade felt his brow pull lower over his eyes as he tried wording out the unfamiliar words he could make out on the first page, not knowing what exactly he was saying. He stopped out of embarrassment when the woodcutter chuckled adoringly and reminded him he was being observed. Just as Conrade was about to toss the pile away from him, his small and crippled pride out-weighing his sense of civility (as it always did when he lost his temper), the woodcutter calmly reached down to turn the page and point at a bit of French text Conrade had missed. Without thinking, Conrade read and found one line stand out to him just because it catered to his juvenile amusement of all things shocking and crude. He was surprised to see that although the piece was called “Lune de Miel,” the author’s name was indefinitely not French. When Conrade’s piqued interest became apparent, the woodcutter turned back to the first page. Conrade was no longer disheartened by the foreign words, but curious to understand this poet’s history in the many lines embalmed in the parchment forever. The woodcutter stroked his heavy fingertip across a line of English as if stroking the curve of Her shoulder in a gentle but earnest reminder of love. He spoke in an unfamiliar warmth that came from somewhere inside without attempts of hiding. It felt much more to-the-point and true than the one used for his native tongue.

I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images, and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle

Infinitely suffering thing.

Although Conrade could sense that they were not words meant to be thrown at someone in anger, he still asked what they meant. Frustration engulfed him when the woodcutter grinned in that gapped, hairy way and patted his head. Conrade hated when he did this not only because it made him feel like a child, but it also meant that he was not going to explain himself. The woodcutter simply insisted that Conrade take the parchments with him and study them overnight. Conrade did not see the use, if he could not understand the writing, but the woodcutter was adamant and Conrade had been made obedient enough to know when it was rude to say no. When the woodcutter saw him out of the cabin with a rousing sneeze at the open door’s displaced dust, he reassured Conrade that there were many things to be learned about English in the pile he held in his hands. It was just about looking in the right places. Discounting it as nonsense, as Conrade often did when he didn’t understand something (or even cared to), he waved and thanked him politely. He then hopped off the creaky porch and walked into the darkened wood.

Disappointed at not learning more severe curses or ways of dealing with disobedient young girls that rolled around in dirt and sullied the worth of a clean, white dress, Conrade thought*. With the parchments held securely under one arm, the other arm swung methodically next to him and propelled his walk home. He thought of what his mother might have ready to eat when he got home, whether he should do his laundry the next morning, and what the woodcutter’s one line of English could have possibly meant. He had never heard anything like it, the novelty of it not only due to his unfamiliarity with the language. It was similar to the saturated hatred he had felt for the wretched mud princess, in that half the passion came from the chaos of experiencing something new.

The complexity of feeling was recognized but not yet quite known. And Conrade set out to learn the language of which he felt scorned, and fight back with the weapon of his enemy. Because although he had been taught well by his mother never to pick a fight, especially from the losing side, Conrade had learned from the other boys in town that admitting defeat (under any circumstances) was unacceptable. If fists were out of the question—which it often was with girls—humiliation remained the only itinerary of attack. And Conrade was willing to admit that the filthy girl with the book had one-upped him with her decent mastery of his language. He would not let it happen again.

###

Ambitious, Conrade returned to an empty clearing the next day. He waited until the sun began to set and before he could lose his guiding light. He ran all the way home to an inquisitive mother, concerned for her son whose face was red. He kneaded his eyes with his fists all through dinner and did not come out of his room all night. Sylvie’s heart reached at the sounds of sniffles and hiccups coming from behind his door. She was certain he had gotten ganged up on by the village boys for his patchy pants again, while Conrade sat by candlelight, vigorously reading the poems, face flush, eyes slack. Humiliated by all his efforts being thwarted by some ugly, stupid girl, who disappears.

How he hated her.

As the week passed, he continued to return like a ghost. And she was never there. He began to practice the lines of poetry with the spittle of venom and desire to hurt. Every day, for a week, he readied himself for war, only to find himself without an opponent. Her continued absence only fueled his hate.

Soon, he had read and practiced everything in the woodcutter’s book enough times to begin to recognize how all the words sound together. What once was so foreign for Conrade, became understandable and beautiful.

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Conrade squinted one eye more than the other as he watched the blurry scenery get snatched past his line of vision whenever he tried to adjust to one scene, one thing. A passing tree, an open field, the vast horizon of faint blue over lush green. His eyes would try to follow one thing before immediately getting distracted by something else as it blew past the train window. He squinted a bit more, his small index fingers twitching in his lap as if pulling the triggers of two guns. He surreptitiously aimed at all the passing trees and rogue farms outside.

   He chewed his lower lip, closing one eye as the other squinted more. Ready. Aim. Fire. Down, down, down. Conrade grinned, opening his eyes to see everything clearly again, his feet resuming their swinging motion.

   “Que vois-tu, mon ange?” Sylvie asked quietly, tilting her head to look at her son beside her, curious as to what Conrade was so fascinated by. She wondered if Conrade was even seeing the scene or if he saw something else entirely. She had always found children amazing by the way they became so easily immersed and impressed by the smallest of things that adults outgrew and found insignificant. With a ghostly smile on her thin lips, she happily witnessed her son enjoying the view, running her calloused fingers through Conrade’s unruly brown hair affectionately to swipe it to the side.

   Conrade brought his shoulders up in a shrug as a response, making a somewhat annoyed sound in the back of his throat at his mother stroking his hair. He didn’t move away from the uncomfortable touch and didn’t look away from the window.

   “We’re almost there,” Sylvie said with cheerful excitement that beautifully masked their real reason for leaving France. “Londres. I think that’s near where your father was from.”

   “Will we get to see him?” Conrade asked flatly, though his heart stammered for a moment at the possibility.

   Conrade could feel the answer hanging in the air, stifling it, before his mother could release a breath. He could even feel his mother’s eyes on him, wanting to meet his gaze, but Conrade felt that his eyes were quite preoccupied at the moment. Visions of meeting some mysterious man, a soldier, invaded his imagination to replace an actual memory as he waited for his mother to tell him in that soft voice that,     No, of course not, mon ange. He’s far too busy for such things.

 

His mother insisted upon reminding him that his father was a soldier and a good man, but whenever Conrade’s young curiosity begged to question why he would leave if his so-called father was a good soldier with his honor to uphold, his mother would gently pat his head and promise to tell him when he was older, when he would understand. Conrade yearned bitterly for time to pass faster so he could be a man and hear what his mother had to say about his father, as do most ten-year-old boys. He wished he could hop on a train, just like he was doing with his mother on their way to London, and pass the years of his life and just watch them go by outside the window, enjoying the view, shooting all the moments he chose to forget and the people that had wronged him.

The fact that he lacked a father made him different from other children; something Conrade learned very quickly. The realizations that his lifestyle was not of a “normal” boy were always jarring for him. The first realization that he was poorer than most, therefore had less than most. The second realization that because he had an absent father that wasn’t a soldier who had lost his life for his country during the war, he not only lacked the honor passed down for most single parent children, but also the understanding of the unconditional love that most children had double of. The third and final realization that though he didn’t have what most kids had, there was nothing he could do to make that truth go away. To some selfish degree only acceptable at a young age, Conrade had asked his mother how he could help them get more money and bring back his father. Sylvie, having been touched by Conrade’s seeming sensitivity and intuition, had only smiled sadly and cooed at her son that having him was all she could ever ask for and nothing else.



 

He had always wondered with a sadness unfamiliar to one so young, why his father wouldn’t come see him. Why did he have to go in the first place? He looked at his mother’s gentle profile, dark eyes hungry for answers. There was a curiosity and level of judgment in his gaze that his mother wouldn’t face. Couldn’t face. The way he sometimes gripped the hem of her dress, looking up at her with fierce eyes that burned with a passion that young Conrade could not yet recognize; it was enough to make Sylvie want to weep and laugh. So intelligent yet still naïve. How to explain? How?

 

In the midst of these thoughts, Conrade pulled out a crinkled, folded notebook with all those English poems transcribed with all of his angry and vehement scribbled notes. He could hear his mother's lilt of a voice disappear in the sonic world of those poems that made him think of his clearing. Of the woodcutter, whom he'd miss and denied he ever cried for. Of that ugly, mud princess who's country he now goes to. Escapes to. And in an uncomplicated way, he hates and loves that mud princess for what she did to him. And wonders if he would ever see her again. If he should go looking for her. If she waits for him the way he did for his forever-absent father. He pondered this as his mother ran her fingers through his hair, combing it back and soothing him, it being her turn to stare out the window, wondering what her new job as a maid for a wealthy family in London would bring. What indiscretions she would have to tolerate for the large life she held fast beside her.

 

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Chapter One-Want and Need

Want and Need

 

They move in mysterious ways, dancers stretching and bending to the greater will that possesses them. They had the power to enchant even frozen men in the glass windows of the classroom. They pool in, mere colors, wanting only to inhabit the same space as those lips.

What those lips could do to a boarding school student reaching adulthood was unfathomable.

The ache in Conrade’s bones push against his very skin to reach out to them. He can only sigh and beg for the ache to leave him just as easily as it had come.

They uncurl into that stance, the one that makes their very softness tangible in the stuffy air.

Still young and hopeful, he was naïve to ever believe a breath could carry the ache away. Not when that smile inhabited her lips the way they did. He felt the room contract.

Unlike the beauty of sunlight pouring in and over the students like paint, her smile terrifies him in a way that’s inescapable. Futile to resist.

“…Conrade?”

So why would he?

An irritable grunt escapes him. The smile departs.

He regrets his thoughtlessness.

“Are you following the material, Conrade?”

The smirk crawls onto his face before he can manage to discipline it.

“Yes, ma’am, I am.”

Conrade is unsure, himself, where the gall to condescend his professor comes from. He blames the same face, the same lips, for releasing the beastly sneer from his own mouth. He can feel the other students’ eyes rake over his back. His insolence had become commonplace in the classroom, especially when it pertains to Gabrielle Addison’s Literature class.  

"Well, for such confidence, I'm sure you have a very good explanation of why Shakespeare portrays Romeo as he does?"

The smug turn on her mouth made Conrade lick his own.

"Because it is accurate," Conrade mused, tapping the edge of his pen against his notebook rythmically.

"Elaborate." She enunciated every word as if to injure him.

"Men, or rather, young men, are arrogant, sensitive, and fickle."

Conrade drew great pleasure in seeing his professor show legitimate intrigue. "'Fickle?' Romeo?"

"All young men," he corrected. The interest had given way to a stonier look. Conrade preferred it.

"Instead of speaking in riddles, why don't you come out and share with us all what exactly you mean when you say Romeo--and 'all young men' are fickle?"

 

His male peers turned to look at him with an almost accusatory stare, while is female ones looked thirsty for some kind of key to the destruction of man.

"Romeo doesn't care about anyone," Conrade began, unable to keep from scoffing at the stares he received. But he never looked away from the incindierary ice behind Ms. Addison's eyes.

"Romeo cares only for himself. It's clear from the moment he is introduced to the play, distracted from his friends over a woman he will soon drop for a much less convenient one."

The comment garnered amused chuckles, but Ms. Addison remained frozen, like a warrior goddess' marble statue, in full color and depth and life, waiting for her ward to move before any external decision was made.

"Why choose Juliet, unless it's simply for the mere chase?" Conrade's tongue did not falter and he prayed to whatever God there may or may not be that it didn't show in the dilation of his pupils or in the swallow hidden in his throat. "Juliet, a fourteen year old girl, of a rival family, to be wed to another. It all makes for an interesting story. But it's not real emotion."

"And what is real emotion?" As Conrade curled her words in his mouth like marbles, he thought he could see one of her shapely eyebrows draw up, waiting.

"Pure. And we all know Romeo's intentions weren't as clean as Shakespeare's love sonnet soul might suggest."

The class erupted in a low rumble of internal discussion, questions, greivances. But all that mattered was his professor, standing with her arms crossed, leaning on her desk, eyes gazing up at her prococious student with a most malicious grin.

Gripped with fear and lust, Conrade knew that smile would consume him.

And in the next moment, it was gone.

"Well done," she praised, walking behind her desk toward the board. "Conrade makes astute observations of the male perspective."

She turns away to whipe away the chalk, signifying the end of class. Almost to the blackboard more than the class, she says,

"But Mr. Conrade also forgets, that women know men can fall easily for simply beauty."

As everyone packed up their books, Conrade did not immediately get up, staring at the nape of Ms. Addison's neck. Her head twists around, one marvellous blue marble of an eye staring up at him and added,

"-And have fallen for much less."

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It is early evening in Paris. The yellowed sky blushes at the approaching night. What remains of the day anticipates the oppressive darkness that brought forth the small specks of modest, unassuming light. Conrade stands outside, framed by the long doorway of the terrace, staring intently past the movement in the city’s buildings. He breathes the last of the day’s warm breeze and braces himself for the night’s unforgiving chill.

What was he doing there? He wonders. Why had he come when summoned, like a good, little soldier? Or a slave. Enslaved by his own will. He never realized such a thing was possible until this night.

Conrade crushes away the thought with his cigarette and flicks the butt away. He watches it fall, feigning interest for its trajectory. He grimaces around another and pats himself down in search of a light, only to have one abrasively presented to him.

“I thought you were quitting.” Gabrielle holds her lighter in front of him with a light shawl held loosely around her. She gives him an all too knowing smile, the same one that Conrade resents deeply for being so trite.

“I was,” Conrade mumbles, reluctantly accepting the light before looking away. He finds it unsettling that Gabrielle can appear before him so easily and silently. It makes it all the more impossible to know whether she’s an elusive figment of his mind or a mere ghost of a memory. 

“Why so contemptuous about it?” she asks amusedly. “You’re always so angry.”

“I have much to be angry about,” he replies. Gabrielle’s close proximity makes him shift stiffly.

“Tell me about it,” she instructs, the smooth curve of her shoulder peeking out of the thin shawl. “It’s not often we get to talk like this.”

“I have nothing to say to you.” And Conrade wants so badly to believe his own words, but instead finds a snarl creep into his expression at his own dishonesty. 

Gabrielle tilts her head to look at Conrade’s face with intrusive blue eyes, the muscles in her face falling easily into comfortable interest.

“You can’t even look at me, can you?”

The gentle lilt of Gabrielle’s voice does nothing to alleviate the mocking jab behind her words. When Gabrielle speaks, it left even Conrade wincing, yet still curious for what other sensations she could possibly evoke by just talking to him.

Conrade finally turns to look down at her, releasing a cloud of smoke to obscure her expression.

“I find the sight of you repugnant.”

Gabrielle laughs, and leaves Conrade feeling juvenile once again. He knows that no matter what he said or how badly he wanted to produce equally injurious words, Gabrielle would continue to laugh.

“You haven’t changed at all,” she muses, still chuckling. “I do appreciate consistency.”

Gabrielle runs her fingertips up Conrade’s forearm, following the inflections of his muscles as he tenses under her touch.

“And you,” Conrade replies, turning to Gabrielle with full force with her wrist now twisted in his grip. “Still living as if you can do whatever you like to people.”

“Are you suggesting that I can’t?” Gabrielle asks. She grinds her teeth as she flexes her fingers in Conrade’s hold, showing no sign of moving away despite the way Conrade’s shadow swallows her.

Conrade towers over the slight woman, feeling a false sense of empowerment as he squeezes around her thin wrist in attempts to break it, forcing her closer to him. He could destroy her physical being in seconds with his bare hands.

“Answer me,” is her curt demand, eyes trained on him, revealing no response to Conrade’s hold aside from her other hand clenching her shawl.

Conrade searches Gabrielle’s expectant eyes for a niche to worm through, a weakness in her defenses. But even as he feels Gabrielle’s tendons bend under his grip and sees the lock in her jaw and feels the strain in her eyes, he cannot break her down. He cannot tear her open and finally see what’s behind the pretty and fatal front and use it to destroy her.

He releases her with a sigh, turning his back on her to finish his neglected cigarette.

He knows whatever Gabrielle hides away, it would sooner destroy him than her.

“I wasn’t suggesting anything,” he replies.

“I see,” Gabrielle whispers, following his eyes out to the city’s horizon.

Conrade licks his lips, releasing smoke with a tired exhale. He stretches his thick fingers and begins to absently pick at the peeling black paint, the fingers holding his cigarette quivering.

“It’s getting late,” Gabrielle says, tugging the shawl more closely around her body as the night air settles in. “We should start getting ready to go out.”

Conrade hadn’t planned on sticking around long enough to receive an extended invitation to dinner, having anticipated all of Gabrielle’s attempts to make him stay.

“I’ll be in, in a moment,” he finds himself answering. He’s surprised at how easily he had submitted to her, and even a bit put off by Gabrielle’s seeming indifference to his newfound civility. 

When she turns to go back inside, Conrade straightens up. He silently places a hand at the root of her neck. She freezes at the touch, as if preparing for his crushing fingers to close her throat, but does not move away or turn to face him. Though usually so unsure and suspicious, Conrade feels confidence pulse through him in his movements. Conrade stands behind her, feeling the warmth emanate and build in the small space between them. The heats of their bodies reach their arms out to each other, just barely touching, but unbearably close. He presses the bridge of his nose against her cheek, fingers gently stroking the back of her neck.

Conrade felt Gabrielle relax. Her fingertips trail down his stubbled jawline, and she listens to the quiet texture and subtle warmth beneath them. Her actions are more scientific than affectionate. With his cigarette still burning in his fingers, Conrade places his hand over Gabrielle’s and removes it from his face. Cradling Gabrielle’s hand with delicate care that seems unreal after such a vice-like grip, Conrade brings her hand up to press his lips against the inside of her bruised wrist. Conrade kisses along the hot flesh, already able to see the puckered redness on her usual unblemished skin. It looks raised and unpleasant on her, like a gift that’s worn only to assure the giver it was appreciated, despite how hideous it was. Obligatory.

Conrade thinks he felt Gabrielle’s fingertips skating along his hairline, twisting around the ends of his dark hair, but he could never be certain of such things with her.

Just as he starts to believe in Gabrielle’s gentle touch, she slides her hand out of his grip with ease and resumes her exit without a word. He watches her, feeling that heaviness so closely associated with the sight of her walking away that brings such freeing relief, such dull, persistent pain.

He looks back out at the night and marvels at how Paris carries the crushing weight with feigned lightness; able to shimmer and breathe without daring to outshine the stars in the sky. With a final drag, Conrade crushes away the last of his cigarette, distracted when Gabrielle calls to him from inside. He obediently goes, leaving the cigarette butt crippled on the black railing.

 

 

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interlude 01

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Chapter Two

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interlude 02

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Chapter Three

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interlude 03

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Chapter Four

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interlude 04

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Chapter Five

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interlude 05

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Chapter Six-Even

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interlude 06

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Chapter Seven

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Outro-Reuniting

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~

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