“You. Are. Amazing,” he said, and kissed me.
At first I was too startled to say a word, and I froze under his embrace. His lips pressed against mine, insistent, and I was shocked to find myself responding to his kiss. My body began to lean forward just as Mark pulled back. His face was filled with joy.
“Amazing,” he repeated, but now his eyes darted back and forth to mine, searching me for an answer to the question he had just posed. We had been friends for so long, and I never realized that he might want anything more. Now I felt utterly confused, and my mouth dropped open, searching for the right words.
“Mark…” My words ran away from me. They always had.
A slight noise from the front of the library made me look up over Mark’s shoulder.
Eliot was standing not thirty feet away, and from the looks of it, he had seen everything.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
After hanging up the phone, Eliot became possessed with curiosity. They were only students, to be sure, but he knew what Brynn was capable of, and he was intrigued by the partial solution. He wanted to see more, and after some tossing in bed he realized that his brain would not let him sleep until he had satisfied his curiosity. He hopped into his car quickly and drove to the library, eager to examine their work. He hadn’t expected to find them still there, and he certainly hadn’t expected to find Brynn in the arms of that boy, Mark.
What’s more, he hadn’t expected the surge of jealousy that turned over in his stomach as he saw Brynn kiss Mark back.
Poisonous thoughts flooded his mind as he stood there, watching his hopes unravel in another man’s arms. He had not known how much he cared for Brynn, or maybe he had pushed the thoughts down again, suppressing his heart with his intellect so as to protect himself from hurt. As much as he rebelled against the feelings of hurt and rage that washed over him, he found his normally impenetrable inner defenses worn to a thin shield that buckled and broke even as he stood, eyes fixed on the scene before him.
Eliot could not bring himself to step out of sight until it was too late. Unable to think of anything to say or do, he simply turned and walked back down the stairs he came from. Initially he thought she might run after him, catch him, but he was at the bottom of the stairs and nothing had happened. Still in shock, he walked out to his car and drove away, and kept driving.
He didn’t know where he was going, and didn’t care. The city of Budapest loomed overhead, oppressively tall. People downtown swarmed the sidewalks, so he drove away, finding the less inhabited neighborhoods that stayed empty at night. Here the snow fell quietly under the street lamps, and only a few pedestrians bothered to wander the streets.
Spired churches and decaying walls loomed over him at every corner, and he soon came to the Danube, the dividing line between the two parts of the city. He parked at the side of a bridge and got out of his car. The cold of the night could not numb the hot rage he felt boiling inside of him. He walked to the middle of the bridge and stood there, looking out onto the river below him.
He remembered the last time he had been in Hungary. Over a decade ago, and every moment of that day stood out as clear in his memory as a picture in a frame. They lowered her into the ground, the coffin made out of fine polished oak. To last for years, the undertaker had said, and Eliot wanted to shake him by the shoulders and scream at him for the careless words. Years? What did that matter? The body inside of the casket would stay lifeless, forever, no matter how expensive the wood crate around it.
White rose petals covered the top of the coffin, and as the military men lowered it into the earth—Otto had insisted on a military guard—one corner had dipped down briefly a few inches lower than the others, sending a cascade of white petals over the dark glossy side of the coffin. The men quickly corrected the error, but Eliot could not erase the image from his mind. The petals like snow coming down like an avalanche over the coffin’s edge. The smell of the roses and the wet cold earth. The people around him crying, and his cheeks dry through it all.
When he returned home, sitting on the mantle inside of the house was another bouquet of white roses, sent from his brother; nobody else knew his address. A card of condolences tucked into the top, unsigned. Eliot had hurled the vase of roses against the wall and still felt nothing inside of him as he watched the glass shatter, the petals fall to the floor. There the shattered bouquet stayed for three days, the flowers wilting and turning brown on top of the burnished hardwood floor, until it as just another sweet dead thing. The housekeeper would sweep up the glass and the petals carefully when she came the next week, and then they would be gone too.