The Saint(112)
“They’re in German. The right hand says—”
Before he could finish she grabbed his hand and yanked it across the table.
“Es war einmal,” she read. “Once there was …”
He handed over his left hand and she read aloud, “Und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute. And if they haven’t died, they are still living.”
“You know German?” Wyatt said, seeming to be in no hurry to take his hands away from her.
“German grandparents. You have the beginning and ending lines of German fairy tales tattooed on your hands.”
“Is that what those are? I walked into the shop and told them to give me whatever the special of the day was. That’s weird that tattoo parlors have those, right? I thought it was weird. You got any ink?”
“Not yet. I want to get the Jabberwocky tattooed on my back.”
“Jabberwocky? Better than a goddamn butterfly. Why him?”
“Jabberwocky’s my sa—” She stopped herself before she finished saying “safe word.” When she’d turned eighteen, Søren had instructed her to choose one. But that wasn’t a conversation she needed to have. “My spirit guide. You know, totem or whatever. So you like fairy tales?”
“Grimm’s fairy tales, the real ones. Not those Disney ones. The real stories.”
“The real fairy tales are incredibly violent,” Eleanor reminded him. She not only knew Grimm’s fairy tales, but she’d also read them in the original German. “In the original Cinderella the wicked stepsisters cut off their toes and heels to fit into the glass slipper.”
“I know. It’s not the Grimm’s version, but in the original French Sleeping Beauty, the sleeping princess doesn’t get kissed by the prince—”
“She gets raped. Small price to pay.”
Wyatt gaped at her.
“Rape is a small price to pay? Did you say that out loud in this school?” He glanced around wildly as if checking for spies and/or women’s studies majors.
“Sleeping Beauty has the same theme as the creation myth,” Eleanor said. “Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden so young and innocent. If they eat the forbidden fruit, they’ll have knowledge of good and evil. But they’ll also lose paradise. They give up paradise for knowledge without even knowing what that knowledge is. Sleeping Beauty loses her innocence in exchange for waking. Otherwise she’d live in a dreamland forever.”
“She didn’t consent to getting raped awake,” Wyatt reminded her.
“Adam and Eve didn’t know what they would win or what they would lose until they’d both won and lost it. It’s like that poem we read. The guy doesn’t know what the meaning is of the road he took until he got to the end of it. You choose first, then you find out what you’ve chosen after. Every choice has a price. Sometimes we don’t know what it is until after we’ve paid it.”
Wyatt leaned forward and stared at her from across the table.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Elle, but you should be a writer.”
“I am a writer.”
He nodded knowingly and tapped the table a few times as if in deep thought.
“Wyatt?”
“Give me a sec. I’m trying to figure out how to bring down a stealth bomber with a knife.”
“Don’t even try it. Do you write?”
“Yeah, but don’t tell anybody. Writing’s like masturbating. Everyone does it but no one likes to admit to it.”
“I admit to it.”
“Writing or masturbating?”
“Both.” Eleanor waggled her eyebrows at him before realizing that she was now in full-blown flirtation mode. She had to shut this down and fast.
“So what do you write?” she asked, trying to get onto a safer topic than sex.
“Mostly poetry about death and the meaninglessness of life and how you make decisions when you’re young that are arbitrary, but when you’re older you have to pretend like they meant something.”
“Holy shit. You’re Robert Frost, aren’t you?”
“Shh …” Wyatt hushed her as if she’d leaked a state secret. “Keep your voice down. I don’t want to get mobbed by the poetry groupies, which have never existed in the history of the world ever.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“And you’re beautiful and you speak German and you write and I want to move into your dorm room and sleep in your dirty clothes hamper.”
Eleanor stared blankly at him.
“The last part about the clothes hamper was too much, wasn’t it?” he asked.
“Only because I don’t have a dirty clothes hamper.”