A week ago, I became a wolf for him, and he hunted me through the woods. When I open the door, he turns quickly.
"Evelyn, yes, hello," he says, covering fast his surprise. "I didn't hear you on the step."
"I did," Nick admits, pushing his black frame glasses up on his nose in prissy superiority. His pale fingers twist the yarn into a lacy pattern, fast and expert. It's one of the many hobbies he's picked up in his thousands of years of life; a little something to pass the time.
"You've come early," Adam comments, marking the unusual hour of my skulking. "I didn't expect you for some time. I'm..."
He trails off, and Nick fills in his sentence without looking up.
"We've made plans, my darling," he says, his tone apologetic.
"What plans?" I ask, settling on the bed. I don't believe them, really, and if they were to convince me, I think about what sort of tantrum I would have to throw to get them to stay. I would rely on my feminine wiles, if I had any.
"We were to take a walk to the nest of a..." Nick trails off and looks at Adam.
"A Northern Saw-whet owl," Adam supplies. "They're quite small and difficult to-"
"Yeah, that," Nick interrupts. "Supposed to be youngin' in there, which he swears to make a gift of to me."
"Oh, that's very nice," I tell the back of Adam, who's ears are red in embarrassment. "It's sweet of you, Adam, it really is."
"Thank you, Evelyn," he says into the window.
"I know what you're about," Nick accuses me, his voice suddenly loud. "You're here early because Lily is speakin to that Jack character."
I roll over to face away from him.
"I don't care that they're talking."
My tone is one studiously arranged to imply that I either don't care or I do, depending on how irritated the listener becomes with me. The tone of plausible deniability.
"Normally when someone is home, you can't get enough ears to talk of all your paranoia," Nick continues, his needles clacking. "I thought you'd be beside yourself, especially after Jack."
"Well. I'm not," I tell him.
"And I don't suppose it's because you've bloomed into a fountain of trust over a fortnight?" he asks, his voice sarcastic. "Haven't mustered up all the love and forgiveness required to look beyond all that's come before, have you?"
"Nicholas," Adam warns him, but he continues on his self-satisfied tirade.
"No, of course not, pet, you'd only be pretend to be those things in order to put on a good face."
The lamplight in Adam's cabin is dim enough that I can hide my expression, as far away from it as I am, and Nick's smirk is evident just beside it. I swim around the waters of my restlessness. I could pick a fight with him, easily, and I know he wants me to, because he missed me, too, and he is perverse and wants only to know what's happening in me. His smug persistence is a clandestine and tormented kind of begging. When he really wants to know something from me, he'll disengage completely and tell me he doesn't care in the least.
I could be reasonable, which Adam is silently pleading with me to do. If I'm reasonable, then there's no need to engage in Nick's doublespeak, which would frustrate me and the night would end with us apart instead of together. The posture of his shoulders is one I know so well I don't need to see his face: Don't indulge him, Evelyn. You can talk to me.
"I guess it feels different," I tell them, and Adam's hands slide relieved into his pockets.
"How so?" he asks me, finally turning and ambling to the bed. Nick curls into himself to make room for us.
"I don't know," I tell him, putting my head in his lap. "Jack being here was so ugly. I don't want to do that again. I don't want anywhere near anything he has to say that's justified."
"Understandable, that," Nick chimes in. "But that's always been your take, and you can't resist it in the end."
"I just don't want to be the fucking spokesman for it, Nick, Jesus Christ," I snap and him, and he smiles. "You don't know what place that puts me in."
"Oh?" he asks me, arching a single heavy brow. "That's rich, that is."
"I'M NOT FUCKING APOLOGIZING FOR YOU ANYMORE," I yell at him, and Adam tightens his grip on my shoulders.
"Eve," he says, his voice low and warning. "You're in desperate need of some perspective."
"Oh, fuck your perspective. No one wanted to back me up when she was here except Brad. Everyone took the same approach. If we don't look at it, it doesn't matter. And I just had to fucking look at it myself."
Both men react to my broad generalization with indignation. They bluster for a moment before settling.
"That..."
"Pure fiction, that is."
"Are you. Did you mean to imply..."
"I told her weekly she wouldn't look me in the face," Nick mutters, his brows now met on his forehead and his expression black.
"And she and I had a very unpleasant confrontation about her lack of regard for me," Adam reminds me. "I lost her as a friend that night, Evelyn. You realize that."
"We all did," Nick adds. Jack had not stayed long enough for Nick to tell her they were siblings, or to witness her twin coming back.
"By holding her to the truth. You lost her as a friend. Sure," I agree. "But I lost something, too. I lost an ability to even be at home, by looking at everything like she was going to destroy it at any moment. You can't... you can't fucking live in the house as it's burning down. And all the things I was seeing her do...all the little manipulations were just new fires."
"So you wanted us to live in the burning house with you then, yeah?" Nick asks me. "You wanted us to all move to one side and let your paranoia through as paramount to our lives? I'm sorry, Ev, but that's madness."
"No," I bark at him. "That's just my point. It was fucking awful then, and I can't bring myself to do it now."
There's a silence for maybe three minutes before Adam coughs into his hand, and I hope for a moment I got him sick.
"Of course," he considers. "It was breathtaking to watch you do it."
"What?" I ask.
"Apologize for us. For me. To demand we be considered."
"Tireless fight for justice, that," Nick says, his own tone considerably more disdainful.
"You also apologized quite a bit to Jack for Bonaventure," Adam continues. "Taking a stand against how...things can sometimes look, from the outside, as you say."
The fight we're having has been had a dozen times or more, leaving me in the place where I wish I would be told what to do, specifically, and I never am. Yes, I can easily focus on how something might look to outsiders, obsess over it, explain it, dissect it, hope they understand it. It's painful and has repercussions on the house. But stop telling me how much you like it, for fuck's sake.
"Whatever," I dismiss him, and he chuffs in irritation, and scratches his eyebrow. I lay quiet for a long time, until he relents his irritation and begins to stroke my hair. I know I'm interrupting them, and I know that they both, in a way that is intensely secret, want me to. Knowing that leaves me in a position to call that to light, to pretend I'm interrupting and sorry for it, to gain their affirmations of my own insecurities, but it would be dragging that secret to the foreground, and their resentment of me then would become brutal.
"To be honest, I'm not especially suspicious of Jack's motives. It's not that, really. Jack, she wanted things I didn't like. I know that was about me less than it was about her. But the truth is, what he wants is fine."
"I imagine it's what he DON'T want then," Nick says, his voice flat. His addiction to the blurting of sensitive truths is something that makes me feel like we're constantly playing the game Operation.
There's a long silence where I consider lying again, and relent.
"Yeah," I tell him.
His derision vanishes on a dime, his voice dropping soft to something intimate and feeling so fast I feel adrenaline in my veins at the turn.
"I'm sorry for that, my darling."
"He said he was in love, rather ardently before," I confess to them, biting back a cynical laugh at my expense. "Not just with me, but maybe with everyone. With... this house. With Brad, even. Maybe it's stupid, I can't tell. It feels like..."
I want to say to them, "That he's not in love with me anymore," but I can't quite bring myself to say something that dramatic. It seems too pathetic and my mood is one where I don't want to feel it. When I consider the hard lines of reality I'm so good at considering, I see that the expression of you being in love with me was some kind of allowance given in the height of a moment of romance, and that it dissipated over a short amount of time to something I would name differently now. Whatever I named in the first letter I sent.
Those hard lines of reality are ones I follow to see all the things I saw with Jack home before. The motivations, the secrets, the justifications, the confusion. The place where I see the house burning down, and all the ways I could attempt to stop it. I see what happened between us, plain and without any emotion, really. We didn't really know each other, things were said, lets be friends. I see along the substantive branches of the trees, or the wires swinging in arcs from speaker to speaker that what I can TOUCH, what's REAL, is that there was a game of pretend we were playing a long time ago, and now we've somehow grown up.
Inside the cabin, where I wish I could live always, is another story, where what you said is real and can't be erased. Where we were once in love and now are not. Choosing to live there together, Adam bites his thumbnail and tears it away in his teeth.
"I remember, you were heartbroken," he says to me. "You did want him to stay. You grieved as we've all learned to. That all loss of that nature is... inevitable."
