The Beautiful Ones - Silvia Moreno-Garcia Page 0,113
Luc Lémy. I do not love him, and I do not believe I could find true happiness with him.”
Now that she had started speaking, it all became easier. She was nervous but determined. She had broken to the surface. She was not drowning but living, everything inside her eager and awake.
“I am in love with another man. Since Oldhouse and before that. He is intelligent and dedicated and kind. He understands me, and I believe I understand him. I like the way he talks and the way he smiles. I like many things about him, I cannot ever remember all of them.”
She approached him and did not know what to do with her hands, she was too nervous. She settled for clutching them together, and her voice dipped.
“I love you,” she concluded.
The minutes went by in a dense silence. He looked more wearied than pleased. Then again, she was unsure how men should take declarations of love. This did not appear in any of her books.
“You have nothing to say to me?” she asked.
“Nina,” he said with a sigh, “Nina we must get you back to your party.”
He extended a hand, as if to point her to the door, and she tensed at once.
“No,” she said, brushing his hand away. “No, did you not hear me? I do not want to go back. I won’t marry him.”
He gave her an odd, brittle look. His shoulders were hunched.
Anger licked her skin.
“What is wrong with you? I am here, baring my heart to you, and you can hardly look at me.”
“Decisions made in the haste of the moment are often regretted. Come morning, you might see matters in a different light,” he replied.
“Different light?”
“Yes. What do you think will happen to your reputation? There will be a scandal if you break this engagement, doubly compounded if you break it for me.”
“I know exactly what I am doing. I have finally regained my senses and realize I cannot walk a path of lies,” she told him.
He ran a hand through his hair and let out a low “no.”
If she’d been wiser, she might have chosen this moment to leave him, mortified by the whole sorry chain of events that had led her to his home. Instead, Nina stared at him. It was the folly of youth that gave her courage.
“You are a coward,” she said.
He snapped up straight, tall and firm again, his shoulders stiff.
“Yes,” she pressed on. “I see it now. You can act the part of a secure man onstage, but you are nothing but a coward. You fear what they’ll say about you.”
“No, I fear for you,” he said vehemently.
He looked scared to death, and she felt like calling him every terrible name she’d ever heard because she could see him receding inward, his head falling. She thought, He intends to leave it at this.
Nina shook all over in disbelief.
“I fear for my heart, too,” he said, raising his head and piercing her with his eyes.
Hector made a noise—it sounded like he was chuckling, she could not be sure. His thick eyebrows were furrowed, and he raised his hands, then dropped them heavily at his side, his fingers curled tight.
“You have no idea, Nina, what it is like to love someone so much, it tears you apart, that you think you will die when you lose them. And after experiencing such awful pain, you never want to feel it again any more than a man wants another limb hacked off.”
“I have some idea,” she whispered.
He did not reply, but she noticed how his jaw clenched at that.
Hector walked away from her, moving along the table, to the other end of the vast room, which served as parlor and dining area alike, this odd home he filled with its jumble of eclectic objects.
“You are a coward.”
“Nina—” he began, and she bridged the distance between them as quickly as he had established it, reaching his side.
“Do you think you can put your heart in a box of iron and throw away the key? Do you think that is the best way to live? Keep your damn heart in a box and let nothing touch it!” she exclaimed.
Ready to depart, now that she had said her piece, she whirled away from him. Her chest burned with ardent sorrow, but at least she was glad she was not weeping.
“No, I do not think it is possible, because you are in there already!” he yelled back.
She gasped but remained afraid that if she said or