on my part, I realized that after it ended. It was . . . thrall. He was, literally, everything a young woman could have wanted or asked for.”
She paused a moment. Not stalling now, Eve noted, but looking back. Remembering. “He didn’t love me. I realized that sooner than I realized my own feelings, but I wanted him to. Desperately. So I tried, as young women often do, to be what he wanted. He and I and Patrice and Sly went everywhere together. It was exciting, and God, so much fun. Weekends at Newport or the Côte d’Azur, an impromptu dinner trip to Paris. Anything and everything.”
She took a deep breath. “He was my first lover. I was naive and nervous, and he was very considerate. The first time. He wanted other things, things that made me uncomfortable. But he didn’t push, not overtly. Still, the longer we were together, the more I felt something off. Something . . . as if I’d catch a shadow or movement out of the corner of my eye, then turn and it would be gone. But I knew I’d seen it.”
She drank, cleared her throat. “He enjoyed illegals. Many did, and it was recreational. Or it seemed so. Then again, recreation was what he did, what we did, so there was always a little boost of something. And he did pressure me to use, to have fun, not to be so closed in.
“When he and Sly were together, there was a kind of wildness. And it was appealing at first, exciting at first. But then it got to be too much. Too fast, too hard, too wild because, at the core I wasn’t what I was trying to be.”
She paused, breathed, and on the arm of the chair Anna continued to sit. A silent wall of support.
“He started hurting me. Just a little, little accidents—accidents that left bruises, and I started to realize he liked to see me frightened. He’d always soothe me after, but I could see on his face he enjoyed frightening me—accidentally locking me in a dark room, or driving too fast, or holding me under just a bit too long when we went to the beach. And the sex got rough, too rough. Mean.”
She stared into her iced coffee for a long moment—remembering again, Eve thought—but her hand stayed steady as she lifted the glass to drink.
“He was so charming otherwise, and so smooth. For a time I thought it was me, that I was too closed in, not open enough to the new or the exciting. But . . .”
“You didn’t want what he wanted,” Eve prompted. “Or to do what he pressured you to do.”
“No, I didn’t. It just wasn’t me. I started to realize, more to accept, I was pretending to be something I wasn’t to please him and I knew I couldn’t keep it up. I didn’t want to keep it up,” she corrected. “Once I overheard him and Sly talking about it, laughing at me. I knew I had to break it off, but didn’t know how. My family adored him. He was so charming, so sweet, so perfect. Except for those movements out of the corner of the eye, except for the accidents. So I picked a fight with him, in public, because I was afraid of him. And I maneuvered him into breaking it off. He was so angry, and he said horrible things to me, but every word was a relief because I knew he didn’t want me, and he wouldn’t bother about me. He’d walk away, and I’d be free. He never spoke to me again.”
She shook her head, let out a short, surprised laugh. “I mean that literally. Never another word. It was as if all those months hadn’t happened. We both attended my cousin’s wedding to Sly, and he didn’t even speak to me, or look at me—not, if you understand me, in a way that was a deliberate snub. It was as if I were invisible, didn’t exist. Never had. I was just no longer there for him. And that was an even bigger relief.”
They look through you, Roarke has said, and Eve understood exactly what Felicity meant.
“Is that what you wanted to know?”
“Yeah. You have a nice place here, Doctor VanWitt. I bet you have nice kids, and a good husband, work you’re good at and enjoy, friends who matter.”
“Yes, I do. Yes.”
Eve rose. “Maybe you were young, maybe you were naive and dazzled and swept.