“Has anything happened to suggest that your Brynne needs protection? Seems a bit alarmist really. Why did her father ask you?”
“The senator’s son is still finding trouble it seems. He was home on leave and one of his mates got killed in an altercation at a bar. More loud noise that politicians hate for a reason. It causes digging into places they don’t want people to know about. Could just be an isolated incident, but the friend knew about the video. Brynne’s dad went on full alert at that point. In his words, ‘When the people who know about that video start turning up dead, then I need to protect my daughter.’” I shrugged. “He asked me to help him. I said no initially and offered a referral to another firm, but he sent me her picture in an email.”
“And you couldn’t say no after you’d seen her picture.” Dad worded it as a statement. I knew then that he understood how I felt about Brynne.
“No. I could not.” I shook my head. “I was mesmerized. I went to the gallery show and bought her portrait. And when she came into the room, Dad, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She intended to walk to the Tube in the dark so I introduced myself and convinced her to let me take her home in my car. I tried to leave her alone after that. I really wanted to…”
He smiled again. “You’ve always been a protective lad.”
“But it became so much more for me than just a job. I want to be with Brynne…” I looked over at my father sitting quietly and listening, his big body still fit for a man of sixty-three. I knew that he understood. I didn’t need to explain any more about my motivations and that part was a relief.
“But she found out that her father hired you to protect her?”
“Yes. She overheard a telephone call in my office. Her dad exploded when he realized we were seeing each other and challenged me on it.” I figured my dad might as well know the whole bloody mess.
“She felt betrayed and exposed I imagine. If her past with the senator’s son, or whomever, is something that you know, and didn’t tell her you knew?” Dad shook his head. “What were you thinking? And she should be told about the death of that other bloke—about the possibility of a threat toward her. And that you love her. And that you intend to still keep her safe. A woman needs the truth, son. You’ll have to tell her everything if you want her to trust you again.”
“I did tell her.” I blew out a huge sigh and leaned my head back on the couch to look at the ceiling. Soot stretched and rearranged himself in my lap.
“Well, try harder then. Start with the truth and go from there. She will either accept you or she won’t. But you don’t have to give up either. You can keep trying.”
I took out my mobile and pulled up the picture of Brynne looking at the painting and held it out for Dad. He smiled as he studied her image through his glasses. A reminiscent suggestion in his eyes told me he was thinking of my mother. He handed it back after a moment.
“She’s a lovely girl, Ethan. I hope we get the chance to meet some day.” Dad looked me straight in the eye and told me like it is. No sympathy, just the brutal truth. “You’ll have to follow your heart, son…nobody can do that for you.”
I left my dad’s place later in the afternoon, went home and worked out for three hours in my gym. I kept at it until I was nothing but a quivering mass of aching muscles and sweaty stink. The bubbly soak in my tub after was nice though. And the smokes. I smoked too much now. It wasn’t good for me and I needed to tone it down. But f**k, the urge was strong. Being with Brynne had soothed me enough so I didn’t crave it as much, but now that she’d left, I was chain smoking like the serial killer we’d joked about in our very first conversation.
I hung the Djarum off my lip and stared down at the bubbles.
Brynne loved taking baths. She didn’t have a tub at her flat and told me she missed it. I loved the idea of her naked in my bathtub. Her naked… This was something that did me absolutely no good to think about but yet I’d spent many hours doing it. And if I reasoned why, was the basis for everything that’d happened with us. Her naked… That photograph Tom Bennett sent to me was the same one I bought at the show. From a pragmatic view it was just a picture of a beautiful naked body anyone would appreciate, male or female. But even with the little he told me in the beginning, paired with that picture of her in all its vulnerability, allure, and stark beauty; the thought she could be in danger or that someone would purposefully hurt her, polarized me to go out to the street and get her safely into my car. I just couldn’t walk away from her and keep my conscience intact. And once we’d met my mind went mad with fantasies. All I could see in my head while we talked was…her naked.
My bath started losing its heat after an hour, and understandably, its appeal. So I got out and dressed and went in search of the book. Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne.
Something Dad mentioned reminded me of it. He’d said my mother loved reading the great poets. I knew Brynne loved Keats. I’d found the book on the sofa where she’d obviously been reading and asked her about it. Brynne had confessed her love for him and wanted to know why I even had the book in my house. I told her that my dad was always giving me books that people left behind in his cab. He hated to toss them out so he would bring them home whenever he acquired anything decent. When I’d bought my flat, he’d hauled over a few boxes of books to fill the shelves and it must have been in the lot. I truthfully told her I’d never read any Keats.
I was reading now.
Keats had a way with words I was discovering. For a man who died at only twenty five, he sure packed some emotion into his letters to his girlfriend when they were apart. And I could feel his pain like it was my own. It was my own.
I decided to write her a letter using a pen and paper. I found some nice cotton stationary in my office and took the book with me. Simba flickered his fins from the aquarium when I walked up, always expecting a treat. I am a sucker for begging animals so I dropped in a frozen krill and watched him devour it.
“She loves you, Simba. Maybe if I tell her that you are pining and off your feed she’ll come back.” So I was talking to fish now. How in the hell had I got to this lowly point? I ignored the urge for a cigarette, washed my hands and sat down to write.
Brynne,
“I do not know how elastic my spirit might be, what pleasure I might have in living here if the remembrance of you did not weigh so upon me. Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammeled me, so destroyed my freedom.
…All my thoughts, my unhappiest days and nights have, I find not at all cured me of my love of Beauty, but made it so intense that I am miserable that you are not with me…I cannot conceive of any beginning of such love I have for you but Beauty.” July 1819
I know you will recognize the words of Keats. I started reading the book you like. I can say I have an understanding now of what the man was trying to express to Miss Brawne about how she had captured his heart.
Like you’ve captured my heart, Brynne.
I miss you. Thoughts of you never leave me, and if I can say it once more and have you believe me, then I guess there is some comfort in that. I can only try to make you know what I feel.
I am immensely sorry for keeping my knowledge of your past and how I came to notice you a secret, but you need to know something because it’s the brutal truth. I had no intentions of taking the job. I planned to give your father the name of another agency to secure you. I couldn’t do that though, as soon as I met you. I wanted to tell you that night on the street that your father was trying to arrange protection but when I saw how you looked at me, Brynne, I felt something—a connection with you. Things moved inside me and clicked into place. The missing piece of my puzzle? I don’t know what it was, I just know it happened to me the night we met. I tried to keep a distance and let you slip away back into your life, but I couldn’t do it. I was drawn to you from the first moment I saw your portrait. I had to know you. And then to be with you. To have you look at me and really see me. I know now that I fell in love. I fell in love with a beautiful American girl. You, Brynne.
There were many times I wanted to say how I came to find you that night at the gallery. I stopped myself every time because I was afraid of hurting you. I could see how haunted you were when you woke up with the nightmare. I could only guess as to why, but I would do anything to keep you from being hurt. I knew somehow that telling you your dad hired security to protect you from powerful political enemies would scare the hell out of you. It scares the hell out of me to think of anyone targeting you for harm, emotional or otherwise. I know you said I was fired, but if anything happens or somebody frightens you, I want you to call me and I will come to you in a moment. I am deadly serious about this. Call me.