I was home. Later, we had friends from school, but even then, we had to find rides places. I was with Julia more than I wasn’t.” Hannah closed her eyes, the smell of Julia hitting her memory: sweet and light and fruity, like gum and lipstick. Her voice drifted. “She was a writer. A lot of people didn’t know that. She scribbled in journals and loved pencil more than pen—so she could erase, make it perfect. She was a perfectionist. Everything in her room had a place; it had order. If it didn’t have a home, she threw it away. Nothing was sentimental. She didn’t get attached to things, she said.” So different from Hannah, whose spaces were always stormy—belongings strewed about, papers buried under clothing, subway tickets from vacations long over, small programs from museums, pamphlets from a whale watch she hadn’t even gone on. She tried to be tidy; it never worked. “She hated being alone. She was always looking for people, searching for something else, something better than what she had. She was an extrovert. She was funny. Always poking fun at people in a way that others called charming.”
“Like you,” Huck said, kindly. Too kind, really. Hannah’s humor ran more cutting, often called more bitchy than funny.
“No, people loved her. They tolerated me to get to her. Julia was everything more than me: prettier, funnier, kinder. I wanted to be just like her.” Hannah let out a short laugh, and Huck pulled her tight. Meant for comfort, but something about their newfound confidence made her heart quicken; she felt a pull down low in her belly, and she coiled a leg around his.
In the dark, Hannah’s mouth found the hollow of Huck’s throat, and he held her. He tasted of salt and skin, and she felt his sharp intake of breath. Her body moved to his, melted against him, and he whispered against her hair, her neck, “I love you, Hannah,” and she knew that he meant it. And that now, someday soon, he’d want to know all of her, the parts she’d kept secret: Wyatt. Julia and Aunt Fae and Trina. Wes. She’d never told anyone about her stepfather, not even Julia. She couldn’t imagine telling anyone now; it felt like it had all happened in another lifetime, to another person.
And still predominant, the circling uncertainty: Would Huck have loved her more had he never come to Brackenhill? Had he never seen with his own eyes the complications of her childhood, of her family? And what if he had never known the secrets of the castle, the ways in which this visit would change her, change them, because surely it would if it hadn’t already done so. She tried to push away this feeling—that this was an ending for them, not a beginning—and found she couldn’t. And maybe it was a necessary end: the end of false happiness. To be married, you had to be real. True. Complicated. Messy.
When they shed their clothes, Hannah had the disorienting feeling that she wasn’t in bed with Huck but with Wyatt. She remembered the first time, her first time ever, in Wyatt’s bed in his dad’s house, with the shades drawn in the middle of the day. She remembered the way he’d smelled—musky and woodsy—the way he’d moved, carefully, fervently, how fast it had been over. And the second time, that same day, hours later, when she’d climbed on top of him, clinging, desperate.
And now Huck whispering that he loved her as he climaxed. She felt the shame in that, thinking of another man during sex. Wyatt showing up at the front door had done a number on her.
She refocused on Huck, on his smile, a glint of something both loving and mischievous in his eyes. “I want to know all of you, Hannah,” he whispered. She let herself be pulled under, away from the castle, Uncle Stuart, the accident, the bone, to a place where nothing mattered, where her sister was alive and they were all happy and she could lie in the garden and see all four turrets in periphery and the sun beat down and she loved a man who loved her back.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Now
Hannah found Huck in the kitchen later, preparing a sandwich for dinner. She felt disoriented, hardly believing that Rink had found the jawbone this morning. That it was still the same day, even the same week.
A purple sky was a thin streak through the kitchen window. Twilight at Brackenhill. She remembered it.