The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,49
last, brittle thread to her old life has broken, and Addie has been set well, and truly, and forcibly free.
Paris, France
July 29, 1715
IV
Dreamer is too soft a word.
It conjures thoughts of silken sleep, of lazy days in fields of tall grass, of charcoal smudges on soft parchment.
Addie still holds on to dreams, but she is learning to be sharper. Less the artist’s hand, and more the knife, honing the pencil’s edge.
“Pour me a drink,” she says, holding out the bottle of wine, and the man pries out the cork and fills two glasses from the low shelf of the rented room. He hands her one, and she doesn’t touch it as he throws his back in a single swallow, downs a second before abandoning the glass and reaching for her dress.
“Where’s the rush?” she says, guiding him back. “You’ve paid for the room. We have all night.”
She is careful not to push him away, careful to keep the pressure of her resistance coy. Some men, she’s found, take pleasure in disregarding the wishes of a woman. Instead, Addie lifts her own glass to his hungry mouth, tips the rust-red contents between his lips, tries to pass the gesture off as seduction instead of force.
He drinks deep, then knocks the glass away. Clumsy hands paw at her front, fighting with the laces and the stays.
“I cannot wait to…” he slurs, but the drug in the wine is already taking hold, and soon he trails off, his tongue going heavy in his mouth.
He sags back onto the bed, still grasping at her dress, and a moment later his eyes roll back and he slumps sideways, lost to sleep before his head strikes the thin pillow.
Addie leans over and pushes until he rolls off the bed, hitting the floor like a sack of grain. The man lets out a muted groan, but does not wake.
She finishes his work, loosening the laces of her dress until she can breathe again. Paris fashion—twice as tight as country clothes, and half as practical.
She stretches out on the bed, grateful to have it to herself, at least for the night. She does not want to think about tomorrow, when she is forced to start again.
That is the madness of it. Every day is amber, and she is the fly trapped inside. No way to think in days or weeks when she lives in moments. Time begins to lose its meaning—and yet, she has not lost track of time. She cannot seem to misplace it (no matter how she tries) and so Addie knows what month it is, what day, what night, and so she knows it has been a year.
A year since she ran from her own wedding.
A year since she fled into the woods.
A year since she sold her soul for this. For freedom. For time.
A year, and she has spent it learning the boundaries of this new life.
Walking the edges of her curse like a lion in its cage. (She has seen lions now. They came to Paris in the spring as part of an exhibit. They were nothing like the beasts of her imagination. So much grander, and so much less, their majesty diminished by the dimensions of their cells. Addie went a dozen times to see them, studied their mournful gazes, looking past the visitors to the gap in the tent, the single sliver of freedom.)
A year she’s spent bound within the prism of this deal, forced to suffer but not die, starve but not waste, want but not wither. Every moment pressed into her own memory, while she herself slips from the minds of others with the slightest push, erased by a closing door, an instant out of sight, a moment of sleep. Unable to leave a mark on anyone, or anything.
Even the man slumped on the floor.
She draws the stoppered bottle of laudanum from her skirts, and holds it to the meager light. Three tries, and two bottles of the precious medicine wasted before she realized she could not drug the drinks herself, could not be the hand that did the harm. But mix it in the bottle of wine, reset the cork, and let them pour their own glass, and the action is no longer hers.
See?
She is learning.
It is a lonely education.
She tips the bottle, the last of the milky substance shifting inside the glass, and wonders if it might buy her a night of dreamless sleep, a deep and drugged peace.