CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Pulling myself from another light sleep, I peer at the bedside clock. Four p.m. A pale gray seam lights the horizon, the place where the sea meets the sky. Rain falls again in a gloomy drizzle, drops gliding down the panes of the two large bedroom windows. A peaceful feeling spreads through me like hot syrup, sweet and thick.
I turn, reaching toward Flynn’s side of the bed. It’s empty, but the sheets are rumpled and still warm from his body.
I push the covers back and get to my feet. His gray T-shirt lies crumpled on the floor. I pick it up and put it on, letting the soft worn cotton envelop me. Orange spice and autumn leaves.
Brushing my hair away from my face, I glance around. Like the kitchen, the bedroom is small but recently renovated with smooth hardwood floors and cream-colored paint. The bed is made of warm, honey maple, large enough to take up half the room. Aside from a dresser and narrow desk, the room is otherwise empty, as if not to detract from the windows with the striking view of the rocky cliff sweeping toward the ocean.
I go in search of a bathroom, finding one right next door. After using the toilet, I splash water on my face. I peer at my reflection in the smudged mirror over the sink. In a sharp contrast to the rigid way I’ve been looking, now my hair is a tousled mess, my lips reddened, my skin still flushed. I look like a woman who has been well and thoroughly fucked. A woman who wants it again.
A shiver rattles through me. I almost can’t believe my fantasy came to life—the start of everything I’ve craved since the day we ran into each other outside the bookstore.
The day he warned me away.
“Flynn?” I pause at the top of the stairs. Everything is silent, only the distant sound of the waves filtering through the stone walls.
I start down the stairs, then hesitate. I was contract-bound not to enter the cottage or lighthouse, but I didn’t cross the threshold alone. Flynn brought me, carried me, here. The rules no longer apply.
Barefoot, I walk down the staircase. It opens onto the front sitting room with a leather sofa and chairs seated around a stone fireplace. Warm tones of royal blue and gray dominate the space, making it both masculine and aligned with the lighthouse’s natural surroundings.
I peer into the dining room—rough-hewn farmhouse table, earth-toned hues, black-and-white historical photos of the lighthouse lining the walls. I cross to the kitchen, but aside from a pot of coffee brewing, there’s no evidence of him.
“Flynn?” I check the workroom, which is also empty, and return to the dining room.
Next to it is another room that could serve as a study, but contains a forest-green sofa and chairs, a second stone fireplace, and a wide-screen TV. On the opposite wall is the entrance to a narrow staircase spiraling upward to the lighthouse tower.
I stop. My heart knocks against my chest. All of the living quarters are in the cottage. So what’s in the tower?
There’s always a forbidden room. A place you shouldn’t go. It’s where Mr. Rochester’s wife is hidden away, where Bluebeard hangs the bodies of his dead wives, where Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger on the spindle.
It’s the dark part of the forest where witches lure children with candy, then lock them into cages. It’s the basement in a horror movie, the dragon’s gold-filled cave.
We shouldn’t enter… but we do. No matter the consequences, the known is better than the unknown. We need to see it to know the truth.
I cross the room and start to climb the staircase. My breathing grows shallow. The stone wall hugs the steps on one side. The other side is bordered by an iron railing. Smooth crevices are worn into the stairs from countless people climbing and descending.
I reach the lantern room. My heart beats relentlessly, like a billowing tide. There’s a small landing edged by the iron railing. A curved wooden door, scuffed with age, a keyhole without a key. A crack around the doorframe, gray light shining through.
“Flynn?”
No answer.
Cautiously, I step forward and rest my hand against the door. “Flynn, are you in here?”
No answer.
Nerves tighten in my stomach. I wrap one arm around my middle, gripping a fistful of his T-shirt. I nudge the door open slightly, catching sight of the glass surrounding the tower, the magnificent, sweeping view of the ocean and metal-gray sky.
Gathering a breath of courage, I push the door open and step inside.
A drafting table, littered with paper and pencils, sits on one side of the room beside a large rolling corkboard studded with drawings and images.
There’s a bookshelf haphazardly stuffed with books and boxes of supplies, a big cushy blue chair and sofa, a large cabinet cluttered with items, and a coffee-table piled with notebooks and a chess set. Crumpled balls of paper surround the area around the trash can, which is topped with a small basketball hoop.
An office. A messy, disorganized one clearly belonging to a guy.
No dragon’s gold or secret horrors. Amusement curves my mouth. So much for letting my imagination run away with me.
I glance at the cabinet, which contains dozens of items—seashells, coins, rocks, wooden puzzles. I walk toward the desk and bulletin board. A chaos of drawings and sketches covers the cork matting. A woman standing on the side of a cliff wearing a suede coat and boots, her reddish hair—
Oh my God.
I stare at the drawing in disbelief. It was the day I put my secret in the wall.
They’re all drawings of me, or of females with my face. A woman in a black cloak, eyes big and haunted, a naked nymph stretched out languidly beside a pond, a winged fairy, a sorceress rising from a nest of fire. A girl in an embroidered tunic, a basket looped around her arm as she approaches the edge of a dark forest. Another naked woman with elaborate bird wings.
All of them wear my face—oval-shaped with green eyes, arched eyebrows, narrow nose. Red hair falling just past the shoulders, sometimes caught in a ponytail or knot. Expressions of power, fear, pleasure.
I tear the bird-woman off the board. Bare breasts, curved hips, a triangle of hair between her legs.
Betrayal, thick and bitter, floods my throat. Some scholarly part of my brain recognizes the artistry and beauty of the drawings, but all I can see are the grainy, vulgar cell-phone photos of me smeared over the internet, black bars slashed across my breasts on the news sites, but exposed everywhere else.
My face, my body. Stolen and used against me.
Ice freezes my blood. Dizziness hits me. I sink to my knees and press my hands to the floor, unable to remain standing. My breath comes fast and shallow.
I’m not Alice in Wonderland, falling and tumbling. I’ve hit the ground and splintered all over again.
“Eve.”
Flynn’s voice stabs me, deep as a puncture wound. He closes his hands around my shoulders, hauling me to a sitting position. Confusion darkens his eyes in the instant before he sees the picture crumpled in my hand.
“Don’t touch me.” Cringing, I scramble away, acutely aware of my naked body under the T-shirt. Fear and shame descend like a thunderstorm. “You shithead, you’re doing exactly what he did!”
“No.” Shock widens his eyes. He falls to his knees in front of me, his hands up. “God, Eve. No.”
Through my blurred vision, I register the despair etched on his face, the plea in his eyes, but I can’t understand it, can’t fathom any other reason he would have so many images of me. A horrific thought strikes.
“Did you… did you take pictures of me?” I gulp down a wrenching sob. “Do you have video cameras? Oh my God, do you have pictures of me… when we… we…”
“No.” He edges closer, his hands still up like he wants to prove he won’t try and touch me. “Please, Eve. Listen. I swear, I never took pictures of you. There are no video cameras anywhere in the lighthouse. What… what can I do to make you believe me?”
I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
I scramble away from him until my back hits the wall. I pull my knees up to my chest, covering my legs with the shirt, hugging my arms around them. Humiliation scorches me from the inside out.
“Eve.”
“Go away.” I crumple the picture into a ball and rest my head on my knees. “Just go away.”
Silence. All I hear is the sound of my sharp breaths, the thump of my panicked heart. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to block out the ugly images burned into my brain. The pictures that will haunt me forever. My mother’s voice, shrill and accusing, pierces me.
Stupid girl. Idiot. Slut.
Nausea roils in the pit of my stomach. Slowly I lift my head. Flynn is still on his knees in front of me, his features lined with deep grooves of pain and regret.
“I’m so sorry, Eve. I didn’t know anything about the photos until you told me. I swear to you I wasn’t doing what that fucker did.”
I clench my jaw. “Drawing naked pictures of me without my knowledge is the same thing. You used me, just like he did.”
He pushes to his feet, his shoulders slumping. He grabs a cardboard box from the corner of the room. Pulling the drawings off the corkboard, he puts them in the box. Images in colored pencil, ink, charcoal, watercolors, pastels. The stack grows bigger. I don’t move, everything inside me broken, brittle like a crushed leaf.
Flynn tears the last picture from the corkboard and takes more from the desk. He piles them all in the box, puts a lid over it, and puts the box beside me.
“Take them,” he says. “I don’t have a computer, so nothing is scanned. They’re all here, but you can search the house if you want to.”
I shift my gaze to him warily. Shadows edge the hollows of his cheekbones, and desperation darkens his eyes. For all his impassivity and stoicism, I’ve never seen him look… defeated.
I don’t know whether or not to believe him, but what choice do I have? Once again, I’m subjected to someone else’s control.
“Eve.” He crouches in front of me, resting his elbows on his knees. “I’m not… I don’t have much of a life up here by myself. I wanted it that way. I chose it. I do maintenance for the Forestry Department, take care of the grounds, and work. I exercise—hiking, jogging, or I go to a gym over in Benton, but other than that I don’t go anywhere or do much of anything else. It’s pretty boring. But I’ve been okay with that. Then…”
He pauses and clears his throat. “I saw you down by the wall. You… you lit something inside me. Like you were a flame. I wanted… I tried to keep you out because you deserve more than someone like me, but you broke my self-control like no one else ever has. You make me want more. All it took was tea, crossword puzzles, and you.”
He reaches out to brush a lock of hair from my forehead, then stops when I flinch at his touch.
“You’re so… you’re so fucking beautiful.” He rises to his feet, his voice hoarse. “Everything about you, not just the way you look. You said those bastards destroyed you, took everything from you, but they didn’t. No one can take your strength, your goodness, your intelligence, your fire. No one can take you.”
He steps back, his dark gaze burning into me like metal flaring.
“I wanted what you have,” he says urgently. “I need it. But I’ve been trying to stay away from you so you could have what you want. So you could focus on finding another professorship, rebuilding your life, everything you deserve. I failed badly. I’m so sorry.”
He turns and leaves. His footsteps echo on the spiral staircase. For a long time, I sit there and breathe, trying to calm the racing of my heart, to suppress the shameful memories. My whole body hurts.
I straighten my legs out. My elbow bumps against the box. Wary, I tug off the lid and peer at the drawing on top of the stack. My face cloaked by a red hood, locks of hair windblown against my neck. My eyes looking back at me—hard, suspicious, strong.
With a shaking hand, I leaf through the first few drawings. Again I notice the expertise and technique, clearly the work of an immensely talented artist. On another page, I’m inside an intricate garden maze laden with open flowers and cascading vines, the pathways winding through cultivated hedges and sculptures.
Recognition prickles the back of my mind. I’ve seen images like this before, in Renaissance etchings and engravings of pleasure gardens, in the chaotic wildness of Hieronymus Bosch paintings, in the beauty and terror of Leonardo’s The Last Judgment. In…
Like when I first saw the Maria Wood drawing, I can’t link my recognition to a specific source.
I pick up another drawing. I’m standing in another maze formed within a jungle, huge palm leaves and thick trees cascading over a dark, coursing river. Animals—bright toucans, coiling snakes, agile monkeys—creep around the foliage along with numerous, intricately detailed insects.
Another close-up sketch of my face—brow furrowed, mouth tense, a fearful glimmer in my eyes. A striking resemblance to the way I’d felt when my world teetered on the edge of collapse.
I drop the drawings back into the box and get to my feet. The tower has a 360 degree view of the coast, stretching from the ocean around to the grassy fields and woodlands in the distance. No wonder he locks himself away up here all the time. Who wouldn’t want to be surrounded by such beauty?
I stare at the spot by the wall where I’d stood, imagining him looking down at me from this angle, seeing me put my secret between the rocks.
After turning back, I pause beside the bookshelf. Stuffed among sci-fi novels and history books, seven picture books sit upright like a row of soldiers, their spines facing outward.
I touch the spines. A vague memory pushes forth. This was where I’d seen a similar aesthetic—in a picture book. I take the first book off the shelf and look at the author name.
The truth crashes through me on a wave of pure shock.