TWO
THE LABELS
“Honestly, some hobbies are best left unshared. Make sure to check yours against our list on page 145.”
—Aurelia Nichols & Jillie Bean, 101 Tips to Lock Him Down
Sitting cross-legged in an oversize velvet armchair, I held my head still as a young doctor examined my pupils with a penlight. He’d shown up not long after my dad had hung up with a final promise to come for me as soon as possible. Uncharacteristically, March had retreated to the bedroom after welcoming the doctor, to take a call from Phyllis. I was pretty sure those two were monitoring my dad’s every move on top of organizing his flight to Paris. I knew March and his omnipotent assistant meant well, but I’d probably need to have a chat with him about not tapping my family’s phones, at some point. Mine? Let’s be real: if I forbade March to geolocate it to his heart’s content, I’d probably end up with a tracker stuck to my underwear label instead . . .
“Have you eaten yet?” the doctor asked with an unmistakable creole accent—guy must have been from Guadeloupe or Martinique.
“Sort of,” I replied. “Does applesauce count?”
He chuckled. “Yes. Any pain?”
“My stitches hurt a little, but the rest of my head is actually fine. I honestly thought I’d wake up with the worst migraine of my life.”
His lips quirked. “Give it a little time.”
“Great . . .”
He shrugged. “Your post-op MRI showed no trace of bleeding. I’m writing you a prescription for painkillers. Only take some if you need it: it’s not candy,” he warned while scribbling something on a prescription pad.
“I get it.” I watched him close his case and grab his coat and scarf from the couch. “Can I go out?”
His head lolled in indecision. “Make sure the wound remains clean and covered. Eat something first, and take it easy. Parc Astérix is off the menu.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that,” I replied with an uneasy laugh. Dammit, was this practitioner of the shadows reading my mind?
“Thank you, doctor. I’ll make sure she stays away from roller coasters for the time being.”
I hopped from the armchair to find March standing in the living room doorway—one of the minor inconveniences of having a boyfriend equipped with a stealth mode. I had yet to leave my pajamas, but he had changed into a pair of jeans and one of his magic crease-free white shirts half an hour ago to welcome the doctor. How one could possibly freshen up, shave, and properly button their shirt in less than ten minutes, I would never know: March was a black belt at adulting, having mastered grooming techniques and organizational skills a grasshopper such as myself could barely comprehend—much less emulate.
“What about flying?” I asked the doctor while he shrugged on his coat.
He frowned. “Long-haul, I suppose?”
I nodded.
“Normally, this is the part where I tell you to go back to bed and stay there for at least another couple of days.”
I gave him an imploring look.
“But you are, technically, stable enough to fly.”
I turned to March with a victorious grin, but he didn’t seem fully convinced: his gaze searched the doctor’s, waiting for the additional warning that would warrant dragging me back under the comforter. But the guy only shook his head with a sympathetic smile that seemed to translate as, “You’re on your own, dude.”
After the apartment’s reinforced-steel door had slammed shut, I latched on to March. “So . . . did my dad call Murrell?”
His lips curved into one of the rare smiles I knew were for me only, pinching two dimples. “Yes. Your father was quite unhappy with the answers he was given and made sure everyone he spoke to was well aware of that.”
I winced. “What did they tell him?”
“Nothing. The entire Odysseus file is classified, much like yours, mine, and everything pertaining to the Lions.”
Odysseus . . . I thought of the half-destroyed space station, a huge white ring orbiting 250 miles above us in the immensity of space. A cold tomb for the man who had killed my mother eleven years ago—and also for quite a few of his men, in the wake of March’s first space adventure. “What will they tell everyone?”
“They’re denying that any launch took place in Ecuador, and the official report will conclude that a major depressurization incident in the orbital ring killed all crew members.”
Yeah, you could call it that. March had definitively “depressurized” those treacherous astronauts and Anies’s Lions one by one. Anies himself though . . . my hand still prickled at the memory of holding the knife, plunging it into his side, so fast, so easily. I had only meant to defend myself, but in the end, I had killed him. And closed the circle. It didn’t really feel like revenge for my parents’ deaths, even though it was. More like another life wasted, more blood, and that queasiness I could feel returning in the pit of my stomach.
March stepped closer, trailing his knuckles against my cheek. “I’m sorry . . . biscuit. For everything.”
I kissed his palm. “It’s okay. I guess it’ll just take me a little longer than the US government to put a lid on all this.”
“I know . . . Your father should land in eight hours. That leaves you a little longer to rest before—”
“All hell breaks loose?” I chuckled.
“I foresee a long night,” March admitted with a sigh.
I leaned closer for a hug, nuzzling his chest. “Do you want to tell him . . . everything?” About Odysseus, and what had happened to me, of course, but also . . . about March’s former line of employment.
“Do you want me to?” he asked quietly.
He would, I realized. If I asked him, March would tear down that last wall between us, the secrecy that was his fortress. I shook my head. “I can’t ask you to do that. I’ll go with whatever you decide to tell him. We can say you work for the CIA, something like that.”
He rested his chin atop my head. “I understand.” A sigh breezed in my hair. “I doubt he’ll content himself with elusive answers though.”
“Yeah, he can be kinda . . . relentless.”
“He found Struthio’s LinkedIn page and sent me an invitation.”
I smiled against his shirt. “Oh God . . . Already?”
“And he asked Phyllis if I could provide my résumé, along with copies of my degrees and tax returns,” March added, a smile in his voice.
“I’m really sorry . . .” I squeezed my eyes shut. Just imagining the amount of lies awaiting me made my forehead throb unpleasantly. March’s education? Should I make up something, or weather the storm as I revealed to my dad that the love of my life had dropped from school at fifteen, and I couldn’t have cared less? Tax returns? Oh, March had those. Over the course of his career, he had made a point to scrupulously fulfill his taxpayer duties, whether in South Africa or the US. All that was left to explain was that those millions he’d declared had been made . . . as a hit man.
“Don’t worry,” March purred. “Handling our return to civilization can’t be more difficult than flying to space.”
“Honestly . . . I’m not sure I’m ready. I need to see him, and I know I also have to call Joy, take care of a million things to wrestle my life back in order, but”—I let out a shivering sigh—“all I want to do is . . . escape.”
He stroked a hand down my back. “When this is over for good, I’ll take you anywhere you want, and we’ll behave irresponsibly . . . for at least a week.”
I giggled. “Netflix and chill every night?”
His lips trailed to my ear shell, and a delicate nip made my toes curl. “Chill, mostly.”
That sent a different kind of shiver dancing up my spine. “I’ll hold you to that, Mr. November. Chill. Every. Night,” I whispered. “But until then . . . I think I’m gonna take a shower.”
“All right. You should have everything you need in the bathroom, but let me know if anything is missing.”
I rubbed my hands in anticipation. “Phyllis struck again?”
He nodded pensively. “Unlike me, she appears to understand the nuance between a smoothing shampoo and conditioner.”
“Don’t worry; I’m not entirely sure either. But I like to read the ingredients to find out how they make it. Did you know they put powdered-mica nanoparticles to imitate gold in glittery makeup? Labels are a world of entertainment at hand’s reach.”
March’s mouth pursed in agreement. “You’re preaching to a converted. I actually went through a phase where I collected can labels as a child. I grew out of it toward the age of fourteen, but I still enjoy looking up products on the USDA’s food-composition database. A fascinating tool.”
If someone had barged into the living room with a camera and taken a pic of me at the precise second he said this, they would have seen the face of love, no, adoration. It was because of tiny moments like this that I measured how goddamn lucky I was. We came from opposite worlds, had grown up thousands of miles and almost a decade apart. Like two grains of sand in the ocean—who both enjoyed reading labels and Wikipedia—what were the statistical chances that fate would entwine our paths? No . . . it wasn’t luck. Dries had accomplished that. Because he’d spawned me and taken March under his wing. Without even being aware of it at the time, he had created a world of possibilities, and now he was gone, but we remained.
“Island?”
March’s face looked concerned and a little blurry as I phased back in. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, and he cradled my cheeks in his palms right afterward, stroking them with his thumbs. “What’s on your mind, biscuit?”
“Yeah. I just . . . I was thinking we wouldn’t have met if it hadn’t been for Dries.”
He pulled me to him and hugged me tight, just like I needed. “I know.”
“Does he . . .” My voice caught, before I managed to force the words out. “Will he be buried somewhere?”
March’s sigh breezed in my hair. “Erwin’s men probably recovered his body from Saraya, but I doubt the CIA will return it. I’m sorry, Island.”
“It’s okay. I kind of figured it’d be like that.”
“But there’s a family grave in Johannesburg. He and Anies staged their burial there, when they joined the Lions. I can take you someday, if you’d like.”
“Yes, please. Even if he’s not resting there . . . I think I’d like to have a place where to say goodbye.”
“I understand.”
I let the wave of sadness wash over me, anchored by March’s arms around me, and after a while, I felt strong enough to let go of him. “Okay,” I said, balling my fists. “I’ve got some labels to read.”
•••
Someone needed to write Chanel to tell them that coumarin was potentially toxic, and they shouldn’t put that in their shower gel. I told March so while slipping on a pair of black velvet skinny pants and a beige turtleneck I had found waiting for me in the bedroom’s closet. He agreed that we should write them to complain—it was one of his many couponing strategies, and he assured me that a well-worded complaint would earn us, at the very least, a few samples. We might even get free products, were I to claim that I’d actually experienced dire side effects from all that coumarin.
Honestly, I was fine, but March looked up from his phone as he typed, studied my face, and said I looked very pale. He then returned to his typing, pressed send, and somewhere in France a “Customer Care Representative” got an e-mail from a guy who claimed that their shower gel had potentially poisoned his girlfriend, and as a result, he demanded samples and coupons in reparation.
After he was done, March tipped his head to the gray sky outside and the spire of Notre-Dame, shrouded in afternoon fog. “I should probably keep you in bed, but something tells me only handcuffs could possibly achieve that. So, perhaps I could take you to see Kalahari and Ilan. I think they’ll be very happy to see you awake and . . . yourself again.”
I battled the urge to jump up and down at March’s mention of his awesome ex and her husband, still worried that my stitches might somehow reopen and cause an unexpected brain leakage. “Oh yes! I seriously need that. Also”—my stomach completed that sentence for me with a low gurgle. I patted it sadly—“do we have anything else other than applesauce? I’m starving.”
“There’s yogurt and some excellent potato-leek soup,” March said. When he noticed my grimace of disappointment, he added, “You spent almost a week on a nutrition drip; the clinic recommended light and liquid meals for at least a couple of days, until your stomach is ready for a reasonable Christmas meal.”
“No steak frites?”
“Not today,” he confirmed with a sympathetic nod.
I briefly mourned the fact that I wouldn’t be able to binge on croissants until I passed out as I’d initially planned, before my eyes went wide in realization. “Tomorrow . . . tomorrow’s Christmas Eve.”
March nodded.
So there was still a small chance that I’d be home for Christmas. With my dad, Joy, and . . . A grin tugged at my cheeks. “It’ll be our first Christmas together, you and me.”
“True . . .”
“What do you normally do for Christmas?” I inquired while shrugging on a comfy navy wool coat and concealing my bald spot with a fleece beanie.
“Well,” he began, putting on his own coat, “not much, to be honest. If I’m not working, I open a good bottle of whisky, and I watch Christmas specials with Gerald.”
I recognized his answer for what it was: a tactful way to say that he drank alone for Christmas because, really, March had no family to go home to, save for a father he no longer spoke to because he held him responsible for his mother’s overdose twenty years ago. The thought weighed painfully in my chest as I followed him in the elevator; I took his hand and squeezed it. The ancient grille clanked shut, and the car went down with ominous creaking sounds—we had four floors to go, and I silently prayed to Raptor Jesus that I wouldn’t meet my demise in a poorly maintained elevator after having survived a two-hundred-mile free fall in a space pod with a crappy parachute.
“This year will be different,” I announced when the doors (thankfully) opened. “We’ll be together. We usually celebrate at my grandparents’ house on Long Island.” As soon as this quasi-invitation slipped past my lips, I hesitated and bit my tongue in an effort to shut up. Maybe I was going too fast?
March led me to a black Citroën SUV with tinted windows that was parked in the street. He flashed me a look of doubt while unlocking the doors. “It might perhaps be a little early for your father to welcome me into the family. At this point, all I’m hoping is that he won’t try to file a restraining order against me.”
“He’d never do that,” I reassured him once we were both seated. Okay, he totally would . . . “Did you answer his LinkedIn invite, by the way?”
“Yes.”
“Good . . . I think it’ll help. He’s really into it.”
“I noticed. I went to like his article on unsecured bonds.”
I studied his profile with no small amount of awe as the engine started, and he maneuvered us out of one of those tight parking jobs Parisians specialize in. “You’ve really thought this through, haven’t you?”
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting*,” March concluded with a wink.
*One could be forgiven for mistakenly attributing this quote to a morally bankrupt turd who liked Roomba cats and was known to a select few as Mr. Stiles. That’s actually Sun Tzu speaking here.