Total pages in book: 111
Estimated words: 105775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 529(@200wpm)___ 423(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 105775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 529(@200wpm)___ 423(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
He returns a moment later to ask if mac and cheese will do for Noah. Tatiana and Jasper order salads. Ulysses and I opt for the flame-grilled, medium-rare sirloin steak with Roquefort sauce. I add the sea bass to Tatiana’s order. She prefers fish, and she needs to put some meat on her bones. A salad isn’t going to cut it. As I don’t know Jasper’s culinary tastes, I get a couple of starter platters and side dishes to share.
Once the ordering is out of the way, Tatiana opens her tote bag and pulls out a box of crayons and a few sheets of salvaged wastepaper. She puts the paper and crayons in front of Noah.
Of course Tatiana is prepared. I didn’t even think about occupying a kid in a too-quiet, too-pretentious restaurant during dinner.
She’s a good mother. That much is clear. Not that I ever doubted she’d be.
Noah draws away happily, as quiet as a mouse. He’s well-behaved, a lot more than I was at his age.
I watch him, unable to get enough. He outlines a plane in black before adding blue clouds to the sky. With his tongue peeking out from the corner of his mouth, he carefully draws windows on the side of the plane.
The scratching of Noah’s yellow crayon as he colors in the plane is the only sound at our table. No one speaks. The silence is stifling.
Rather than being bothered by the absence of conversation, I’m glad for it. Little in life unsettles me. Certainly not an uncomfortable atmosphere. In any case, I prefer using the time to study Tatiana. I already took in every detail when I cornered her in that shabby kitchen and pinned her against the wall. But now I can take my time to look at her.
Her hair is still the color of a pale sun on a clear blue morning. She hasn’t tamed the waves into glossy curls as she used to do when she’d snuck out of her parent’s condo to meet me. The long strands hang wild down her back. She left it to dry naturally, not having bothered with a brush before I bundled her into my car.
Her face is as strikingly beautiful as I remember, albeit a little thinner. It’s the kind of face that demands to be noticed, not only because of the perfectly symmetrical features but also because of those haunting eyes.
They possess a strange kind of magic. You can’t look into them and not be affected. They move you for reasons you don’t understand. There’s something poetic yet also tragic in those pale green depths. Their magnetism is a little disturbing, like the compulsion to stare at the gory scene of an accident on the road. You know you shouldn’t look, but you can’t help yourself. And when you do, you can never unsee what you’ve seen, and you know the picture will haunt you forever.
If a person’s eyes are truly a mirror of his soul, Tatiana’s soul must be an infinite well of secrets and sadness. Or maybe it’s just an optical illusion—the way the almost translucent irises swallow the light and trap the beams before projecting them as the rarest shade of green. I’ve never seen another color like it. The mix between the cool-toned hues of the rarest, most precious jade stone and the vibrant green of young mint leaves is a whole new color created just for her. Those pools are either glowing or murky, depending on whether they reflect the sun or swallow the shadows. Set off against her porcelain skin, the contrast is striking.
Her flawless skin has always been pale. Now, it’s almost transparent. Faint blue veins run beneath the soft undersides of her wrists and arms. If I were able to trace them, they’d form a roadmap to her heart. After all, the heart is where all blood enters and exits, the throbbing center of fragile human life.
I know the map to her heart like the back of my hand. I drew that map when I taught her the secrets of a woman’s body and the carnal nature of a man’s sinful desires. How sweet and innocent first love is. How vulnerable. Completely impressionable.
Once upon a time, the crayon was in my hand, and she was the paper I filled at my whim. She was the canvas I submitted to my strokes—thick black lines or soft blue clouds, wherever the mood took me—but it always ended in fucking fireworks, an explosion of pleasure firing through hot-blooded veins and then, in the final throes of sweaty bodies and tangled limbs, with an arrow in the heart.
Yet the woman sitting across from me isn’t the woman I claimed five years ago. The tiny scar on her left cheek is new. So is the silver line from an old cut on her chin. I want to know how she got those marks. I want to know everything. And she will tell me. Because I always get what I want, no matter the methods I have to use.