“I love you.”
They are in New Orleans when he says it, dining in a hidden bar in the French Quarter, one of his many installations.
Addie shakes her head, amazed the words do not turn to ash in his mouth. “Do not pretend that this is love.”
Annoyance flashes across Luc’s face. “What is love, then? Tell me. Tell me your heart doesn’t flutter when you hear my voice. That it doesn’t ache when you hear your name on my lips.”
“It’s my own name I ache for, not your lips.”
The edge of his mouth curls up, his eyes now emerald. A brightness born of pleasure. “Once, perhaps,” he says. “But now it’s more.”
She is afraid that he is right.
And then, he sets a box before her.
It is simple, and black, and if Addie were to reach for it, it would be small enough to fit within her palm.
But she doesn’t, not at first. “What is it?” she asks.
“A gift.”
Still she does not take it.
“Honestly, Adeline,” he says, sweeping the box from the table. “It will not bite.”
He opens it, and sets it back before her.
Inside, there is a simple brass key, and when she asks him where it leads, he says, “Home.”
Addie stiffens.
She has not had a home, not since Villon. Has never, in fact, had a place of her own, and she is almost grateful, before she remembers, of course, that he is the reason why.
“Do not mock me, Luc.”
“I am not mocking you,” he says.
He takes her hand and leads her through the Quarter, to a place at the end of Bourbon Street, a yellow house with a balcony, and windows as tall as doors. She slides the key into the lock, and listens to the heavy sound of the turn, and realizes, if it belonged to Luc instead of her, the door would simply open. And suddenly, the brass key feels real and solid in her hand, a treasured thing.
The door swings open onto a house with high ceilings, and wooden floors, with furniture, and closets, and spaces to be filled. She steps out onto the balcony, the layered sounds of the Quarter rising to meet her on the humid air. Jazz spills through the streets, crashing, overlapping, a chaotic melody, changing and alive.
“It is yours,” says Luc, “a home,” and the old warning sounds, deep in the marrow of her bones.
But these days, it is a shrinking beacon, a lighthouse viewed too far from port.
He pulls her back against him, and Addie notices again the perfect way they fit together.
As if he was made for her.
Which, of course, he was. This body, this face, these features, made to make her feel at ease.
“Let’s go out,” he says.
Addie wants to stay in, to christen the house, but he says there will be time, there will always be time. And for once, she doesn’t dread the idea of forever. For once, the days and nights don’t drag, but race ahead.
She knows that, whatever this is, it will not last. It cannot last.
Nothing ever does.
But in the moment, she is happy.
They make their way through the Quarter, arm in arm, and Luc lights a cigarette, and when she tells him it’s bad for his health, he lets out a breathy, noiseless laugh, smoke pouring between his lips.
Her steps slow before a shop window.
The store is closed, of course, but even through the darkened glass, she can see the leather jacket, black with silver buckles, draped over a mannequin.
Luc’s reflection shimmers behind her as he follows her gaze. “It is summer,” he says.
“It won’t always be.”
Luc smooths his hands over her shoulders and she feels the soft leather settling against her skin, the mannequin in the window now bare, and tries not to think of all the years she went without, forced to suffer through the cold, of all the times she had to hide, and fight, and steal. She tries not to think of them, but she does.
They are halfway back to the yellow house when Luc peels away. “I have work to do,” he says. “Go on home.”
Home—the word rattles through her chest as he walks away. But she does not go.
She watches Luc round the corner, and cross the street, and then she lingers in the shadow as he approaches a shop with a luminescent palm painted on the door.
An older woman stands on the sidewalk, closing up, her frame bent over a ring of keys, a large bag drooping from one elbow.
She must hear him coming, because she murmurs something to the dark, something about closing, something about another day. And then she turns, and sees him.
In the glass of the shop window, Addie sees Luc, too, not as he is to her, but as he must appear to the woman in the doorway. He has kept those dark curls, but his face is leaner, sharper in a wolfish way, his eyes deep-set, his limbs too thin to be human.
“A deal is a deal,” he says, the words bending on the air. “And it is done.”
Addie watches, expecting the woman to beg, to run.
But she sets her bag down on the ground, and lifts her chin. “A deal is a deal,” she says. “And I am tired.”
And somehow, this is worse. Because Addie understands. Because she is tired, too.
And as she watches, the darkness comes undone again.
It has been more than a hundred years since Addie last saw the truth of him, the roiling night, with all its teeth. Only this time, there is no rending, no tearing, no horror.
The darkness simply folds around the old woman like a storm, blotting out the light.
Addie turns away.
She goes back to the yellow house on Bourbon Street, and pours herself a glass of wine, crisp and cold and white. It is blisteringly hot; the balcony doors are flung open to ease the summer night. She is leaning on the iron rail when she hears him arrive, not on the street below, as a courting lover might, but in the room behind her.
And when his arms drift around her shoulders, Addie remembers the way he held the woman in the doorway, the way he folded around her, swallowing her whole.
