He laughed. ‘So you thought you’d wake me to suffer in insomnia with you?’
She bit down on her lower lip and it wasn’t light enough to see her properly, so Thanos reached out and switched on the bedside lamp. Both squinted a little as they adjusted to the brightness.
‘I need to speak to you.’
‘Okay.’ The word was a prompt, an invitation.
But Alice didn’t speak. She seemed to be choosing her words carefully, but she also seemed to be anxious about something. Stressed. Nervous.
He hadn’t seen her like this since that first day in the office when she’d been staring at the stack of overdue bills and her face had been ashen and her eyes bleak.
‘Tell me,’ he prompted, knowing that whatever it was, he’d fix it. Money, health, her mother? ‘Alice?’ Impatience zipped through him. Still, she didn’t speak. ‘I can’t help you if I don’t know.’
‘I’m trying,’ she said, her eyes beseeching.
But it wasn’t good enough. Concern was slashing through him as a whip would butter. ‘Try harder.’
Her voice shook when she spoke. ‘What are we doing?’
It wasn’t at all what he’d expected her to say. ‘Huh?’
‘This. You, me.’ She pointed from him to her. ‘What is this?’
Something shifted inside him, an emotion he couldn’t quite grasp. Guilt. Annoyance. Frustration. ‘I don’t understand.’ His voice was guarded.
She breathed out softly, shifting a clump of her dark brown hair so he reached a hand out and caught it, smoothing it behind her ear.
‘This. Our marriage. I—can’t make sense of it.’
He placed his hand on her arm, gently stroking her smooth flesh. Goosebumps trailed in the wake of his touch. ‘What’s to make sense of?’ he prompted, trying to join the dots and unable to connect them. He looked around for his phone, to check the time.
‘Alice, it’s two in the morning. Three hours ago we were making love and now you look as though you’ve seen ten ghosts. What’s happened?’
A strangled noise erupted from her chest, a pained noise, and his worry grew.
‘I couldn’t sleep.’
‘You said that.’
She nodded jerkily, standing then, pacing towards the window and staring out of it. She wore a flimsy silk negligee and even then he ached to draw her into his arms, to pull her to his body and pleasure away whatever was worrying her.
‘I keep having this premonition of disaster,’ she said. ‘Like a blade of panic that comes out of nowhere. And I had no idea why; I couldn’t understand it because everything’s so good. Perfect, actually.’
She turned around to look at him, her expression haunted, her eyes pleading.
‘And this is a problem?’
She nodded slowly, her expression stricken. ‘Yeah, I think it might be.’
His laugh was just a short, sharp sound of confusion. ‘Why?’
‘Because it’s the kind of perfect I want to hold onto.’ She bit down on her lip, allowing her words to sink in. ‘It’s the kind of perfect I want to last for ever.’
For ever. Her words slammed into him, and on a cellular level he rejected each one instantly. There was no such thing as for ever. No such thing as happily-ever-after and a perfection that didn’t disappear.
‘I fell in love with you, Thanos.’ Her voice cracked, and then there was silence, as if she was waiting for him to speak. But he couldn’t because panic was strangling him, just as she’d described, wrapping around him, making his eyes a little blurry, and his brain squeal.
‘I didn’t mean to.’ Now she was whispering, wrapping her arms around her torso so she looked both ethereally beautiful and fragile all at once. ‘I swore I wouldn’t ever get involved with a guy again. I was done with men.’ The words were laced with self-directed anger. ‘And then you came along and you were so different.’