No matter how I cared for Alexandre, he’s the past, I tell myself over and over again.And just like anything else in the past that can’t be changed or that you can’t get back, there’s no point in dwelling on it.
It’s easier said than done, though. As we get back to the flat and I start to build a fire in the fireplace, I keep remembering doing the same in Alexandre’s apartment, sitting on the rug in front of it while I smelled garlic and butter from the kitchen, the leaping flames last night as we sat together under the blanket in the twinkling glow of the Christmas lights, the first time I’d ever done something like that with a—
With awhat, Noelle?I ask myself almost angrily as I get the fire started.He certainly wasn’t your boyfriend. He was barely your lover. He wasn’t even really a—
“Friend,” I whisper to myself as I scoot back away from the flames, pulling my knees up to my chin as I stare into it. “He was my friend, by the end. And I left him.”
But I hadn’t really had a choice.
And if I’m being honest with myself—which I really don’t want to be right now—he was more than that.
Muchmore.
Georgie re-entering the room and flopping down on the floor next to me forces me to stop wool-gathering over Alexandre and pay attention to him. He’s sitting close to the fire as if he can’t remember what it feels like to be warm, and he’s so thin it makes my heart hurt. Even though I truly did come back as soon as I could, it makes my heart hurt and fill with guilt to see him like this. I feel as if I should have known better than to go to that bar, that I should have known they would never let me pay off a debt that significant so easily.
I’d been so much more naïve and innocent just that short time ago.
We eat our street-food takeout in front of the fire and talk about school, about Georgie’s future, about me going back to my job, anything but me, and what happened. I do everything I can not to think of Alexandre, but it feels nearly impossible. I miss him with a bone-deep ache that I know there’s no salve for, and the sadness is impossible to shake. I’m afraid of what will happen to him, now that he’s all alone again. I’m worried that the voices in his head will come back to haunt him, that it will be all too easy for him to reopen his wrists and bleed out without anyone there to save him. It’s a weight I know I shouldn’t have to bear, but I’m afraid of it all the same.
Whether he’s truly bad, good, or something in between, I know he is, above all else, a broken man. One that no one since a long-ago woman has ever truly loved.
At that moment, I know the truth—that I wish it could be me who brings him back to life, the one who can show him again what it means to be loved.
The one who could break the curse he brought upon himself.
23
ALEXANDRE
When I wake up, I’m alone.
I’d known I would be. But that doesn’t change the way I feel the fissures of my heart crack open when I look to the side and see the bed is empty and the grief that fills me when I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she’s gone.
Noelle is gone.
I remember faintly, as if in a dream, her kissing me goodbye—or at least I think I do. For all I know, she left in a hurry, without a word or a caress, glad to be free of me. But I want to believe that’s not true—that she meant what she said to me last night. That we spoke a language all our own to each other, and hidden inside of it was the truth.
I’ve fallen in love with her, and she with me.
My Noelle. My beauty. Mypetite souris.
Except, of course, she’s not mine any longer.
Getting up feels nearly impossible. I feel weighed down with loss, and the feeling is so familiar to me that it makes it that much worse.This is why I wanted to be alone!I think angrily as I push myself up, ignoring the screaming, white-hot pain in my wrists as I do so.This is why I wanted to rot away in the dark. So that I would never feel this again.
I feel hollow, airless, as if I can’t breathe without her.She left me!Anger tears through me at the thought, the awful betrayal of it, just like Anastasia.
She didn’t leave you for another lover. She left for her family. The family she was stolen from foryou.
I didn’t ask to steal her away!
You didn’t let her go until far too long, either.
I can feel the pain building as I stumble down the hall—in my bones, my chest, my head, like a pressure valve demanding to be released.She’s gone, she’s gone, you lost her,repeats in my head, mocking me,screamingat me, the voices laughing at my pain. My devastation. I totter into the living room and see the remnants of what she did for me last night—the burned logs in the fireplace, the twinkling Christmas tree, the wine glasses left out on the table, the blanket haphazardly across the couch. I remember her tucked against me, watching the firelight as I explained my nickname to her, the way we laughed, and howeasyit was for just a moment. Suddenly, at that moment, I had beengladI hadn’t succeeded in killing myself. I’d been glad she saved me.
“You should have let me die!” I scream the words from a throat still raspy and sore, more a roar than anything else, the words tearing themselves from me in a rush of hurt and grief and anger. “Anything but leaving me alone again!”
I will never see her again.