it is theorized that the goddesses acrasia and amoret were once a single female figure,
rather than the two-headed goddess worshipped in llyr today. when did llyrians begin to
see love as strictly dichotomic, rather than of a vast and multitudinous quality? why was
this dichotomy characterized by submission versus dominance? i put forth the argument
that this doctrinal transformation is tied to the evolving role of women in llyrian society,
the fear of female advancement, particularly in the decades immediately following the
drowning.
from the social history of a sainthood by dr. auden davies, 184 ad
preston drove fast down the unlit roads, the green hills invisible in the dark, only fat smudges like
thumbprints on a windowpane. they passed by with dizzying speed, the blackness racing
alongside them. effy did not sit in cars often, and when she did, they were almost never going at
such a pace. she leaned back in her seat, feeling vaguely nauseous.
she couldn’t blame preston for not taking notice; he was staring straight ahead with intense,
almost unblinking focus, headlights carving tunnels through the dark. she trusted him, of course,
but this had to be the most reckless thing either of them had done so far—including sneaking
around right under ianto’s nose and, for her, jumping out of a moving car.
that car had been going a lot more slowly.
effy closed her eyes. again and again, in the theater behind her eyelids, she watched the
progression of the photographs, the satin robe pulling apart, the girl’s breasts bared to the cold
room. she watched the letters trembling in her shaking hands, myrddin’s hasty scrawl rolling past:
my sly and clever girl. my foolish and lovely girl. my beautiful and debauched girl.
call her by her name, effy wanted to shout, but at no one in particular, because myrddin was
dead. the girl probably was, too. blackmar’s daughter. myrddin’s . . . conquest. she had been lost
to the ages, just like those drowned churches.
in all her time at hiraeth, effy had never heard the bells.
suddenly she was crying. the tip of her nose burned, her eyes grew fierce with water, and a
strangled sob forced its way out of her throat. she clapped her hand over her mouth, trying to stifle
the sound, trying not to distract preston from his task, but her breaths were coming hot and fast,
and tears were running paths down her cheeks.
“oh, effy,” preston said. and then, absurdly, he pulled the car over. “i’m sorry. there’s very
little worse than when our heroes fail us, is there?”
“i didn’t know myrddin was your hero. i thought you didn’t like him.”
“i do like him,” preston said. “i mean, i did. i still like the words that are attributed to him. i
like that he wrote about death as decay. deaths that last years and years, the same way the
drowning—well, never mind. those words still mean something, even if myrddin didn’t write
them. even if he did.”
“it’s just . . .” outside the darkness settled around them, slowing like low tide. “preston, i’ve
read angharad a hundred times. you know i can quote it word for word. it saved me, believing all
the things myrddin wrote—or didn’t write. every story is a lie, isn’t it? a story about a girl who’s
kidnapped by the fairy king, but defeats him through her courage and cleverness . . . if that’s not
true, then everything i’ve always believed is a lie, too. you told me that the fairy king never
loved angharad. that he was the villain of the book. i think you were right.”
“effy.” preston drew in a breath, but he didn’t go on.
“there’s no fairy king at all,” she said. speaking the words aloud terrified her. they felt like
walls closing in, crumbling on top of her. “i thought angharad was some ancient story made new,
and myrddin was some otherworldly genius, magic like the rest of the sleepers. but he was just
some lecherous old man, and angharad was just some shrewd attempt by his publisher to make
money. there’s no magic in it at all. or at least there isn’t anymore, because i’ve stopped
believing in it. now it’s just another lie.”
and what of all the times she had paged through angharad, trying to discover its secrets,
taking heart in the way angharad’s life so clearly mirrored her own? what of all the nights she
had slept with her iron, with her mountain ash, seeing the fairy king through her slitted eyes?
none of it was real. she was a mad girl, one whose mind could not be trusted, precisely the
kind of girl her mother and the doctor and her professors and master corbenic had said she was.
that was the truth at the very center of everything, the truth she had tried her whole life to
evade: there were no fairies, no magic, and the world was just ordinary and cruel.
she ought to have been embarrassed, with how much she was whimpering and blubbering, her
vision blurred with tears. but preston only looked at her in concern, his brows drawn together. he
shrugged out of his jacket and held it out to her.
“here,” he said. “sorry i don’t have any tissues.”
it was all so absurd. effy blew her nose on a sleeve. “why are you being so nice to me?”
“why wouldn’t i be?”
she huffed a pitiful laugh. “because i’ve been awful to you. pestering you just to pester you,
trying to get under your skin, being foolish—”
“you don’t see yourself very clearly, effy.” preston shifted in his seat so that they were facing
one another. “challenging me isn’t pestering. i’m not always right. sometimes i deserve to be
challenged. and changing your mind isn’t foolish. it just means you’ve learned something new.
everyone changes their mind sometimes, as they should, or else they’re just, i don’t know,
stubborn and ignorant. moving water is healthy; stagnant water is sickly. tainted.”
effy wiped her eyes. she still felt embarrassed, but her heartbeat was returning to its ordinary
rhythm. “which one of your heroes failed you?”
preston sighed. it was a very weary sigh that could have belonged to someone thrice his age. “i
told you before that my father is dead. well, plenty of people have dead fathers; it’s hardly an
uncommon backstory. but the manner of his death—i can’t really imagine anything worse.”
“you don’t have to talk about it.” the sadness in his tone made her feel bad about asking.
“no, it’s all right. my mother is llyrian, as i’ve said. her family is from caer-isel, quite well-
to-do, seven advanced degrees among her immediate family. scholastically inclined people. my
father is from very far north, up the mountains—it’s a bit like the bottom hundred, a very rural
place, but sustained by mining rather than fishing. it was a torrid story of forbidden love, as far as i
can tell. they moved to a suburb of ker-is—caer-isel—on the argantian side of the border, close
enough that we could visit my mother’s family often. my father could never go—no llyrian
passport. anyway. he worked as a construction manager, nothing prestigious or glamorous.”
preston was a good storyteller. he paused in all the right places, and his voice grew grave
whenever it was appropriate. effy tried to stay as silent as she could, hardly even daring to breathe.
it was the first time preston had spoken so openly about himself, and she didn’t want to risk
shattering the delicate moment.
“he was working late one night, during a bad storm. it was summer; i was sixteen. the roads
were slick and deadly. his car skidded out on a sharp turn.”
“oh,” effy said. “preston, i’m so sorry.”
“he didn’t die then,” said preston. he gave her a flimsy half smile. “he survived, but he hit his
head hard on the dashboard, and then on the pavement. he wasn’t wearing his seat belt—he was
always reckless like that. it drove my mother mad. the ambulance arrived and took him to the
hospital, and by the next morning he was awake and talking. only the things he said didn’t make
any sense.
“my father wasn’t from some well-heeled family, but he was a brilliant man. self-taught,
literary, very thoughtful. he easily held his own at the dinner table alongside my uncles with all
their advanced degrees. he had a library in the basement with hundreds of books. what else? he
loved animals. we never had any pets, but he would point out every rabbit he saw on the lawn,
every cow we passed on the side of the road.”
preston’s voice became smaller and smaller as he spoke. the grief in it made effy’s heart
wrench.
“i’m sorry,” effy said again, but he didn’t seem to hear her.
“a traumatic brain injury, the doctors said at first. he might return to his old self eventually,
but there was no way to tell. day after day, and he hardly recognized us, my mother and my
brother and me. sometimes i could see a rare moment of clarity in his eyes, when he remembered
someone’s face or name, but it would be gone again in just a blink. his body, externally, was
unharmed—he could do all his regular things, supposedly. so the doctors let us bring him home,
only it was like living with a stranger.
“he was intractable, combative. he broke glasses and shouted at my mother; he had never
done that before. he tore all the books from their shelves. he was nothing like he’d been.
eventually we confined him—or rather, he confined himself—to the upstairs bedroom, where he
spent every hour of the day watching television, sleeping. we brought him his meals on trays. i
was the one who found him, in the end. dead right there in the sheets. his eyes were open, and i
remember the light of the television still flickering over his face.”
“preston,” she started, but she couldn’t think of what to say. he gave her a tight nod, as if to
indicate that he wasn’t quite done yet.
“when they did the autopsy, they found out that the doctors’ initial diagnosis had been wrong.
it wasn’t a traumatic brain injury, or at least not the kind they had been envisioning. that we had
been thinking of all along. it was hydrocephalus. fluid in the skull and spinal cord that can’t be
flushed out. the pressure builds and builds. if the doctors had known, they might have been able
to put in a shunt, drain it out. but no one knew until the end, until he died. hydrocephalus. water
on the brain.”
preston’s voice was nearly inaudible now. hollow-sounding. resigned. effy wanted to reach
out and hold him to her chest, but she settled on laying her hand over his instead.
for a moment they both froze; she waited to see if she’d done something wrong, stepped too
far over some invisible line. but then preston turned his hand over and entwined their fingers.
“i wish i remembered,” he said very quietly, “the last time he pointed out a rabbit on the lawn.
when i found him that day in the bedroom, all i could think of were the rabbits. that gentle,
brilliant person he’d been—that person was dead long before he was. sometimes i feel guilty even
doing what i do, studying the things i study . . . because my father never had the chance. and he
won’t even get to see me graduate, or read any of my papers, or . . .”
he trailed off, and effy squeezed his hand. the wind rattled the car windows, and it was like
they were awash in a churning river, clinging to each other so that the water wouldn’t drag them
down.
preston lifted his gaze, eyes meeting hers.
“thank you,” he said.
“for what?”
“i don’t know. for listening, i suppose.”
“you don’t have to thank me for that.”
preston was silent. after a beat, he said, “and, well, i suppose that’s partly why i don’t have
much faith in the notion of permanence. anything can be taken from you, at any moment. even
the past isn’t guaranteed. you can lose that, too, slowly, like water eating away at stone.”
“i understand,” effy said softly. “i understand what you mean.”
with great gentleness, preston untwined his fingers from hers and placed both hands back on
the steering wheel. “let’s get back to hiraeth,” he said. “i think we can still manage it before
midnight.”
somehow, even bereft of her sleeping pills, effy managed to fall asleep. it was preston’s presence
that soothed her, just like it had the night before, his mere proximity enough to make her feel safe.
the next thing she knew, the car had stopped, and her head jerked up from where it had been
leaning against the cold window, her lashes fluttering blearily. through the rain- speckled
windshield, in the valley of the headlights, she could see the vague shape of the guesthouse. her
vision was still black at the edges, and her head felt very heavy.
“hey,” preston said. “we made it. eight minutes to midnight.”
“oh,” she said, her voice thick. “i’m sorry. i can’t believe i fell asleep.”
“there’s nothing to apologize for. i’m glad you got some rest.”
effy scrubbed at her face, scraping off some of the salt tracks left on her cheeks. her eyes were
puffy. preston got out and walked around the car to open her door for her. she stood up unsteadily,
and he offered her his arm for support.
she took it, fingers curling into the fabric, feeling the lean, corded muscles through his shirt,
pressing against him for warmth. she let him lead her up to the guesthouse. the night was damp
and wreathed in mist, and there was no sound save for the crickets and their feet shuffling through
the grass.
when they reached the doorway, preston said, somewhat awkwardly, “you must be relieved
to have your sleeping pills again.”
“yes. i suppose i can’t expect you to lie chastely next to me every night.”
preston gave a soft laugh and removed his arm from her grasp. “good night, effy.”
effy’s stomach felt hollow with disappointment. but she said back, quietly, “good night.”
she watched him as he walked back to the car, and watched the car until it had vanished into
the darkness, taillights blinkering away. only then did she go into the guesthouse and lie in the
green bed.
if she went back outside, would she see him? the flash of white between the trees, the long,
slick black hair? he had appeared to her so clearly, so many times, since that very first night on
the bank of the river. now she knew it was truly just her imagination. a sad little girl’s effort to
make sense of a world that was insensibly cruel.
she felt her eyes start to brim again, and she squeezed them shut to stop the flow of tears.
there was nothing left to do except try to be good now. to swallow her pills dutifully. to simply
look away if she saw the fairy king in the corner of her room. no more iron, no more mountain
ash, no more fanciful girlish tricks.
no more angharad.
myrddin was dead now, in more ways than one. it was time to let him rest—or rather, it was
time to bury him. they had the letters, the diary, and soon, the photographs. the truth would fall
on top of his lifeless body like grave dirt, and maybe then she would be free.
effy fumbled for the pill jar on the bedside table. when she closed her fingers around it, she
felt a searing sense of relief.
only this time, she didn’t take the sleeping pills to stave off thoughts of the fairy king, or
master corbenic, or myrddin’s letters, or the girl from the photographs. she took them because
otherwise, she would have lain awake all night, wondering what might have happened if she had
refused to let preston go.
even though ianto had initially encouraged her to leave, and even though they had technically
made it back before midnight, the next morning, he was not pleased. he glowered at them over his
coffee as water dripped steadily from the ceiling, over the glass chandelier, and pooled on the
dining room table.
seconds ticked by, punctuated by the falling of those large droplets.
“there’s a big storm coming, you know,” ianto said at last, setting down his cup. “two days
from now. the biggest in a decade, the naturalists are saying. the road down to saltney will be
washed away until saints know when.”
“i thought winter was meant to be the dry season,” preston said.
“not in the bottom hundred. not anymore.”
silence again, save for the water falling. effy wondered what was leaking from upstairs, how
the water had gotten in. she had forgotten how strongly hiraeth smelled of the sea—salt and rot,
sodden wood.
she thought of the time she had turned over a fallen log in her grandparents’ back garden: the
wood had disintegrated right there in her hand, and she’d stared down at the slimy dead leaves, the
white mold, the fungi that had sprouted up like flower heads, each one shaped and striated like an
oyster shell.
trees didn’t die when they were cut down, did they? their dying took months, years. what a
terrible fate to endure.
“i suppose you’ll want to board up the doors and windows,” effy suggested mildly.
“i don’t need a northern girl to tell me how to weather a storm, my dear,” ianto said. his tone
was light despite the bitterness of his words, but there was the faintest gleam in his eyes —
something knifing through the muddled paleness. effy’s skin prickled. “what i do need are your
blueprints. wetherell has been hounding me for days. where are they?”
she exchanged a look with preston that she hoped ianto didn’t see. two days until the storm
meant they had two days to discover the house’s secrets. they could not allow themselves to be
trapped up here on the cliffs indefinitely.
trying to keep her voice cheery, effy said, “they ought to be done in two or three more days.”
ianto let out a low breath. “once the blueprints are done, we will still need to hire contractors,
builders, search for supplies . . . i had hoped to begin construction before the end of the year.”
for all that she’d teased preston, effy felt a bit guilty lying to ianto now. “that’s definitely still
possible,” she said. “i promise. two days, and it will be done.”
“all right,” ianto said. but his pale eyes had grown sharper. “i hope you both had a . . .
gratifying trip.”
he was trying to goad them into confessing something, but effy wasn’t sure what. could
blackmar have called ianto and exposed them? or did ianto merely have a vague suspicion that
they might be lying, and hope to hit a target just by chance?
effy remembered the look of jealousy on ianto’s face as he had watched them drive away. it
was somehow the most sinister emotion she could imagine. her heart pattered in her chest.
“i think we both found what we needed,” she said uneasily. “if you don’t mind, i ought to get
back to work now . . .”
but ianto didn’t shift. he kept staring at her with his glass-sharp eyes, his enormous fingers
curled around the handle of his coffee mug.
“mr. héloury,” he said. “you can leave us. i’d like to speak with effy alone.”
for a moment, it looked like preston might argue. silently effy begged him not to. they were
so close to proving something, and they only had to survive ianto and this house for two more
days. now was not the time to prod the serpent.
preston appeared to have reached the same conclusion. “fine,” he said, rising to his feet. “i
have my own work to do, anyway.”
he left, but he watched effy over his shoulder until he was through the threshold. effy held on
to his gaze for as long as she could, until the tether snapped and she was forced to look at ianto
again.
“what did you want to talk to me about?” she tried to sound serene, pleasant. tractable.
“i hope that argantian boy didn’t do anything untoward.”
effy couldn’t manage to keep herself from blushing. “no! of course not.”
“good.” ianto inclined his head. the water had finally stopped dripping; the pool on the dining
table was murky and stagnant.
he was silent for so long that effy felt she had to say something. “is that all?”
ianto looked back at her at last. “you know, i’ve spent all this time trying to pin down what
sort of girl you are, effy. all women are either an acrasia or an amoret. patroness of seduction or
patroness of submission. but some women are far more one than the other. i believe you’re an
acrasia. a siren, a temptress. men can’t help what they do when they’re around you.”
she tried to choke out a laugh, hoping she could brush off his words—but ianto’s face was
deadly serious, colorless eyes bright, no more murk.
her heart ricocheted in her throat. she had her pink pills in her pocket. if she took one of them
now, would it convince her he had said nothing wrong at all, that it was just her imagination that
made her blood pulse with prey-animal panic?
in the pale mirror of ianto’s eyes, effy saw herself reflected back, only she was a child again,
red-nosed and whimpering, as she had been on the riverbank. impossible—a trick of this wretched
house and her addled mind. she blinked and blinked until the image was gone, yet ianto did not
for a moment lift his stare.
she had disavowed myrddin. she had left behind her hag stones in the pocket of her other
trousers. she had sworn to herself she would be sane and safe without them. but that was the
problem with annihilating her imagination. her mind could no longer conjure that escape hatch,
that crack in the wall. there was nothing for her to slip through.
effy stammered her way through the rest of the conversation, then fled upstairs.
preston was perched on the chaise, holding myrddin’s diary, when she walked in. he looked up at
her, with joy and relief, and said, “i got them.”
“got what?” effy was still breathless from her desperate scramble up the stairs, and ianto’s
voice was pulsing in her ears.
“the photographs,” preston said. “i decided to take advantage of the opportunity when you
were with ianto downstairs, and—effy, are you all right?”
“yes,” she said, but her voice was shaking. her legs threatened to give way beneath her.
“ianto just, well . . .”
preston’s back straightened with attention. “did he threaten you?”
“no—not really.” how could she explain it to him? she could barely explain it to herself.
ianto hadn’t brandished a knife; he hadn’t even tried to shift closer and slide a hand up her thigh.
as if conjured, master corbenic’s face appeared before her, rippling like a reflection on water.
he had said to her once: you need someone to challenge you. someone to rein you in. someone to
keep you safe, protect you from your worst impulses and from the world. you’ll see.
the words now felt like prophecy. if a story repeated itself so many times over, building itself
up brick by brick, did it eventually become the truth? a house with no doors and no windows,
offering no escape.
i was a girl when he came for me—
i will love you to ruination—
my beautiful and debauched girl—
men can’t help what they do when they’re around you—
“stop it,” she whispered, too low for preston to hear. “stop it stop it stop it—”
“effy,” said preston gravely, rising to his feet. “please. sit down. you look pale.”
too numb and too queasy to refuse, she let him lead her to the chaise. he sat down beside her.
they were not touching, not quite, but she was close enough to feel the heat of his body, and see
those two little grooves that his glasses carved into the bridge of his nose. she still wanted to ask
him if they hurt. or if they had hurt once, but he’d grown so inured to the pain that he didn’t even
notice it anymore.
“i’m sorry,” she said meekly. “i’m—i’m fine. i just haven’t eaten in a while.”
a mad girl, like the doctor had said. like her mother had always believed, like the other
students whispered in the halls. she tried to catch her breath, gulping down huge mouthfuls of air.
preston sat tensed next to her, fingers curling and uncurling in his lap. as if he wanted to reach out
and touch her but didn’t quite dare.
at last, effy lifted her head. stop it, she told herself again firmly. it’s not real. none of it is
real.
“you said you got the photographs?” she managed finally.
preston hesitated, still looking very worried. “yes. and something else occurred to me. if the
pictures were indeed taken on this chair, then it means that blackmar’s daughter was here at some
point, at hiraeth. which means that the affair went on for more than just a year. blackmar said that
myrddin didn’t move here until after angharad was published.”
effy frowned. she felt dizzy, unsafe in her own skin. “so that diary entry of myrddin’s where
he mentions blackmar dropping off the manuscript—that was just to his apartment in syfaddon?”
“it must have been. part of me began to think, well, maybe it’s something as simple as
blackmar doing some light editing of the manuscript and then bringing it back to myrddin to send
to greenebough? there’s nothing exceptional about that. but then why is blackmar so
uncomfortable at any mention of angharad and his daughter? he was sweating when you asked
marlowe about it. i keep running it all over in my mind, paging through myrddin’s diary, but
there’s something we’re missing, something—”
“preston,” she cut in. “we need to get into the basement.”
she had been thinking of ianto, of course, which made her think of the key, which made her
remember that dark locked door, the wood rotting and speckled white with barnacles. she
remembered the water, shifting and seething, so black that it had seemed impenetrable, that it had
seemed like a floor she could have walked on, like something she would have to break in order to
slip through.
and then she had been thinking of her own theory, her mind turning on in the silence like a
record player in an empty room, though it still felt too fragile to speak aloud. she was thinking of
the girl in the photographs. effy had once thought her gaze empty, but now she realized that the
girl had simply escaped her own body, her spirit wandering elsewhere while myrddin’s camera
flashed over her naked breasts.
effy knew that trick well. it was almost like magic. if you tried hard enough, you could believe
yourself out of the cold and banal world.
the color drained from preston’s face. “we can’t go down there—it’s all submerged, and we
don’t even know if there’s anything of use . . .”
“we have to try,” effy urged. “what else can we do? the storm is coming, and we’re out of
options.”
preston drew a breath. “even if we can get the key—and that’s quite an if—what are we meant
to do? swim through the dark until our hands happen to touch something? something that could
be too heavy, something that could drag us down? that seems like an awfully good way to
drown.”
his voice was wavering like it never had before, and his hands were fisted so tightly on his lap
that his knuckles had turned white.
effy frowned. “are you scared?”
“of drowning? of the dark? yes. those are very reasonable things to be scared of,” preston
said tersely.
hydrocephalus. water on the brain. how could she blame him for being afraid?
“then i’ll do it,” she said. “you can just hold the flashlight.”
“effy, this is all mad. we don’t even have the key.”
“i can get it,” she said. and even though a part of her wished she didn’t, effy felt quite sure of
that. “i promise you i can. and then i’ll swim. i’m not afraid of drowning.”
she meant it. well, in some primal way, maybe she would be afraid once she was under, her
lungs throbbing and burning, the light slowly waning overhead. but in an abstract sense, drowning
didn’t scare her.
she wasn’t afraid of dying, not really. it was the ultimate act of flight, an escape artist’s tour de
force. drowning did not seem like a particularly easy way to go, if ianto was to be believed, but it
wouldn’t matter once she’d already taken the plunge. fear and pain could be endured if you knew
that eventually, they would end.
“stop it,” preston snapped. “just—just stop being so reckless. that’s the one terrible thing
about you, you know. you jump out of moving cars and dive into dark water.”
he sounded as angry as he had when they’d confronted marlowe at the party, and it shocked
her. but his anger had a different edge now, something tense. something desperate.
effy was silent for a moment, letting his words settle over her and then slip off, as if they were
that dark water itself.
“you don’t understand,” she said. “you weren’t there in that car with ianto. when i jumped
out i wasn’t doing it to be reckless—i was saving myself. what you think of as recklessness, i
think of as survival. sometimes it’s not very pretty. skinned knees and a bloody nose and
whatever else. you told me i don’t see myself clearly, but i do. i know what i am. i know that,
deep down, there’s not much else to me but surviving. everything i think, everything i do,
everything i am—it’s just one escape act after another.”
believing myrddin’s stories had become an escape act, too, her greatest and most enduring
one. but it had made her unstable, untrustworthy, a fragile, flighty thing. that was the cruelest
irony: the more you did to save yourself, the less you became a person worth saving.
effy held preston’s gaze, undaunted, challenging him to reply. her chest was heaving. she
heard herself swallow hard.
“you couldn’t be more wrong about that,” preston said. his throat was pulsing. his eyes, once
pale brown, had somehow turned dark. “you’re not just one thing. survival is something you do,
not something you are. you’re brave and brilliant. you’re the most real, full person i’ve ever
met.”
effy’s breath caught, and when she tried to speak, she found that no words would come. she
wanted to say i don’t believe you. she wanted to say thank you. she wanted to say tell me more
about who i am because i don’t know anymore.
if myrddin had not written angharad, if he really had just been some lecherous old man, if
there was no fairy king, then who was she? just a mad girl, thrashing about in black water. a part
of her only wanted to cry.
she didn’t do or say any of that. instead, in one swift, decisive maneuver, she swung her leg
over preston’s hips, straddling him, and bore him down onto the chaise. she pinned him there,
their faces closer than they had ever been before, noses near enough to touch. where their chests
were pressed together, she could feel their hearts pounding in frenzied tandem.
for a long, long moment, neither of them moved or spoke.
“effy,” preston whispered at last. his hand slid under her skirt, his fingers folding around the
curve of her hip. “we can’t.”
“don’t you want to?” don’t you want me? she’d meant to ask, but she couldn’t quite find the
courage to make that small substitution.
“of course i do.” he shifted, and effy felt him, hard and urgent against her thigh. “and if you
were just some girl, at some party, i would. but i know you. i know what’s been done to you—”
her stomach fluttered. “what’s that supposed to mean?”
with his other hand, preston reached up. at first effy thought he was going to stroke her face,
but instead he gathered up the golden hair that was falling over both of them, tickling his cheeks,
twisted it into a knot, and tucked it over her shoulder.
it was a neat and gentle motion, the tendons on the inside of his wrist flexing. effy let out a
quivering breath.
“i know about that professor at your college,” he said softly. “what he did to you—i’m so
sorry.”
she felt as if she’d been slapped. she recoiled, sitting up, now perched awkwardly in preston’s
lap.
“you never told me,” she said, voice trembling. “you never told me that you knew.”
“you never brought it up. i didn’t want to be the one to mention it.” preston sat up, too, arms
braced around her so she wouldn’t topple backward. “at first i wasn’t even sure it was you—there
were just whispers about a girl in the architecture program who slept with her adviser. and then i
learned you were the only girl in the architecture program . . .”
“i never slept with him.” her stomach lurched as if she might vomit. “i’ve never even—it’s
not fair. men just say whatever they want and everyone believes them.”
“it’s not fair.” preston’s voice was low. “i know.”
“we did other things, but not that.” the tip of her nose grew warm, the way it always did
when she was going to cry. she tried desperately not to cry now. “and everyone thinks i started it
but i didn’t. i never got anything from him. that’s what all the boys at my college said. but he just
touched me and i let him.”
“effy,” preston said. “i believe you.”
she blinked, half in bewilderment, half to keep the tears from falling. “then why won’t
you . . . ?”
preston flushed lightly. “i didn’t mean it like that at all, that you were some fallen woman and
i—never mind. but i won’t be another man who uses you. i don’t want you to think of me that
way, just a shag on a chaise. i don’t want to be something else that keeps you from sleeping at
night.”
effy felt a sob rise in her throat. she pressed the heel of her hand to her eye. “i would never
think of you like that. i thought you were . . . cold, frigid, like the stereotypes say. really. i didn’t
know you felt anything at all when you looked at me.”
“i did. i do.” preston’s grip on her tightened, knuckles folding gently against the small of her
back.
she remembered the way he had scrawled her name repeatedly in the margins of that paper:
effy effy effy effy effy. she wanted to hear him say her name like that, over and over and over
again.
she was halfway to begging—fallen woman indeed. what sort of temptress was she if she
couldn’t seduce the man she really wanted?
“i’m sorry,” she said miserably. “i’m so, so stupid.”
“stop it. you’re not.” preston swallowed, and effy allowed herself, at last, to put one hand to
his throat, feeling it bob under her palm. “i wanted you, too. for so long. it was terrible.
sometimes i could barely eat—sorry, i know that sounds like the strangest thing. but for days i
didn’t feel hungry at all. i was . . . occupied. you took away all the other wanting from me.”
she held her hand there against his throat, and preston held her that way in his lap, and
outside, the sea roared against the rocks with a sound like nearing thunder. all the papers,
myrddin’s diary and letters, the photographs, spilled out on the floor, their edges lifted by an
uncommon breeze. and still something slid between them, like water through a crack in the wall.
