Sage Elise Rothschild
Saturday 18th of February, 2012
The evening tastes like gin and rebellion, and I’m not certain how I’ve arrived at this particular moment, though I can trace the exact mechanics of it if I close my eyes. The flat in Notting Hill is saturated with bodies and laughter, someone’s playing Nick Cave far too loud, and Charlotte is sprawled across the sofa with a martini balanced dangerously close to extinction. Victoria is somewhere in the kitchen conducting a fierce argument about whether brown sugar belongs in a proper sazerac, and the sheer absurdity of it washes over me in a wave that feels almost like peace. Tomorrow at fourteen hundred hours I board the transport that will take me halfway around the world into the kind of landscape where joking about cocktails becomes a quaint memory, a ghost of the girl I am tonight. But right now, in this moment, I let myself breathe in the wreckage of my current life and simply exist in it. Natasha appears beside me with a fresh glass, her eyes reading me in that way she perfected years ago, and I don’t object when she settles against my shoulder. We don’t need words. The entire unit knows I’m deploying tomorrow, and they’ve arranged this gathering with the precision usually reserved for tactical operations, which is to say with brutal efficiency and genuine affection. There’s something bittersweet about being surrounded by people who understand exactly what you’re about to walk into, who’ve all stood on that precipice and made the jump, and who know that some of them won’t come back the way they left. No one says it aloud. That’s not how we operate.
My mobile buzzes in my pocket, and I know without looking that it’s Thomas. He’s called four times already, and I haven’t answered once. I’ve seen the messages, though, read them with a kind of distant removal that should probably worry me more than it does. Thomas Blackthorn, my fiancé of two years, stationed currently in the States with his unit, wondering where I am and why I’m not answering. Wondering why I’ve been distant since I discovered, three days ago, that he’s been fucking someone named Rebecca for the past twenty months. I found the evidence in his flat, a stupidly obvious trail of hotel receipts and text messages he was too arrogant to properly delete. The kicker, the part that sits like a stone in my chest, is that Rebecca is pregnant. Visibly pregnant. With his child. I discovered this through the rather unfortunate timing of running into her at Liberty, and she made the mistake of assuming I knew, made the mistake of offering sympathies about how difficult the pregnancy journey must be for a woman who “didn’t want children anyway.” I hadn’t realized I was the type of woman who could smile through that particular revelation whilst maintaining a perfectly intact facade, but apparently I am exactly that woman. The real problem isn’t the infidelity itself. The real problem is that I was engaged to Thomas Blackthorn whilst being entirely, catastrophically in love with Dean James Astor, and Thomas knew it, and he’d been patient about it in the way people are patient about things they’re about to actively sabotage. I think perhaps that was the point. I think perhaps he was marking time, waiting for me to choose him properly or choose Dean, and when I chose neither, chose instead to marry him out of obligation and habit and family pressure, he’d taken that as permission to seek elsewhere. Which is, I suppose, a fair assessment. I’d been absent from the engagement in meaningful ways. I’d been half a person in that relationship, and Thomas, whatever his faults, deserved someone fully there.
None of that makes it any less fucking painful.
The evening wears on with the texture of a farewell that no one’s articulating directly. Victoria produces a bottle of Veuve Clicquot that costs more than a fortnight’s rent, and we toast to deployment, to staying sharp, to looking after each other on the ground. The conversations drift between operational details and gossip about who’s shagging whom back at base, and I drift with them, contributing when prompted, laughing at the right moments, performing the role of a soldier who’s excited about the deployment ahead rather than a woman with a detonated personal life who’s about to spend the next six months in a war zone with a broken engagement and an inconvenient crush on her commanding officer’s best mate. By half eleven, the party has shifted into the kind of intimate gathering that only happens when most people have drifted home and the remaining crew is the hard core. Charlotte’s changed into something more comfortable, Natasha’s curled into the corner with a book she’s not reading, and Victoria’s engaged in some sort of philosophical debate with a bottle of wine about the nature of duty. And then there’s the moment, which arrives with the precision of something orchestrated by a hand I can’t quite see, when Dean James Astor lets himself into the flat with the easy familiarity of someone who’s been given a key, and everything inside me organizes itself around his presence in a way that should feel alarming. He’s still in combat dress, which means he’s come straight from base, and there’s something in his bearing that speaks of twelve-hour training rotations and the kind of exhaustion that sits in the bones. Dean has the look of a man carved from expensive marble, all sharp angles and controlled precision, with eyes that can read you in the time it takes to blink. He’s got a reputation that’s slightly larger than life, though most of it is unearned theatricality. What’s earned is his technical excellence and his capacity to make even the worst field situations feel manageable through sheer force of competence.
He’s my commanding officer, which makes what I’m about to do monumentally stupid, and yet I watch myself stand as he enters the room, watch myself excuse myself from Charlotte’s mid-sentence commentary, and feel the machinery of my body align itself toward him with the automaticity of a compass finding north. He’s been expecting me to do this, or something close to this, and it reads in the particular tightness around his mouth. Dean makes his way through the flat, speaks briefly to the others, and finds me where I’ve strategically positioned myself near the kitchen. When he reaches me, his proximity sends a small electric current through the base of my spine. “You shouldn’t be here,” I say, and it’s perhaps the most dishonest thing I could say, because we both know I’ve been tracking his movements all week, both know that I asked Natasha to invite him, both know that what’s between us has been building with the heat of something pressurized that’s about to rupture. “You’re deploying tomorrow,” he says, and there’s something rough in his voice, something that speaks of decision-making and the subsequent regret of having decided anything at all. Dean’s jaw is tight, and he’s standing at precisely the distance protocol would demand, which means he’s fighting as much as I’m fighting, which means he’s likely been fighting longer and harder than I have. “I am,” I confirm, and the weight of it drops between us like a stone. He reaches out then, his hand finding the small of my back, and it’s such a minimal contact, such a precise point of pressure, and it absolutely undoes me. Everything I’ve been holding in check since the moment I discovered Thomas’s betrayal crystallizes into a need that’s neither rational nor deniable.
I look up at him, at the particular architecture of his face, at the way he’s watching me like I might dissolve, and I know that I’m about to do something that crosses a line I shouldn’t cross, something that violates every professional boundary and every courtesy owed to my fiancé, though I suppose that courtesy is already well breached. Thomas broke faith first. Thomas has been breaking faith for twenty months. “Come,” I say, and it’s less a request than a statement of fact, and Dean follows me through the flat to the guest toilet, a space barely large enough for two people, and I lock the door behind us with a click that sounds obscenely loud in the small room.
