The Undoing. Averil Dean
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below the lift. The snow was falling up, burning cold against his face.
He swung himself out of the chair, dangling over the snow by one hand. As he dropped to the ground, he heard voices from the white mist overhead, disembodied, calling his name.
* * *
Julian heard Eric land with a muffled thud on the snow. The kid didn’t pause to pop into his rear binding, just slid into the whiteout without a backward glance. The snow folded behind him like a curtain.
“Something tells me that wasn’t Eric in Celia’s bed last night,” he said.
Kate turned to him. Her eyes were hidden behind silvered goggles that reflected his own image back to him, warped as a funhouse mirror.
“As if you didn’t know,” she said.
* * *
Always afterward, with the blaze of orgasm retreating into embers, Rory expected relief. Temporary, maybe, and only physical, but there should have been some period of minutes or hours when his skin felt tougher, when his mind stopped chasing itself in circles and found a reason to rest.
“Insanity,” Eric once said, “is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Or maybe that’s stupidity. They’re not that far apart...”
Not that he was talking about Rory when he said it.
Under his palm, he could feel Celia’s heartbeat, quick as a bird’s wing, her slender collarbone at his fingertips. He nuzzled into the downy hair behind her ear. The scent of her flooded his nose.
Minutes passed with neither of them moving. Celia would always wait, as long as he wanted, letting him soften and slide away before she’d ever make a move to free herself. He traced her spine, his fingertips rasping gently against her skin. His jaw had left pink stains on her shoulders and neck, but his fingers were too rough to soothe them away. He used his wrists and the backs of his hands.
She was waiting, patiently, not complaining about the hard floor or the chill in the air, or the work she needed to get back to, or the way he’d been just now—too hard and fast, too eager to get inside her and not at all eager to leave. She didn’t talk about Eric, but Rory wondered if she’d been with him, too, that morning, whether she was exhausted trying to keep up with them. Exhausted by the secrets they were keeping.
Eric was their friend, after all. The three of them had been together since they were children. He remembered the first time they came here, hearing Celia run up and down the hall overhead and Eric’s footsteps racing up the steps to join her. Rory had stood in almost exactly this spot, plucking at the peeling wallpaper and failing utterly to understand what Celia saw in the place.
To her it was magic. She said no one would ever leave a place like this.
It didn’t seem that way to Rory. Not at the time and not now. The only magical part of the Blackbird was the girl who lived in it.
He helped Celia to her feet. She lifted her face and kissed him. It was a woman’s kiss, openmouthed and generous. Her lips were cool and fresh; her arms twined delicately around his neck. It was like being kissed by a flower.
It almost decided him. The words crowded up to the base of his throat.
He couldn’t say it. He had to say it.
The decent thing would be to leave Jawbone Ridge. Just get in his truck and keep driving. In the summer, on his way back to town, spent and filthy from his job with the forestry service, he’d sit behind the wheel at the foot of the mountains and think, Turn around. Go the other way. But somehow he never could do it.
He should never have let it come to this. He should have stopped, could have stopped a hundred times. They could have gone on being family to each other, the way his mother always intended. He could have found someone else.
But those possibilities were behind them. This was where they were, and he wanted Celia with a single-mindedness that wiped away any mental image of his life but the one that included her. His desire had become laced with a possessive greed, so powerful that he’d lain awake night after night, twisted in the sheets, pulling at his dick like he could milk out some peace of mind, some resolution at the thought of Celia in the room next door, asleep in his best friend’s arms. He’d allowed the jealousy to grow, sick with shame at his own weakness. It was unfair to change the rules, he told himself. This was how they’d always played it. He understood that. He tried to accept his role in her life. In the beginning he’d even encouraged it.
“This is a small town,” he’d told her. “People think of us as siblings. They won’t tolerate it. Go and be with Eric. No one has to know about...this.”
“We won’t be able to hide it,” she had said.
But he had overridden her, patronized her. So sure always that he knew what was best for Celia.
Now he had to admit that she was right. He couldn’t hide it. Every time he glanced in her direction, it was like looking through a mask, a parody of brotherly affection. He had to keep his eyes on her face, forget the live feeling of her nipple in his palm, the texture of her skin, the damp heat of her mouth. He had to watch with gritted teeth as Eric teased her, kissed her publicly, while Rory could only wait and scheme and smile, smile, smile.
What Celia felt about it he never could guess. On the surface she seemed unchanged, but he gathered small evidences in the things she said, in an indecipherable expression or sidelong glance, in the way she clung to him and cried his name. (Had she held him that way the last time? Had she come as hard? Did she want him more or less than before?) He examined every word and gesture, aware with each passing day that the unfairness of the situation had begun to rankle: he was tired of being the odd man out. He wanted to know where he stood.
He wanted her to break a promise. It was selfish and unreasonable and unlikely. Celia didn’t break her promises.
He’d rehearsed this moment so many times in his head, piecing together what sounded like a convincing string of words until he said them aloud, alone in his room, the reproachful hotel groaning and snapping around him as if it knew he was scheming to steal its mistress away.
Fuck the Blackbird. Fuck Jawbone Ridge and brotherhood and promises. He had to put it out there. He needed her to himself.
The words that had long been boiling in his chest surged upward. As they spilled from his mouth, Eric walked through the door.
One Day Earlier
KATE OPENED THE top drawer of Julian’s dresser. It was half-full of socks and folded-up boxers. The next drawer had things in it, too, but probably there was room to combine them. Kate hadn’t been home in more than a week, and her clothing had begun to accumulate. She’d been using hangers, tossing laundry into her duffel. Waiting for Julian to offer some space for her to settle in. But he was absentminded that way.
She gathered up his clothes and began to shift them to the right-hand drawer.
He wouldn’t mind. They had been dating for months now; they were a couple. Everywhere Kate went, people asked, “Where’s Julian?” and their heads would swivel around, scanning the room. She’d roll her eyes and say that they were not joined at the hip, but secretly she’d feel a warm little glow at the association. Julian was somebody, not like most of the men from Telluride. He came from generations of money, but when she asked him where it all started, he was vague. Investments, he said, not looking at her, bored as if she’d blundered into some obvious question he’d answered a hundred times before.
That was the problem with Julian. It was so easy to irritate him and set his attention wandering.
It hadn’t always been this way. When they first met, it seemed that Julian wanted nothing more than to make her happy. She wanted the same, or thought she did. They treated each other cordially. Never argued or took a stand on principle, never made demands, as if they were both afraid one really ugly fight would tear the whole thing apart. They built a careful stockpile of goodwill, as if saving it up against