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Henry looks at her drenched in sunlight, and thinks she’s an Aphrodite proper — no, not Aphrodite, he thinks, Athena, glorious and cold, and wonderful. She’s sitting across an armchair, legs dangling over the armrest, delicate bare feet rocking back and forth absently. Her golden hair is like a halo around the sharp features of her face and his stomach turns with longing as she lifts her eyes from the book sprawled in her lap, and her glance meets his. In a few wide strides, he’s standing right next to her, reaching out to touch her like she’s made of paper, like she’s made of glass. Reverently, he caresses her hair, his fingers slipping through it like through silk. He wants to believe there is nothing carnal about his desire, but she moves her face ever so slightly, chin pointing towards him, and he trembles as her cheekbone nests in his palm, the feeling of skin against skin igniting a small pyre inside his ribcage. Camilla breathes out a small sigh, her eyes searching his for words neither of them wants to speak out loud.
He thinks of the Iliad. For his Helen, he would storm into Troy singlehanded.
Around her, he always feels too big, too rough, as if he could easily break her. Trembling, he runs his thumb along her lips, their eyes locked. It feels like they are always walking the thin line between wanting and having, but he knows. He doesn’t have to ask. On most days, just touching her like this is enough. Her skin is warm, heated by the sun, and he barely runs his fingertips along her cheekbone, her jaw, along her hair. She’s still as sculpture, leaning into his touch, leaning into his longing with a yearning of her own.
When Bunny stumbles into the room, glass in hand, guffawing, he has no idea he has walked into something just as intimate as a kiss.
*
He places his hands on the counter, essentially trapping her between his body and the solid wall of kitchen cabinets. Her breath catches in her throat, and he can see her heartbeat quicken in a vein on her neck.
She glances over his shoulder at the living room, where they can hear Francis’s bored drawl as he recounts a story. Charles is too distracted playing with Francis’s cufflinks, and Bunny and Richard are playing cards on the floor. She lets out a relieved sigh. They’re allowed to steal this moment together.
She lifts her chin up, letting her lips part slightly, and Henry presses his forehead to hers, keeping their mouths at the brim of a touch. He inhales her scent, runs his fingers through her hair, lets them get tangled and lost in her luscious golden locks. She lets her hands rest on his chest, almost a barrier between them. The air in the kitchen is hot and heavy, made all the hotter and heavier by the tension between them.
“Millie,” Charles calls from the living room, bursting their bubble. As if electrocuted, they spring away from each other, but as she leaves the kitchen, carrying the scotch that she came in for in the first place, her fingers find his, and they brush their fingertips in a silent expression of longing.
*
Epi oinopa ponton, he thinks. Looking at her, he feels the same kind of longing that the Greek soldiers felt on the shores of Troy, looking towards the wine-dark sea and yearning to go home. He imagines that letting himself get lost in her will feel precisely like that: going home.
She’s sitting cross-legged on the blanket, her skirt spread around her like the wings of a bird that’s just taken flight, and she’s working on her Greek composition. A delicate frown furrows her brow, and he wishes he could reach over and caress it. Instead, he sits on the blanket, legs crossed at the ankles, perched up on his elbows and soaks in her beauty, the prettiest flower in the midst of a flower field. She reminds him of a thousand different poems in a thousand different languages at once. Mischievously, she reaches for the cigarette packet in his shirt pocket and pulls it out, taking a cigarette out and placing it between her lips without breaking eye contact. He leans forward and lights her cigarette for her.
Francis is in the house, sleeping, and Charles, Bunny and Richard are a safe distance away, tossing a football at each other, barefoot in the grass, their pant legs rolled up. No one is paying attention to Henry and Camilla, and he wistfully runs a thumb along her cheekbone. She breathes out a wisp of smoke and smiles at him through her eyelashes.
“I want...” he whispers, but he doesn’t say what. He wants the world raw, and he wants to give it to her on a silver platter.
She takes a drag from her cigarette, then looks at him with genuine sorrow in her eyes.
“Charles...” she begins, then drops whatever she was planning on saying, her gaze lingering on her brother across the field.
And Henry knows, he knows and he wishes he didn’t because he cannot bear the thought of Charles, drunk and rough, his skin red, his hands quick, pulling at Camilla’s clothes, burying his face in her soft skin, kissing the places Henry wishes he could. He knows, and wishes he could hate Camilla for it, for the way she resembles Charles, and reflects Charles’s movements a moment before he’s thought to move, and smells like Charles, and dresses in Charles’s clothes.
He knows this: Charles on his knees, his head resting in Camilla’s lap, and her fingers in his hair; Charles kissing her hands, and up her thighs; Camilla naked in his bed, the moonlight running across her creamy skin.
She breaks the silence.
“I don’t want him,” she says, but what she means is, I don’t always want him. He cannot begin to understand what the twins have — and maybe he doesn’t want to.
“I will always give you only exactly what you want,” he retorts. It’s not exactly a response to what she said, but he knows she understands what he means. He speaks to her in Greek. English is incapable of conveying all that he feels.
He reaches for her hand and she runs her fingers across his palm and up his arm in a gentle, secret caress. Sometimes it’s all he needs. Sometimes it’s not enough.
*
Camilla steps into his apartment, shaking from head to toe, and he can immediately tell it’s not from the cold. She’s soaking wet, like she walked all the way from her place to his in the pouring rain, water drip-drip-dripping from her hair, from her slacks, from Charles’s white sweater pooled around her slender frame. Her white tennis shoes are mud-spattered, and a single muddy footprint rests on the Oriental rug. Henry searchers for her eyes, wide and wet, and desperate, then notices, in alarm, that her lip is split, a thin trail of blood trickling down her chin. Before he has the chance to say anything, she takes in a deep, sharp breath, and then she’s into his arms. In half a blink of an eye, he’s wrapped himself around her, engulfed her in his embrace like he’s wanted to for so long, and he doesn’t care that the water seeps into his shirt. Camilla’s lips find his, and he’s holding onto her so tight, he should be afraid he’ll break her, and she’s burying her fingers in his hair, hungry, desperate, searching — for what, he does not know. He stumbles backwards as she pushes him into the wall, kissing him with a voracity he never would have thought she possessed, and he lets her, for once weak and unguarded, and completely at her mercy. She tastes like blood, and rain, and tears, but also distinctly like Camilla, and he’s overwhelmed with the unnamed emotions that he feels for her. He cups her face in both hands, then looks into her eyes intently, searching. His fingers touch the cut on her lip and she winces.
“Did he—“ he begins, but she won’t let him finish. He doesn’t want to know, because if he does, he’ll murder Charles in cold blood. He buries his face in her neck, rocking her gently back and forth, then finds her lips again and lets her seek solace pressed tightly against him.
“Can I stay,” she breathes out in Greek, her voice harsh and gorgeous.
“Please,” he wants to say, but instead, he whispers, “as long as you want to” into her skin.
Later, she sits in a kitchen chair, fingers knit around the stem of a wine glass, one of his shirts draped around her. He puts his hands on her shoulders, and she reaches up to rest her palm gently on top of his knuckles. Every gesture is a secret language for them, one they’re both fluent in, and she lets her eyelids flutter shut, revelling in his scent, and in his touch. He leans forward, his lips brushing the top of her head, and he whispers gently into her hair, the barest hint of a smile touching his eyes.
*
The sky is ink-dark through the window, the cracks of dawn beginning to spread on the horizon, but it’s still too early for sunrise. He cannot sleep; he was never much of a sleeper, but ever since November his insomnia has barely let him get the slightest wink of sleep. He’s jumpy, and on edge, almost exhilarated with all sorts of sensations at once. And since he cannot sleep, he does what he always does on nights like this: he calls Camilla. He imagines her, soft and delicate, sitting on the floor in her robe, her finger twisting and twirling the phone cord, her voice barely a whisper so she doesn’t wake Charles up, her voice velvet, murmuring softly in Greek, and sometimes in Latin. He can almost see her, tracing with her toes the triangle of light on the floor that’s seeped through the cracks. He leans back in his chair, listening to her honeyed words, and for once, he’s happy he cannot sleep.
*
He wonders if the rest of them know, sometimes. When Camilla wears his shirt, plain white, indistinguishable from Charles’s, except for the HMW embroidered on the shirt pocket. When she pulls out a pack of his cigarettes, the red bullseye blooming out of the shirt pocket like a gunshot wound. Maybe they do. He thinks Francis might know, when he silently searches for Henry’s gaze whenever Camilla’s upset. He thinks Richard might know, when he swallows his own longing for Camilla, resigned at the flush in her cheeks when Henry’s touch brushes her.
It’s always this: stolen fingertip brushes, stolen glances, stolen touches when no one is looking.
He hopes Charles knows, when Camilla doesn’t come home until daybreak, wine on her breath, and the scent of Henry seeped into her skin, flushed pink with the marks of his love.
*
Henry notices the bruises blooming on her thighs like a bouquet of hydrangeas. She’s sitting in his bed, naked, the linen sheets barely covering her soft skin.
“He did this,” he says, and it’s not a question. His rage isn’t red-hot, but a cold, seething, quiet white. He knows he’ll have to murder him, and he hopes Camilla forgives him someday.
“I didn’t want him,” she admits, her voice harsher, coarser in English. He thinks of Charles, forcing himself on Camilla, rough and grunting, and he gently pulls her into his arms. He’s never said it before, not to her, and not to anyone, but it rolls off his tongue gently: σὲ ἀγαπῶ.
She nestles into his embrace, skin to skin. Se agapo, she murmurs back, and he kisses her hair, running his fingertips across the bruises Charles has left on her like pictures in a storybook.
*
He’s not shaking when he pulls her into his embrace. He’s unafraid. He knows it’s the only way out. His lips find her hair, that gentle spot where her temple meets her golden locks, where honey seeps into gold, and he presses a gentle kiss. Then, he leans in and whispers into her ear. The rest of them will always wonder what he said to her. He thinks it maybe should have been I’m sorry. Instead, he breathes out σὲ ἀγαπῶ, before pushing her away into Francis’s arms and pressing the gun to his own temple. The spot where the gun kisses his head is the same as the one he kissed on hers. Before he pulls the trigger, he meets her eyes. Epi oinopa ponton. He knows she screams his name.
The rest of it is black.