The Undoing. Averil Dean

      “You’re tired,” she said. “We’re all tired. We knew it would be this way at first. Probably jet-lagged, too...”

      She drew her hand away, fussed over an open drawer and found a bottle of sleeping pills. She shook out two tablets. But Eric curled her fingers with his palm and held them closed.

      “I don’t need another pill,” he said. His words, which had started uncertainly, tumbled out. “I need you. I need it to be just you and me. We can go someplace warm, someplace with palm trees and sand, where we can listen to the ocean every day, lay under the stars every night. We can get one of those big hammocks, baby, we can live someplace new, and you wouldn’t have to work so hard, and there wouldn’t be so much goddamn snow...”

      His voice raced on, a current of words sweeping him far away from her. She looked at him, light-headed, as if some crucial underpinning had come loose; they could be sliding right now, down the Ridge as so many others had done before. She gripped the edge of the sink.

      “I like the snow,” she said.

      He drew back as if she’d struck him.

      A slow anger bloomed in her chest. How like Eric to throw down something this impulsive and expect everyone else to follow.

      “You want us to leave here after all this work?” she said. “Leave the hotel half-finished. Just walk away, with no reason and no explanation—”

      “Oh, I’ve got my reasons.”

      “No,” she said.

      He dropped her hand. The sleeping pills clattered to the floor. He backed away a step.

      “You won’t come,” he said.

      “How can you even ask? This is our home. This is what we’ve always talked about. You and me and Rory. How can you think of leaving him behind?”

      “Easily.”

      “Look, I don’t know what’s going on between you two—”

      “Because you don’t want to know.”

      “Because I don’t need to know. It’s not my business. If you and Rory had a fight, go to him and work it out, because I sure as hell am not going to leave in the middle of the night and go off to sip mai tais on the beach with you.”

      “I see,” he said. “You choose him over me.”

      Celia sighed. She reached up to stroke the hard line of his jaw, as though it might soften if she were patient enough to smooth it away.

      “I choose us,” she said. “The Blackbird. Like it always has been.”

      He shook her off, his mouth set in an unhappy line. His gaze traveled down her body, and he reached for the towel she had tucked closed against her chest.

      She caught it first. Her fist curled across the knot of terrycloth.

      “Let’s rest tonight,” she said.

      He laughed bitterly, peeling off his shirt as he turned to start the shower.

      “And so it begins,” he said.

      * * *

      Celia changed her clothes, pulled her damp hair over her shoulder and opened the door. Julian was standing just outside the bedroom door, in the dim hallway. His shoulders blocked the light from the staircase and cast his face in shadow, but even so she could see the smile creep across his lips as he bent toward her.

      “Trouble in paradise?” he said.

      His voice was low and rich with amusement, as though they were sharing an inside joke at the back of a crowded room. He propped his hand on the wall behind her head. She couldn’t look him in the eye without stepping aside or craning her neck; either choice felt like a concession, so she willed herself not to move, not to lift her face to him. She stared past the shadowy bump of his collarbone at the wall sconce near the end of the hallway.

      “Let me by, Julian.”

      He leaned in closer, lowered his head to speak from just above her ear. His breath was warm on her temple.

      “What are you going to do when they leave you—tell me that. Do you even know?”

      A shiver crawled up her neck. Don’t speak. He doesn’t know us; he doesn’t know what we’re about. But the question in her mind bubbled through the tarry silence and burst from her lips before she could stop it.

      “Why do you hate me, Julian?”

      For a moment she imagined a flash of surprise in his expression.

      “I’ve been nice to you,” she said.

      The surprise, if it had been there, was gone. His face hardened. He pushed back from the wall and turned away.

      “You haven’t been,” he said. “You haven’t been nice at all.”