Me, Cinderella? Part 16

Eliot didn't respond to anything I said, and the meeting at the academy with Mark was brief and awkward. I sat on the other side of the table and listened as Eliot explained a number of different options we had to explore now that we had broken through the solution to the first, specific case. Occasionally he would glance up at Mark, but never at me.

Then he left, and Mark and I were alone in the university library. I began to gather up the papers to go, but Mark put his hand on my arm.

"Brynn?"

I turned to see him only inches away from me, his body so near mine that I could feel his breath on my skin.

"Mark-"

"I need to talk with you." His face was so serious that I almost laughed out of sheer nervousness.

"About what?"

"Come on, Brynn, you know about what." He leaned in as if to kiss me, and I stepped back.

A lump rose in my throat and I coughed. I didn't want to do this to Mark. He had been one of the best and closest friends I'd ever had. But I didn't feel the same way towards him, and he deserved to know that.

"Mark," I said carefully. "I don't think we should go any further with this."

His face dropped into a mask of apathy. He only looked like this when it hurt, I could tell. "Why?"

"I just- I don't feel that way towards you."

"You kissed me back. Last night." His voice pleaded with me, and his careful mask began to crack.

"I'm sorry, Mark. I was excited about the problem. We both were."

"But I thought...look, Brynn, I know we could be a good couple."

"Mark, don't."

He forged ahead with the words that I'm sure he'd been practicing all last night. "I really think there's something between us, Brynn. I've always felt it. You're so special to me, and you always have been. Just give me a chance to be that person for you, too."

"Mark-"

"Don't do this," he said, his voice cracking. "Please, Brynn, don't throw this away without a shot."

"I'm not throwing anything away. I just don't think we should be together. Not like that."

Mark paused, his brow furrowed deeply. He looked tortured, and I wished that there was something I could do to console him. But any kindness I had in me was safely tamped down. If there was one thing I didn't want, it was to send mixed messages. No more hugs. No more shared smiles. No more anything for a while.

"I don't understand it." His voice turned hard, and he looked away from me. I didn't know what to say, so I just stood there, waiting.

"I don't understand. Do you just not care about me?" His eyes flashed dark and accusing at me.

"I care about you a lot, Mark. Just not in that way."

"So what?" He threw his hands up in the air angrily. "Are you going to pine forever for him?"

"Who?" My face turned hot as I realized what he was saying.

"You know who I'm talking about. You light up whenever Herceg comes into the room."

"So?" Was it that obvious?

"He's a professor, Brynn."

"So?" I shuffled the papers again in my hands, trying not to admit what Mark already knew. That's not the least of it, I thought. He's also a prince and heir to a fortune. He lives in a castle, for G.o.d's sake.

"So you think he would care about some dumb student?"

"No!" I threw the papers down onto the desk, and tears sprang to my eyes. "I know that! Of course he doesn't care! That's not the point, Mark!" Fury raged in me. He had no right to talk about Eliot in that way. I had never heard him speak so bluntly, so meanly.

"What's the point?" he said.

"I don't feel that way about you, and that's all there is to it." A frisson of energy crackled between us, and I could see that things wouldn't go back to normal anytime soon. If ever.

"Okay." Mark stacked my scattered papers together and pushed them back towards me on the table. "I'm sorry."

I saw the rejection ripple through him and sag his limbs, but I couldn't do anything. Sorrow ran through my, but I couldn't fix this thing between us right now.

"Me, too," I said.

The s.p.a.ce between us had grown too dangerous to stay in. We couldn't be friends, not like we had been before. I wanted to throw myself into the river outside and freeze until I couldn't feel these emotions anymore. The pain of being rejected by Eliot was almost as bad as the pain of hurting Mark. I could deal with being hurt. I had always been the one who could handle pain. But dealing it out to someone else was too much. The two people in my life who I felt closest to here, and they had both been torn away from me. More alone than ever, I retreated back into the safety of mathematics, and the dam inside of me that I thought had been torn down now stood taller than ever, my protection from the messiness of he outside world.

Eliot sat at his desk, reluctantly petting the gray ball of fur that sat purring on his lap. As the phone rang again, he prayed for Marta to stop calling him. After the tenth ring, he gave up pretending to be in the shower.

"Eliot? Finally!" Marta said, her voice bright and enthusiastic. "I've called about that d.a.m.ned cat you wanted to get rid of."

"Oh!" Eliot breathed a sigh of relief. "I'm so glad."

"Did you think I was going to ask about that girl of yours? I convinced the l.u.s.tigs to take her cat in a couple of days. How is she?"

"The cat?"

"The girl."

"Marta, the subject is over."

"I was just asking how she was."

"She's doing well. She's done some good work on the project with another student." His voice caught on the last syllable, and he coughed to cover it up, but Marta didn't miss anything.

"Another student? A boy? Eliot, are you jealous?"

"It's not my place to be jealous."

"You don't have any compet.i.tion." Marta seemed unworried. "She'll come back around."

"Thanks, Marta, but I'm really not looking for any kind of relationship right now."

"You've been saying that for ten years, Eliot."

The pause between them stretched and curled across the phone connection. Eliot shifted uncomfortably back in his chair, leaning his head on the hard leather. A burning desire flickered up in his consciousness and he stamped it down.

"I can't." I won't.

"Why not?"

"She's a student-"

"So what? Eliot, don't think her heart isn't in the same place as yours."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I've seen my share of lovestruck maidens." He could hear the wine being sipped at the end of her sentence.

"You're being absurd." As insightful as Marta was sometimes, she couldn't help but insert herself into drama. Or create it if none existed. And he was sure that none existed here.

Marta sighed, a heavy sigh meant to chastise.

"If you think she doesn't love you, you're either so stupid you can't see the nose in front of your face or so scared that you're pulling back into your sh.e.l.l. And I know you're not stupid, Eliot."

"I don't believe she does love me. If she ever did, I'm not convinced she does anymore."

"I am."

"Marta, even if we both wanted something, I can't." Eliot stood up from his desk and began to pace from shelf to shelf, the phone pressed to his ear.

"Whenever you say you can't, it usually means you've just gotten in your own way, Eliot. You always trip over good intentions. Don't let them get in the way of love."

"I can't-"

"Can't what?"

"Love!" Eliot rested his head against the wall. "I can't love anymore. Not again."

"You won't let yourself. Eliot, when was the last time you went to church?"

Eliot smiled wanly. Otto wasn't exactly the religious type, but Marta strove to get him to church every Sunday. Whether for the publicity or for the moral salvation, Otto usually obliged.

"It's been a while." Ten years is a while, isn't it?

"Try it, maybe. You might learn a little something about forgiveness."

"I don't deserve it. The accident was my fault."

"And it's in the past. The long past. You deserve a future."

"Thank you for your concern, Marta. Give my love to Otto."

"I will. Forgive yourself, Eliot."

Eliot looked at the phone, then hung up.

I don't deserve a future, he thought. And even if I did, she deserves a brighter one than I could give her.

Weeks pa.s.sed. Eliot kept his distance from Brynn, and she kept hers. Her work, already impressive, had become near-professional in its diligence, and she made sure to doc.u.ment not only her successes, but the avenues of inquiry that led to failure. She stayed late at the academy every night, or so his a.s.sistants told him. He wasn't quite sure what happened between her and the Joseph boy. Either she hid the relationship from him so well he couldn't figure it, or nothing had happened after that first night he caught them together. Regardless, on the rare occasions he came to visit the academy and saw them working together, he felt a tug of jealousy.

Why should he be jealous? It had been his decision to stay out of her life, and the choice had been made for her own good. Every time he saw her, though, he came closer and closer to ruing the decision he had made. In her time at Budapest, he saw her grow and mature, not only as a mathematician, but also as a woman. Each visit made him more aware of her budding grace, her beauty that was no longer childlike. He began to make excuses to come to the academy more often, every time knowing that he was playing with fire.

The semester went on and on, and his work made progress in leaps and bounds now that he was actively sharing ideas with the interns and a.s.sistants. Each day brought him closer to the answer to his problem, and at the same time closer to the day when Brynn would leave and go back to America to graduate, find a job, marry someone else. Eliot tortured himself with imagining her future husband, her future family, her future life without him. He was no idiot. She was young and had the rest of her future in front of her, and he was sure her brief experiences with him had disillusioned her about the possibility of staying with him. No, that chance had come and gone, if it ever existed.

He lectured at the front of the cla.s.sroom, but his lectures were directed solely towards her, and although she never raised her hand to ask a question, he tried to read her expression to know what parts he needed to explain more thoroughly. And although she stayed quiet, the last words she had directed his way echoed incessantly through his mind: When will you go to visit your wife?

It was a beautiful spring day, only a few weeks before the semester was due to be over, and driving down to the academy he opened the windows and breathed in the fresh cool air. Normally he would have turned off of the main road to the academy to avoid pa.s.sing the cemetery, but for some reason that day he didn't; not a conscious decision, no, not at all. When his car pa.s.sed by the cemetery he braked hard and pulled over to the curb. Sitting at the wheel, his throat choked with tension, and he willed himself to relax. He looked up to the front of the cemetery, and the open doors seemed to call him inside, the sun shining brightly above.

When will you go visit your wife?

He left the car at the curb and walked through the iron gate. The gra.s.s underneath his feet squished wetly with the dampness from the thawed winter frosts, and everything grew bright and green between the stone graves. In places where the caretaker had forgotten to mow tiny alyssum blossoms had taken hold and spread their white petals in the shade of gravestones. His feet took him quickly to the family plot, though he paused before opening the gate and walking over.

His mother had not wanted Clare buried in the same plot, but Eliot had insisted that she was just as much a part of the Herceg family as any other. They had only been married less than a year before she died. Before he killed her.

Drawing closer to the gravestone, Eliot blinked hard. The stone was surrounded by gra.s.s but right in front of Clare's stone lay a small bouquet of white roses. He bent down and picked them up, brought them to his nose and inhaled. The smell was still fresh, the roses new and alive. His eyes turned to the gravestone, reading the words engraved there.

"Clare, oh Clare." He fell to his knees and pressed his forehead to the cold stone, his eyes closed. He began to talk, haltingly at first, in a low whisper that couldn't be heard by any living soul.

"I miss you Clare. I see you-G.o.d, I see you every day, everywhere. It's a beautiful day today. Sunny and cold, your perfect day. I'm sorry you can't be here to see it. The ice is melting and the stream has come up in the back. I go out and sit there and think about you.

"The problem is going well. We just solved another specific case; this one was much harder, but I think I can generalize it-of course, don't let me go on and on about math. You always let me go on for far too long. There's someone helping me-"

Eliot breathed in deeply before continuing.

"She's lovely. You told me that if anything happened to either of us, we should find happiness."

Eliot's voice shattered on the last word, and tears streamed down his cheeks. The guilt he carried inside of him flared up and made his skin burn with shame.

"I haven't been happy, Clare. I haven't. I haven't ever let myself be happy. And I know-I know you would want me to let go, but I can't. I just can't. I miss you so much and I'm sorry I hurt you. I wish I could go back and live through it again. I would-"

He stopped. He thought of what he would say-that he would never have tried to woo her, never taken her away from her life and put her in a place where she would die so meaninglessly. But that wasn't right. He couldn't erase the past like that. Every beautiful moment spent with Clare taken away? No. No. He did not know what he wanted, but it was not that.

As he opened his eyes he realized his tears had stopped. His fingers moved over the letters of her name and he whispered to himself.

"You're right, Clare. As always."

There was nothing he could do now, nothing that would reverse the chain of motion that led to her death. There was only the here and now, a sunny day that she could not see. He looked down to the bouquet of roses. He had clutched the stems too tightly, and the thorns had pierced his hand. He opened his hand slowly, watching the beads of red appear in the punctures. He was alive, this proved it. The ache that shot through his hand as he flexed it open proved it. He breathed slowly and let the pain ride through his body, his palm throbbing with his heartbeat. Blood smeared the petals of the roses, red on white. They looked beautiful, like the hybrid varieties that bloomed at this time of the year in the gardens of his estate.