Stay by Nicola Griffith Read Free Book Online

see Julia again for the first time.
    “Tall, taller than she really was, anyway, because of the way she held herself, like a ballet dancer. When I saw her come in that night with you, I said to myself, Now there’s a handful, because I thought she’d be snooty, you see. It was the way she carried her head. But she wasn’t.” He picked up his steak plate and knife and fork. “Until Tammy came in. Though I don’t blame her for it—I expect she took her cue from you.” He looked up. “Your face is a study.”
    I just stared.
    “You think Tammy’s body blinds me to her faults?” He shrugged comfortably, then started cutting his steak. “Bit more well done than I like. No, I think I see her very clearly. You, now, you were the one who was blinded. You couldn’t see her good points for her bad. Ah, now your face is closing up. I haven’t seen that face for a while. No doubt you’re thinking, He doesn’t know the half of it and I’m not going to ruin his image of his fiancée by telling him. Tell me, did she try to seduce you? Yes, I thought so. She tried it with all my other friends who didn’t like her.”
    “I—”
    “Oh, I know, you turned her down.” He speared a piece of steak, put it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed. “So, you turned her down, not your type, but the point is, Torvingen, the point is, she is my type. She might use sex like subway tokens but I trust her in my own way.” He forked up more steak. “Eat, eat, while it’s still hot.”
    I did. My teeth sank into the juicy muscle. Everyone is different. “Different people want different things.”
    “Yes. And Tammy was the one for me.”
    “I'll find her.”
    “No doubt.” He looked at his steak sadly. I reached out and touched his arm.
    “I’ll find her,” I said again. We ate for a while without saying anything. I drank my beer.
    “She pretends she’s tough,” he said, “but she’s not. She’s smart, and pretty as a picture, and she knows her way around the world, but sometimes I’d look at her and just want to hold her, protect her from everything. She wouldn’t let me.”
    “No,” I said. I hadn’t been able to protect Julia. I hadn’t been able to protect myself from her. Dornan got up, disappeared into the trailer, came back with a box of tissues.
    “Every luxury,” he said with a crooked grin that showed the blue tooth. “Even halfway up a mountain.”
    I wiped my face. The tears kept welling, I kept wiping. “I can’t bear it.”
    “You will, eventually.”
    “Tell me about it, Dornan, about grief.”
    “It never goes away. After a while, though, after a long, long while, life starts to sand it down and take the sharp edges off. Over the years it gets smaller, until you don’t notice it so much. Sometimes some jagged bit will catch you off guard, but that happens less and less.”
    I thought of Julia weeping on the boat in Norway, so many years after her brother died. “I don’t think I can live for years feeling like this.”
    “You don’t have much of a choice.”
    “There are always choices.”
    “Oh, you won’t kill yourself, you’re too self-centered, and you’re too stubborn to go mad. So that means you’ll have to cope.”
    Cope. A small word for a terrible task.
    “Building this house is one way of doing it, of course.” He put his plate down and twisted to look past me at the cabin. “It looks almost finished.”
    “The outside, maybe. The inside needs a lot of work. That interior wall needs finishing, some of the floor pulling and relaying. The handrails up to the loft have to come out. I have some lovely walnut I want to put up there, really fine grain. I also want to turn the board gable into one of half logs, so it matches everything else.”
    He stood, dusted off his jeans. “Show me.”
    I did. I showed him each joint, discussed every decision on materials and design, and explained how I’d cut the walnut for the railings myself, from the sixty acres of mature black walnut