Drowning in His Love

I thought I died.

But somehow a thread of me came loose and drifted back, weightless, toward the one place I always went.

Toward him.

There he was, under the lights. The man who turns me into his whole world every time a camera is pointed at us.

The man I spent ten years certain didn't love me.

I never told him what I'd decided. There were two reasons.

The first was that the doctors had run out of ways to fix me.

The second was something I'd convinced myself was true, something that felt true at the time: that he'd be lighter without me. That I was the weight he'd been carrying all these years, and if you took me out of his life it would get easier. I was so sure of it.

So that morning I said goodbye the way I always did.

He was leaning in the doorframe, watching me, lazy about it, like he had all the time in the world.

"See you, Rhys."

He raised an eyebrow.

And then I was gone from his world.

Chapter One

Finding him in a crowded room was never hard.

Rhys pulled every eye in the place toward him without lifting a finger. He was born doing it. Tonight the room was a ballroom dripping gold, some afterparty thrown in his honor, because the man who used to sing in dive bars until his voice gave out had gone and won the kind of award that puts your face on every screen in the country.

He'd earned it. The voice, the jaw, all of it. The industry took one look and knew he'd been built for this.

The last three things he ever said to me were from that morning.

You look beautiful today.

Have a good trip.

Come home to me early.

He'd said them with his chin propped on one hand, watching me across the table until my face went hot, and then he'd laughed. Head tipped back, stupidly, unfairly gorgeous. He asked how many years we'd been married and whether I could please, just once, stop going red every single time he looked at me.

I grabbed my keys and bolted like a coward.

I never did manage to tell him what I'd decided.

Even if I had, he wouldn't have stopped me. I was sure of that too.

"Mr. Maddox, a toast to you. I hope we get to work together, so many more times, I"

A girl in a long gown, glass lifted. Then her heel caught the hem, or someone jostled her, or maybe something quieter was moving under the surface of the room. She pitched straight into his chest.

He turned a few degrees and caught her by the waist. Steadied her. A second later his hand was already gone and the glass sat upright in his fingers, not a drop spilled.

The spill was on him. Champagne blooming pale gold down his shirt, and beside it a print of her lipstick, bright and loud.

"I'm so sorry, I"

"It's fine."

He cut her off gently, tipping his head down until she was looking straight up into a pair of warm, faintly curving eyes.

"Don't let it ruin your night."

He leaned in, half an inch. Blinked, slow.

"Next to that, a pretty girl's pretty dress getting stained would be the real tragedy. Wouldn't it?"

The blush climbed all the way to her ears.

He'd already stopped caring. A small nod, a murmur about needing to change, and he peeled away from the crowd.

And the second he turned, the instant the room fell out of his sightline, it all went out of his face.

The warmth. The curve of his eyes. Gone, like a hand passing over a candle.

What was left was cold. Bored. So sick of the whole thing he could barely hold himself straight in it.

I tilted my head and drifted after him.

There you are. Still performing, Rhys.

He didn't go back to the party. He found a corner of the garden and lit a cigarette instead.

Somebody wrote about him online once. I never forgot it.

Commenter: [He came down from somewhere up above us. He's like an angel. Born with light.]

An angel. Sure.

They should have seen his face just now, in the half-second he thought no one was watching.

Chapter Two

An angel. If they say so.

I always thought he belonged to the dark.

When every guard came down, when the mask finally came off, there was nothing gentle left in him. Sharp. Cold. Cruel, even.

Those nights, tangled up with him in the dark, he wasn't gentle at all.

He'd turn me to face the mirror and hold me there and make me watch the two of us like it was something I was supposed to learn by heart.

Look, he'd say, low, his mouth at my ear. See that. Mine.

Never a question. Just a fact he needed me to see.

And when I searched those black eyes for something cruel underneath it, I never found cruelty. I found something stiller than that. Emptier. A man with both hands closed around the one thing he couldn't survive losing, daring the dark to come and try for it.

The smoke blurred his face. He had his phone out, head down, and I drifted close enough to read the screen.

It was our chat.

Of course it was. I hadn't texted him.

I love texting him. Always have. Reply or no reply, it doesn't matter. A reply makes my whole day and no reply just makes me try harder. He told me once, flat as anything, that he'd muted my notifications.

He never mentioned that he'd pinned me to the top of everything.

Our last messages were still sitting there from the night before.

Me: [do these two cats look like us?]

Me: [this one's me. the one that won't stop headbutting you]

Me: [you only text back when you're in a good mood]

Me: [i'm crushed. truly.]

Ten minutes later, from the other room, he'd written back.

Him: [Not alike.]

Two words. The last two he ever sent me. That's where our whole history stops on the screen.

He looked at it for a while. Then he pressed the phone dark.

Heels on the path behind him. He put the cigarette out and turned to the girl standing there. The same one who'd spilled champagne down his front.

"Mr. Maddox. I know this is forward of me, but"

"I've liked you for the longest time"

Moonlight on her face, that particular flush of someone who'd found her courage at the bottom of a glass.

He looked down at her. His eyes curved, a fraction.

"Sorry. I'm off the clock right now."

A beat.

"So maybe save it for the fan meet?"

Always leaving a door open for people. Gentle. A blunt knife dragged slow.

"No, that's not what I"

"You've had too much to drink."

Flat. The eyes as cold as the words. She shook her head, quick.

"I'm not drunk, I"

"If you were sober, you'd be able to see the ring on my finger."

He lifted his hand and let her look. The band caught what little light there was and threw one clean, bright arc across the dark.

The blush drained out of her face. She took a step back, then another, whatever she'd come out here holding gone out of her all at once.

He didn't wait to watch it land. He turned his back on her and left her at the gate with the cold wind.

That wasn't like him.

I honestly thought he'd keep the act going a while longer. He usually did.

I drifted after him and watched him fold into a corner and thumb something into his phone. Then he lifted it to his ear and leaned back against the wall, half his face sliding into shadow.

He was calling someone.

Me. He was calling me.

It rang. And rang. And rang, all the way down to the dead tone at the end.

I didn't pick up. My phone was somewhere at the bottom of the river by now, out of his reach for good.

First time for everything.

Rhys couldn't find me.

Chapter Three

There was a time I believed, all the way down to the floor of me, that Rhys loved me.

Why else, the night we ran from that place, would his have been the hand closed around mine?

I used to think that if I ever just told him, said the words out loud, he'd have no choice but to be mine. Why else, in all those months of hiding, of ducking and running, did he hand me every good thing to eat and keep nothing back for himself?

We came out of the same group home.

I was six the year Rhys took my hand and ran.

The woman who ran that place used to call me a dog. Made me eat off the floor the way a dog would, to drive the point home.

The night he pulled me out of there, I think I cried out every tear I'd been allotted for the rest of my life.

He held me against his chest. His voice came out light, close to bored.

"I'm no good at the comforting thing."

"You've got me now. So quit crying, yeah?"

After that, my whole world narrowed to exactly one person.

Later he told me he'd found someone to take us in. A tall, thin man looked me up and down and clicked his tongue.

"Fine. You want this one in school, she goes to school." Then he showed Rhys a mouthful of yellow teeth. "But you work for me."

So the man took me in, and just like that, I had a school to go to.

Rhys didn't. He went with the man instead, out before sunrise and back after dark. Doing what, I never knew.

And in my head it was obvious, a settled fact: Rhys gave up school for me. Rhys would give up anything for me. The night we ran, out of everyone in that place, mine was the only hand he took.

I couldn't help what happened after that. I fell, and I kept on falling.

He got beautiful the way boys do all at once, the year everything about his face sharpened and turned unfair. He smiled easily. Everything he did had a pull to it. He'd cross the school gates on those long legs and drag a dozen girls' stares along behind him.

People were always coming to me for his number.

I'd shake my head, say I didn't have it, and wonder how one person got to be that wanted.

Every memory I own from those years has him in it. Him, wrapped in the sour ache of a crush I never said out loud.

Until one summer, loud with cicadas.

I was at the windowsill of our beat-up rental, peeling the wrapper off a popsicle. He came out of the bathroom still toweling his hair, water sliding down the cut lines of his stomach, all of him drawn gold and impossible by the late sun.

I forgot the popsicle existed.

Sugar water ran down my wrist and dripped on the floor, and I didn't move. Not until he was suddenly right in front of me.

Close. Too close.

He bent his head and dragged his tongue up the popsicle, base to tip, watching me the whole way, the last of the sun caught in a pair of pretty, dark, dangerous eyes.

I couldn't see anything else. My pulse went off somewhere behind my ears.

"Spacing out?"

"If you're not going to eat it, I will."

His voice landed warm and ticklish against my ear. The popsicle was already gone from my hand.

I stared at the pink of his mouth.

I couldn't stand it another second.

I shoved him down onto the bed and pinned him there. The popsicle slid off the edge and cracked against the floorboards. I went for his mouth, clumsy, half-blind with it, and he turned his face away.

Both of us breathing wrong. Just looking at each other.

"I like you," I said.

He tipped his chin up. His voice came out feather-light.

"What."

"I like you." I said it again.

The whole sunset pooled in his eyes, and slowly, he looked away from me.

"Sorry."

I stared at the side of his face, so beautiful it put a crack straight through my chest.

"I think I've let you misunderstand something."

And that was that.

Chapter Four

I kept pushing my angel for an answer.

"You don't like me. Fine. Then why were you always so good to me?"

"Was I? I'm the same with everyone."

"Then why save me that night? Why take my hand?"

"Because you were sleeping closest to the window we ran for. I only had time to get one person out."

"Then why send me to school on my own, and not"

"Because I don't like school."

He meant every word of it. No hedging, nothing tucked away, the pretty last light just sitting in his eyes.

And that was the curtain going up.

On ten years of me throwing myself at Rhys and never once being caught.

He called me three times.

I didn't pick up a single one.

Obviously I couldn't. My body was drifting somewhere out there by now, no telling where.

The party had mostly emptied out. It was deep into the night. He stared down at his phone for a long moment, then switched to another number and tried again.

I saw whose it was. My boss.

"Hi, Ms. Ashford?"

"I'm so sorry to bother you this late."

His voice was built for singing, and just as built for this. Warm, easy to take in, the kind of voice you can't quite manage to get angry at.

"This is Eve's husband."

"I wanted to ask. Did her trip go smoothly today?"

""

"Oh. Nothing on the department's calendar right now."

"I see. No, no, the debt's all mine, she leans on you for everything"

The rest was pleasantries. He handled them without a single seam showing.

But the color of his eyes had gone dark as the night at his back.

He walked and talked, and somewhere in the middle flagged down a cab.

The driver asked where to.

He hung up, lifted his head, and said three words.

"The police station."

He wanted to report me missing.

They told him you can't file on a missing adult before twenty-four hours are up.

There was a man parked by the door, in to report a stolen e-bike, who took one look at the situation and decided to weigh in.

"Ahh, kid, you want my honest read? Girlfriend's got a bone to pick with you."

"Stormed off somewhere, too worked up to answer. Happens all the time, trust me."

Rhys sat down next to him on the bench outside the precinct. Still in the suit, badly out of key with the room around him.

His eyes were beautiful, and a little empty right then.

The man was still going. "Hold on, aren't you that singer? The one who blew up recent"

"She wouldn't not answer me."

He said it to no one in particular, his face easy, streetlight pooling in his eyes until they threw off little bursts of neon.

He said it the way you'd say one plus one makes two.

"She texts me back from the shower."

""

And that part was true. That one pure-hearted year, there wasn't a single stupid thing I wouldn't have done for Rhys.

Senior year, deep in the worst of exam season, and I could still lose a whole afternoon to studying recipes to cook for him.

Because somebody, somewhere, had handed me a line I couldn't shake loose: the way to a man's heart is through his stomach.

So he never came home to the same meal twice. I kept records. What he reached for, what he nudged to the side of his plate, what he actually liked, and I folded every note into the next thing I made him.

He said he didn't like doing the comforting.

Fine. I'd do the comforting. I'd take care of him. That could just be my job.

Chapter Five

So I picked the bones out of his fish, peeled the shells off his shrimp, warmed his milk to exactly the right temperature.

He came home for dinner like always. Three dishes and a soup. My classmates were grinding through practice problems every night, and there I was, the only one studying recipes, dead certain every plate of it was something he loved.

That day he set down his chopsticks and smiled at me.

"Eve."

"Mm?"

"Shrimp's too salty."

I nodded. "Okay. I'll go lighter next time."

"Soup's too heavy."

"Really? I thought you liked it richer"

"The tomato and egg is too spicy."

It wasn't until that last one that something snagged. I hadn't put a single chili in it. And I'd tasted everything two minutes ago. There was nothing wrong with any of it.

He looked me over from a very comfortable slouch.

Something in me sank.

"Do you not like my cooking anymore"

"Eve."

He said my name again. Chin up, looking at me, the lamplight folding a clean line down the bridge of his nose.

His voice went soft, soft enough it was almost a whine.

"My shoulders are killing me."

I was up and behind him before he finished, working my thumbs into his neck.

"Is this too hard?"

I asked it quietly, kneading the knot at the base of his neck, that small strip of it showing above his collar, beautiful too. I always thought Rhys could stand next to anyone on a screen and lose nothing by it.

"Eve."

"Mm?"

"When you're done, clean the kitchen."

"Okay."

"Wash the dishes."

"Okay."

I answered to all of it.

"And transfer me twenty thousand."

""

My hands went still.

"Twenty thousand I don't have that much right now."

I dropped my head and asked it carefully.

"Can I send it once I'm in college? Once I'm earning?"

The night lamp swayed, mirrored in his eyes. In all that shifting, glittering light in Rhys's eyes, I could never find a single thing.

He smiled, suddenly. Reached out. Touched me.

Just once, my face, gone the instant it landed.

Then he said, "Eve. Step out for a bit."

"I want a cigarette."

""

I waited at the top of the stairwell like a good girl.

The autumn night was mild, good for counting stars, except I got to my sixty-seventh star and he still hadn't called me back in.

Finally I pushed the door open myself.

Not a trace of smoke inside.

The kitchen curtain drifting a little. The dishes all washed, stacked clean.

On the table, a sheet of paper and an envelope.

The paper was his handwriting, very neat. I never knew when he'd practiced it.

Do well on your exams. It's fine if you don't. I'm leaving. I won't be home for the next few months. Don't look for me. You won't find me.

I opened the envelope and counted, head down.

Loose bills, folded together.

Twenty thousand.

I did well that year.

I was already top of the school, and I overshot on the exams on top of it. Not many kids out of a small town like ours ever pulled a score like that.

I wasn't happy about any of it.

Not until Rhys came back.

He'd turned in the man who took us in. Turned out the man ran one of the bigger pickpocket rings in the area, and they came down hard on him. Life, more or less.

Word was, in the courtroom, the man spat at Rhys and cursed him down to the last brick of his family.

Shame for him. Rhys never had one to begin with.

Chapter Six

Rhys, meanwhile, came back like nothing had happened, presents in hand.

Congratulations on being an adult. Congratulations on getting into the school you wanted.

That was the second time I told him.

He was smoking next to me. He lowered his eyes at me.

"Hey, Eve. Could you not go poking the one sore spot every single time?"

Rhys called me again.

This time my phone was already off.

I think it was the first time in my life I'd gone almost a full twenty-four hours without answering him.

The old me couldn't have stood to make him wait one second.

He was scrolling back through our chat again. What was even in there worth reading. All of it was me, message after message after message.

Me: [so bored.]

Me: [Rhys, what are you doing?]

Me: [keep me company.]

Me: [i like you.]

Me: [don't ignore me.]

Me: [heartless.]

Always the same. Always ending on some charge I filed against him. Sometimes he'd write back. Sometimes he wouldn't.

I never minded. He'd long since gotten used to it. Used to me making noise at his side just to be felt. Used to me, tucked under his arm, biting down on his collarbone.

"Rhys."

"Could you care about me. A little."

And this time, he scrolled all the way to the bottom.

That message he'd sent me, the one I'd left sitting five hours now.

Two green bubbles, bright against the screen.

Him: [You said you'd come home early tonight.]

Him: [Eve. You're really, really late.]

In college, Rhys and I worked in the same city.

We moved in together. The rent was cheap and the complex was falling apart.

There was a rooftop on the top floor, and the two of us always liked being up there around dusk.

"Rhys, what kind of girl do you actually go for?"

I asked him his type once, back then.

He leaned on the railing, all loose and unbothered, angling his body to block the autumn wind screaming past for me. Half that gorgeous face steeped in the sunset's brushwork.

"Rich, I guess."

"Someone who can bankroll me. Doesn't need coddling. Low drama."

"Ugh. I hate the ones who cry over everything."

I never once doubted that Rhys's whole life goal was to find some rich woman to keep him. He really didn't look like a man with lofty ambitions, or maybe it was just that most things fell into his hand the second he crooked a finger for them.

But after that, my favorite hobby in college became one thing.

Making money.

My brain was, frankly, very good at the school part. Problems that took other people two or three minutes, I'd have in seconds.

It didn't take long before I got into a company some upperclassmen had started.

After that, I started getting rich.

I remember it. That day was Rhys's birthday.

Snow coming down thick, the whole night white with it.

I carried out the cake I'd bought him. A three-thousand-four-hundred-fifty-nine cake. The kind, I was sure, that only rich people got to eat.

"Rhys."

I pulled stacks of cash out of my pocket. My pay from the last few months, so much of it.

Piled it in front of him.

"Look. I got rich."

"I don't have to let you work so hard anymore. I"

That was when the sirens started coming, far off and getting closer.

The red and blue of them washing color across the snow, and still I was chasing his eyes.

"Rhys."

"Can you eat one bite of your birthday cake?"

"I really did spend so long getting this ready, I"

"Happy birthday, Rhys."

Then the police took me away.

Chapter Seven

The company I'd signed onto was neck-deep in illegal fundraising and tax fraud.

As the registered legal representative on paper, I was the first one they came for.

The upperclassmen had, apparently, vanished without a trace long before. I was the only one left holding it.

That was when it landed on me: maybe the warm welcome, the eager recruiting, all of it had been for exactly one purpose. To put my name in that seat. To have a body to hand the police when it came apart.

The stretch after they booked me into the detention center, I don't like to revisit.

The short version: the upperclassmen got picked up eventually too. And I'd kept enough evidence, early and quiet, that I wouldn't be charged.

The day I walked out of that place, Rhys was the one who came for me.

Nothing in his eyes had changed. But I'd gone quiet. He lifted his coat and laid it over my shoulders.

Got me in the car.

And then he asked me, like we'd never been apart a single day in our lives:

"You want hotpot?"

I used to try, all the time, to find something in Rhys's eyes.

Never any luck.

At the hotpot place I watched his face through the steam rolling slow off the boil. Thinking, so it's actually real, people whose lashes are long enough to lay shadow under their eyes.

"Eve."

He said my name.

My whole heart rode up and down with the piece he was dragging idly through the pot on his chopsticks.

"This whole thing. You getting locked up."

"Let's be clear up front. Not my problem."

He watched me over his propped hand, those beautiful eyes with nothing left in them but beautiful, the smile sitting in his brows, gentle and cold and thin.

"Don't try to guilt me into anything."

"Officer. Sorry to be a bother, but I think something may have actually happened to my partner."

That was the third time Rhys checked his watch before saying it to the officer at the desk.

"Sir, she's an adult, capable of moving about on her own. We've logged what you've told us. But it's possible her phone just died, or she's somewhere with bad signal. Try not to worry too much for now"

That answer was the first time I'd ever seen something lost surface in Rhys's eyes.

"Our situation's a little unusual."

"To my partner, I'm important. She wouldn't leave my messages unanswered. I just searched our whole thread. Officer, I don't know if this counts as evidence, but she has never once taken more than five hours to write me back. Sorry. I know, portable chargers are everywhere these days, I"

The officer had already dropped his head, working through the paperwork with a pained little smile.

It was the old man, the one there about his stolen e-bike, who had the appetite to pour fuel on it. He leaned in.

"You two just had a fight, that's all."

"All that 'I'm important to her'"

"Face it, kid. Your wife just doesn't want you."

Rhys went still. He'd just opened his mouth to answer when a gust of autumn wind came through the door that hadn't been pulled all the way shut.

Something in him seemed to catch on it. He froze for a beat and looked back over his shoulder.

At the same moment, the dispatch line at the desk lit up.

"Rivermont Police, go ahead. We've recovered an unidentified female body at Eastmere."

"We're trying to confirm whether anyone's filed a recent missing person report that"

I wanted to watch Rhys cry