Averil Dean - The Undoing

One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand, four...

The lift hummed to a start. It traveled a few yards, then stopped again with a jerk that set the chairs swinging. Eric could just make out the lift operator in his box at the top of the run—only forty yards to go, but it may as well have been a mile.

“Goddamn it,” he muttered.

Julian sat back comfortably, his arm around Kate’s snow-dusted shoulders. If Eric was there to circumvent trouble with Kate, he was doing a fine job; she had been bubbly and easygoing all day, in spite of the weather.

“No point stressing, man,” Julian said. “You have somewhere else to be?”

Eric ground back the answer with his teeth. Though they’d been sedentary for almost an hour, his heartbeat was tripping like a snare drum. His eyes burned with cold, with the chain of sleepless nights that had started in Alaska and continued at the Blackbird Hotel.

From his breast pocket he pulled out a flask of whiskey, unscrewed it and took a burning slug. Julian and Kate waved it off, so he took a couple more swallows himself, then more after that since the flask was nearly empty.

The exchange with Celia nagged at him, became tangled in the threads of previous conversations, as if the words had come untethered from their context. He couldn’t remember who said what, or when, or whether certain comments were a response to something someone else had said. He couldn’t put the pieces together. He couldn’t think. That was the problem—he couldn’t think. His mind was a freight train, fast and unsteerable, pushed by its own weight and momentum with Eric like a panicked conductor trying to keep the fucker from jumping the tracks.

He stared into the whiteness, rocking back and forth with the energy leaping in his chest.

That impatience on her face. She wanted him to go, didn’t she? Wanted to be rid of him. He remembered standing in the hallway—was that last night or the night before? He couldn’t be sure. But definitely he remembered standing in the hallway with his hand on the doorknob, and finding it locked.

At least...he thought he remembered.

He blinked into the snowstorm. On every side, the snowflakes whirled and dissolved into a fine white mist, like a cloud.

I’m losing it, he thought helplessly.

Kate was chattering on the seat beside him. Her voice was painfully bright, a needle in his ear.

“I’ll bet Celia was glad to see you,” she said.

“Got that right.” Julian laughed. “I thought there was an avalanche last night, but it turned out to be Celia’s headboard banging on the wall.”

Eric’s racing mind skidded to a halt. A hard tremor shook his body, locked his jaw.

Last night.

Time had gotten slippery again. He couldn’t remember whether it was last night or some other when he’d awakened to find himself on the couch downstairs, blinking into the dying embers of the fire. He’d gotten very drunk—he remembered that. All of them sitting around the hearth, and Celia plucking out a melody on her guitar while Julian lounged back in his chair, laughing with Rory and Kate. Eric had watched with a drink in hand, but he’d kept himself distant. Once he’d met Celia’s eye and she’d smiled—a blank kind of smile like she meant it for someone else and Eric just happened to be in the way.

He must have fallen asleep soon after. Someone—Celia, of course—had covered him with a blanket, and they all went upstairs and left him alone beside the cooling hearth.

He’d never gone upstairs last night.

If it was last night.

He glanced over the edge of the chair at the crazy swirling flakes. Surely there weren’t enough snowflakes in the sky to fall this way for so long; they must be cycling around, like the inside of a snow globe, the same flakes falling and rising again—how could you tell?

He dragged his mind back to Celia, trying to focus through the haze. But her face appeared again with that fleeting glance of impatience, that thousand-yard smile, turned away and with her eyes shut tight as he fucked her, like she was imagining someone else in his place. The memories rose like specters in the storm.

Panic rose to bursting in his chest. He had to see her.

Right now.

“There’s no place like home.” Kate was laughing. Shrill peals of hilarity, driving the needle into his brain.

As if she knew.

As if they both knew. And thought it was funny.

Maybe everyone was in on the joke. Maybe Celia was making a fool of him. Celia and Rory both, making fun, making other people laugh at him.

Eric pressed his hands over his ears, rocking back and forth. The chair swung wildly through the snow. Overhead, the cable creaked in protest.

He had to see Celia. Now, right now, right fucking now.

He could just make out the surface of the run thirty feet below the lift. The snow was falling up, burning cold against his face.

He swung himself out of the chair, dangling over the snow by one hand. As he dropped to the ground, he heard voices from the white mist overhead, disembodied, calling his name.

* * *

Julian heard Eric land with a muffled thud on the snow. The kid didn’t pause to pop into his rear binding, just slid into the whiteout without a backward glance. The snow folded behind him like a curtain.

“Something tells me that wasn’t Eric in Celia’s bed last night,” he said.

Kate turned to him. Her eyes were hidden behind silvered goggles that reflected his own image back to him, warped as a funhouse mirror.

“As if you didn’t know,” she said.

* * *

Always afterward, with the blaze of orgasm retreating into embers, Rory expected relief. Temporary, maybe, and only physical, but there should have been some period of minutes or hours when his skin felt tougher, when his mind stopped chasing itself in circles and found a reason to rest.

“Insanity,” Eric once said, “is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Or maybe that’s stupidity. They’re not that far apart...”

Not that he was talking about Rory when he said it.

Under his palm, he could feel Celia’s heartbeat, quick as a bird’s wing, her slender collarbone at his fingertips. He nuzzled into the downy hair behind her ear. The scent of her flooded his nose.

Minutes passed with neither of them moving. Celia would always wait, as long as he wanted, letting him soften and slide away before she’d ever make a move to free herself. He traced her spine, his fingertips rasping gently against her skin. His jaw had left pink stains on her shoulders and neck, but his fingers were too rough to soothe them away. He used his wrists and the backs of his hands.

She was waiting, patiently, not complaining about the hard floor or the chill in the air, or the work she needed to get back to, or the way he’d been just now—too hard and fast, too eager to get inside her and not at all eager to leave. She didn’t talk about Eric, but Rory wondered if she’d been with him, too, that morning, whether she was exhausted trying to keep up with them. Exhausted by the secrets they were keeping.

Eric was their friend, after all. The three of them had been together since they were children. He remembered the first time they came here, hearing Celia run up and down the hall overhead and Eric’s footsteps racing up the steps to join her. Rory had stood in almost exactly this spot, plucking at the peeling wallpaper and failing utterly to understand what Celia saw in the place.

To her it was magic. She said no one would ever leave a place like this.

It didn’t seem that way to Rory. Not at the time and not now. The only magical part of the Blackbird was the girl who lived in it.

He helped Celia to her feet. She lifted her face and kissed him. It was a woman’s kiss, openmouthed and generous. Her lips were cool and fresh; her arms twined delicately around his neck. It was like being kissed by a flower.