Even the types of books that featured the type of clientele that Rehab catered to weren’t her poison. But there was a reason for the locale, for the choice, and it was entirely to do with the man she’d been corresponding with. She knew he had no idea who she was, but she knew him perfectly. Even without the recent meeting at the Venetian, Maren would remembered that scar, those uneven eyes, and the moment he’d realized he might have saved someone who didn’t merit saving. These days, she had fallen further and further, and she knew he wouldn’t save her, not if he knew, not if the cards all laid themselves out upon the table to be played again.
But he didn’t know. He didn’t know, and Maren knew he would hate this place, this night-time beach with the pulsing music and the mostly naked bodies. She suspected he might hate it as much as she did, but she allowed for men’s love of porn, and the possibility that his appreciation for the mostly naked women would eclipse his distaste. But she suspected he would hate it, and she hoped he did. It wasn’t a test, not truly, but it was certainly meant to see past skin deep, to see if there was something there beyond the words on the journals and the savior in the alley.
And so, she slipped on a character, as she always did. And, perhaps, she wanted him to see through it. These days, the only person who truly saw her was Kellan, but even he bought most of the facets of the lie. She was so accustomed to slipping on people like a coat, personalities like a shawl, and she had long since forgotten how not to do that. But she craved it all the same, that nameless thing that was understanding, and belonging, and being first somewhere, for someone.
Rehab was not Jack's style of haunt, not remotely. It was loud, crowded, and full of people whose sole desire seemed to be a narcissistic need to be worshipped, or sating their own lust. Sex and getting wet and wasted was the order of the day.
He didn't know who he was looking for, or where she would be. Of course, his correspondent might not be a she. It was only a guess, based on handwriting and the way she wrote, her choices in poetry. The mysterious letter writer could just as well have been male, could have looked or sounded like anything. The real question was why the poetry had been left for him in the first place, why they'd opened up a line of communication. Had they seen him go into the elevator? Did he know them? Tonight he'd hopefully find out.
He stayed along the edges of the raucous party that was Rehab, steering as clear as possible of the dancers and flailing, drunk hands, the occasional call from a group of messily drunk girls circling the edges of the pool, looking for someone male and unattached. He managed to do wonders to shake off the couple hangers on he managed to grab at one point simply by not acknowledging them, and got shouted, indignant profanities for his rejection.
He had no idea why his letter-writer had chosen a place like this. Did they like the ambience, or was it a joke? They didn't seem like the sort who would thrive in pool full of horny drunks, but it was impossible to tell, sometimes. He didn't begrudge anyone their good time, didn't think himself above the desperate and the happy and the moneyed. He just knew this wasn't the place for him. This place was for people who made life into a game for themselves. He'd never drowned his sorrows in these kinds of vices, and had never seen the appeal.
He found a corner that was minutely quiet, although there was a couple already flat on the ground in the shadows apparently well on their way to a quickie. He didn't look for more than a second to make sure she seemed to be going along with it willingly, then just scanned the crowd.
Maren saw him shortly after he disappeared into the darkness of the shadows, a knight retreating to his castle in armor that was unsuited for table and board, his feet heavy across the rushes that led into the keep that was the corner he had sequestered himself in. She noted things before she moved - his lack of swimming attire, the way his eyes settled on the couple scuttling for the neighboring darkness. She watched a moment longer, taking in his discomfort, the long sleeves and denim that was so illsuited. He was a spectre, a haunt who had lost his way from the thorny paths of a cemetery, only to find himself here, amongst the living.
She waited a moment longer.
A moment longer still.
And then she moved from her own hiding place. She took the long way, winding along a path like Red gone to Grandmother’s, but unable to avoid the wolves along the way. Tonight she was the girl from the fairy tale - curious and fearless, a red bikini and a sundress of the same unforgiving scarlet overtop, thin and flimsy and cotton hinting at what lived beneath. Her dark hair was loose to her shoulders, her skin pale and her eyes unfathomably dark. She approached from behind him, as if she was the wolf in the tale and not the little girl with the basket of sweets.
“You came,” she said, her voice Montana husky. A hand touched the small of his back before he could move. “Don’t turn around?” It was a request, and not a command.
Jack heard the voice behind him and began to turn his head. Then she asked that he not turn to look, so he stopped. That voice struck a chord, familiar from somewhere, but he didn’t immediately recognize it. The hand on his back didn’t seem like a threat, and he let her touch as she liked. It was interesting, how her voice cut through the din. He’d been right about her being female, obviously, though anything more was still up for debate. His head had turned just enough to catch a flash of red, and then he turned his eyes forward, as she’d asked him to. “You thought I wouldn’t?” he asked. He looked across the pool and the crowds without focusing on any of them, just as conscious of the couple in the corner behind them as he was of the girl with her hand on the small of his back.
“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it,” she replied, as if it was an answer to some question he had not asked. Perhaps it was, perhaps the quote hearkened to all their letters, to the fact that she thought he would not come because of those higher thoughts. “I wanted to see if you would come. If it was all a lie, the words you wrote. Men are wound up in lies. They slip them on like coats and wrapped them around themselves for warmth.” She paused, and the tip of her head was an almost audible thing in the darkness, oddly so with the pulsing beat of the music and the accompaniment of moans and whimpers. “You moved,” she said of Turnberry Place, her hand still on his back, fingers spread there.
Jack listened to the words, and savored them, even though he didn't know where they came from. They sounded like poetry, but not any poet he could remember, though the words had a truth to them that he liked. "I don't know that one," he admitted. "But I like it. I've known that feeling." He listened as she went on, her scrap of poetry about men and what they were like. "You don't think much of men," he observed. It wasn't the first time she'd said something of the sort. "Not all of us are liars. Just as some women may lie, but not all do." He was highly conscious of her hand, of her fingers. A small girl, based on her voice and the size of that palm.
"If I hadn't expected to see you here, I would have left you a note," Jack said, a touch apologetic. He didn't want her to think he had been running. After all, if he had been, he simply could have not come to meet her and that would have been that. "It was a necessity, unfortunately. I was living at Turnberry at a friend's generosity in exchange for some personal help. Security, I suppose you could say. I was needed elsewhere, so now I am providing the same service to another friend." A pause, filled in by the thump of halfway-distant music and the din of conversation beyond. "Are you going to tell me how you knew?"
“Wuthering Heights,” she offered. “I figured you would like the sentiment. I like the words, I like believing they could be true, but I don’t actually have in faith in them once the book is closed,” she replied, a roundabout comment to her opinion of men. “Women aren’t to be trusted either,” she explained, and her fingertips flexed against his back as she tried to think of a passage to explain that particular distrust. Like the wolf on the path, her hand slid higher along his spine, more harmless danger without warning. But she was not perfect in her memory, in her quotes and excerpts, though she would like to believe she was. “But they are dangerous in other ways,” she finally finished; no prose, only true sentiment. And what of restraint? “Each of our passions, even love, has a stomach that must not be overloaded. We must in all things write the word finis in time; we must restrain ourselves, when it becomes urgent, draw the bolt on the appetite, play a fantasia on the violin, then break the strings with our own hand.” Another pause. “I live in the Towers, something like a princess kept there by chains she forged and has not yet figured out how to break free of.”
"One day you'll care for someone like that, and your mind will change," Jack said, eyes cast out across a field full of people who didn't seem to care about things like true love all that much. His words were sure, calm, and absolute. "Everyone is dangerous," he corrected. Anyone could be violent, anyone could be untrustworthy. Gender hardly mattered. "Men just tend to take it the extra step." There was distance in his voice, and experience in that. She had only the back of his head to look at, but if she'd searched with her fingers, she would have found the ugly scar under dark curls.
"The poet in the dungeon, sickly and unkempt, rolling a manuscript under his convulsed foot, measures with a look that terror enflames the stairway of vertigo down which his soul plunges." Jack guessed at where her chains might have stemmed from. Personal failings? Bad acquaintances? The law? His gut instinct was to guess she was being held against her will, but he always guessed that first, always assumed someone was behind the evil, always assumed there was a horror behind every corner, as much as he wished there wasn't.
Jack listened to her quote at him again, another text he didn't recognize. Restraint, then. Her own restraints, or self-restraint? He couldn't tell where the connection was, but moved with it all the same. "That's a very Victorian sentiment, though I can't say I know the source. Tempering one's appetites." He mentally traced the shape of her hand on his back. It didn't worry him, and he didn't move when she pressed higher. "Self-restraint is important, of course. If our desires run rampant, we're bound to just do harm to ourselves or people we love." Self-control was paramount. Without it, he would simply be back where he had been when Helen died, and he would not be able to help it - there would be suffering, and he would be the one to inflict it.
“You are an optimist. Some women are destined to be Isabella Linton. Not all of us can be Cathy, Jack. Not all of us are destined for Cathy, and they both died in the end - Isabella and Cathy. Heartbreak, and when heartbreak comes from a book you can close the cover and forget it. In real life, I don’t think it would be as simple. No, we are not all destined to have great love, and you haven’t convinced me it exists off the page. Happy endings certainty don’t.” She moved her hand, and she slipped back into the shadows, back to where he could turn and not make out her features. She was a shock of red, of hair turned ebony by darkness.
“I don’t like the Victorian sentiments of that verse, of Les Miserable, of Javert. No, on paper there is no restraint. The best stories burn, like fire, and life should be the same. But it’s not, it’s dulled over, doldrums and no poet in a dungeon. Real life is grocery stores, and traffic, and bills. Those things do not exist on the page, those boring facets of living are painted over.” She shook her head in the darkness. “No self-restraint. I want none.”
"I can't convince you," Jack said. "Nothing will convince you until you know it for yourself." That was that, as far as he was concerned. There was no reason to argue the point - she wouldn't believe until she'd experienced it.
He felt her hand slip away from his back, but she continued to speak, so she hadn't left. He couldn't hear the couple any more, so either they'd grown tired of having company in their little corner or they'd simply finished and wandered off. "Real life is those things, and the best stories burn, you're right. But I can't think of anything that can't hurt someone if self-restraint isn't placed on it. Even love can be nightmarish if pursued without regard for the desires of the other person." He turned his head a little. "May I turn around?"
“Yes.” One word in the darkness, and that was all that fell from her lips.
Jack turned to regard her. She was difficult to make out back in the shadows, but what he saw fit the image in his mind and matched the voice, the small girl with too much strength in those smooth shoulders to be dismissed or underestimated. He thought he knew her, now, even though her facial features were still an indistinct smudge, and he took a step toward her. “Why here?” Red clothes, red and more red, everything loose and falling in waves, from her dress to her dark hair. It was a nice costume, but something about it seemed like just that - a costume, not real.
“To see,” she said, and it was a cryptic response, a curious wolf watching Red on the path. She offered nothing more than that, the dark-haired girl in the shadows. He was right about the costume, though, because everything was a costume and nothing was real. Not like it was on the page, and even the loud thumping music over his shoulder was hollow. If it was written, that music, it would be a colorful description of beat, of tempo and sensation. As it was, it was flat and it made her feel nothing at all, and that was living. She wasn’t sure he would ever understand that. “You feel everything so strongly,” she said, and it was almost a sad statement, a realization that despite their shared love for the written word, they were both very, very different.
Jack gave her distance, and didn't move any closer. He wanted to see if she'd come out into the light on her own, the better to see her with. He'd mostly forgotten about the music, and was conscious of the people beyond, but in a distant sort of way. "I suppose so," he said. His continued calm refuted that idea completely, but it was so all-encompassing for that very reason. If he wasn't calm, if he didn't keep himself in check in all things, then there was only chaos left. "I wish I didn't. And if that's jealousy I hear, don't be. Emotion without measure is fine on the page, but..." He trailed off. "It's important, of course, because without feeling we can't have joy, or feel all the things that make living worthwhile. But burning, though, it never ends well. Feeling too much is just as terrible as feeling too little."
She didn’t move. The wolf in the shadows trying to lure the unsuspecting Red to him. “No, you don’t understand. Living a life where nothing is as amazing as reading someone else’s story, that’s agony. Living where no one understands you, that’s agony. Living where the best you can hope for true emotion is sleeping and dreaming, that’s agony.” She shook her head, black hair falling against her pale cheeks in the darkness. “No, sir. I would rather burn. I would rather burn, and burn, until there was nothing left of me, because then I would at least know what it felt like. The exquisite pain of loss, the indescribable feeling of love, the sensation of joy, of contentment. I’d take any of it. If feeling just as terrible as feeling too little, then I will take the former and shrug off the latter.”
Jack listened, and watched, and when she was done, he said, "Then you should have them. And no doubt you will, if you seek sensation that badly." He could hardly begrudge her that. "I'm biased, after all," he said, with a small smile. Too much feeling, too much knowledge of how feeling could go so terribly wrong. The highs had been exquisite, but, seeing nothing in his future anymore, it would have been nice if he could imagine a day when the worst of his feelings would be blunted and not just covered over and restrained. Life would be easier, then. "You ought to find someone who can make you feel all of that. Or, better yet, shake off those chains you talked about and find it all for yourself. Go as far as you need to go, so you can know, and decide for yourself whether it's better to burn."
“Why are you biased?” she asked, infinitely curious, infinitely nosy. It came of too much reading, that desire to pry and pry into the lives of others until she had crawled under skin like pages. “Why do I need someone else to feel things?” she asked, and she shook her head, a mournful thing in the darkness. “I think sometimes wounds scab over too many times, and all sensation is loss. Even the potential for sensation, so vibrant once, is too far beneath old wounds to ever be felt.” It was a sad statement, a resigned one. One that recognized things, as she had done earlier. “You deserve someone who can make you feel again, erase the bad things and make good things come instead. Burn.”
"I'm biased because I have my own reasons for favoring self-restraint. I feel that burning does me no good. And I don't know if anyone can erase the bad, make it all disappear like it ever was," Jack said, smiling faintly. "I like the idea of it, but I'm starting to think more and more than I've left that behind me."
He closed the distance between them, finally. In the dark, his eyes adjusted a little, and his guess as to who she was solidified at last. "I used to burn for everything. I burned in love, and I burned in hate just as strong. And people died." He studied her face. "I don't think that will shock you much, somehow. As things stand, it's better for everyone if I turn my back on all that, and just try to live. I wasn't happy, burning in every fiber, and I hurt people, even people I cared about. My reserves are a little too deep, I think. So I stay away from all that now. The woman I loved is with someone else, and I let the people I hated go. Now I'm just trying to get by, and be of as much use to my friends and everyone else as I can be." He looked her over again, in her screaming scarlet clothes and her retreat into the shadows. "I'm sure that sounds awful, to you, to turn my back on it.”
“No, sir,” she said, not speaking until that distance between them was crossed, “it sounds like my reality, though I did not knowingly turn my back on these things; the result is the same.” She looked around the shadows, listened to the sound of life just over his shoulder, out of reach and miles away, for all that it was so close. “Nothing shocks me. The books are to blame. You could tell me you were angel, demon, savior, murderer, and none of it would shock me. Do you not understand that I am numb? You, there, with your dead and your choices, you still have more feeling in your pinkie than I do in all of me. You chose, and choice is changeable by its very nature. I choose, and yet nothing comes of it.
She edged around him, toward the noise and the chaos, away. “You only need to choose to be quickened once more. I don’t believe you are the type of man to live in the nothing, Jack. That is loss speaking, until you find something that is stronger than the loss, and the numbness will fall away like a shroud.” She paused. “Good evening, Jack.”
“If you never knowingly turned your back,” Jack said, “Then perhaps one day, you will unknowingly find your way to it all again. If you want it that badly, it will come. But neither I nor anyone else can tell you when.” It wasn’t a satisfactory answer to her predicament, but what more could he do for her? He didn’t know how to find feeling, any more than he really knew how to turn it off.
He turned to watch as she moved around him and away. “I could say the same to you,” he said. He hoped it would all be that simple for her, since he could no longer see a future where something trumped that loss and made it all disappear into nothing again. He smiled a little, though, when she said his name. “Good evening, Maren,” he said. “I hope you won’t stop writing to me.” These days, all he had left to his name were words.