Madame X - Wilder Jasinda - Страница 34

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“That’s your past, not who you are.” My palms are flat against the cool glass.

“It’s more than anyone else knows about me.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah . . . oh.” He smirks. “I’m getting to the part that starts to define who I am. After I phased out of the army, I was bored shitless. Had some money saved and nothing to do. Bummed around a bit, started getting into trouble again. I’ve got a knack for trouble, you see. It follows me, and I follow it. We’re very closely intertwined, trouble and me. I met this guy at a bar in St. Louis. He was a private security contractor. Talked a good game, got me to sign up for a tour in the desert. One tour as a defense contractor turned to two, turned to three. Good money, bad shit.” He shrugs. “Got out after the third, took my money and ran. I’d seen enough. Done enough. So I took what I had, bought a bar in Chicago, redesigned it, rebranded and restaffed it. Sold it. Did it again. Made good money, discovered I had a good head for that kind of thing. And I liked getting my hands dirty, ripping the places apart and rebuilding them. Then I had this investment opportunity . . . over here, in Manhattan. A big money investment, big risk, big return. It . . . didn’t pan out. Let’s just say that and leave it there.”

I sense a major plot hole. “You’re skipping something, Logan.”

He nods. “Yes, I am. That’s a story I’m not interested in telling just yet. It’s a big part of who I am, but it’s still hard to talk about. Still sort of learning how to move past it, you could say.”

“But you ask me who I am. Not so easy to answer, is it?”

He merely shrugs, a Gallic lift of one shoulder. “Is it fair to ask a question I find difficult to answer myself? No. Of course not. But how you answer that question, it tells me something. You, for instance, didn’t answer at all. You merely turned the question back around on me. You’re defensive. Private. Impossible to know. Who are you, X?” His eyes are deep, and sharp. “Make me an answer. Something. Anything.”

I’m not supposed to talk about me. It’s never been said outright, out loud. It’s an unspoken rule. Don’t talk about myself.

But how can I not? He’s looking at me, looking into me, eyes like the deepest seas, turbulent and roiling and fraught with chasms of such impenetrable depths I could get lost and crushed and devoured.

“I am Madame X.” It’s an answer, isn’t it?

“More.” A quiet demand. A command.

“I . . . I don’t know.” I turn away, desperate, rest my forehead against the glass and fog it with my breath. “You should go.”

“I have fifty minutes left, X.”

Ten minutes? That’s all that’s passed? An eternity, stretched thin and twisted into a loop, all within the space of six hundred seconds.

“Tell me one fact about yourself. It doesn’t have to be embarrassing, or a secret. Just . . . anything.”

“Why?” I whisper it.

This should be a simple conversation, but it isn’t, and even the why of that is beyond me. He confounds me, sets all I know of how my life works upon its head.

“Because I’m curious. I want to know.”

“I’m Spanish.”

He’s too close. Leaning in. Breath on my ear. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“What happened? With the investment?” Why the hell am I asking him this?

He laughs. “Right for the jugular. It was . . . complicated. Certain elements of the deal weren’t exactly legal. I knew it, but I thought I’d gone through enough layers to keep myself clean, you might say. But . . . I got betrayed.”

“So you’re a criminal.”

“Once upon a time, yes. Semireformed, remember. All of my current business endeavors are entirely legal.”

“You don’t seem the type.”

“Which type?”

“To be a criminal.”

“I came to a point where I had to reinvent myself.” He’s still so close I can hear him swallow, hear his breath.

He still smells faintly of cinnamon gum, but that scent is overpowered by scotch. I don’t know what he did with his gum; a strange detail to notice. He’s not touching me, though. Just standing in my space.

Why am I not pushing him away?

“Reinvention of one’s self is difficult,” I say.

“Yes. It is.” His finger now, index finger, on my chin. Just touching. Not turning me to him, just touching. “Why did you have to reinvent yourself, X?”

“Because I . . . got lost.” It is the shape of the truth, if lacking in substance.

“You’re leaving something out, X.”

“Yes, I am.”

“How about your real name?”

“I told you already. My name is Madame X.”

“That’s not even Spanish.” There’s a smile in his words, though I don’t look at him to see it. I can hear it, and it is blinding enough in its beauty, even heard but unseen.

I let out a long, slow breath. “It’s the only name I have.”

I sense the smile fade. My eyes change their focus, and now I can see his reflection in the window glass. His eyes are searching, a strand of golden hair across his eye. The corners of his eyes are crinkled, as if from long hours squinting in the sun. His skin is weathered, leathery. Rugged. He is beautiful, but hard and sharp, threat seeping from his pores. Yet somehow utterly gentle. So powerful, so sure of his capacity to eliminate any threat to himself that he need not posture. A tiger in the jungle that knows he is king.

“X. Why X?”

My eyes go, of their own will, to the painting on the wall. He turns away from me, and I sigh in relief. But I trail after him to stand beside him in front of Portrait of Madame X. He examines it. We stare at it in silence for a long, long time. I, remembering. He, perhaps, seeking clues. He will find none in the brushstrokes, nor in the composition, nor in the subject, nor in the use of color, the black and the white and the browns, not in the arch of her neck or the sharpness of her nose, the paleness of her skin or the drape of her hand. The only clues lie within me.

My voice, quiet in the golden evening light. “I lost myself. I lost . . . who I was. Who I could be. I lost . . . everything. And I saw this painting. I don’t know why, but it struck me. I had nothing, no name, no past, no future. And I saw this painting, and it . . . it meant something to me. I saw myself in it, somehow. I don’t know. I’ll never know. But I chose this painting. Madame X. Other portraits of the time, they’re given names. But this one? Just . . . Madame X. She has a name, you know: Virginie Amelie Avegno Gautreau. But in this portrait, she is Madame X. The subject of a painting, no more, no less. Something in that meant something to me.”

I expect a comment, something deep and meaningful. Instead he turns and moves across the room to the wall opposite, to Van Gogh’s Starry Night. “And this one?”

I shrug. “I just like it.”

“Bullshit.”

I frown at the sudden and harsh vulgarity. “Logan—”

“Tell me the truth, or tell me to shut up, but don’t lie to me.”

“I wasn’t lying. I saw it, and I liked it. I felt empty, and . . . blank. Numb. The kind of numb where you have so many feelings you just stop feeling any of them. I couldn’t express them, couldn’t express anything. And this painting? It expresses so much. Loneliness, but also peace. Distortion, confusion, passion. Insanity, even. There is something to latch on to, though, in the church steeple. You look at it, and you can see so many things. Whatever your past has brought you, there is something of this painting in you. Of course, then . . . I knew none of this. Not even my name. I just . . . knew I could look at the Starry Night and it would help me make sense of some of the many things in my mind.”

“I have so many questions.” His voice is quiet as he says this, as if admitting a secret he fears will gut him.

“Me, too.” There is far more truth in those two words than I can even withstand.

I am compelled to turn away, to let myself collapse on the couch. I find my fingers wrapped around the glass tumbler, eyeing the finger’s worth of scotch whisky. Touch it to my lips. And yes, my lips touch the faint smear on the rim where his mouth pressed against glass: an intimacy. My lips burn, my throat burns, my eyes water, I cough and swallow, cough. Liquid fire races down my throat, spreads through my stomach and into my veins.

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