Work Text:
There are two kinds of talk in this town: polite talk and pub talk.
The polite talk is exactly that: polite and without an unkind word to say. Polite people talk polite talk; they’re friendly, always helpful, and complimentary. They talk about the pretty American girl willing to assume responsibility over the mansion on a hill until the master and mistress return from their extended holiday. They admire her clear brown eyes, the bright smile she always wears.
“How good of her to keep the house up in such good order,” they say.
“How far she walks, just to get the groceries.” The women say, shaking their collective heads. “Shame on Malcom, leaving the poor dear to handle things herself.”
“So very pretty.” The old women add, in their sewing circles. “When will the Heelshires return, to relieve her of all that work? She ought to be looking at marriage and babies. Why, my grandson…” and there are always plenty of grandsons.
Then there’s the pub talk. The men speak hunched over their ale and drinks, muttering this and that; eventually, this and that creep outward into the public sphere without much care for who hears what. They talk of Malcom, formulating theories that contradict a tale of desertion—ones which polite company is quick to accept and denounce for the pretty American’s sake.
But these men don’t talk of a pretty American girl with clear brown eyes and a bright smile. They talk of the foreigner who comes into town every week, in her denim and turtlenecks, then walks all the way back up the hill without a complaint.
“No girl takes all that on without bleating protests once in a while.” They say.
“Something’s off in that head of hers.” The men grumble over their pints. “Hasn’t even got the sense to get herself a car.”
They talk of other things too: of tall shadows, those belonging to a brute, glimpsed through the windows by passerby who do more than pass by; of strange sounds heard late at night by those with ears that hear too much. Some say it sounds like a wounded animal, wailing out its misery. Others say it belongs to a foreign girl with legs spread for a specter—this phantom has a name, but it is a name not spoken in polite company—who has claimed her for its own.
“Malcom had an eye for her.” the old men say over a game of chess that never really ends. “Just like the other one—big burly lad, the one who came lookin’ for her? Funny how neither one’s been seen since. Now she’s taken up with some brute.”
It would be more polite if they just called her a whore, but that doesn’t seem to be a word used much in this town. The implications are enough.
There’s two kinds of talk in this town, and Greta hears both. The thing about pub talk is it’s really just talk. Men, and some women, old and young, muttering and grumbling over drinks and chess boards and checkers. There’s nothing more to do in this town besides talk, and the more people talk, the more opportunity their imaginations have to run wild. It’s all very tiring, but she presses onward with her pretty smile and clear brown eyes because it’s best to not ruffle feathers in this town.
And then things happen. Like today, when she’s simply stopping in for shelter from a chilly afternoon—and a cup of hot cocoa—and some boorish brute makes it his business to tell her exactly what he thinks of her unholy affair within the walls of Heelshire Manor. As though he knows anything of her affairs. As though he knows anything of what transpires within the walls of Heelshire Manor.
She quietly finishes her drink. Licks away lingering smears of whipped cream from her lips. And then she responds with similar cordiality.
“I’m home.” She calls out, later, to an empty house, and sets her shoes by the door. It’s always a gamble whether or not the shoes will still be there when she gets back, but one way or another they always turn up again.
She puts the groceries away, but only after she has washed her hands and carefully attended to bruised knuckles—the middle one is split—with ointment and a little gauze wrapping. The thing about pub talk is it doesn’t stop for anyone, but it can be contained when necessity demands discretion. A little American girl throwing fists in a grown man’s face, and successfully deviating his septum in the process, isn’t something that will be talked about in the coming days. For him, he walked into a wall. For Greta, she had an accident moving things around in the attic.
Strange, to think she once abhorred the thought of physical violence. She still might, in a select few circumstances. But this, and the several before it, does not fall under such circumstances.
Long cool fingers reach for her, appearing without warning. (She no longer starts at his sudden materializations in her company. She only tucks away a smile, thinking it appropriate for what people say.) One brushes over the gauze wrapping, and she feels the question in place of actual words. It’s something she has learned over the past months (nearly a year now): to feel words in a gaze because Brahms only speaks when he has something to say that warrants the extra effort.
“Someone else got mouthy at the pub.” She smiles at him. “Nothing to worry about, Brahms.”
But his eyes say differently, and the way he cradles her one hand in both of his seconds the notion. It has nothing to do with wagging tongues and circulating rumors. He doesn’t like to see her hurt. Physically injured.
(She realized it, the first night, when he wouldn’t stop touching her hands. Her palms. Then she saw the scrapes, the small cuts and their dried pools of rusted red. Did she get them rushing through the house, trying to flee her own demon? Did they come about in her hasty escape through the back door, or perhaps in her blind dash through forest realm? She doesn’t remember. Didn’t remember at the time, either. But she remembers Brahms, fingers brushing each one, as if touch alone could heal.)
One hand remains his captive, dwarfed between long fingers; the other ascends, catches his jaw in delicate fingertips. He sighs. He often sighs when she touches him.
“Kiss.” She whispers. Her fingertips tug, gently, and it’s the only encouragement he needs.
It was a surprise to her, to realize how little interest Brahms has in sex. It’s the closeness he wants: wrapping long arms around her and tucking his cheek into her hair while she reads to him on the sofa; resting at her feet while she sits in the big chair by the fire; his head in her lap at night, in bed, while she strokes his hair and murmurs softly, not to make conversation but to simply give him the sound of her voice. Twenty years of wasting behind walls, phantom presence while a porcelain doll enjoyed that which could have, should have, been his, left a gaping hole. After two decades, it still bled fresh. The best way to handle pain is to hide it from the world, pretend it isn’t there, pretend you aren’t slowly dying from within. So he did.
She did, too. Once. One wounded soul always recognizes another.
(The doll is tucked away in the attic, in the old room. Its face is repaired, though the scarring will always be there. The child bears similarity to the man, now. One scarred visage matched to another: cracked porcelain and fire.)
Brahms may have little interest in sex, as a general rule. That doesn’t mean he refuses her when the moment comes.
The first time was the same night, when a goodnight kiss wasn’t enough, when her unraveled obligation was still somehow the only stable thing she could cling to. That’s the thing about emotion: it’s like strong drink. Too much of it, all at once, without a break in between, goes straight to the head. And suddenly certain things (hands, everywhere; lips marking a path down the throat, shoulder, chest; every available appendage devoted to touching and feeling; bare skin meeting, bodies fitting as one…) don’t seem like terrible ideas. And none of it can be chalked up to some perverse idea of martyrdom when hers was the body straddling his and her mouth and her hands alone were responsible for compensating a lifetime without touch in one single night.
She was no victim then. She is no victim now.
Brahms spends a lot of time kissing her neck. Black curls tickle her cheek, his scent wafting through the strands. Stubble scratches in time with his kisses. He needs a shave again. But she really never pushes the point. She’s grown to like the feel of it, chaffing and rubbing: a striking contrast to the smooth glide of hot breath and warm lips, the flash of a tongue when he wants to relearn her taste. Different sensations, all at once, too much yet never really enough.
(He likes kissing her there, in that way, because Malcom did the same thing—that night that never was. Brahms saw it, saw them. He kisses her neck because he wants the skin to carry his scent, bear his marks. Only his. No one else. She knows it. Whether he knows she knows doesn’t really matter.
She thinks very little of Malcom, these days. When she does, it’s with a dull pang of grief: the kind one feels after hearing a friend has died, but not a close friend; the friend they were close to in childhood, so many years ago, and some thoughts are had about “if only” and “what might have been” but it all passes with ease and not much in the way of emotional suffering. If she grieves anything for Malcom, it’s that he thought she needed saving. That he didn’t realize, didn’t understand until it was far too late, she was beyond salvation.)
She shivers when he goes past her neck, beyond the clavicle. He mouths at covered skin for a torturous minute—not because he doesn’t know any better, but because he’s seen the way it makes her arch and fist hands in the bedsheets: the heat, the stiff cotton, and her skin. Then, only after a whimpered Please has shuddered off her tongue, those large hands delve under hemlines and she’s lying bare in a matter of seconds. He never wastes time with that part, getting her naked. Staring at her afterward, dark eyes drinking in every exposed inch, is when he takes his time. When he looks at her like she’s everything, just like the first night when he looked and there was steely resolve in his eyes that justified his actions, only moments earlier, because doing so delivered her right into his arms. She wasn’t used to such silent worship, the first time. She wasn’t used to being someone’s everything.
(She rarely thinks of Cole. If she thinks of him at all, it’s the memory of copper coating her taste buds, smeared across lips that kissed cold porcelain as though it were real, as though she were adoring human flesh. She thinks of the taste, of his blood transferred amidst another kiss. Nothing more.)
“Brahms…” she breathes, slow and heavy. He loves touching her, like he can’t get enough of her body, her scent, her heat, this closeness she’s allowed him to have. The clumsiness is long gone from his touch. They’ve done this too many times, and he’s learned quickly.
His kisses go lower: down her belly, inner thighs, and then between her legs. She goes limp against the bedsheets, stares at the ceiling. She lets herself feel. Feel everything. That’s the best part of this, all of this: the feeling. He’s not the only one who revels in their closeness. They are both strangers to this realm of intimacy. Real intimacy. The kind two people share when they can’t get enough of each other, can’t imagine life without the other. Equally yoked in addiction of one another.
She never lets him finish her, not this way. Her hands pull and push and then she’s straddling him, kissing his neck with the same fervor as he’s kissed her, mumbling this or that about him having too many clothes on. (He never takes his clothes off until she does it for him, even as he’s so quick to throw hers across the room.) Sometimes she’s slow about it, but not today. Today she’s got adrenaline and endorphins pumping hot through her system, the rush of breaking bones with bare hands still fresh in her veins, and she wants him.
Her name flutters in his next breath; his eyes briefly close while both hands lock around her hips. He likes to savor this part, the exact moment their bodies are joined, and she lets him. She needs this minute to adjust, to settle herself in place and find balance. Today something changes. Today, she pauses. And she looks at him.
He must feel the intensity of her gaze, because his eyes snap open and he frowns. (She still isn’t entirely used to the open access to his expressions, without that infernal mask to hide them. But she doesn’t dislike it, and she feels no remorse for delivering a worthy fate to that hideous thing. If asked, she wouldn’t deny the sheer delight, when she smashed every last shard to fine dust.)
“What is it?” she can usually get him to be more talkative when they’re having sex; the emotional rush loosens his tongue. Her continued silence seems to ruffle him a little (he’s easily aggravated, when it comes down to it), and his frown deepens. It creases the scars into thick lines of ruined flesh. “Greta?”
She ignores the sharp edge to his voice, the one that usually precedes an outburst, because her next words will upend everything soon enough. She exhales, slowly, and she feels the corners of her mouth tugging upward. “I just realized I’m in love with you.”
“…Greta…?” he hasn’t used that voice in a while—the one so soft, frayed at the edges, that beckons familiarity to the days of phantom children lingering behind bedroom walls—and he stares at her with undisguised fear. Please don’t hurt me whimpers to her in his eyes, and she understands. The last people who loved him couldn’t live with him. They chose Death over him.
“I love you, Brahms.” She whispers; her hair brushes his damaged brow when she leans down, brown strands slipping from bare shoulders. She kisses him there, on the forehead. The bridge of his nose. The mirrored lines of his jaw. Then his mouth, several times. “I love you.” She breathes, sharing his broken exhales. “I love you.”
“Greta.” His arms are around her, voice low in her ear, hips rocking insistently; soft moans brush her temple, each thrust bringing him deeper, bringing her closer, keeping them together. “My Greta.” He sounds as though he’s just reached ecstasy, rushed to Paradise on the wings of three words.
This is when it’s easiest to think of nothing, of no one else: when he’s pinned her into the mattress and bedcovers and she’s rolling her hips into his and everything feels hot and real and wonderful. When her hair is a mess smeared across her skin and sweat slicks the friction between his body and hers. When she can look up into his face and see the ugliness of scars spread wide across a chalk-white canvas—skin sapped of all color from two decades without sunlight and a porcelain veil—and not care that she’s willingly opened her legs for a murderer. A monster, to those who loved him before her, and he still is. True love’s kiss doesn’t possess magic in the real world. A monster remains a monster, and the pretty princess can either be his captive, his poor broken little trinket to be played with at whim, or she can become a monster herself.
(Greta knows she chose the latter. She chose it the moment blood on Brahms’ hands became a stain to be cleaned off and not a crime to be abhorred. The chains she wears are the ones she placed upon herself. His crimes link them together, her and him, because she keeps his secrets and as such takes part of his guilt for herself.)
“I love you, Brahms.” She whispers, again, and another chain drapes around her neck.