Devil In The Waters 10-4: Bitter Oranges (Patreon)

Nothing had gone how she’d thought it would. She’d pictured Josh exploding with emotional joy opening the door to see her standing on the other side, all the way in Italy. Just for him.

Then again, his agonized reaction wasn’t inexplicable. While extreme, it wasn’t bizarre or out of place. And that’s what hurt the most.

Josh at last revealed the pain she’d caused him. All the last week he’d held it in, plastering over his terrible discovery with the thin explanation she’d planted the panties in Devlin’s couch for him to find. She didn’t think Josh believed that. Now she knew he didn’t. Josh didn’t believe it, but he wouldn’t say it. Saying it would make it realer than he could handle.

But what did Josh know? Nothing. What was it that he believed? Josh would tempt his darker half with the worst thoughts imaginable, but he was a rational man.

So here she was, almost eleven in the morning, sitting on a medieval brick wall with the high Mediterranean sun on her face. She’d wandered the city beginning early in the morning, skipping breakfast so she could clear her head and escape the hotel room that overnight had become a tomb of dreadful worry.

The Giardino degli Aranci was a remote and quiet spot in the otherwise busy city. Not a key attraction for September tourists. An oasis for thought and reflection, which she did, nursing her second cappuccino of the morning, the cooling paper cup held in her fingers between her knees as her gaze lingered to the east from the park’s beautiful belvedere, back from where she'd departed this morning. Josh would be awake and attending meetings by now.

The bend in the Tiber River showed on her left, St. Peter’s Basilica on the right. The pruned and nurtured canopy of ancient orange trees towered more than fifty feet overhead, extending behind her in a colonnade lining the park’s central footpath avenue. Someone planted the first orange tree in honor of Saint Dominic. The garden began with one orange tree imported from Spain over a thousand years ago. Something small can become something big.

There was an ache in her heart. A lamentation of her unnecessary crimes and the pain they caused. A melancholy. Melancholy, but something larger than only this terrible moment with Josh. The pain she’d caused him rose high in this territory, but it wasn’t the whole of her suffering. Something about the belvedere, the calm, the tradition, the link to the past, and even the oranges, summoned something lost, some small flickering something inside her.

Lost time. More meaningful times, connected times where her family was whole; a time of lanterns and paper boats and joss paper and her parents’ distant families. All now gone.

The oranges here in this Italian garden were like the ones her father would offer up during the Ghost Festival—though the last time she'd seen him do it was outside the Lungshan Temple in Taiwan, the summer after her mother died.

The lasting impression earned from watching her mother die had been a nihilistic dispossession of faith and magic and the joys and lusts of living. Her mother’s dreams had gone unfulfilled. She’d half-raised a family, but never saw the fruits of her caring labor. Instead endured half a decade of suffering. Half a decade of chemo and hair loss and hospital trips and being brave but crying behind the bedroom door. Once a carefree joyful woman, a beautiful woman unpossessed of agonal mortality, descending into sorrow and haggard frailty.

She tossed the coffee cup into the trash bin, her stomach soured. Her hands jittered with unresolved malaise and too much caffeine. She rubbed a thumb into an orbital ridge to push away some building tension.

After Tiffany’s party this summer everything she’d dreamed of opened before her like a fairytale book. Pages with gilded edges and hand drawn illustrations, the script in elegant feather pen calligraphy. A life filled with all the delicacies of the world. But they were all temptations, false things that lured her from duty and care. She’d been careless and she couldn’t remember why. Maybe just the ills of living in her fatalistic anomie.

Like a fool she’d trudged that fairytale path. A linear modality, and one thick with the dancing lure of temptations always a few steps ahead of her, ensuring her feet were ever moving forward, disregarding the danger of growing darkness.

Hands in the pockets of her cotton pants, she left the belvedere and its stunning view behind, traipsing the avenue underneath the orange tree canopy’s cool blue shade. Sleep last night had been small and fitful. Up at five in the morning, not knowing what to do with herself, puttering around the narrow hotel room, four floors above Josh, her room looking to the north. Every item around her life wobbled on its shelf, threatening to crash to the floor and ruin everything. The hidden panties caused the shaking. They were the earthquake that set the ground under her feet into heaving instability.

Devlin played a card she never had anticipated. Never believed he would have the balls to play. So much for poker. This whole time she’d thought it was her who held the upper hand. Devlin showed her it wasn’t. He didn’t know he wouldn’t hold the upper hand for long. Devlin had an enemy now, and he would pay. She would make him pay.

For now she would head back to the hotel to nap in the afternoon before dinner with Josh. Plus she had paperwork and contracts to look over, and she wanted to lie in a hot bath for a while and think some more.

* * *

She met Josh at an expensive restaurant on the Via del Plebiscito. They sat at a table for two by a smoky window overlooking the street and the street-side tables. Stone medieval archways separated the rooms, the ceilings were bright tin; silver-painted walls and crystal chandeliers, the floor a harlequin pattern in white and lemon-yellow tiles. The hard surfaces in the old renaissance building made hearing difficult.

She said, “I’m buying, okay?”

Josh still wore a suit. He shrugged, his face grim, looking tired. “I can expense it.”

“Just let me.”

He looked at her, blank. “Fine.”

Nothing about this trip was easy. This man on the other side of the table was her closest ally in life. Her best friend. Her husband. But she’d disregarded that sanctity. Her hands trembled holding the menu. Nervous with Josh like this was a first date. Wanting to make a good impression. Wanting him to like her, think she was pretty, think she was smart and funny. He’d known all those things to be true, and she’d betrayed him.

Josh reached over and fingered down her menu, looking at her with sober eyes. “Before you start talking, before you say something... Don’t apologize. Don’t apologize for anything. You understand why?”

She did. He’d made it clear in his hotel room. She set down the menu, saying, “I won’t.”

“Good,” he said, holding his hands together near his face, looking out to the street. “What are you ordering?”

She said nothing, cupping her cheek, looking down at the floor between their table and the next, feeling heavy yet empty. She looked to Josh and said, “You were right, Josh. I shouldn’t have come here. I was at home and I was heartsick. Heartsick thinking maybe you didn’t want to love me anymore, and I got scared, and I came here.”

Josh closed his eyes. “Kimmy. Don’t...”

“Don’t worry, Josh,” she said. “I won’t say anymore. I had to say that. But I’m done now.”

They perused their menus in silence, her heart racing, her stomach tight. She’d eaten nothing today and she still felt little urge to eat. She decided on the beef tartare with fresh truffle and Josh ordered a beef steak with honey and pistachios.

“Do you want wine?”

Josh shook his head and she passed the menus back to the waiter. She said, “I hope we don’t get kicked out for not ordering wine.”

Josh smirked and it was the first ray of hope since she’d booked the flight here out of Pearson. Her heart ached. Not for herself, but for Josh. She took a deep breath and reached for his hand. He didn’t pull away and her eyes welled like she would cry. She couldn’t help smiling. She pushed her slender fingers into his warm grip and he squeezed them. Their eyes met. She said, “All the games are over. Okay?”

He nodded, his eyes turning down, his lips slimming.

“We never should have played them,” she said, thumbing his knuckles.

He looked up again, his eyes glassy and wet, the whites showing sign of pink. “I never should have asked you to play.”

She shook her head. “We’re not going to talk about it.”

Josh put his head down again, his grip on her hand still firm.

She had to be the strong one. Josh couldn’t lead right now. One look at him would tell someone how lost he was. “We’re not going to talk about it ever again. You want to know what we’re going to do?”

He asked her what, and she showed him the most confident expression she could muster in this awful moment so far from home. “We’re going to have this dinner. Then I’m checking out of the hotel and I’m flying back to Toronto. You’re going to concentrate on work. You’re coming home to me on Friday night—tomorrow night—and we’re going to spend the weekend being good to each other.”

Josh nodded, silent, his unseeing eyes looking near the middle of the table.

“I’m never going to do anything ever again that might hurt you. Even if you w-want me to, it’s too dangerous.”

Josh looked up, his eyes wetter than before. A tear spilled from his right eye and he withdrew his hand from hers to wipe his face with the yellow napkin.

She gathered her hands in her lap, her shoulders sagging, wondering how she could ever do anything to hurt such a good man. “Josh, baby...”

He sniffled, blinked his eyes, then wiped them again. He put his elbows on the table and bunched the napkin near his mouth staring at her. She met his eyes and soaked as much pain from him as she could.

At last he set the napkin down, and steadied himself. Then he looked at her again. “Did you, um... Did you and him ever, uh...”

Her lips began to tremble and her chest shuddered.

“Did you and him ever laugh at me? Laugh at me behind my back?”

Her trembling mouth fell open and everything in her dropped away. Her vision blurred with tears and her neck swelled. She began to sob, falling forward, hating the man she loved could think she would do that. She’d done so much worse in her mind, but that’s what Josh feared. He feared she’d humiliated him with a man he hated. A man he warned her about. Faces from nearby tables turned her way and she hid in her napkin, crying into it.

She excused herself from the table, pushing back and clinging to the napkin for safety and security. She headed to the washroom, stopping at Josh and holding his neck, stooping near his ear to whisper the most honest thing she could imagine: “Never, Josh. I love you and I could never do that. Please, don’t think that.”