Refusing To Talk

Refusing To Talk


POV: Selina

She squeezed my hand once. That was enough. Felix tried to speak with me that afternoon. He found me in the sitting room where I had established a temporary occupation, a chair by the window, a book I had found on the shelf that I was reading approximately thirty percent of, the remainder of my attention on the garden outside where two of his security team were conducting their rotation with the practiced invisibility of people good at their jobs.

He came into the room and sat in the chair across from me with the careful deliberateness that had replaced his previous habit of occupying spaces as if he owned them. He did own this one. He was doing it anyway.

"I'd like to explain some things," he said.

"When you're ready." I looked at my book.

"I'm reading."

"I can see that." he said, then paused.

"Selina..."

"I'm only here," I said, setting the book down and looking at him directly,

"Because I realized you aren't the one who wants me dead. And since the one who does is still out there, I don't have a great many options that don't end badly for me." I held his gaze.

"That's the extent of my current position. I'm not ready for explanations yet."

He looked at me for a moment. Something moved through his expression, not the controlled blankness he usually deployed, but something more genuine and therefore more difficult to look at directly.

"Alright," he said.

He stood and left the room, which I had not entirely expected him to do without pushing, and his willingness to leave without pushing was itself a form of communication that I was not ready to receive, so I picked up my book and looked at the same page I had been looking at before and waited for the information to stop feeling like information.

He tried again the following morning. And the afternoon after that.

I was not, if I was being honest with myself in the privacy of my own head, being entirely fair about it. I knew this. I had done the accounting clearly enough in the dark hours of the second night, lying awake with the house quiet around me and Amaya breathing steadily in the other bed.

I knew that what Felix needed to say was probably something I needed to hear, that the version of him I was currently watching move through his own house with the careful, deliberate patience of a man who had decided to earn something rather than take it was meaningfully different from the version I had run from.

I knew all of that...

I was not ready anyway...

Because ready would mean sitting across from him and listening to him explain the things that had happened and whatever he had learned about Martin and whatever he thought it meant for what came next, and ready would mean having a conversation I couldn't walk away from halfway through, and I needed to be able to walk away.

I needed that option to remain available while I figured out what I actually thought and felt about a situation that had layers upon layers, each one complicated, none of them resolved.

So I was not ready.

And I was aware that not-ready was beginning to look, from the outside, like something else.

On the third day I wore the blue dress.

I am aware of how this sounds. I am also being honest, which requires acknowledging that there was calculation in it, a specific, deliberate calculation of the kind that women engage in when they have been through something difficult and need to remind themselves that they are still themselves,

Still the full version of themselves, still in possession of the things that were theirs before any of this began.

The blue dress had been in the bag I had managed to keep through three weeks underground and a petrol station in Drover's Flat and the back of Felix's convoy, which was either evidence of organizational instinct or pure stubbornness and was probably both.

I wore it to breakfast.

I was aware of Felix noticing. He was very controlled about it, which somehow made it more noticeable rather than less, the specific quality of a man applying considerable effort to maintaining a neutral expression.

He tried to sit with me in the kitchen while I was making tea.

"Selina," he said, and his voice had a quality I hadn't heard before, not the careful patience of the past three days but something underneath it, something that had been held under the patience and was beginning to press against it from below.

I picked up my tea and walked out of the kitchen. He did not follow. That evening I came through the study where he was working, took the long route through the house to get to the garden, the route that went past his study rather than the shorter route that didn't.

I was aware, as I passed the open door, of the exact quality of his attention following me through the room. He said nothing. I said nothing. I went to the garden and sat in the evening air and thought about what I was doing and whether it was working and what exactly it was working toward.

Amaya found me there twenty minutes later. She sat beside me and looked at the garden and said, without preamble: "You're enjoying this too much."

"I'm not enjoying it," I said.

"You're wearing the blue dress," she said. I looked at the garden.

"Lina." Her voice was quiet and direct in the way it always was when she had decided that what needed to be said was more important than diplomacy.

"He is trying. Whatever he was before, he is trying now. You can stay angry, you have reasons, real reasons, I'm not diminishing them. But you cannot stay angry and wear the blue dress at the same time and call it a position." I looked at my hands.

"I know," I said.

"You're scared," she said. Not unkindly.

"That's different from angry, and it's more honest." I sat with that.

She was right. She was irritatingly, precisely right, in the way she always was when I most wished she would be wrong.

"He has things to tell me," I said.

"That I'm not sure I'm ready to hear."

"I know." She paused.

"But you're going to have to hear them eventually. And making him work for the opportunity isn't the same as being ready, it's just making both of you miserable while you wait to be ready."

I looked at the evening light in the garden. At the security team moving in the background. At the house behind us where Felix was in the study working on finding the man who wanted me dead, doing that work while I wore a blue dress and walked through rooms to make a point.

"Tomorrow," I said. Amaya looked at me.

"Tomorrow I'll listen," I said. 

"Today I still need to be angry." She considered this with the fairness she brought to assessments.

"That's acceptable," she said.

"But tell him tomorrow. Don't make him guess."