I Was Supposed to Kill You

I Was Supposed to Kill You

I Was Supposed To Kill You

There you are, beautiful as always. You know, I always know the moment you arrive before I even turn. The room goes still and close, the way the air turns before snow, and I smell your perfume. Warm vanilla and a spice I could never quite name. Come, sit. Take the chair by the window. You always did love sitting there. The view out across the open sea, the waves breaking white against the broken sea wall, the birds wheeling above it as the light goes. Beautiful, yes, but not nearly as beautiful as you. But I love it because of the way the last light catches in your auburn hair, the way it traces the gentle slopes of your face, the way your golden eyes illuminate, showing every speck of amber and earth-brown.

Let me look at you, just for a moment.

You’re wearing the lemon-sorbet dress, the one with the little pearl buttons you could never do up on your own. Your hair is down the way I like it. Coming loose at your temple no matter how you pinned it, gentle curls cascading. There is salt drying pale along your hem. You have been down at the water again, haven't you? You always do that when you can’t sleep. I, too, have been unable to sleep.

I have something to tell you, and I need you to let me reach the end of it before you speak. I have carried it for so long, long enough it has worn a groove in me, clean to the bone.

They sent me to kill you.

That is the truth of how we began, and I never told you. But I am telling you now.

I was supposed to kill you, and I could not. I threw my whole life on the fire sooner than lay a hand on you, and I would do it again tonight, and every night after.

You know what I am.

I think you always knew, deep down. I am… was, oath-sworn. An assassin bound young and beaten into submission. They made my right hand theirs to control. Gave me your name on a strip of parchment, and a whole season to commit the deed. As though it should take a season to open one throat.

I found you feeding the crows, do you remember? A heel of bread going to them scrap by scrap. You talked to them as though they owed you money and were late in repayment. Salt in your hair from your dip in the sea, sleeves shoved past the elbow, laughing at something one of them did, a stumble of sorts. I stood there with the order in my hand, and for the length of that laugh I forgot what I had come down to the water to do. You looked at me as though I were the one with no business being there. Told me you had been waiting weeks for me to show my face again.

Something in me the oath had never reached rolled over in its sleep and awoke.

Why are you looking at me like that?

You used to look at me as though I were the last warm thing in a cold and barren landscape. You would come up from the water with your hands frozen through, searching for my warmth. And you would shove them under my shirt against my back and laugh when I swore.

I would give you all my warmth now, if you would only let me near.

But tonight you sit with your hands folded in your lap and your eyes on me, grey and level as the glass at your back. You will not soften, and I cannot think what I have done to earn it. I broke the oath, for you. Do you know what that costs a man? It comes for what it is owed, and I knew that. I chose you regardless. So do not look at me as if the decision was different. You know I would have died before I followed my oath.

That I could never. Not to you.