Voice Under My Skin

“You must be Leo’s cousin!”

The bride hugged Diana before she could step back. She smelled of peonies and hairspray, and she held on a beat too long, the way kind people do.

The sweetness caught at the back of Diana’s throat. She swallowed and blamed the flowers. There were enough of them in this room to bury somebody.

“I’m Claire,” she said, as if Diana might not know. “I’m so glad you came. Family is family, right?”

“Right,” Diana said. Her smile didn’t move. She had practiced it in the mirror for a week.

Over Claire’s shoulder, Leo went pale above his designer tux.

Cousin. Two years of her life folded into one word. Two years of covering his rent when he came up short, of the job she’d helped him land, of forgiving him the first time she found another woman’s earring in her bed. In April he had ended it. By June he had a fiancée.

Eleven days before the wedding, a message had arrived from a stranger. Claire had found Diana in Leo’s old photos, and Leo had told her she was looking at his cousin.

Claire wanted to invite his “favorite cousin” in person. Diana had met her for coffee, ready to tell her everything. Then Claire had shown her the seating chart and talked about Leo’s lonely childhood, and Diana had understood that this woman had been lied to as thoroughly as she had. She’d paid for both coffees and said nothing. Claire wasn’t the villain of this story.

So she had come. Not to look unbroken, though she’d zipped herself into a rented dress for that too. She had come to sit through it once as herself, and then stop playing the role Leo had written for her.

Just get through the vows, she told herself, and found a seat in the shadows near the floral arches.

The vows were long. Leo had never once been that eloquent with her. When the officiant reached in sickness and in health, Diana’s nails left little half-moons in her palms.

Don’t you dare cry at his wedding.

She blinked hard, and that was when she felt it: a prickle at the back of her neck. Someone was watching her.

He sat alone at a table near the back, an untouched glass of champagne beside him. Tall, broad through the shoulders, his dark suit cut so well it looked poured over him. His collar was open, and a line of black ink crept up the side of his neck, the coiled tail of a serpent disappearing under his jaw.

He didn’t look away when she caught him. Most men did. Not even when she narrowed her eyes. He simply went on looking, unhurried, as if she were a page he intended to finish.

Diana raised an eyebrow.

One corner of his mouth lifted. He tipped his glass a quarter of an inch.

For a moment, his eyes flashed gold. Diana glanced at the candles, but none stood close enough to explain it. When she looked again, his eyes were dark.

Diana turned back toward the altar. The flowers had begun to smell wrong.

Peonies, candle wax, the powdery perfume of the woman in front of her. She could separate them all, and each seemed stronger every time she breathed. Heat spread beneath her skin. She pressed her palms to the underside of her chair, searching for a cool place.

Across the aisle, the stranger straightened. His glass stopped halfway to the table.

Diana looked away. She had come to survive a wedding. Apparently her body had decided that was too ambitious.

The violin rose, thin and painfully loud. Her heartbeat seemed to answer it from everywhere at once. When the room tipped sideways, she stood and slipped through the side door, keeping one hand on the wall until it closed behind her.

In the washroom, she set her clutch beside the basin and turned on the cold tap. The water struck porcelain with a crack that made her flinch. She wet her hands and pressed them to her face.

For a few seconds it helped. Then the warmth returned, along with a restless urge to go back into the room. There was somebody in there she wanted to find.

Leo, she thought automatically, then shook her head. No. That was an old habit. Leo was exactly where she had left him, marrying somebody else.

Breathe.

Diana looked up.

The word had arrived with a small pressure behind her left ear. A man’s voice, low and close. She should have heard a footstep, seen a reflection, felt somebody standing behind her.

There was nobody in the mirror but her.

“Hello?”

She checked the cubicles. Empty. The tap kept running. Beyond the door, applause rose and faded.

Diana shut off the water and waited for the voice to return. It didn’t. She tried to reproduce it in her own head and only managed her own tired voice saying a word that now sounded ridiculous.

She had barely eaten. The room was crowded, the dress was too tight, and she was watching her ex make promises. Any of those things could explain feeling ill. She wanted one of them to explain the rest.

She stayed at the basin until her hands stopped shaking. The heat eased enough for her to breathe without fighting for the next breath. In the mirror she looked flushed and annoyed, which was an improvement.

When she returned, the officiant was reaching for the final page. The stranger had turned in his chair. He watched her cross the room with a concentration that no longer felt entirely like admiration.

Diana sat down carefully. Beneath the flowers she caught something clean and unfamiliar, cedar after rain. She wanted another breath of it. That bothered her almost as much as the voice.

“You may now kiss the—oh!” The officiant laughed as Leo kissed his bride early. The room laughed with him.

Diana didn’t. The man in the dark suit had set his glass aside. His eyes moved over her face, and his jaw loosened only when she settled into her chair. For a moment she imagined sitting beside him instead, telling him about the terrible vows, making that serious mouth turn up again. The thought was so ordinary, after the washroom, that she almost smiled.

***

At the reception, Leo found her by the dessert table.

“Diana. You came.” He had the nerve to sound relieved. “Thanks for—you know. Going along with it.”

“With what?” she asked sweetly. “The part where I’m related to you, or the part where you were sleeping with your bride while I was still paying your rent?”

“Keep your voice down.”

“My voice is down. I’m just using all of it.”

Leo glanced toward Claire, who waved at them from across the room. He waved back, and his smile looked painful. “Stay for the after-party, okay? She wants photos with family.”

“No.”

He blinked. Leo had never been good with that word coming from her.

“I came because she asked,” Diana said. “She seems lovely, which is more than you deserve. I’m not going to ruin her night. But I’m not your cousin, Leo. I’m not taking photos. I’m done.”

She turned to go. His hand closed around her wrist, hard, the way it used to when he wanted a conversation to end on his terms.

“Don’t make this a thing, Diana.”

A sound came from just behind her left shoulder. It was low and rough and so quiet she felt it more than heard it, like a big engine idling in the dark.

Leo let go as if her skin had burned him.

“Problem?”

Diana turned. It was the man from the back table. Up close he was bigger, and the room seemed to rearrange itself around him. Two guests at the next table fell silent. A waiter changed direction.

“No problem,” Leo said quickly. “Mr.—sir. Enjoy the party.” He all but fled.

Diana rubbed her wrist and looked up at the stranger. “Did you just growl at him?”

“I cleared my throat.”

“That was not your throat.”

“It was in the general area.” His dark eyes went to her wrist, and something in his jaw tightened. “Did he hurt you?”

“No.” She dropped her hand. “Do you know him?”

“Everyone in this room knows who I am,” he said, which wasn’t an answer. “You handled that well.”

“You were eavesdropping.”

“I was standing near the profiteroles. You were the one using all of your voice.”

She almost laughed. She caught it just in time. “Who are you?”

“Someone who has watched you be polite for three hours to a man who doesn’t deserve your good manners.” He paused. “And who would like to know whether you’re leaving.”

“I was about to.”

“Alone?”

There it was: the question, laid on the table between them like a card turned face up. A warning bell rang somewhere in her head at the quiet darkness beneath his calm. The rest of her didn’t seem to care about bells.

Behind him, across the room, Leo was watching them, rigid with something that looked a lot like fear.

Diana had spent two years doing what was safe, sensible, and good for Leo. She had come here tonight to stop.

“I’m not his cousin,” she heard herself say.

His gaze didn’t flicker. “I know.”

It should have struck her as odd. Later, it would. Right then, it only felt like being believed.

“I don’t usually leave weddings with strangers,” she said.

“You were leaving either way. I’ll hold the door.”

“And where would the night end?”

His smile was slow and entirely without innocence. “Wherever you decide it does.”

Diana set down the sparkling water she’d been holding all evening. She tucked her clutch under her arm and walked past the gift table, past Leo’s open mouth, past the string quartet sawing through a love song, and out through the double doors into the warm July night.

She didn’t look back to see whether he followed. The door swung open behind her, and his footsteps fell into step with hers.