LITMIR.BIZ

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scowling at her sloped ceiling, wishing herself asleep.

      And she told herself she didn’t mind if she carried the remnants of that night—and that napkin, and everything that had come after—with her forever. She knew she would. It was as if that night was a tattoo she wore on her skin, much brighter and more vibrant than the text she’d already put there.

      Margot could choose to ignore the tattooed sensation and that trembling thing that lived in her now, every time she thought about Thor. Or she could try. But she was determined that her research reflect the change she’d lived through that night.

      She flipped through all the notes she’d made on all those nights out in the city’s bars and clubs. She listened to the voice recordings she’d made, imagining the faces of the people she’d met, and if she pretended that there wasn’t one particular face that she saw above all, well...that was no one’s business but hers.

      She begged off from coffee dates and dinners her friendly colleagues invited her to and threw herself into her work with the kind of passion she remembered from way back in the last of her doctoral dissertation days.

      That was the last time she had given herself permission to immerse herself in her research completely. She’d thrown herself into her dissertation and hunkered down with it until it was done at last. Until she couldn’t quite tell the difference between the writing, the thinking and her. Until she wasn’t sure where the words ended and she began, as a separate being.

      Margot told herself it was a kind of freedom. Even a sort of bliss.

      And she ignored the part of her that whispered that really what she was doing was hiding.

      She restructured her arguments. She developed new theories.

      “I still don’t understand why you picked such a dramatically remote place to spend your sabbatical,” her father told her with his usual condescension when she took a break from it all on Sunday evening to call her parents like the dutiful daughter she’d always been. “But I suppose Iceland is all the rage these days. As are treatises on sexuality, one supposes.”

      Margot burned with her usual shame and fury at that.

      And normally she would have fallen all over herself to explain what she was doing. To try to make herself palatable to the one person alive who had never approved of a single thing she’d ever done—

      But there was that tremor inside her. There was that ache in her fingers. There was the memory of the bluest eyes she’d ever seen and the approval in them that had made them seem lit on fire.

      She wasn’t the same person she’d been before she’d gone to Thor’s hotel.

      Maybe that was why she laughed instead of launching into the usual host of hurried explanations her father never paid much attention to anyway.

      “I’m a tenured professor, not a teenager trying to be dramatic, Dad,” she said, the same way she’d have laughed at a pompous student in one of her classes. “If the research I wanted to do could have been done in Des Moines, I would have gone there. I’m not in Iceland because it’s trendy. I’m here because it’s critical to my work.”

      Her father sputtered, and Margot braced herself for the flare of his temper—but instead, he handed the phone over to her mother quicker than he usually did.

      Margot stood across the dark autumn arch of the planet, staring out her little window into the quickly coming night, and wondered why it had taken her so long to stand on her own two feet.

      “What on earth did you say to your father?” her mother asked, muffling the receiver as if she was whispering. She likely was. Margot could see her as easily as if she was in the same house. Her mother was walking through the house from her father’s study, back to the kitchen table, where she liked to spend her time. She read the paper there, listened to the radio and watched the kind of television that made Margot’s father curl his lip in disgust.

      Margot had always curled her lip in the exact same way at those shows, just to prove once again that she was nothing like her mother; that she was smart and intellectually curious and was worried about weighty matters, not the latest royal wedding or Hollywood scandal or silly movie-of-the-week.

      “I think Dad forgets that he’s not the only academic in the family,” she told her mother, squeezing her eyes shut as if that could keep her from having to look at herself too closely.

      Her mother let out a sound that could have been a sigh. Or a laugh.

      “Your father forgets he’s not the only academic alive,” she replied after a moment. “It’s part of his charm, really. But, Margot, you should know that no matter how he gets—and you know how he can get sometimes—he’s so proud of all you’ve accomplished. We both are.”

      There was no reason Margot should have found herself blinking back tears at that. At another example of kindness from a person who she hadn’t always treated well, so busy had she been trying to earn Ronald Cavendish’s next distracted smile.

      “I couldn’t have done anything without you, Mom,” she heard herself say, and it actually hurt as it came out.

      Because it was true, and she hadn’t understood that before. It was true, but Margot had been careening around all these years feeling superior to her own mother and the simple, steadfast love she’d always offered no matter the lip-curling or superiority complexes around her. Margot had always been so sure that kind of solidity and certainty was beneath her.

      Maybe you’ve been emulating the wrong parent all this time, something inside her suggested. Harshly.

      “I love you, too, honey,” her mother was replying, sounding surprised—which also hurt. “Are you all right?”

      If that wasn’t an indictment, Margot didn’t know what was.

      “I’m perfectly fine,” she told her mother.

      And God, how she wanted that to be true, even if she wasn’t sure she knew herself any longer. Maybe the truth was that she was finally figuring out the truth of who she should have been all this time.

      No matter how much it hurt.

      All in all, it was a full ten days later when she emerged, feeling shaky and strange, blinking her way into the bright, white light of a shockingly clear Reykjavík morning.

      It was cold, the way it was always cold. She could feel the wind slice into her despite the fact she was wearing her heavy parka and good, warm boots. The air slapped at her face, making her eyes tear up and her skin feel chapped on contact.

      Margot arranged her scarf to cover her mouth, then shoved her gloved hands into her pockets as she headed down her little street toward the busier, more central part of Reykjavík. She took deep breaths of the thin, frigid air and told herself it was time to accept the fact that there was no more avoiding the one subject she hadn’t wanted to address at all.

      Not directly.

      If she pressed her lips together, she could still feel that napkin there, teaching her a thousand things about herself she hadn’t wanted to know.

      And what a funny thing it was that she could be brought so low by a simple bit of fabric and the man who’d offered it to her. She felt humbled, altered, and she couldn’t tell if that was a positive or negative—not even all these days and a new interaction with her parents later. Margot thought that really she should have objected. Surely every feminist bone in her body should have risen up in protest—

      But that was the curious thing. She couldn’t think of anything more feminist than locating her own voice, by any means possible. Did it matter how she’d gotten to that point? Or was she trying to complicate her own responses because she thought she should have reached it on her own?

      Was what had happened to her problematic—or did she want it to be, so she could dismiss it? Or shame herself into denying the experience had changed her?

      If another woman had told her that she’d

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