Chapter 27 #4
Tamsin smiled without remarking on it, though she squeezed his hand, and Roman continued to tell her everything he had seen and heard.
At some point she abandoned proper posture entirely and tucked both feet beneath her.
Roman moved closer on the sofa, their shoulders touching.
Someone came in to tend the fire; Roman stopped speaking long enough for the servant to finish, resuming before the door had fully closed.
He was halfway through an account of Salmond’s proposed collection of petrified wood when he became aware that he had been speaking for a very long time. Roman stopped, then sighed. “Forgive me.”
His wife wrinkled her nose. “Whatever for?”
“I have been talking rather a great deal.”
“Yes.” She smiled as he stared at her. “I like it.”
Roman looked away, something unfamiliar catching low in his chest. The fire had caught again; flames moved quietly around the fresh coal. “I nearly did not go this evening.”
“Why?” There. One of her simple questions.
Roman could have said he had been tired, or blamed the weather, Salmond’s eccentricities, the inconvenience of the hour but as Tamsin tilted her head to rest it against his shoulder, he relaxed.
His wife wanted to know him. And he wanted to be known.
“I thought it would be another room full of men wanting to improve something.”
She slowly shook her head, her curls brushing his jaw. “You’ve had enough of improving things, I suppose?”
“No.” Roman considered his answer. “Yes.” And still Tamsin said nothing. He sighed and rested his head against hers. “I must say again that I do not know.”
“That seems to be happening to you rather often lately.”
There was no mockery in her words. Roman exhaled through his nose.
“Yes. I suppose it has.” The silence that followed was not like the silences of the last week.
He did not feel compelled to escape it. After a moment, he said, “It was different. This gathering, I mean. I felt different while I was there.”
“How did it feel?” Her voice was soft, their joined hands resting in her lap.
“No one needed anything from me.” He considered those words carefully, turning his head just enough to brush his lips against her forehead. “I do not mean they did not want me there. Salmond did, who knows why.”
“Roman.” She sat back enough to look up at him with an expression he had seen before. It was somehow both accusatory and affectionate.
He could not help but give in with a sigh.
“They wanted my interest, perhaps. My opinion, when I had one. But nothing depended upon my being able to persuade anyone. There was nothing I could ruin by failing to make the right argument.” He squeezed her hand.
“I had forgotten what it was like to care about something that did not require me to do anything immediate about it.”
For a moment, Tamsin did not answer. Finally, “That sounds rather nice.” Her head returned to his shoulder.
Roman relaxed. “Yes. I suppose so.” He sat with the realization a moment as a clock started to chime, and then kept on chiming. Midnight. Both of them looked toward it as he frowned. “Is it really that late?”
His wife glanced at the mantel. “Apparently so.”
He had been home more than an hour. He could not remember when time had disappeared so completely and so pleasantly.
Tamsin untucked her feet and reached for her abandoned book. Roman felt an immediate, irrational objection: he did not want the evening to be over. The thought arrested him as the pair of them rose.
For several days he had been attempting to spend time with his wife, because she had told him, with painful clarity, that she could not endure a marriage in which she was alone.
He had thought the answer was to be present—to come home, sit beside her, ask questions about her day.
He had treated companionship as another obligation he had neglected, another item on his daily agenda, another obligation he must learn to perform properly.
Tonight he had not performed anything. He had walked through the door wanting Tamsin: not her competence or her judgment, not her ability to smooth a difficult dinner or manage an impossible family or tell him what someone else required.
He wanted to be near her. He had wanted to see what expression crossed her face when he told her about Salmond’s ridiculous collection, and hear what questions she would ask. He had wanted to make her laugh.
Tamsin moved toward the door and Roman fell into step beside her, the dogs following them.
“Do you think,” she asked as they climbed the stairs, “Mr. Salmond would allow me to see the fossil?”
Roman considered. “I am certain he would be delighted by your interest, if that is truly what you wish.”
“It is. I would like to see something that old with my own eyes.”
The answer rose easily to his lips. “Then I will take you myself.”
Tamsin looked up. Roman wondered whether he had moved too quickly — whether she would hear assumption in it, or obligation, or one more decision made on her behalf. “If you would like me to.”
Her expression softened. “I would.”
They continued toward the stairs, and while Tamsin walked beside him, he no longer had the peculiar sensation that they were two people traveling in the same direction by accident.
He kissed her goodnight outside her bedchamber door, but they both knew the door between bedrooms would open within a quarter hour, and they would be in each other’s arms again.