Chapter 12
Rosalind came awake quickly, a sharp gasp bringing her out of a dream in which someone had turned her into a statue while she was teaching her tally class at the clinic.
Perhaps appropriately, for a few moments, she was frozen in place, awaiting her body to catch up with her mind in the wake of returning to the real world. She blinked her eyes open, drawing in a few deep breaths, and turned her face to the side.
Her new husband was beside her still, but not sleeping any longer.
He was seated against the headboard of the bed with a stack of papers on the back of a hardcover book in his lap, scratching a quill against the paper in sporadic, diagonal notes rather than even lines.
He did not see right away that she had awoken, and so for a moment, she had occasion to observe him.
His pomaded curls were squashed on the side facing her, which must have been where they had pressed into the pillow when he napped.
The rest had come loose from the control over the styling and sprung free over his ears and brow as he worked, quivering when he changed his mind about something and scratched the quill over a word or a letter he didn’t like anymore, after having put it on paper.
Her eyes trailed down to his fingers, spattered with ink. He’d removed the waistcoat. His sleeves were rolled up. His feet were bare.
She felt suddenly very warm about how exposed he was, even knowing logically that she was far more on display with her injured leg all the way out.
The light was lower than it had been when she’d fallen asleep. It was early evening, she wagered, which meant she had napped for some hours. She supposed she was entitled to some exhaustion after such a momentous morning, but all the same, it felt a little lazy.
She had told herself she would be more productive and comport herself with significantly more vim now that she did not need regular doses of Mae’s herbal drink. Ah, well. She could try again tomorrow.
“Is that a new sermon?” she asked quietly, trying to be soft, but still startling him so much, he stabbed his quill directly through the paper and likely into the cover of the book he was using as support.
He snapped his head around to look down at her, those dark green eyes of his gone wide, fringed with lovely dark lashes. “Rosalind!” he said. “I didn’t realize you’d awakened. Do you need anything?”
She giggled. She wasn’t sure why she did, but something about it was so very endearing.
She wanted to face him and pushed herself up onto her hands and knees, moving around so that she could lie on her good side while she reached down to re-secure the buttons, making a bit of a production out of the entire process.
He watched, something a little wary on his face, but did not move to interfere without her express invitation.
“Not a sermon,” he said, once she was settled and flicking buttons back into their eyelets, his gaze still following the progress of her work.
“More just thinking on paper. What Miss Casper said about the body acting as its own healer being the work of intelligent design was inspiring to me, so I was thinking of other ways that it does so.”
She gave him a sleepy little smile. “My mother would like that,” she said. “She is a woman of science, you know. Like Mae. What else did you think of?”
He glanced down at the paper and then peeked back up at her again. “I would just hand you my notes if I thought anyone could read my scribbling. I’m afraid my penmanship is a bit of an atrocity when I’m not being deliberate.”
“Isn’t everyone’s?” she asked, giving another giggle. “Abe calls his ‘chicken scratch,’ and that’s when he is trying.”
“I was thinking about hay fever, actually,” he said.
“How we sneeze and our eyes water to get the irritants away from the tender bits of our face before we can inhale or absorb them. It is a bit like the body knows we wish we could splash ourselves in the face with water, but since we can’t, it is doing the next best thing. I know it’s a bit nasty.”
“No, no,” she said, coming up on her elbow and dropping the buttons. “No, that is perfect! And so astute! What else?”
He laughed, going a bit pink around the ears. “Do you really want to know?”
She leaned forward and grasped at his sleeve. “Desperately! Oh, I want to think of one too! You must give me a moment. My mind is still sleepy.”
He laughed again, softer this time, his head cocking gently to the side. “Take as many moments as you need. Maybe if I lose the vicarage, we can go into business together writing academic and theological essays, hm?”
She blinked, giving him a little frown. “Do you really think you are going to? Because of me?”
He sighed. “I don’t know. But absolutely nothing about that particular mess is because of you. And I really am hopeful that it will simply blow over, like so many other things have. Do you want to know what else I wrote?”
She nodded, looking wary but as though she truly did want to believe it would blow over as well.
He assumed what he hoped was a reassuring look of good cheer and turned the scribbled sheet toward her. “All right. I also wrote about how sometimes when you get a splinter and you can’t pluck it out, your skin pushes it out itself, after a time.”
“Oh, that is true, but it can take an awfully long time,” Rosalind said. “I’ve a bit of graphite that has never come out of my leg from falling on a pencil as a girl. I suppose my body thought that was all right. Just some necessary punctuation, hm?”
“Your poor leg,” he said, biting his lip. “Cursed to suffer?”
“It is the same leg, too,” she realized, blinking and pushing herself up to sit. She pulled the nightgown up around her calf and pointed to the little gray dot just below her knee. “Look, it is here. My comma.”
He peered at it, amusement on his face. “Is there still a piece of something in there?”
She shook her head. “No. I think it is like a tattoo. Just colored under the skin. Touch it, it is smooth.”
He paused, glancing up at her, and after a moment, he set his work on the bedside table and turned to give her his full attention.
He reached out and brushed the pads of his fingers over the little patch of skin.
He lingered there, the warmth of his skin soaking into hers, and when he pulled away, a bit of the ink smudged into his fingertips had transferred alongside her little scar of graphite.
“Ah,” she said, a little breathless. “Now it is a semicolon.”
He huffed out a little breath, looking somewhat dazed by the observation.
“Do you have any scars, Matthew?” she asked him, tossing the skirt of the nightgown back over her leg.
He nodded. “A few. One on my knee from falling down as a boy.”
“Everyone has that one,” she said, waving her hand. “It doesn’t count.”
He squinted, chewing at his lip. “All right,” he said, holding out his arm and turning it outward so she could see the bend of his elbow as he pulled his sleeve further up.
“These three lines are from my feeble efforts of trying to learn to bake my own bread after my mother moved to Croydon last year.”
“Oh, no!” she said, pushing her fingers over her lips to hide a smile as she looked at them. “Did you manage the bread, though, in the end?”
“I managed something bread adjacent,” he replied, chuckling. “It never rose correctly. I suspect I wasn’t patient enough with the dough, and I kept bumping my arms trying to pull it out of the oven to check its doneness. Thus the burns.”
“They will probably fade,” she said, leaning over to touch one of the white lines on his otherwise lightly tanned arm. “I had one from a curling wand when I was younger that vanished over the years. You’ll still need to do better, I’m afraid.”
“Hm,” he said, narrowing his eyes at her a little. “You are a difficult audience, Mrs. Everly.”
She curled her lips inward on the instinct to grin at being called that, putting her hands in her lap and turning her eyes up at him in expectation.
He sighed, shaking his head. “Reed broke my collarbone once, when we were boys. It’s got a scar on it. That one is never going away. Of that I’m quite certain.”
“Did he?” she said with a gasp. “Why would he do such a thing?”
“Because young boys are foolish,” he replied with a chuckle. “Do you want to see it?”
She nodded.
He gave her a look she had never seen from him before, a flicker of something she’d perhaps call seriousness or weight settling over his face as he considered her answer.
“All right,” he said, and even his voice had taken on this new tone, a little deeper. A little darker. He sat up a little straighter, turning toward her with his legs crossed in front of him, and moved to unbutton the top of his shirt, his eyes locked on hers.
It was at that moment that Rosalind realized that she had asked him to disrobe for her. She felt the flush of heat graze over her face and dig into her chest, but she did not move or open her mouth to take it back. Because she realized, too, that she wanted him to continue.
She wanted to see.
She held his eye for as long as she could until curiosity brought her gaze lower, over the bare, sculpted lines of his throat, which flexed when he swallowed, and the little dip of bone where the two collarbones met.
There were light-brown curls of hair on his chest, sprayed out in either direction, light and airy and fascinating.
She very much wanted to touch them. She blinked at that thought, wondering if she ought to clasp her hands together to hide such impulses from escaping into the room.
He reached the end of his buttons and peeled the shirt back over his bare shoulders, a play of muscles moving under the sun-kissed skin that he revealed as the fabric was pulled away, and all the while he watched her still. He did not look away from her, no matter how much he had to move.