XXIX #3
He went over the edge after her. She held him as he did.
The sound he made was not a word; it was lower and rougher than anything she had heard from him before, and he buried it against her shoulder, and his whole body went rigid and then heavy, and his breath went out of him in a long shudder, and he was still.
His weight came down on her. She did not mind it.
Her hand found the back of his head in the dark, her fingers in his hair.
He did not move for some time. He was breathing into her shoulder, and his hand was at her waist, and she was holding him, and the dark was not the same dark it had been an hour ago.
She shifted one palm on his chest and felt his heart slow beneath it. It was rapid at first, then thick. Under her hand, there was a man’s heart and warmth and the heavy astonishment of having crossed some invisible boundary from which there was no return, and she lay still and was not sorry.
His breathing changed again. She heard it before he moved — the painful effort of gathering his conscience back around himself.
Then he stirred. His hand came to her face in the dark, his fingers moving into her hair, finding the strands at her temple and drawing them back with a tenderness that was almost unbearable.
His lips came to her forehead. Soft. Not the kiss of their earlier hours.
Something else entirely. Something that felt far more dangerous.
She heard him draw a breath.
She heard him try to release it evenly.
He did not succeed. The breath came out broken, caught somewhere in the middle, and then there was silence, and she could hear him fighting for the next one.
“Are you—” The words thinned almost to nothing, the whisper worn through. “Did I — are you hurt?”
“No.”
He made a sound. Not a word. Something beneath words, and the something had a ragged edge to it that she had not heard from him before.
Then, carefully, he sat up.
The mattress shifted. He sat at the edge of the bed in the dark, and she lay still and listened to the cost of it — the long silence before he could speak, the breath he had to find first.
“I am sorry.” The whisper was barely there. He pressed on through it. “I am so sorry.”
“You did not hurt me.”
“That is not—” She heard his breath go unsteady again. “That is not what I am sorry for.”
“Then what?”
He did not answer immediately. She heard the long working of it — not choosing words but trying to hold the ones he had.
“You did not know,” he said at last. “You could not have chosen freely. I have… there are things I cannot give you yet, things you would have needed, and I told myself I would not — that it was yours to decide when I could offer you more — that this was not mine to take before then.” The whisper broke on itself.
“I despise myself for what I have done to you.”
“You have not—”
“I have.” The force of it surprised her — the whisper pushed to its limit, as close to raised as she had ever heard it.
“You had every right. You had every right to know what you were accepting before you accepted it. And I took that from you. I have been taking it since July, and I took more of it tonight, and I—” He stopped.
She heard him press both hands over his face.
She heard the sob he was trying not to make behind them.
She sat up in the dark and reached for him.
Her hand found his arm, then his wrist, and she followed it up to where his hands covered his face, and she laid her hand against the back of his. The tension in him was in his hands, in the held sound behind them, the effort of the holding.
“Let me see you.”
He went very still.
She brought her other hand up and found his face in the dark — his jaw, the wet at the corners of his eyes, the sharp angle of cheekbone that she had mapped so many times in her mind and was touching now, and he was letting her.
She held his face in her palms the way she had at the table, earlier, when she had tried to give him something he could carry.
He took her wrists. Gently. Not removing her hands — just holding them where they were, his grip careful and close, his head bowed into her palms.
“I know,” she said. She did not know what she knew. She knew something. “I know you cannot tell me yet. I know there is a reason. I am not asking for the reason tonight.”
His grip on her wrists tightened the smallest amount.
“But you are not nothing,” she said. “I am not sorry, and you are not nothing to me.”
He turned his face slightly and pressed his mouth to her palm — not a kiss, exactly, more a bracing press against something — and then he released her wrists, and her hands fell away, and he stood up.
She heard him gather his clothing in the dark, each movement deliberate and quiet. Then he stopped.
She waited.
He did not speak. He moved towards the door.
From the hearthrug came a low rumble — Falstaff roused, a sudden, sharp growl directed at the figure moving in the dark.
A muttered curse came back at the dog. Not the whisper — lower than that, rougher, briefly real — one unguarded syllable of actual voice before the habit of months caught it. She lay still and held it in her mind like a key she had no lock for.
The corridor door opened. It closed.
She lay in the dark and listened to the sea.