Chapter 20 #2
And he had pressed, gently, and she kept refusing, kept finding reasons—the lack of space, the hour, the sheer impropriety of it all.
And this—this was the part he had returned to a thousand times.
She had said no, and he had not let it lie, and his mind, for three long years, had always stopped at exactly this point, because this was where his body ought to have stopped.
He should have stepped back and bowed and let her be.
But now, after what she had revealed earlier—You did not make me do anything.
I always had a choice—he allowed himself to look again at the rest of the memory.
He saw the dark flush of color in her cheeks.
The way she could not stop smiling. The way her hands were clasped behind her back—a small, contained, careful gesture—and yet her body was already swaying, side to side, an unconscious answer to a music that had not yet begun to play. She had wanted to dance.
He had taken her hand at last. He remembered the exact moment of it.
Her hand was warm and small, and his fingers had closed around hers as though they had been designed for precisely this purpose.
His other hand had come to rest just below her shoulder blade, and they had been standing so close that he had wondered, with a kind of distant astonishment, whether he might simply stop breathing altogether.
They had never danced before. Of course they had not.
When, in all the time they had known each other, would there ever have been an occasion for a human serving girl and the son of one of the oldest fae families in the Isles to dance together?
And so it had not happened, until that night, in a kitchen with no one to know.
Kazrian could not stop looking at her, and she had not looked away either. And they were so close it was nearly unbearable, and the small foolish music in his own head had carried them through the simplest of steps—two, three, turn—whatever could be contained in the narrow compass of the kitchen.
“I want to do this every day,” he had told her. “Every night. With you.”
She had pressed her lips against another smile and something shone in her eyes. “You are not supposed to want that,” she’d whispered. But she had not stepped away.
The dance had slowed until it was barely movement at all. A swaying. A breathing. His heart creating its own rhythm entirely. He had pressed his brow to hers, and the world had narrowed to the space between their mouths—an inch of air that felt like the most important distance in the world.
“Kazrian.” A whisper. Her breath against his mouth. “This is … perhaps the very worst idea.”
A small laugh at that. His hands had come up to cradle her face. His thumb brushed across her cheek. “How can that be,” he’d asked, “when you are the very best thing in the entire world?”
He heard the unsteady catch of her breath. Her hands found the front of his coat, fistfuls of it, gathering the fabric tight. “You will be ruined,” she’d said in a shaky voice, even as she’d pulled him closer.
“I will not. Nor will I let anyone ruin you.”
Her hands had slid up and around his neck, her fingers tangling in his hair, and his blood had rushed hot and heavy through his veins. “Your … your family—”
“They adore you.”
“Not like this. And my family—society—you do not understand how cruel—”
“I will never let anyone hurt you.”
He pulled back just enough to look at her. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes half closed, and he thought, with a helpless, aching certainty, that he had never wanted anything so much in his life as to close the last small distance between their mouths.
He took her hands gently from around his neck and held them, clasped, between both of his. He could feel her unsteady breath. He was not entirely steady himself.
“I know we are too young for this at present,” he said quietly.
“But I want you to know, because we have only ever skirted around the edges of this, and I have never said anything outright …” He looked down at her hands in his, then back up at her.
“There is no one else for me, Lucie. There never has been. And if you will have me, I will gladly wait for you.”
Something in her face shifted, a small, helpless movement. “You cannot say things like that. It simply is not possible. There are—there are rules, and I have always known what I may have and what I may not.”
And Kazrian had opened his mouth to tell her that he wanted nothing in this life so much as to give her every single thing she had ever been told she could not have when Evryn’s voice had come ringing through from the front of the shop.
Calling his name. Asking, with a laugh in it, whether Kazrian had got himself thoroughly lost looking for Grandmother’s mask.
And he’d dropped his hands from hers, and Lucie had stepped back, and the moment had closed like a door.
He had gone back the next morning. He was not certain what exactly he’d expected—only that the night had felt like the beginning of something, finally, and he had wanted to say so plainly, in daylight, where there could be no mistaking him for a young man carried away by an evening.
They had spoken in the pantry—there were people about, and neither of them wanted to be overheard—and she had told him, with her hands folded and her face very still, that she did not care for him in that way.
He remembered the confusion more than anything else.
Not hurt—not yet. Only the strange, tilting sense of a floor that had ceased to be where he’d put his weight.
He had thought back to the previous night, to her hands fisted in his coat, her fingers tangled in his hair.
He had started to say something, to point out that he had not imagined any of that.
But her gaze had gone just slightly past him—not quite meeting his eyes—and she had said that if he recalled, last night she had been the one to name every reason it could not work.
That she had not been as clear as she ought to have been about the most important reason—that she did not feel for him the way he did for her.
He had left, not fully accepting it yet, and when he’d quite literally run into Aurelise, clearly distressed about something, he’d welcomed the distraction.
“I cannot do it any longer.”
Kazrian opened his eyes. The garden was deepening into dusk, the light nearly gone, and Rosavyn had turned bodily toward him, her chin propped on her drawn-up knees, watching him with an expression caught between exasperation and concern.
“I have just sat in silence for what I believe may be the longest unbroken stretch of quiet I have managed in the whole of my natural life,” she said.
“It has been agony. And the entire while you have been sitting there with your eyes shut and the most devastated expression I think I’ve ever seen on your face, and I cannot bear another moment of not knowing why.
” She poked his arm. “I am not Aurelise. I cannot simply know it out of your head.”
He frowned. “She does not read my mind.”
“She may as well. The two of you have always had that—that twin business, the long looks, the saying nothing and meaning everything.” She waved a hand.
“But she is at the palace, and I am here, and I am not her, so you shall have to do me the very great inconvenience of using actual words. What is it? Is it The Honeycomb? Is the wretched building still besting you?”
A breath of something almost like a laugh escaped him. “The building is still besting me, yes.” He let his head fall back against the bark again. “But that is not what occupies my mind tonight.”
“Then what?”
He was quiet a long moment. The fountain murmured. The first proper star had come out above the garden wall, pale and small.
“I still love her,” he said.
He heard the words and was aware, distantly, that he had said them aloud, into the open air, where saying such things—about her, specifically—was not permitted. But he had named no name. He had been careful. This was safe.
“Ah,” said Rosavyn softly. She uncurled one hand and laid it over his where it rested in the grass. “Yes. I rather thought as much.”
Kazrian turned his head and looked at her. He blinked. He frowned. “You do not even know of whom I am speaking.”
Rosavyn gave him a look of fond patience. “Kazrian,” she said. “Of course I know of whom you are speaking. You have loved her for years.”
“But—” He sat up a little straighter against the tree. “How could you possibly—I have never—I have not said a word, not to anyone except—”
“Did you truly imagine I would not notice?” She drew her hand back and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
“I befriended Charlotte years ago, and by way of Charlotte I came to know Lucie, and then Iris when she arrived to work there, and between the three of them, I had ample reason to visit the tea house every Season. I was there, Kazrian. I have eyes. I watched the pair of you orbit one another for years.”
Kazrian sat in a kind of stunned silence. “Have you ever,” he managed at last, “said anything to—to anyone—”