Chapter Twenty-Two
OfficialEndeavourHigh: Seniors: they’ll never catch me alive!!!!!!
Hayes paces when he’s thinking. It’s intimidating, actually. He stomps, and watching him move back and forth is making me kinda dizzy. We’re discussing our project, as we have been for what feels like years. He keeps coming back to Pride and Prejudice.
We’re in the big study room today because the librarian likes me.
I requested it for a reason: My usual study room is entirely too small for me to share with Hayes.
We’d be sitting too close, and I’d be able to smell him and feel him, and I could not be expected to think rational thoughts in those conditions.
Besides, he’d have nowhere to pace in a room that small.
“And that’s why Darcy’s big, grand gesture is getting his friend to marry Lizzie’s sister? Because it’s not just making the Bennetts happy, it’s like he’s saving Jane’s life?” he asks, running one hand through his curls. They’re standing on ends in all different directions.
I think about this moment in Regency terms. If we were found here, alone behind closed doors, with him looking so disheveled … it would be ruinous.
For me, at least. He’d be fine.
Not just because men are allowed to literally fuck around and never find out, but because he has the clear advantage in social class. I wouldn’t even be ruined, really, because I am not rich enough to be considered a lady. Nobody would even force him marry me.
Thank God for that … right?
“Saving her from ruin, yeah. Jane is the oldest daughter, and she’s under pressure to make something of herself the only way she can—by marrying a rich man. And when the whole family is disgraced by Lydia eloping with Wickham, all the Bennet girls’ prospects go down the toilet.”
Hayes nods. “So Darcy fixes that.”
“Exactly.”
He nods again. Lots of nodding happening in the midst of all the pacing.
“The only part I’m not getting is how the two themes connect. Life and death. Romantic and gothic.” He spins on his heel and begins another lap.
“Honestly, they shouldn’t. They’re two separate classes for a reason. Even in the most basic sense, they’re very disparate ideas. But the way I see it, they connect in a historical context. Romances—or marriages, at least—were life-or-death situations for women in high society in that time period.”
He nods, interconnecting his fingers behind his back as he walks. It’s like we’re at a Regency-era ball, moving in an overly choreographed dance. Only I’m sitting still. He doesn’t respond, so I keep verbally dancing.
“Who you married determined the quality of your life. Whether you loved them or not. Whether you even remotely liked them or not. It was a matter of survival. Women worked, of course, they were seamstresses and brewers and laundresses and all kinds of things, but none of it paid anything, and society women weren’t supposed to work at all.
Your husband was your lifeline. Try and imagine the pressure that—”
“You couldn’t marry just anyone.”
People interrupt me all the time, for one reason or another.
They interrupt me because I just keep talking beyond all reason and well beyond all social propriety.
Or they cut me off because whatever they have to say is better or smarter or more important.
Rarely, if ever, does someone cut me off because they understand what I’m saying well enough that they just don’t need to hear the rest of it.
“You could, theoretically. In England, women had free choice for marriage, like, legally. You could marry some random guy off the street. You could marry the stableboy you fell in love with. But if you were a gentleman’s daughter, like the Bennet girls, you’d be losing your way of life and your security.
And society would consider you and your upbringing a waste, so you’d also be an outcast. It would be really hard to survive. ”
Hayes freezes for a minute at that.
“You’d do that, wouldn’t you?” He’s standing right in front of me, and he rests his palms on the table, leaning over until his face is close to mine.
How am I supposed to breathe? “You’d marry the man you fell in love with, even if it meant the end of everything else.
Even if he was just some guy in the eyes of the world. ”
“I’d never fall in love with some guy.” Been there, done that, got the ill-fitting, scratchy T-shirt. Not happening again. “And I’d never be in that position anyway, because I wouldn’t be a society girl. You know I was raised in a barn.”
He rolls his eyes in a way that’s somehow … fond.
And then Hayes tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. His chilled fingers whisper over the skin of my cheek. My breath halts for a second, the air between us getting thin once again.
“It wouldn’t matter if you were raised in a well,” he says. “You’d still be a genius.”
Where did all the oxygen go?
“And just for the record,” he continues, quietly, “I would marry the woman I fell in love with too. Whoever she was. Whatever class she was. Just because I loved her.”
He’s standing so close that I feel more than hear his phone vibrate in his pocket.
The moment shatters around us, and I lean as far back in my chair as I possibly can. There has got to be more breathable air in this room.
He checks his screen; it’s a text. I’m too flustered to even read it over his shoulder, so I wait.
“Everyone’s heading to the fair. Wanna go?” He raises one eyebrow, and that makes me as feral as the wink.
I want to ask who everyone is.
I want to be reasonable and say I should head home and get some rest. (That’s what I told Esha when she invited me to the same fair, like, half an hour ago.)
But I also want to stay this close to him.
“Sure.” I shrug, like this invitation is nothing.
At the sound of my own voice, that one word, my mind flashes back to the last time I said that to a boy. To the last time I wanted anyone this much. Those memories are almost enough to make me step back. Enough to make me walk to my car alone and drive all the way home.
It can’t end like that again. I can’t go through that again.
Hayes holds the study-room door open for me. It’s a completely unnecessary gesture. It would’ve stayed open on its own. As I pass through, I let my hand drift over his shoulder, barely touching his chest again. I feel the brush of his sweater with my fingertips.
I’ll try again. But if he disappoints me, it will really, really hurt.