Chapter 14 #2
"You were not wrong to give him a chance," he said. "You were wrong to assume that what he showed you was all of what he was. But that is not a flaw. That is just being human."
Elizabeth held his gaze for a moment. Then she looked down at his hand.
"You were terrible," she said quietly. The words arriving before she had decided to send them.
He looked at her. "When?"
"Eight years ago." She kept her eyes on the ice pack. "You were so controlled. So composed. I never knew what you were thinking and I was always trying to read you and getting it wrong and feeling like I was the problem. Like I was too loud, too much, taking up more space than I was supposed to."
"You were never too much," he said. His voice very quiet. "You were exactly the right amount. I just did not know how to show you that. I did not know how to show anyone that."
Elizabeth looked up at him.
The kitchen was very still.
She was close enough to see the small things — the set of his jaw, the steadiness of his eyes on hers, the particular quality of attention he gave her that she had been trying for weeks not to name.
She became aware that she had not moved her hand from his.
Neither of them moved.
The gap between them was small.
It had been getting smaller by degrees without either of them deciding it should.
Now it was very small. The kitchen was very quiet.
His hand was warm under hers and she was close enough to see the exact moment his eyes dropped to her mouth and came back up, slow and deliberate, and something in her chest pulled tight.
She did not move away.
He leaned in. She felt his breath before she felt anything else — warm, close, the particular stillness of someone who had decided something and was giving her every opportunity to disagree.
She did not disagree.
Their lips were a breath apart. Close enough that the gap was more suggestion than distance.
Close enough that closing it would have required almost nothing from either of them.
Close enough that she could feel the warmth of him and the quiet of the kitchen and the full weight of eight years sitting in that small space between them.
Then he stopped.
He did not move away entirely. He just stopped, that breath of distance still between them, and she felt rather than saw the decision move across him — something pulling back inside before his body followed.
His forehead came to rest against hers briefly, the lightest possible contact, and she felt him exhale.
Then he sat back.
She stayed very still. She was not sure she was breathing.
She lifted the ice pack when she recovered. "Keep that on for another few minutes," she said. Her voice came out almost level.
"All right," Darcy said. His voice was not entirely level either.
She stood and went to the other side of the kitchen and stood with her back to him and gripped the edge of the counter and stared at the wall and waited for her chest to stop doing what it was doing.
Behind her, the ice pack rustled.
She did not turn around.
Neither of them said anything about what had almost happened.
Neither of them needed to.
***
Darcy sat in the kitchen for a long time after Elizabeth excused herself and left.
The ice pack had gone warm. He set it on the counter and looked at his knuckles and thought about the last twenty minutes in the usual way he thought about things that required honest examination rather than management.
His heart had stopped pounding. Some few minutes ago, it had felt like someone was playing a drum with it.
When he had leaned in, when the gap between them had been nothing but breath and eight years and whatever it was neither of them had said yet, his legs had done something embarrassing and structural that he was choosing not to examine too closely.
He exhaled.
He grabbed the not-so-cold ice pack and let his mind run back through the event of the past twenty minutes in the way it was going to run through it whether he allowed it or not.
He had pulled back. Even though everything in him had not wanted to.
He knew why he had pulled back.
The first reason was simple and he was not ashamed of it.
He had just hit a man for putting his hands on Elizabeth without her consent.
He was not going to turn around and do something without her consent in the same breath, regardless of how it had felt in that moment, regardless of what he had seen in her eyes.
Adrenaline did things to people. Gratitude did things to people.
A woman who had just been frightened in the living room and then watched someone come to her defence was not necessarily a woman making a clear-headed decision, and he was not the kind of man who took advantage of that.
He had never been that man. He was not going to start now.
That was the first reason.
The second was more complicated.
She had said he was difficult to read. That she had felt like the problem, always too loud, always too much. He had heard it and it had landed and he had meant what he said in return.
But.
He sat with the but for a while because he was fairly certain that was not all of it.
He knew himself well enough to know that he had been difficult, that his composure had read as coldness, that he had let silences go on longer than they should have and called it integrity when James — even Bingley — had called it something else entirely. He could own that. He did own it.
What he could not own was the whole one month of dating Elizabeth.
He had loved her. He had been certain of it then and sitting in this kitchen at half past nine in the morning with warm knuckles and her breath still in the air he was certain of it now.
There was no point pretending otherwise.
He loved her. He had probably never stopped.
But she had ended it with four lines in a text message and she had never told him why. Not really. She had said he was controlled, that she had felt small, that he was difficult to read. All true. All real. And none of it enough to explain four lines and eight years of managed distance.
There was something she had not said.
Something she was not saying still.
He could feel the shape of it in the room the same way he could feel the shape of anything she was not telling him — a particular quality of held breath, a sentence that started and stopped, a look that arrived and was immediately redirected somewhere safer.
Until they could cross that bridge, whatever it was, however long it took — he was not going to move. Not physically. Not like that. He was not going to steal something from her in a moment of high emotion and call it a beginning.
If it was going to be a beginning, it was going to be a real one.
She deserved that.
So did he.
He picked up the ice pack and put it back in the freezer and stood at the counter for a moment and then went upstairs to change his jacket.