Chapter Nine #3
When he looked at her, it was with an intense stare which smoldered his hazel eyes into a charred brown and the corner of his mouth wavered into the ghost of a smile, as if he was studying her.
Not in a way that made her feel like an object, but rather a marvel.
A warm sensation trickled through her chest and she sat up a little straighter.
“Y-Yes, of course. I am not one to teach, but I shall try my best, Jane,” his mouth caressed the utterance of her name, and she wished to hear him say it again—and again, and again.
Instead, he held his hands over the keys, fingers splayed, poised, ready. He nodded to her own. “Place your hands over mine.”
And she did, his hands hot and shaking beneath her palms. She blushed at seeing their hands together, at the tickling texture of his hair and raised veins. The heat from her chest entered the tips of her ears the more her mind began to wander—
He, slowly, began to play a melody. It was a familiar one, with the cadence of what felt like a child’s lullaby, a nursery rhyme, the notes gentle staccatos.
One that if someone didn’t know it then perhaps they had a marred childhood—which worried Jane for she couldn’t conjure a name for this particular tune.
She couldn’t name the tune, but she could almost name the sensation that made her heart ache with a desire to grieve.
“Something of my own composition, of sorts,” his breath warmed the shell of her ear. “I allow whatever emotion troubling me to take hold of me and release itself across these keys until I am at ease.”
Jane pressed into him. “And what emotion puppets us now, maestro?”
He gave no answer, and instead, she saw a wry smile strain his mouth as he continued with his refrain.
Together they played the same tune again and again, to a point where Jane was certain she could play it with her eyes closed.
Meredith would have loved Terence. She would’ve loved to find a way to play her cello in tune with his harpsichord and to turn such harmony into courtship.
Jane didn’t want to think of that, though, and banished it with a grit of her teeth.
She wanted this one admirer, this one friend, to be solely hers—for once.
The carnal urge to claim him urged Jane to scoot closer to him, to lean further into his warmth, to press her hands harder upon his. She needed him to be hers.
Hers.
There was a sudden chill beneath her fingers and a loss of a consistent tempo within the music that pulled her out of the haze of desire and possession.
She broke free of the envy wriggling in the folds of her brain to see that she had become the musician.
Terence’s hands braced her elbows, the small of her back, to correct her posture.
“Very good,” he whispered against her ear despite the discordant twang of Jane playing a wrong note.
She was playing music, not well or very elegantly, but it was music nonetheless, and her heart fluttered as his hand lingered against her back, burning through fabric and into her skin.
She hummed and twisted her mouth in a smirk. “Thank you.”
As much as dread had turned her belly into lead and excitement frayed her nerves, she decided that, for now, she could forget about blood and murdered horses and hidden books and beasts, and instead fixated on the heat of his touch, his sigh that tickled her hair as he whispered with a grim breathlessness, “Beautiful, Jane.”
She wasn’t sure how, why, or when she came to this conclusion, but Jane realized that she and Terence never shared a dinner together.
They did have lunch together in Cambridge, yes, but never the formal dinner she would’ve expected having in an expensive Englishman’s house.
She had hoped for dinner at a table so long it could host an entire king’s court and illuminated by glittering candelabras that dripped threads of wax all over the food, which would have been piled in mounds that’d make her mouth water.
Mountains of turbot in lobster sauce, mutton cutlets, braised beef, and quail served on silver platters, crystal decanters of red wine gravy, soups ladled with gilded spoons.
But the lack of such was a disappointment, much like how the Drowning House—this whole trip—had been a disappointment.
She couldn’t help but resent that fact, and felt that Terence ought to have an obligation to dine with her as a guest—and perhaps even as a friend. Especially after several days and nights of a haunting steeped in blood.
Jane had it all planned out: they’d have dinner, then they’d dance in the sitting room (she already prepared to ask him, as she predicted he’d lacked the bravery to do so himself) when she’d then be seduced in his arms as they moved lazily in time to some flowery waltz he played on the phonograph, nevermind the fact she didn’t dance.
She imagined that Terence could. Beneath the timid quivering, he wielded the restrained elegance of a performer, a gentleman, a lover.
She wondered how gentle his kisses would be, if his lips would shake shyly against hers and allow her to take the lead, or if he was an animal starved and depraved with want.
She couldn’t decide which she liked more.
It was thoughts such as those, intoxicating in their sickly sweetness, that prompted her to abandon where she sat at the harpsichord, chasing the memory of how Terence’s touches felt as his hands held her steady, and stepped into the kitchen.
Ms. Hudson hadn’t set out to make dinner yet, and Jane hadn’t seen her or Mrs. Foster or Ruben since the incident with Mistletoe that morning (she couldn’t blame them for sequestering themselves to their quiet corners of the house for the time being), so she thought she could try to make…
something herself. Jane wasn’t by any means a cook, her skills being nothing more than what she learned from observing the cooks who toiled in her family’s kitchen when she was a child, but she could at least put things and spices together to create a meal that could be somewhat edible.
And one of those things she could make was soup.
With the kitchen to herself and a quiet having befallen upon the house, she rolled up her sleeves and set to work.
Her hands still felt the phantom sensation of Terence’s beneath hers, the whispers of his melody continued to find a home in her ears, as she chopped potatoes and started a pot of water.
Those lingerings had become an incessantly pleasant distraction, even long after he dismissed himself to his own corner of the house, seemingly for the evening, and left her in the sitting room, but not before reminding her to retire to bed—and lock her door—by nightfall.
She elected to disobey that request, just this once, as she wasn’t necessarily in a rush to return to the company of Old Man Hayes’ carvings, not yet, at least.
Night encroached on the Drowning House, and Jane hoped that whatever made the house and its master and staff so afraid of it—whether it be the beast or something more foul—would seek her out only if it meant that Terence would come to her rescue, armed with the Winchester rifle, and press her flush against the heat of his bosom as he kept her safe, keeping evil at bay with his gentle, large, trembling hands—
She coughed and laughed as her cheeks grew warm.
“He is hardly the protecting type,” she mused aloud with a smile. “I feel like it’s more likely for me to protect him rather than him protecting me.” She failed to find disappointment in that speculation, at least. In fact, she found it equally handsome.
What Jane ended up making was a simple potato soup.
(She made a note to have Mrs. Sterling write a check for Ms. Hudson to compensate for the foods and tools Jane used.) A gentle aroma filled the air in the kitchen, and she was proud of herself—until she tasted her creation.
It wasn’t awful, just… bland. Too watery and too salty, with hardly any flavor aside from the hint of heavy cream. And it somehow tasted burnt.
She didn’t care. Dinner, regardless of quality, was but another excuse to steal more of Terence’s company for herself rather than being alone, stewing over beasts and Clauneks and wards against evil forces.
Just as she ladled the soup into bowls and turned to retrieve Terence from wherever he was hiding, she was startled to see that he was already lurking in the kitchen doorway.
Excitement sparked in her chest upon seeing him, but in that same instant, the spark snuffed itself into oblivion.
He was… changed. This wasn’t the Terence she’d been with in the sitting room.
This Terence stared at her with a malicious anxiety that rivaled the distress he wore that morning.
His white shirt was unbuttoned to expose a heaving chest glistening with clammy damp.
Hair hung loosely over a face carved with the harsh lines of fear, and his eyes were blown so wide open she saw the sleepless red that fringed them.
Across his throat slashed a brutal scar, a collar of smoothed flesh. Jane nearly asked him about it.
He looked feral. Utterly primal and ravenous.
“You look as though you’ve seen a spook,” Jane said, her smile nervous.
“You are not in your room,” he said, and the bluntness of his observation made her laugh.
“Well, obviously. I thought you’d enjoy some dinner with me, and—”
“To your room, Jane. Now,” he spoke past gritted teeth, and each word pushed through in a taut grunt. “Please.”
Her brows knitted together and her jaw hung loose as she searched for a reply. “But I thought we could—”
“Jane—” she flinched at the way he snarled her name horribly from somewhere in the back of his throat.
“I beg of you. I will not argue this, I just—” He huffed as his hands clawed through his hair.
She could practically hear the violent thrum of his heartbeat in his throat, and it resembled the roiling thunder outside.
Jane narrowed her eyes and raised her chin. What’s wrong? Is there something I can do to help? “Why should I go to my room?”
The moment he bared his teeth and barked a sharp,“Because I told you to!” Jane wished she’d held her tongue.
He drew a long breath in through his nose in a faltering attempt at composure. “Because I am begging you to do so, Jane. I… J-just—listen to me, please, and go.”
A dread not too unlike what fermented after his ominous warning following her first night at the Drowning House returned to spiderweb its way through Jane’s gut, and her appetite—for both soup and company—dissipated.
His breathing had become increasingly ragged, the hollows of his face deepened, his shoulders slouched as though he were a scolded dog when she glared at him, lips turned downward in a frown.
She didn’t know what to feel in this moment as they held each other’s gazes, the sweat on his brow leaking down his face like tears, but an emotion she could name was hurt. But she couldn’t let such hurt show.
She curled her lip in a sneer before she carelessly dropped one of the bowls onto the counter. The bowl, to her chagrin, didn’t shatter, but a mess of spilled cream and potatoes was made.
“Tomorrow, I expect answers for all—” with her free hand she gestured to, well, all of him, the house. Her fingers were bent to form claws. “Because I am tired of whatever games and mysteries are being played here. Goodnight, Mr. Hayes.”
So she avoided his gaze as she took her bowl and went to her room.
Out of spite, she didn’t bother to have her door locked.