Chapter 27 #2
Alaina finished her tea, yawned, and then guided me off her lap. She stood and smoothed her skirts. She petted the top of my head as she passed me and disappeared into her bedroom.
I stood also and put out the candles. I rearranged the cushions and grabbed my blanket off the chaise. I settled back down in front of the hearth to wait for her to come back so that I could say good night.
She floated in like a ghost only a few minutes later, her white nightshift stark against the shadows, the chamberstick flame thin and tenuous.
She crossed over to me and held out her hand palm down.
As per what had become our nightly ritual, I took it and pressed the back of her hand to my temple, in deference and in affection in the absence of the kiss I could not bestow with a beak.
“Good night, princess.”
Instead of her usual “good night, Kaylay,” she set the chamberstick down on the side table, took a seat on the chaise, and never let go of my hand. Instead, she put her newly free hand over mine.
“Is everything all right?” The shift in routine alerted me to new stiffness in her posture and resolve in her grasp.
“Yes,” she said. She smiled, the gesture absent and distracted, secondary to thoughts she had not yet given voice. “You know, Kaylay, you don’t have to sleep on the floor.”
“I know.” I squeezed her hand, touched by her concern. “But the chair doesn’t accommodate me, and the chaise is not long enough.”
“I didn’t mean the chair or the chaise,” she whispered.
“Then?” I stared at her a moment, and she didn’t elaborate. “I know you don’t mean the cage,” which still resided in the anteroom.
“Of course not.”
“And you certainly aren’t proposing that I climb into bed with you.”
Alaina averted her eyes at that suggestion and nibbled her bottom lip. The implication silenced me as effectively as the muzzle. And she didn’t say no. She flicked her gaze to me, a question set deeply into her brows.
“You’re not serious,” I gulped around my shock.
“Why shouldn’t I be?” Alaina’s gaze fully returned with her affront. “The tsarina keeps you in her bed.”
“She keeps me on the floor.”
“Even for....?”
“We don’t sleep,” I said, correcting Alaina. “And I never share her bed.”
“I hate her!” She worried at my hand in her grasp. “You should be afforded a bed. I would like to share mine with you.”
“I cannot.”
“I am not a maiden,” she argued.
“I did not realize you were proposing that kind of arrangement.”
Not that I hadn’t had silly little daydreams about being able to be freely affectionate and intimate with her.
But that’s all they were — daydreams, what ifs, illusions of possible joys — all devised to keep me alive for the here and the now.
That was all. They were never intentions or plans for the future.
She was a princess. It didn’t matter what the folktales said.
A princess wouldn’t want a monstrous bird. I chose to ignore that the tsarina did.
“I was just reassuring you that in accepting my offer, you wouldn’t be sullying my purity,” she said.
Things had somehow become very serious very quickly, so I asked to keep it barbed, “What purity?”
“Then you should have nothing to worry about!”
I glanced at the doorway of her bedroom. “I cannot.”
“Is this like the last time? Do you think I will hurt you like she does?”
“No, but....” I withdrew my hand from her. “I am content out here. Good night, princess.”
I settled myself in front of the hearth as usual. Alaina rose from the chaise without any additional protest and retrieved the chamberstick, taking the hint. The muffled sounds of her slippered feet against rug grew distant with her retreat into the bedroom.
I breathed more easily knowing that I had won this small test of wills. Why then did some nasty nagging little piece of me point out that I was disappointed?
A stupid, pathetic tear slipped over what had once been the bridge of my nose.
I studied my talon-tipped fingers, my scaled palms, and the feathered backs of my hands and arms in the firelight.
Could such hands provide warmth and intimacy in the bedroom, no matter what the arrangement?
The tsarina still wanted me like this. Could Alaina?
Alaina’s steps grew louder as she returned to the antechamber.
I couldn’t find enough voice to ask if she had come back to torment me, and by the time my voice could rise above my distressed contemplations, she had laid a pillow down behind me and joined me on the floor.
She cuddled against my back, as much as she could given my wings.
“Alaina, what are you doing?”
“If you will not join me in my bed, then you leave me no choice but to join you in yours.”
“Alaina.” My throat tightened.
“It won’t be the same,” she promised. “We can just sleep. That’s all. Just sleep. Just like this.”
“You’re a princess.”
“And you’re my friend.”
“And your friend can sleep on the floor, especially when that friend is the court pet.”
“That’s an even worse objection,” she scolded me. “Any pet would sleep on my bed with me. They would not fight me about it like a certain contrary creature.”
I did not know how to combat that logic. Most of the nobles at court with pets babied them. And yes, they probably shared their owners’ beds too.
“You are out-maneuvered, Kaylay.” She ran a fingertip over the ridge of my wing. “Admit it.”
“You are only thinking of yourself in this,” I whispered.
“I just want to be close to you.” She withdrew her hand. “Do you not want to be close to me?”
“Please.” The lack of her touch stole my warmth despite the fire.
“Please stay? Or please go?”
Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Please. And I didn’t know how to explain it to her.
I didn’t want to tell her the truth, the shameful reality of my own weakness, and how, even misused, I could still not banish longing. It would tarnish me in her eyes still further. But there was nothing else that I could tell her to explain my conflict.
“Regardless of my form,” I said, “I am not immune to wanting.”
“Wanting,” she repeated, her voice devoid of the judgment I was certain it would contain. She replaced her hand on my wing. “What is it you want?”
“Please, do not encourage futile desires.”
“Does the tsarina not...? I thought—”
“Sex and affection are two very different things.” I pulled away from Alaina, disturbed in a variety of ways, and sat up, resigned that I would not be sleeping for a long while.
“Does the tsarina not give you affection?”
“No more than your husband likely gave you.”
“Don’t you dare bring Pytor into this! My relationship with—”
“You understand duty, necessity, ownership,” I continued, talking over her protestations.
“You understand the danger of refusing. And like most noble women, you laid back, submitted, and endured. Sometimes you even considered taking a lover on the side to offer you the intimacy that your legal bedmate refused to give you.”
“What does any of this have to do with—?”
“What do you think I do?”
Alaina stopped. She stopped touching me. She stopped speaking. She just stopped.
I hated the silence, but I could not fill it. My heart thudded like I had been running. My back ached from the stiffness. And I didn’t want to say anything else to Alaina.
I bowed my head and regretted my honesty.
Alaina was my only company, and she was good company, keeping me from dwelling too long on my impossible situation.
But even to her, though we called each other friends, I was but another amusement.
Like I was to the tsarina. But, unlike the tsarina, if Alaina lost interest in me, I would lose everything all over again.
“I hate having serious conversations with you,” I confessed at long last. “They always become too serious. You’re going to grow bored of me.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Not yet.”
“I don’t know that I ever could be,” she said. “I enjoy tormenting you too much. Which is why I am insisting on sleeping beside you.”
“A torment indeed.”
“Kaylay?” She reached out and touched my arm. “I don’t want to sleep on a floor.”
“Then don’t. You have a bed.”
“It is cold and lonely, and you will not join me in it.”
“It is not right that I should.”
“It is my bed,” she said, “and I am your social superior. I get to determine what is right or not. And I declare that it is right.”
I didn’t answer.
“I don’t want sex,” she said. “I want affection. I want your affection.”
She released her hold on my arm and sought out my face. When she found it, she placed both hands on my cheeks and bent my head down. Her lips pressed to my brow.
“I don’t know about the ladies in the wonder tales,” she whispered, “but I can appreciate the magic in my life.”
That almost set me to weeping again.
“Come to bed with me. Please.” She stood and found my hand, tugging me up with her.
This time, I was helpless to resist. I stood and followed. The warmth from the connection of our hands radiated through me. I would have followed her anywhere to maintain it. She released my hand only when we reached the head of her bed.
Sense returned with the breakage of connection. I took a step backward. “I can’t.”
“Kaylay!”
“I will defile you.”
There it was, the other unspoken truth I did not wish to commit to words.
I would lower her. I would ruin her. And I didn’t want to do it even at her request. She would never know that I had been Mikhail, but her rejection at the ball left a lasting mark.
Even now, wearing a form so different from my last and bearing another name, I still feared making her ridiculous.
A princess and a monster. Wasn’t that ridiculous?
“The tsarina keeps you as a lover. If it does not defile her—”
“The tsarina defiles herself beyond any measure I may.”
Alaina sought my hand, took one, then took the other. She led me back to the bed.
“You had the right of it when you described my marriage to Pytor. I have not known one content moment in my bed since my arrival in Ilyichia. But I have known affection, and that has all been from you.”
“Then,” I said with great reluctance, “as a pet. At the foot of your bed.”
“Beside me. Princess Alaina commands it.”
“Then I most certainly refuse.”
“You will not join me when I command it on principle. And you will not join me when I ask it as your friend. What must I do?” She raised the backs of my hands to her mouth and kissed my knuckles.
“From one lonely person who wants to be held and cuddled, who wants to feel safe and valued, to the only person she cares about in this entire country — please, Kaylay. Lie beside me. Ease my nights? Let me ease yours? Please.”
If I hadn’t been a monstrosity, the warmth of her tone might have suggested that we become lovers too. For a man, the invite was there. But for her strange friend with wings, it was a far more intriguing proposition — an offer of softness.
“Yes,” I whispered.
She climbed backwards onto the bed as she led me, releasing my hands only to draw back the blankets and tuck herself between them.
She found my hand again and held it until I lied down beside her.
She fit herself against me, placing her head on my shoulder, throwing her arm over my chest. She took one deep breath and then let it out, and with it, all tension and space between us as she relaxed into me.
I longed to enjoy the connection and the care, but all I could imagine was the tsarina bursting through the apartment doors on some pretext and finding us together, limbs entwined, Alaina’s face tucked against me, compromised in our closeness.
I wrapped my arms around her on instinct, as if I could protect her.
“This is dangerous, Alaina,” I whispered to her in the dark.
“Why?”
“Because the tsarina does not share.” I stroked her back absently through the shift. “I do not have much to lose, but you do.”
Alaina buried her face in my chest and mumbled something that I interpreted as “I don’t care.”
I wanted to tell her, “Remember, there was a prince who had everything taken from him because he told her ‘no.’” But I couldn’t because I wasn’t supposed to know about that.
“You will need to do something about the sheets since I shed feathers,” I said instead. “And we should probably lock the doors. If she should find us—”
“Kaylay, shhhh. She’s never been in my apartments.”
I wanted to argue, but I did not want to think of the tsarina. I did not want all the fear and worry and doubt she inflicted on both of us to ruin our time together. Instead, I referred to our earlier conversation.
“Recall the folklore. Stories are cautionary. If I visit each night and share your bed, a jealous person is bound to harm me. And then you might have to marry me to fix it.”
“Mmm,” she said, a smile built into the sound. “I could do worse.” She stretched up and kissed the underside of my chin before returning to her place on my shoulder. “I could do so much worse.”