Chapter 10 #2
And the more she thought about it, she figured Dara’s solution had some merit.
If she asked Kalen to stay with her tomorrow night, they both could get whatever was between them out of their systems. Kalen was a woman of the world, and Verna would only be a dalliance to her.
And she would be sure to be an accomplished lover, judging by the kiss.
Even if she wasn’t attracted to Thom, she could learn to get pleasure out of the marriage.
In a much better mood now, Verna finished up her accounts and went in search of Kalen. She was wiping down her short sword with an oiled cloth when Verna came down the amphitheatre steps. She looked up once, then back at the blade, with an expression Verna couldn’t read.
"Lady," she said. Nothing more.
Verna stopped a few paces from her and clasped her hands in front of her, which was something she did when she wanted to appear more composed than she felt.
The sand was churned from the morning's work, the last of the guards disappearing through the low arch.
The amphitheatre had a particular silence when it was empty, as though the stone held the sound in.
She cleared her throat, searching for the words she’d had rehearsed on the walk down.
They had seemed reasonable in her rooms, but now she wasn’t so sure. "I want to talk to you," she finally got out.
Kalen ran the cloth along the flat of the blade without looking up. "You've been avoiding me for twelve days."
"I've been busy."
"Mm." The sound was neither agreement nor contradiction. She turned the sword and drew the cloth back along the other side. "What do you want to talk about?"
Verna looked into the distance, at the sword, then at Kalen's face. She was not, she had decided, going to dress this up. Kalen had no patience, and there was no version of this that could be made to sound dignified. She may as well be direct and take whatever came from it.
"I've been thinking," she said, "about what happened between us."
Kalen's hand slowed on the blade, then resumed. "And?"
"I've come to a decision." She kept her voice level. "I think we should—" She stopped, then started again. "I think it would be beneficial if we—" She stopped again.
Kalen looked up. Her expression genuinely curious now.
Verna lifted her chin. "I want you to come to my bedchamber tonight."
The oiled cloth stopped moving.
Kalen looked at her for a long moment, then said, "I beg your pardon?"
It was so perfectly an echo of Verna's own words to Dara that she almost laughed, which would have been entirely unhelpful. "You heard me."
"I did," Kalen agreed slowly. She lowered the sword, keeping the cloth loosely wrapped around it. "I want to make certain I understand." She tilted her head. "You spent two weeks blatantly avoiding me, and now you're asking me to come to your bed."
"Yes."
Kalen stared at her. "Why?"
Verna had prepared for several responses, but fumbled for the words. She had expected an arrogant smile, not a puzzled look.
"I have my reasons," she said.
"I'm sure you do." Kalen set the sword carefully against the arena wall and turned to face her properly, with the expression of someone who had decided this required her full attention. "I'd like to hear them."
Verna looked at her. "Does it matter?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because," Kalen said, without hesitation, "the last thing you said to me was that it couldn't happen again, that we were worlds apart, and that when the Trials were over, I'd have my freedom." She held her gaze steadily. "That was twelve days ago. Something has changed and I want to know what."
"I spoke to Dara this morning."
Kalen waited.
"She thinks that my reluctance to marry Thom stems from a lack of experience." Verna kept her voice even and matter of fact, as though she were discussing harvest yields. "She suggested that I remedy that before the wedding."
Kalen looked at her for a very long moment. Then she unfolded her arms, turned away, walked three paces across the sand, and turned back. "She suggested," Kalen said carefully, "that you take a lover. To prepare yourself for your marriage to a man."
"In essence."
"And you came to me."
"Yes."
"To get experience," Kalen said, and something in her voice had changed. It wasn't anger, more fury.
"I came to you," Verna said, the careful composure she had been maintaining with considerable effort beginning to slip, "because you kissed me against a wall twelve days ago and I haven't slept properly since.
Because every time I close my eyes I'm back in that archway.
Because I should have written back to Thom's steward by now and I haven’t done it. "
Her voice dropped as she pressed on. "Because I know what nothing feels like.
I have felt nothing every time a man kissed me.
And I know that whatever I felt in that archway was not nothing, and I am thirty-three years old and I would like to understand passion before I sign my life away to a good man who deserves better than a wife who feels nothing when he touches her. "
A quiet fell between them.
Kalen looked at her for a long time. Her expression changed, softening into something else. She crossed her arms again, but differently this time, not the closed posture of a woman holding herself apart, but something that looked more like a woman holding herself together.
"This is not," Kalen said quietly, "what I imagined when I thought about how this conversation might eventually go."
Despite everything, Verna felt a flicker of something warm. "How did you imagine it?"
"Not with Dara in it for a start," Kalen said drily.
Verna almost smiled.
Kalen looked at her for another long moment, then gazed toward the sea wall, with the expression she wore when she was thinking something through. Verna waited. She had learned that pushing Kalen toward a decision only made her slower to arrive at it.
"If I come tonight," Kalen said at last, her eyes were direct and serious. "It won’t be as a tutor, Verna."
"I know that," Verna said, ignoring the use of her name without the title.
"I'm not something to get out of your system before you go off and marry someone else."
The bluntness of it should have stung but somehow it didn't. "I know that too."
Kalen held her gaze. "Then what are you really asking?"
The truthful answer sat just below the surface, and Verna, who had not told it to Dara, who had not written it to Thom, who had not even said it clearly to herself in the two weeks of restless nights and cold baths, found it arriving in her mouth with a simplicity that surprised her.
"Because I want to," she said. "I have wanted to since that morning in the amphitheatre when you were twenty feet away and moving like something from a different world, and I understood in about ten minutes that I was in a great deal of trouble.
" She held Kalen's gaze steadily. "And I’m tired of being very sensible about it. "
The silence stretched between them, warm and still.
Then Kalen uncrossed her arms and let them drop to her sides, and the last of the resistance in her expression faded.
"What time?" she said.
Verna felt something release in her chest that had been wound tight for twelve days. "Late," she said. "After the household has settled. The second bell."
Kalen nodded once. She reached down and picked up her sword from where she'd rested it against the wall, tucked it under her arm, and walked past Verna toward the steps without looking at her.
Halfway up the stone stairs she paused, her back still turned.
"Verna," she said.
"Yes."
"Don't change your mind." It wasn't a command exactly. The tone was too quiet for that. It was closer to a request, and from Kalen, that was remarkable enough to stop Verna's breath for a moment.
"I won't," she said.
Kalen went up the rest of the steps and disappeared over the top of the wall, and Verna stood alone in the empty arena, pressing her hand flat against her stomach as though that might stop what was happening underneath it.
The ring on her finger tingled.