Chapter 21 #2
“Blackmoor taught me,” she said quietly. “Very early.”
He waited for her to elaborate, and that patience finally undid her.
“My parents loved each other once. I believe that… I have to believe that, because I have seen the letters they wrote to each other when they were young, before William, before any of it. There was real warmth in them. Real tenderness.”
She looked at the lake rather than at him.
“And then I watched it die. Slowly. Not in one terrible moment that you could point to and say, ‘There, that is where it ended,’ but in a thousand small ones. A cold word at breakfast. A door closed a little too firmly. The way my mother stopped looking up when my father entered a room.”
She wrapped her arms around herself, though the cold was not entirely what she was guarding against. “By the time I was old enough to understand what I was watching, there was nothing left between them but duty and bitterness wearing duty’s clothes.”
“Isadora—”
“William tried to hold us together,” she continued, the words coming faster now, as though once begun they would not be stopped.
“He was barely more than a boy himself, and he was already managing the household, our parents, Letitia and me, because someone had to, and neither of them would. I watched my brother become an old man before he was twenty because love had failed in our house and someone had to be responsible in its place.”
Her voice had begun to tremble. She heard it and hated it, the careful architecture of her composure finally giving way after years of careful maintenance.
She turned her face away, toward the dark water, because she could not bear for him to watch it crumble.
“For a long time, I believed that it could be different for me,” she said, her voice quieter now. “I was a foolish child who read poetry in window seats and believed devotion was simply a matter of choosing it correctly. I believed I would be the exception.”
She took a shaky breath. “And then I grew older, and I watched it for long enough, and I stopped believing it. I stopped believing that love stays what it starts as. I think I decided, without meaning to, that the only way to survive marriage was to never actually need it to be anything more than an arrangement. Because if you never expect warmth, it cannot be taken from you.”
“Isadora.” James stepped closer.
“I am not finished,” she said, though her voice had thinned.
“I have spent years afraid of exactly this… of binding myself to someone and watching the affection leach out of it slowly, year by year, until I am sitting across a breakfast table from a stranger who is only ever polite to me because the alternative would be a scandal.”
Her hands had curled into the fabric of her shawl. “I still want it. Desperately. That is the humiliating part. Some foolish, stubborn part of me still wants to believe that love can exist without becoming that. Without becoming my parents.”
Her voice cracked on the last word, and she pressed her lips together hard, mortified by the sound of her own emotions in the cooling air.
“I do not know if I believe it anymore. I want to, but I do not know if I’m allowed to.”
She turned further away, blinking hard, furious with herself for the tears she would not let fall.
“Isadora.” James’s voice was very low. “Look at me.”
She shook her head.
“Please.”
She turned back slowly and found him standing closer than she had realized, close enough that the cold evening air between them had nearly vanished.
“What happened between your parents was not your fault,” he began.
“It was never yours to carry, and you have been carrying it since you were a child far too young to be given that weight.” His eyes held hers, steady and certain.
“You should not measure what is possible for you against what they failed to become. It should be a matter of our choosing. You are not them. Whatever I am, whatever I have done with my life, however careless I have been with other people’s expectations, it is my choice.
And you are nothing like your mother became. You never could be.”
Her breath caught.
“If anyone deserves the kind of love you once believed in… the steadfast kind, the kind that does not change with circumstance… it is you,” he continued. “I have never met anyone more deserving of it.”
She stared at him, something in her chest cracking open at his words, too startled to form a response.
He took a step closer. This time, there was no hesitation in it. Her pulse was racing painfully at the heat in his eyes.
“You cannot keep believing you are safer without it,” he rasped. “Not when it is making you unhappy. Not when I can see exactly what it is costing you to keep saying no to something you want.”
“James,” she whispered.
“I am done being careful,” he said.
He closed the remaining distance between them, tilted her chin up with two fingers, bent his head, and kissed her.
His kiss was sure and warm, and his hand came up to cradle her jaw with a tenderness that made her breath catch sharply against his mouth.
She felt the cold night air disappear entirely, replaced by the heat of him, the solid warmth of his chest as her hands found the front of his coat without her permission, gripping the fabric as though she might lose her footing without it.
She did not pull away.
She kissed him back fully and helplessly, and he made a low sound against her mouth. It might have been her name, or it might have been nothing at all, as his other hand settled on her waist and drew her closer still.
Her heart was beating so hard she could feel it in her throat.
Her breath came unsteady when his lips moved against hers, slow and certain, asking nothing and somehow asking everything, and she answered them with a desperation she had not known she was feeling until this exact moment, until his hand tightened slightly on her jaw and she felt herself sway into him.
Emotion rose unexpectedly, sharp and overwhelming. Her eyes stung, and tears gathered at her lashes. She had never imagined a kiss could hold so much longing, so much relief, so much aching tenderness all at once.
There was only this: his mouth on hers, his hand cradling her face like something he had been waiting a very long time to be permitted to hold, and her own heartbeat roaring so loudly in her ears that she could hear nothing else at all.
When he finally drew back, his forehead resting against hers, both of them panting in the cold air, she opened her eyes to find him looking at her as though she were the only fixed point in the entire darkened garden.
“Isadora…” he said roughly.
For several long seconds, she could not say anything at all.