Chapter Thirteen #2
“My upbringing was not the same. You walked into my father’s house convinced you were the honest man in it, and you were right, and that was the intolerable part.
” Her tone stayed exactly where it had been, the one she kept for rent-day.
“I had spent years being the only honest person in every room and called difficult for the trouble, and here came a man to whom honesty cost nothing, who had never once been punished for it, who had been born already wearing it and had never had to buy it.”
“And you wanted to watch me buy it.”
“I wanted to watch you pay for it, and I am not proud of that. But you asked why it went strange.” She let go of the pen for good.
“The truth is that I cannot settle my account with my father and go on being angry at you for never having been him, and I have been using the second to keep from feeling the first.”
“That is the most honest thing you have said to me.”
“It is the most honest thing I have said to anyone. Do not make anything out of it. I told you what happens to collected things.”
“I disliked you too,” he said, and it was so plainly offered, so without the softening a kind lie would have carried, that she believed it before she had time to be hurt by it.
“From the second meeting. You had decided who I was before I had said three sentences, and you kept deciding it, over and over, whatever I did.”
“I could not afford to be wrong. Being wrong about a man is how women in my position come to grief.”
“I understand that now. At the time it was a trial for another man’s crimes before a judge who would not read the evidence.
” He held her eyes and let her have the silence to think in.
“I disliked being the stand-in for every man who had ever done you harm, and I disliked being punished for a cruelty I had not committed by the one person in the world clever enough to know I had not committed it.”
“I did not know it. That is the point. I could not afford to know it.”
“And now, can you afford it?”
“I can.” She held his eyes, and that was harder than any of the rest of it. “You were partly right about me.”
“You were more right about me.” He said it easily, a concession made without cost. He would not take more of the blame than he was owed nor give her less than her due, and the exactness of it undid a knot in her she had not known was tied.
“I did walk into that house certain I was the good man in it. You were correct to want to see me pay for it, and I was insufferable while you waited.” He paused.
“I have simply turned out to be paying in a currency neither of us expected.”
“And what currency is that?”
He got as far as the first word of the answer and no further, and let it go unsaid. The space where it had not been said hung in the warm air of the library, louder than any sentence he could have finished.
“You have fallen behind on your Northumberland correspondence,” she said. It was cowardice, and they both knew it, and she watched him decide whether to let her have it.
“That is not what I was going to say.”
“I know what you were going to say. I would rather you did not say it, because I have no drawer for it either, and I have run out of drawers this week. A woman can only be handed so many things she cannot file before she stops being able to stand up under the sorting.”
He rose from the chair, and she braced for the cowardice to be granted, for him to walk the moment off and let it close over as she had taught every moment of her life to close.
Instead, he said: “I am going to do a thing, and I am going to tell you before I do it. I am aware that is not how it is done, but I do not care how it is done. You have spent your entire life being reached for without warning, and I will not be one more hand that arrives before you have had the chance to see it coming.” He did not move.
“I want to kiss you. That is the sentence entire. You may say no, and I will go back to my own end of the table, and not a line of anything you have signed will change by a hair.” He held her eyes.
“Or you may say yes. There is one clause only, and nothing engrossed on the back of it.”
She looked at him, and what he had done was the one thing that could have made it possible.
He had handed her the moment before he spent it.
In every other room of her life the choosing had been taken out of her hands even before she reached them, and he had stopped exactly short of that place and left the choosing in hers.
Nobody had ever asked her.
“You have my yes.” She held his eyes, and gave him back his own grammar, because it was the only language either of them fully trusted. “There is nothing engrossed on the back of mine either. I have read it to you entirely.”
And the kiss, when it came, came slowly, gently, and entirely without hurry, because he had asked and she had answered and there was no longer anything to seize.
She found, with a distant astonishment, that the significance of this kiss was in the arm’s length he had left her, and the question he had spent it on.
She was being kissed, for the first time in her life, by a man who had made certain first that she was permitted to stop him, and who had wanted the yes more than he had wanted the kiss.