Chapter Forty-One #2
But Noé shook his head. “My father will lose,” he said.
He adjusted his position, bending his neck to observe me.
“He offered you a deal because he is terrified of you, Lovett, and rather than confront you directly like a respectable person, he prefers to burden you with impossible tasks in the hopes that you will trip.” His thumb moved over my temple, smoothing down a wisp of hair.
“You will solve this mystery. I am certain of it.”
I looked up at him. His eyes were clouded and impossible to read, one of his hands resting on the back of my neck, the other placed just below my rib cage.
“I would never let him harm you,” he murmured.
The frankness with which he stated it made me flush. How many times in our relatively brief partnership had I made him repeat such sentiments? And how many times had I given him nothing in return?
I suddenly hated myself for coming here. “You do not owe me your loyalty.”
He chuckled dully. “Life is not a lender’s counter, Tamerlane.
Not every exchange is designed to incur a debt.
You have my loyalty because I’ve decided to give it to you—not because you’ve earned it, not because I wish for a payment to make up the loss.
” He exhaled, turning his face up toward the ceiling in frustration.
“I am your ally,” he said tersely. “I’ve been your ally from the very beginning. When will you accept that?”
I did not know how to answer. It was a strange notion, the one he was vocalizing.
Absorbing it made my throat feel tight. Eliot and I had been allies—and yet, there had been holes in our partnership, conditions to the vow.
Though I would never admit it to him, I was not sure whether I’d ever truly forgiven him for his original betrayal of me, his secret second partnership with Sybil during the Vainglory.
Nor had he trusted me since my betrothal to Noé.
Neither of us, I realized now, had been willing to set down our pride for one another—to put the other’s needs, the other’s emotions, wholly before our own.
In that way, our romance was more like a business deal; we were both too cautious, too cognizant of our own interests, to risk being made fools of.
The second we felt slighted, we pulled away.
Noé’s fingers brushed over my arm—I was shivering, I noticed distantly. My dress clung to me like pondweed, rain-slick and cold.
He clicked his tongue. “You’re shaking. Here—that gown can’t be comfortable.”
Moving me gently aside, he sat up. My skin flushed as he tugged his ascot loose, pulled down the straps of his suspenders and began working at the buttons of his shirt. Beneath it, he was wearing only an undershirt, so thin I could see the lines of his muscles.
I hesitated when he stripped off the shirt and extended it toward me. Noé smirked. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll be distracted—I won’t look.”
I remained where I was, suspicious. “What will you be doing?”
He shifted. “I,” he pronounced theatrically, “am going to choose a book to read to you.”
He gestured to the shelves around us. “It was something my mother used to do for me, when she was alive,” he said.
“As a boy, I was prone to vivid nightmares—horribly afraid of the dark, actually, which my father claimed was a shamefully feminine trait. Naturally, he had no desire to comfort me on the nights where I woke the servants up, crying, so the task fell to his poor, beleaguered wife.”
Pausing, he glanced at me sidelong. His cheeks, I noticed, were tinged with the faintest hint of pink, as if the confession had made him unexpectedly self-conscious.
“I know you have a great love of reading.”
“When I’m able,” I murmured. It was my typical excuse; I repeated it without a thought, and then felt rude for doing so. Ducking my chin, I pushed myself upright, taking the shirtwaist from him and making my way to a darkened corner of the library to change.
When I returned, Noé was standing by the nearest set of bookshelves, running his finger across a row of titles. He looked over at me as I approached. On me, his shirt was long, falling almost to my knees—yet sighting me in it, a stillness seemed to pass over him.
“There,” he said. “That suits you nicely.”
With a shallow cough, he pulled a single book from the shelf.
“All right. I’ve chosen Duchamp’s Wasting Season. It features a wily, occasionally malevolent female protagonist—I thought you might relate.”
He smiled tentatively. It was strange, seeing him afflicted by such timidity, in comparison to his standard quick-tongued confidence. All his brazenness seemed to have disappeared when I’d left to change, and mine with it.
Shyly, like we were both children, I lowered myself back onto the sofa. My good sense had returned enough that I did not feel the need to prostrate myself over his chest this time—indeed, I cringed to think of it—so instead we sat side by side, the novel balanced in his lap.
He cleared his throat, looking over at me. “I suppose we’ll begin with chapter one.”
Settling in, he lowered his head and began to read.
“ ‘When she returned from the garden, he had already left. She felt his absence in the soles of her feet, crusted like damp earth over her toes. In her younger years, her father had called her a skeptical child, and she had always taken the criticism as a compliment: how difficult she was to trick, how canny and wise. Now she realized her faults. He had told her he would leave come winter, and because she believed nothing, she had not believed him either.’ ”