Firelight #2
Marin withdrew. The shadow remained for one impossible heartbeat. Then released. Oliver's eyes lifted to hers. Neither spoke. The fire snapped behind him. One of the flames bent away. Oliver looked toward it.
"So," he said quietly.
Marin folded her arms.
"Do not."
"I haven't said anything."
"You are about to make a joke because you are frightened."
His expression sharpened. That landed. A fraction of tension left his shoulders. Marin let herself count that as useful.
"I wasn't frightened."
"Then you're becoming less convincing."
Oliver looked back at the window. The harbor beyond was nearly black, broken into pieces by rain and lamps.
Marin studied him. There were moments when everyone else's version of Oliver disappeared.
The charming merchant. The impossible survivor.
The man who could walk into a ballroom and make strangers orient toward him before they understood why.
The dangerous one. The amusing one. The man whose attention had become a kind of currency in certain rooms.
This Oliver stood barefoot in low pajama trousers at three in the morning, bare skin marked by things that had nearly killed him, staring into rain because he had just learned that something might be staring back from his own shadow.
Marin wanted him with sudden, painful intensity. The reaction annoyed her. It also did not surprise her anymore. She stepped forward. Oliver looked at her. Marin caught the waistband of his trousers between two fingers and pulled him the final inch toward her.
His eyebrows rose.
"Are you conducting an examination?"
"Possibly."
"Should I be concerned about professional boundaries?"
"You have never respected professional boundaries."
"I have respected several."
"Name one."
Oliver appeared to consider this seriously. Marin kissed him before he could answer. It was not meant to become anything. That was the first mistake. Oliver's mouth softened beneath hers before answering with familiar heat. His hand settled at her waist. Not pulling. Waiting.
Marin moved closer. Permission changed the touch.
His fingers tightened. The kiss deepened without haste, because they no longer needed haste to prove desire existed.
Marin knew how he kissed when he was amused, how he kissed when frightened, how he sometimes paused just before losing control as if some private part of him still found the experience surprising.
Tonight there was something restless beneath it. She felt it in the hand at her waist. In his breathing. In the careful way he refused to turn uncertainty into pressure. Marin slid her fingers along his side. Warm skin.
Muscle tightened beneath her touch. The faint ridge of a newer scar passed beneath her thumb. Then the room changed. The fire dropped. Not extinguished. Compressed. Every flame in the hearth leaned away from them. Marin opened her eyes.
Oliver did too. His shadow had climbed the wall behind him. Not literally climbed. That would have been easier. It remained attached to the floor and yet extended upward in a shape the fire could not have made.
Broad shoulders. A head. Oliver's profile. Only the darkness beneath the silhouette's jaw remained too deep, a pocket of depth the wall itself did not possess. The silhouette behind him tilted toward Marin. Oliver did not move. The shadow did.
Marin stepped back. It followed her with its face.
"Hunger," Oliver whispered, not as identification but as the first name available for something that had already taught both of them to distrust impossible dark.
The word barely left him. The shadow shuddered. Marin's skin prickled. Marin did not call the movement recognition. That would have been interpretation, and interpretation was exactly how frightened people turned coincidence into certainty. But it was a response of some kind.
Oliver turned. The shape vanished into ordinary darkness.
The flames lifted again. For several seconds neither of them moved.
The impulse to fill the silence came and went.
Marin let it. Whatever the shadow was, giving it a story before she had evidence would only make the story harder to dislodge later.
Oliver's breathing slowed by deliberate degrees.
She knew that technique now. He used it when pain, fear or temptation arrived strongly enough that his first reaction could not be trusted.
The knowledge was intimate in a way she had never expected intimacy to become: not knowing only what pleased him, but recognizing the small disciplines by which he remained himself.
Then Oliver looked down at himself.
"That seems discourteous."
Marin stared at him. He met her eyes.
"I know."
She exhaled.
"Good."
"I considered waiting another thirty seconds."
"I would have thrown you out the window."
"Third floor."
"I know."
A laugh almost reached him. Almost. Marin touched his wrist. His pulse was fast now.
"Did it feel like you?"
Oliver's expression changed.
"No."
"Did it feel external?"
He hesitated.
"Also no."
The answer tightened something under Marin's ribs. She released his wrist only to take his hand.
"Sit."
He obeyed without commentary. She sat beside him on the edge of the long settee near the fire. For a moment they simply watched the flames behave normally. Marin disliked normal behavior after witnessing impossible behavior. It felt dishonest.
Oliver's thumb moved once across her knuckles.
"I dreamed about the other versions again."
The admission did not come from nowhere. Marin saw that at once. He had been watching the ordinary fire as if comparing it to the shape that had just stood behind him, and whatever comparison he made had stripped the last usefulness from silence.
The admission exposed an old habit Oliver knew too well: he decided which dangers became other people's business only after he had tested them privately. Marin turned.
"When?"
"Last night."
"You didn't tell me."
"They weren't interesting."
"Oliver."
"One drowned."
Her anger disappeared. He kept his eyes on the fire.
"One didn't know you."
Marin said nothing.
"One did."
That should not have been the version that frightened her most. It was.
"What was different?"
"He looked happy."
Marin waited. Oliver's mouth tightened.
"And?"
"He was not me."