Chapter 14 Eden #2
She scoffed. “You’re as close to decent as any man I’ve ever met.”
“I mean it.”
“What don’t you think you can do?”
Oste sighed and shook his head. “I… I’m a physician. I work terrible hours. I’ve ignored buying property to rent a dingy place instead just because it’s close to the hospital and has the best fougasse.”
“Oh, the horror! He miserably proclaims something that I find charming!”
“My apartment is tiny.”
Dorotèa looked up at the warming sky and spread her arms. “He ignores the fact that he can get a second place for more preferable days.”
Oste gritted his teeth. This woman! “I have a compromised constitution. I am mutilated and less capable. Scarcely pillars of good husbandry.”
“Oh, no.” Dorotèa set her hand against her forehead and swooned backwards into the bench. “Oh, God. Not the scars that made you even more handsome.”
“Mademoiselle! I could die young. Merde! I could fail in protecting you because of those—”
“One of the best duelists in Aix may have to use her talents. Whatever shall she do?”
Oste dragged his hands down his face, exasperated. “I have voyageur blood.”
“The physician forgets registries consider his mother a Provencal, and that alleged Provencal blood has made him uncommonly dashing.”
Oste slapped his thighs and squeezed his eyes shut. “I lay with men, Dorotèa.”
This earned him an uncharacteristic silence.
In the dark of his forced blindness, he grew increasingly aware of his again racing heart.
It pulsed loudly in his ears, and both heat and chill grappled and tumbled all the way down his body, beating him with so much force he thought he’d throw up or faint.
It was like having a fever again. He opened his eyes to see if he was on the ground yet, but was faced, instead, with Dorotèa’s deadpan visage peering across at him. He froze.
“I knew that already,” she answered blandly.
Oste startled and smacked his spine back against the bench. “You—what?”
“Erm—well—the duelist heard a few passing comments, and considering the depth of the newest edition of On Liberation in the Bedroom, it wasn’t…
terribly hard…? To put it together. I mean, there’s talk, now and again.
You could have confided in me.” Dorotèa inclined her head.
“I’ve heard you lay with women, too. Is that true? ”
He blinked rapidly. “It certainly isn’t a lie?”
“That’s helpful.” Dorotèa continued on as casually as she might discuss the weather. “If you felt passions exclusively for men, well, I’d see your conundrum.”
“Is this not a conundrum?”
She frowned and straightened her head. One brow rose up. “Why would it be? You like cocks. So do I. As far as I’m aware, that’s just having good taste.”
It was back. The incoming apoplexy. The garden spun anew, and Oste had to put a hand to his head to stop what he was sure was a fit from happening, or for him to further lose grasp on reality.
Dorotèa blinked back at him, seemingly catching on to his crippling bafflement. She took his hand again. “So, I clearly don’t get it enough. Tell me what you think you need to tell me.”
Oste supposed he was willing, but he was yet to recover from her initial response. Granted, he ought to have been less surprised by Dorotèa opening her mouth for just about anything, but he was not, as he so clearly felt, at his best.
Chronic lamentations could hardly be strung into coherent words.
That which he’d felt did not come to his tongue so easily, but the impatient girl on his arm surprised him by how diligently she waited for him now.
Well, if she could be patient, he could be honest, he supposed, in his own fumbling way.
“It’s…” Oste began, but what he’d thought up immediately felt wrong.
The physician counted to five and started again.
“There’s the matter of people who aren’t as unbothered as you.
If the wrong person found me out, I’d be damned in more ways than I could imagine.
Saint-Mitre’s political leanings are already irritants to some officials, and I’d not be surprised if there were some eager to find any dirt to do something about it—about me.
Unfortunately, I made myself better known during the last riots.
I’m honestly shocked nobody has ever knocked on my or Eflamm’s door about our publication, but I think nobody wants to make a scandal out of something they find quite… helpful.”
“That’s true,” Dorotèa mused, and he breathed a sigh of relief that she understood the danger. “But that would be the past, no?”
“And that’s the other matter,” Oste continued.
He dug his nails into his hose on his free side.
He grimaced when he spoke, the rest physically uncomfortable to say.
It settled into his stomach like a rotting mass.
“The matter of myself. How could I—it’s—I could continue as I am, and grieve, perhaps, having marriage and a wife.
Or I could find myself a marriage, and dismiss this other part of myself that is equally…
me. Either possibility feels wholly dishonest. I’ve desired a family, of course I have, but what sort of unnatural husband would I be?
I’d be one who has been in the company of other men, and, God help me, liked it.
Good husbands are not meant to be libertines.
And yet, how could I live with myself if I pretended so much of me did not exist?
Do you see now? No matter what I choose, I’m damned. ”
“I don’t,” Dorotèa drawled.
Oste drew his brows together. Despair stitched its way into his features. “You don’t?”
“Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see how it’s a choice. All this ‘one or the other’.”
“I… I don’t see how it wouldn’t be?”
She shook her head. “Let’s say your wife doesn’t give a damn. Can you not have a family and also know that your tastes are different but no less yours? Could you honor it, if she did?”
He blinked, and the rest of his body felt as cold as his hand did in hers.
When he glanced down, his fingers had even adopted a darker hue from diminished circulation.
It was little wonder al-Anezi was so inscrutable in identifying his nervous disposition.
“I’d not considered that a wife ever would. ”
“It’s possible a wife could have also read On Liberation in the Bedroom front to back and sees that some things are not quite black and white.
A wife might even be deeply curious herself.
Did you know, reading it taught me to have some respect for myself?
It’s funny, really. I learned about pleasure and the value of my body from you. ”
Oste leaned forward at this and craned his neck to stare dead ahead at Dorotèa. She sported the same nonplussed demeanor as before, sitting there primly like an immovable object. She was more terrifying than he ever thought. It excited him, he was mortified to realize.
“I should also mention,” Dorotèa added, “that someone also considered to be an unnatural woman doesn’t actually mind very much at all. As someone who bears that title, truthfully, I find it nice to know that there’s a kindred spirit out there.”
“Unnatural,” he scoffed. “I’d call you magnificent. Extraordinary.”
Dorotèa smiled, with tears welling in her eyes. “Then you know how I see you.”
There was nothing to say to that. Oste drew her into his arms instead and tangled his cold fingers into her dress.
She warmed him, especially when she returned it in full and rested her head on his shoulder like she’d been waiting to do for half her life.
It occurred to him, then, that they both had.
“Let’s say that feelings are returned,” Oste began, hesitant, “and that it terrifies me?”
“Then we’ll talk through it,” she murmured into him.
He imagined what it would be like to hear that muffled voice next to him in his bed.
“We’ll figure out what needs figuring out, because we’ve proved we’re good at that, as long as we can bicker once or twice.
You know, I actually think I’d be an easier lover than your assistant.
I’m quite low maintenance. Just set out a water bowl and some table scraps, and I’m set. ”
Oste drew his head back. “Like a cat?”
She clicked her tongue. “That’s a clever arse.”
“You’re absolutely ridiculous.”
“Hmph!” Dorotèa burrowed her head back into him and closed the distance again. “I thought I was extraordinary.”
“Extraordinarily ridiculous.”
“This is why people call you cranky.”
“I respond with an output equal to the weight of stimuli.”
“I like the way you talk, Docteur,” Dorotèa quipped, then angled herself back again so they could see each other proper.
He liked a lot of things about her, too, but was determined to hold his mouth in a flat line and stay true to the sourness she accused him of.
“Truly, though. I’ll listen to your fears, every last one.
They won’t offend me, whatever they are. You’re worth it to me.”
Oste let out a nervous chuckle. “I’m actually quite nervous about being able to please you, if I may be so salacious.”
“Nothing about our conversation has been remotely pure but rest assured that point… goes both ways.”
“Ah?”
“My escapades were a waste of purity. No fun, no meaning, no good. But since, I’ve been a voracious reader.
And… Jeanne has told me very, very much, because I—well I guess it’s no secret now—erm, I teach her fencing, and, of course, sometimes we chatter to pass the time, but…
this is all to say that I have never done many things, and certainly haven’t performed admirably.
Much at this point I’ve only pictured in my mind in great detail. ”
He raised a brow. “How much detail?”
“If I said it out loud, I think I’d go to hell. You’ve unfairly occupied my thoughts. If we’re both nervous, perhaps we could put it to rest and see by… doing.”
Oste bit his lip. He couldn’t say he wasn’t tempted, and he felt his groin answer even before he could.
He gave a quick shake of his head as he considered it and steadied his breath.
“I did want to do this right, Dorotèa. I… It wouldn’t technically be proper, if you…
if I… it’s just, ideally, such a thing is left until marriage.
I know we’ve both—ergh. I’d like to be a gentleman about this. I think of it as a new start.”
She shrugged. “I understand. I do appreciate a libertine with some morals.” She followed it up with a delicate laugh. “You see how quickly I start to make little of such things again?”
“You’re not a wicked woman,” he scoffed again, then set his composure back into place. “You’re a resilient one, no thanks to anyone who had a hand in your life. You are as you are, and you are someone I admire.”
Dorotèa kissed his cheek. “How special you make me feel.”
“I grew acquainted with the feeling myself when we were children. You caught those fireflies, and I…” Oste looked down with a sheepish smile and set his jaw.
“If I have not actually scared you off and you are, as you say, willing to figure this out, then the proper thing I ought to do is go and see both of our fathers. And if it’s acceptable and sorted, then, well, you know… ”
Dorotèa stared back, wide-eyed. He’d stupefied her into silence, and when he realized his clumsiness with the subject, he gasped himself.
“Ah!” Oste sputtered. “I—I speak of marriage, yes. Boudiou, to hell with my dull heart. I swore I’d have a whole show of asking, too. Something planned, and lovely.”
He pushed up to his feet with a wobble and paced. Dorotèa’s taut face tracked him back and forth until he stopped and crouched down in front of her.
“Yes, Dorotèa, do you reckon you’d like to marry?” he asked. “I’m not feeding you table scraps, though.”
His physician’s intellect concluded that she quite wanted to on account of how quickly she threw herself back into his arms.