13. Lissy #2
We look at each other properly for the first time in six days. He seems… distracted. Nervous.
Exactly how I feel.
"She knows," I say. She knows we kissed.
"They all know. Brynna started a betting pool at her own wedding." He exhales loudly. "I came today because I couldn't think of a reason not to that didn't sound like the real reason."
"Which is?"
"That I've been counting the days between fittings." He says it flatly, like a fact he's confessing to a magistrate. His hand comes across the desk — not far, just far enough — and I put mine in it. His thumb crosses my knuckles once.
I look at our hands on the desk. Then I look at my sketchbook, still open, showing yet another wedding dress. Another dress that will not be mine.
The needle. The oak. You know how this ends.
The words echo through me, a reminder of what I’ve told myself for years now.
And when I move next, I don't answer the voice.
I don't say anything to Torgan, either. Instead, I stand, lean across the desk, and kiss him.
He goes still for half a heartbeat. Then his hand comes up and cradles the back of my head, and he kisses me back, and it's nothing like the courtyard.
The courtyard was careful. This kiss has six days of want behind it, and I can feel every one of them, because I have felt every one of them too.
The desk edge digs into my hip. Papers slide off somewhere. I don't care.
I do care about one thing. I break away, breathing hard.
"Saskia," I manage.
He lifts his lips from mine, breathing into me. "Is eating pastries."
But she’ll come back, and anyone on the street could look in and see the dressmaker climbing across her own desk at a client's brother.
I really should have made those leather curtains when I had the chance.
I take his hand and pull him around the desk. "Storage room. Now."
He follows me. "As my lady wishes." This enormous, careful male follows me through the curtain into my little back storage room — a second desk, a lamp, bolts of fabric stacked to the ceiling — and I catch one look at his face before he shuts the door behind us.
He's done being careful.
He rushes at me and presses me against the door and kisses me until my knees stop being useful. I fist my hands in his shirt and pull him closer, and he makes a low sound that I feel more than hear.
"Tell me to stop," he says against my jaw, "and I stop."
"Don't stop." I shake my head, as though something has come over me. "Don't you dare stop."
He does not. His hand finds the hem of my skirt.
It has been years since anyone touched me.
I made peace with that a long time ago. I told myself it was part of the arrangement — the dressmaker makes the dresses, and she goes home, and she puts the kettle on.
That was safe, that was where my imagined curse left me in my life.
And I believed it right up until this moment, with his fingers sliding up my thigh and my whole body telling me how much of a liar I've been all my life.
He touches me slowly at first. Then not slowly.
I gasp as his fingers trail up my inner thigh, between my legs. Feather-light, completely unlike the rough, war-callused fingers I felt around my face when he kissed me.
His thumb circles the sensitive nub between my legs, and I cannot control my breathing. And then his index finger slides into me.
I cry out, clinging to him. His hand is too big, and I’m too tight around him, but he moves his finger gently while stroking me with his thumb.
The sensation is too much. Too much after going so long without being touched like this.
He watches my face the whole time. That's the thing that unravels me — not only his fingers, though gods, his fingers — it's that he watches me like my every reaction matters. Like I'm precious to him.
"Torgan—" My head tips back against the door.
"I have you."
He does. His other arm wraps around my waist and takes my weight, and I stop being able to hold anything back, and I come apart against the storage room door with his name in my mouth.
He holds me up through all of it. Then he keeps holding me, while my breathing slows. The shop beyond the door is quiet. My legs are still shaking.
"All right?" he asks.
"You've ruined me for pinning hems in this room." Gods, my voice is hoarse.
"Good," he says, with a secretive smile.
I straighten my skirt. He tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear, and his hand stays at my jaw a moment, and we stand there in my cramped storage room like two people for whom the entire world is different.
"There's a wedding in the forest in five weeks," he says softly, as he searches my face. "Come with me. Not as the dressmaker. Not as the chaperone's errand." His jaw works. "With me. Where everyone can see."
A laugh bubbles out of me. "You're asking me now?"
"You were preoccupied before."
"Yes." I press my palm flat against his chest, over his heart, the way I did in the courtyard. It pounds against my hand. "Yes, I'll come with you.”
Where everyone can see us.
The bell out front jingles.
"LISSY! Your baker friend is a GENIUS and I bought twelve—"
We break apart. I turn the doorknob and we both burst out into my shop. Saskia stands with her back to us in the doorway with a pastry box balanced on one palm while she’s completely engrossed in a tart. She finally looks at me. She looks at her brother.
Then she looks at my hair and my flushed cheek.
Then, very slowly, she bites into her tart.
"So," she says, chewing. "What'd I miss?"