70. Then Dog
THEN: DOG
Several moons after I had allowed for Avery’s courtship to begin, I was in town watching Adelaide while Rowena was preoccupied with the delivery of a babe.
I had been by her house to bring her some pennyroyal as she had requested.
An older child from the family had been sent to her and Thane’s house to ask her to come, as his mother was in labor.
Rowena had handed Adelaide to me and asked me to watch her until Thane came home from wherever he was.
I panicked at this but could only agree. Winters had passed without Thane and I being alone. I dreaded it ever happening. I passed the time telling the girl stories she only half understood, all the while listening for Thane’s footsteps at the door.
It was known about town that the new blacksmith was paying attention to Magda’s girl. Folk would say things like, “Good luck to him, poor man,” or “Should someone tell him of her, that she has already lain with other men?” or “Does he know she isn’t quite godly, that she prays to the earth?”
Rowena had commented on it, joyfully so, in front of Thane, asking me if I truly considered him for a husband and that he seemed like a good man. Thane’s head had snapped up from the ledger he was writing in while seated at their dinner table.
“Someone courts you?” he asked.
“Avery Finch,” Rowena had answered for me. “The Ecclestonian. Our new blacksmith. I like him.”
And so when Rowena had come sailing through the doorway that night, thanking the gods for such an easy birth, swooping up her daughter in her arms, I had breathed a sigh of relief.
I breathed it too early. I made my way to The Pale Horse, briefly stabling Zara outside it.
I was low on my medicinal whiskey and did not relish the idea of coming back to town for anything other than church.
Thane was in the tavern at a table with Wynne, Kent, and several other men his age, many of them Perpatanians.
While I stood at the counter and waited for Gertie to fill a jug, I looked away from him purposely, but I felt the weight of his stare from across the room.
“This is a welcome surprise,” came a voice that sent relief through me. Avery stood next to me, his bulk leaning against the counter.
I should have greeted him, should have even smiled, but I said, “I am not staying,” in the most dismissive way and turned back towards watching Gertie.
I was overwhelmed by the rush of comfort I had felt at seeing him there. It frightened me how I had gone from self-conscious and unhappy to nearly elated at the sight of him.
“One drink?” he said, leaning down so that his words were in my ear.
I could not fight it anymore. I wanted the freedom to simply like him, to be a woman pleased with the attentions of a big, strong man who some might have considered good-looking.
For he was, in his own way, his nose rather large and broken, his eyes perhaps too small for his face.
His lower teeth were crooked, and one of his ears was somewhat misshapen.
But all of those things together, with his towering figure and cocky manner, made him truly fine.
He was a fine man, and I did want him. I surprised myself with this.
I had always thought I liked a leaner man with a tapered waist, someone whose musculature was more defined.
I had always thought I liked men like Thane.
But I liked this man. And so I looked up at him and said, “One.”
“Thank the gods,” he breathed, eyes not having left me.
I rolled my lips together to hide any satisfaction at his overtness while he paid Gertie not only for my jug but for a tin of cider.
“You ordered for me without asking what I wanted,” I griped when I should have thanked him.
He shrugged. “Barrels are all kicked except the cider. You once told me you only buy the whiskey for your patients, that you don’t like the taste.”
He was stealing my heart day by day, and all I did was mistreat him. “Thank you,” I relented.
“Thank you,” he answered.
“For what?”
“For standing here next to me. I am the envy of every man here.”
“Surely not every man.”
Avery leaned even closer. “Every man with sight.”
Fighting a smile, I sipped. “I see you have already had some whiskey or cider tonight.”
He nodded. “I am rather drunk actually.”
The chuckle escaped my lips before I realized it did. “Drink some water tonight before bed. You will have a sore head in the morning.”
“I won’t remember,” he replied. “I will fall into my bed preoccupied by the vision of you standing there with your pretty pink mouth on that cup.”
I swallowed. His words were innocent enough, but his stare was bold.
“Is that too close to the boundary line you have drawn?” he asked.
“The boundary line?”
He drank from his own cup. “You once said, ‘refrain from discussing the shape of me.’ Is that too close to your rule? I would hate to break it.”
“I must ask a question,” I replied instead of answering him.
“Please,” he said, taking on that solemn tone he sometimes used that terrified me, that voice that held so much promise in it.
“You court me. You seek me as a wife.”
“I do.”
“Won’t you have to cross that boundary at some point should we marry?”
“You mean, as your husband I will want to—nay, I will need to—discuss the shape of you?”
The space between us was fraught with something, the way the air crackles after a lightning storm.
“Are you saying I may now, after some time has passed,” he went on when I did not speak, “discuss the shape of you again?”
“Perhaps not as vivid a description as the day we met.”
He set his cup down and ran the tip of his forefinger around the shell of my ear. “Oh yes. I was an animal that day. I won’t even blame those godsdamn trousers of yours. The fault is entirely mine. I was without decency. Just at the sight of you.”
I willed myself not to react. “You were obscene and outrageous.”
“Obscene and outrageous,” he repeated, letting his hand fall away from me, but it skimmed the strap of my dress briefly before he wholly withdrew it. “Have you forgiven me? Can our courtship now begin?”
“Begin? What have you been doing all this time then?”
He picked his cup back up and sipped. Then he said, “Groveling.”
I laughed loudly, unbridled, helplessly charmed by him.
Avery smiled down at me, pleased at this.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Thane shift in his seat, eyes on us.
“So,” my suitor continued, “I may now discuss your shape?”
I set my cup down, having finished the cider. “I need to get home.” I decided I had shown him enough of my feelings tonight. I needed to be alone to think through this new admission I had shown to both him and to myself.
He walked me outside to the alleyway between The Pale Horse and the public stable used by its patrons. He handed me the jug of whiskey he had insisted on carrying and then kissed the back of my hand and told me he would dream of me all night.
As I watched him walk away from me towards the town square, the side entrance to the tavern spilled light and noise into the alley, Thane stepping out from it. He was faced towards Avery’s retreating back and did not see me farther back in the darkness about to step into the stables.
“Blacksmith,” he said. “A word, if you please.” It was a command.
Avery halted in his steps.
A breath passed, and neither man spoke or moved.
I stood in the shadows and observed them.
The first and only man I had ever loved, now my sister’s husband, stood in challenge to my new suitor, a man I had only begrudgingly considered even if he was the man I now thought of at night when I slipped a hand between my legs—imagining those brutish features in place of where my hurried fingers were.
“She plays with you,” Thane said. “You should know no man who has pursued her has ever won her. Even if she beds them.” He crossed his arms and leaned against the alleyway’s stone side.
Thane meant to sound convincing, and he would have to anyone but me. I could hear his spiking envy, his futile bid for control, his need to know if Avery stood a chance with me.
Avery was half turned away, about to enter the main road to return to his bed in the smithy, an ease in his body, loose with drink and perhaps relaxed with hope after my finally deigning to flirt back.
“What’s that now?” he said, his tone pleasant, but there was a note of irritation on the air after he spoke.
“Roberta,” Thane answered. “She toys with you. Like a cat with a mouse.”
“Then I am the world’s most willing mouse,” Avery replied.
“It can only end in heartbreak for you.”
Now Avery turned fully to face Thane. He rubbed his chest with his left hand and then pounded it with a fist, coughing. “Strong drink served tonight.”
Thane’s nostrils flared. He wanted a reaction from the blacksmith.
“What did you say? Heartbreak?” Avery asked as if they were two women at a well exchanging commentary about weather or harvest.
“You heard me. Don’t pretend at not caring.”
“I would say I hardly pretend. I pursue her quite openly.”
“You pursue her quite foolishly. You act the fool.”
“Have you ever used a card deck for something other than a game? The Fool is a lucky card sometimes.”
“Are you ever serious?” Thane asked, derision in his question.
I caught my breath. Thane rarely let his princely carriage break.
This was more than my bedding someone new.
He saw Avery as a threat. And perhaps those waters were muddied, but he was also my oldest friend as well as my first love.
Thane had known me better than anyone save Magda.
And so, I now saw it too. Avery was a threat to Thane.
Thane saw him as a possible mate for me.
Thane saw, before I could admit it to myself, Avery was a worthy contender.
He really could be more than a man I daydreamed about having rut into me. He was worth more than twilight lust.
I suddenly felt a pang of guilt at having ever played with his heart.