Charlotte Ellis
The garden smells of crushed roses and London and something I have been refusing to name for two weeks.
I am loading the last transport crate by torchlight, my muscles aching from the gala breakdown, when I see him.
Alexander is sitting on the stone bench near the old wall, his jacket off, sleeves rolled to the elbow, a glass of whisky in his hand that he has clearly not been drinking.
The amber liquid catches the garden lights and holds still.
He does not look up when I approach. He is staring at the roses I planted temporary arrangements around three days ago, the ones that will need deadheading by morning.
His stillness is different from his usual stillness.
This is the stillness of a man who has stopped trying to hold something together.
I set the crate down on the gravel path. The sound is loud in the quiet garden. "Why are you still out here?"
He finally looks at me. The garden lights catch the exhaustion in his face, the shadows under his eyes, the tension he carried all night while smiling at four hundred people who wanted something from him. "I have been trying to work that out."
The gala ended two hours ago. The last guests left forty minutes after that. Mrs Hartley is inside supervising the final cleanup, and I told her I would handle the service entrance myself because I needed the air. Because I needed to not be inside anymore.
Because I needed to not be near him while I was still wearing a midnight blue dress that made him look at me like I was something he had been waiting his whole life to see.
I cross the garden slowly. My heels sink slightly into the soft ground, and I slip them off without thinking, carrying them by the straps as I move toward the bench. The grass is cool and damp under my feet. The sensation grounds me in a way I desperately need.
"You should go inside," I say. "It's cold."
"I know." He does not move.
I stand in front of him. The bench is old stone, weathered by decades of English weather, and he looks like he belongs to it. Like he has been sitting in gardens exactly like this one his entire life, carrying weights exactly like this one.
"I'm done," I say. "With the commission. The arch is down, the peonies are packed, the arrangements are cleared. I should invoice you in the morning."
"I know."
The silence that follows is the longest I have ever let happen with another person without filling it.
I am someone who talks. Who makes jokes when things get uncomfortable.
Who deflects with observations about flower varieties or lighting conditions or the specific shade of green in eucalyptus leaves.
I do not deflect now.
At the end of the silence, I am still standing in the same place.
Alexander sets down the whisky glass. He stands, and the movement is slow, deliberate, the opposite of everything that happened inside tonight with the crowded rooms and the careful conversations and Sebastian watching from across every room we shared.
He crosses the distance between us.
His hands go into my hair before I can decide if I want them there, except I already know I want them there, have wanted them there since the first time he corrected my lighting calculations and I realized he had actually read the brief.
His fingers are gentle against my scalp, tilting my face up, and the garden is cold but his hands are warm and everything I have been not doing for fourteen days resolves into something specific and loud.
He kisses me.
It is not tentative. It is not a question.
His mouth is warm and certain, and he tastes like whisky he did not drink and something underneath that is just him, and my shoes fall from my hand to the grass because I need to touch him back.
My palms flatten against his chest. I can feel his heartbeat through his shirt, fast despite how steady his hands are.
He pulls back just enough to speak. "Tell me to stop."
"No."
He exhales against my mouth. "Charlotte."
"I said no."
His hands slide from my hair to my waist, pulling me closer, and the bench stone is suddenly cold beneath me because at some point we sat down and I do not remember deciding to do that.
His weight is careful and certain at once, his body angled over mine without pressing, giving me space to move away if I want to.
I do not want to.
"I need you to understand something." His voice is low against my ear, and the words send heat down my spine. "I have been thinking about this since you handed me a eucalyptus stem and asked if I wanted tea."
"That was practical."
"It was the kindest thing anyone has done for me in years." He presses his mouth to the space below my ear. "And I have not stopped thinking about it."
I turn my head and catch his mouth with mine, and the kiss deepens, and his hand finds the small of my back and presses me closer, and the London dark holds everything we are not saying.
The garden smells of crushed roses and night air and his clean green scent, and I stop being careful about anything at all.
Time becomes unreliable. There is the cold stone of the bench and the warmth of his body and the way he says my name like it means something specific to him.
There is his mouth on my throat, my collarbone, the edge of my shoulder where the dress has slipped.
There is my hand in his hair, pulling him back up so I can kiss him again.
There is the moment when he pulls back, breathing hard, and looks at me with an expression I have never seen on anyone's face before.
"Come inside with me."
It is not a question. It is not a command. It is something in between, and I understand that if I say no, he will accept it. He will walk me to my van and watch me drive away and never mention this again.
I do not say no.
We do not speak as we walk through the service corridor.
His hand is on my lower back, warm through the thin fabric of the dress, and the touch is proprietary in a way that should bother me but does not.
Mrs Hartley is nowhere to be seen. The house is quiet in that specific way that old houses get at night, all creaking wood and settling stone.
His bedroom is on the second floor. I have walked past it twice during my two weeks here and never looked inside. The door closes behind us.
The lamp clicks off.
But there is still the ambient glow of London through the curtains, enough to see by, enough to see him by, and when he turns from the window I understand that he has been giving me time to change my mind. The understanding of it undoes something in my chest.
I cross to him instead.
His hands find my waist the moment I am within reach, and the relief in the gesture is unmistakable.
Like I have answered a question he did not have the words for.
His palms are warm through the thin silk of the dress and when he pulls me against him I feel the full length of him, the solidity of it, and I tilt my face up.
He kisses me differently here. Slower than the garden.
More deliberate. There is no urgency in it, no desperate quality, only a thoroughness that makes my knees want to stop doing their job.
His mouth moves against mine like he is cataloguing something.
Like he is learning by touch what he has been observing with his eyes for two weeks.
I reach for his tie. He lets me pull it loose, lets me work the knot with fingers that are steadier than I feel.
He watches my face while I do it, and the attention is almost unbearable.
The same quality of focus he brought to my design briefs, to my margin notes, to every argument about light I have ever made in his presence.
He has simply redirected it and the effect is devastating.
The tie comes free. I drop it somewhere. My fingers move to his shirt buttons and he exhales against my mouth, a controlled sound that tells me his control is less absolute than it appears.
“Charlotte.”
“I know,” I say. “Keep up.”
He makes a sound that might, under other circumstances, be a laugh.
His hands find the zip at the back of my dress, the small brass pull I have been acutely aware of all evening.
He draws it down slowly, slowly enough that I feel each tooth release, and the silk loosens and falls and pools somewhere around my feet that I am no longer paying attention to.
He steps back.
Just far enough to look at me. The London glow catches the planes of his face, the sharp jaw, the darkness of his eyes.
He takes me in with the same systematic thoroughness he brought to the ballroom architecture, the ceiling measurements, the chandelier calculations, and I resist the urge to cover myself, because this is Alexander, who has never once made me feel approximate, and I know this look.
He is solving a problem. He is deciding exactly what he wants to do first.
The decision, when it arrives, is his hands on my shoulders, turning me.
His mouth finds the back of my neck. The curve where my neck meets my shoulder.
The space between my shoulder blades where tension has lived for years.
He takes his time. He is unhurried in the way he is unhurried about everything, the way he read during my first visit, the way he measured ceiling heights, the way he waits for the right answer instead of reaching for the convenient one.
I brace my hands against the window frame and breathe.
“You have been thinking about this,” I say.
His voice, low against my spine: “Since the eucalyptus. I told you.”
I turn. Get his shirt open. Push it off his shoulders and down his arms, and there is the scar on his left side that I noticed earlier, a thin curved line below his ribs, and I trace it before I think to stop myself.
He goes still.
“Later,” he says. “I’ll tell you later.”
I press my mouth to the scar. Feel him exhale.