Chapter 16 #3
“No, don’t trouble yourself. I am quite done.”
No sooner had Nic turned than Dashiell gripped his shoulders. “Nic, stop.”
“Let go.” Nic pulled free and spun away, as angry with himself as with Dashiell and wishing it all unsaid.
Dashiell grabbed his arm. “Nic—”
“Excuse me, Master sa Vare. I’ll thank you not to manhandle me.”
“Oh no, you can’t high-and-mighty lord me into being quiet this time, Nic. You mean everything to me and you always have.”
Nic yanked his arm from the vowsmith’s tight hold and flung his hands wide, all disbelief, all hurt. “And yet you left without even saying goodbye!”
He spun in search of his coat again, hardly thinking. How foolish to have spoken at all, foolish to have believed he’d wanted only fairness.
“Stop walking away from me,” Dashiell growled, and Nic was bitterly satisfied to have communicated something, even if it was just his anger.
“You have no right to demand that now.” Nic snatched up his coat, determined to make a proud stride for the door, only to find the vowsmith had dashed ahead of him and pulled the key from the lock.
“You want to know why I left?” Dashiell said, sliding the key into his pocket.
“I left because my parents always told me a good vowsmith doesn’t have a home, that when you travel a lot, home has to be something you carry with you.
So, when I realised that this had become my home—no, that you had become my home—I couldn’t stay.
I feared getting in too deep and still having to go back to my real life when my apprenticeship was over. ”
You had become my home.
Nic couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe.
“For a while I let myself dream that if I was successful enough, I could earn you,” Dashiell went on, a mocking laugh ghosting past his lips. “But I work with marriage contracts enough to know how much I’m worth, and how much less it is than you.”
“That’s not true,” Nic whispered, struggling to swallow the lump building in his throat.
Dashiell pushed away from the door and came to stand before him, to brush a hooked finger down his cheek.
“You’re sweet, but you know it’s true. No amount of success could ever bring the younger son of a baronet near the heir of a duke.
I wasn’t born a man who could ever hope to love you, so I ran. ”
Tears dampened Nic’s eyes. Dashiell’s admission was eating through his anger and flaying him open. Had that been tension he’d felt? The hesitance? Hot and cold blown by the vowsmith’s failing attempt to hide his own desires?
Dashiell spread his arms and let them fall, a defeated gesture with a watery smile. “I’m sorry, Nic. I have treated you abominably. I ought to have told you then, ought to have said goodbye, and I didn’t. Easier to convince myself you felt nothing for me. That it was only my heart I was breaking.”
He gestured toward the rest of the house existing somewhere beyond their golden room.
“And I knew the moment the Serrals came to me that I ought to turn this contract down, but I couldn’t.
I could no more have turned down the chance to see you again than I could have sprouted wings to fly.
I hardly slept for days. I bought a whole new wardrobe.
” He plucked at his now rumpled shirt. “I wanted to be perfect, to impress you, and I walked in and you…” Dashiell huffed another mocking laugh and ran a hand through his dark hair.
“You looked right through me. And when I followed you into the garden that first night, you made it clear you didn’t want me here.
What a fool I was for thinking you might care to know me again. ”
“You broke my heart! I had to protect myself.”
“I know. I know, and when you kissed me… That you’d done so in anger was all that allowed me to pull away, yet I couldn’t help hoping there had been something more.
A hope I dared not even acknowledge because I am not brave like you, Nic.
I’m not. I’m a coward and I hurt you to save myself.
And then I did it again when—fuck, I’m sorry.
” He gripped Nic’s face between his hands and planted tiny kisses over cheeks damp with tears.
“You are so perfect and so precious but even now all I want to do is run because we can’t do this.
I am no more worthy of you now than I was then. ”
“Dash…” Emotion suspended Nic’s voice, the urge to scream at the universe almost overwhelming.
Because Dashiell was right. Nothing had changed.
They had been brought together again for a brief moment, but it was a moment that would end, their lives diverging on separate courses that no power could force together.
Dashiell’s smile grew lopsided, seeming to begin in joy and end in misery. “It’s been a long time since you called me that. Dash. No one else does, you know.”
“I missed you,” Nic whispered, determined to swallow the truth that followed, that soon he would miss him again—the best they could hope for a life of meeting every few years, a love spent in snatches, dried and wasted in absence.
“I missed you too. And I am so sorry, Nic, truly. God, even just my behaviour the last few days has been so selfish.” He pressed a hand to his brow, his eyes squeezed shut as though in pain. “Utterly unforgivable.”
Nic took hold of his face and, drawing him down, kissed his forehead. “Yet you are forgiven. And in truth, mine was not that much better. Just… please don’t make decisions about… about us without me. Don’t let your back be all the conversation I see.”
Us. A word that could encompass so much, yet had to mean so little.
Released, Dashiell nodded and swiped his sleeve across his eyes. “I won’t. I promise. Although it hardly matters when all the us there can be has already passed. Even this now is too dangerous, especially after today.”
After a third body had been sent to the crypt.
Nic wiped a tear from Dashiell’s cheek, somehow holding back his own.
“I know,” he said, because sixteen-year-old Dashiell had been right.
They had no future. They could linger awhile, there in their golden bubble outside of the world, but that would only make it harder to walk away.
Better to stop now before they got tangled any further, before they could share and reminisce and bring life to the impossible.
Nic couldn’t have said which of them moved first; the space between them simply shrank until Dashiell’s nose brushed his, until their lips touched, until Nic clasped Dashiell’s face in his hands and sought to express all he couldn’t say, to retrieve and hold everything they’d been and everything they could ever be in this one final kiss.
A plea that time might cease went unheeded, and when at last they parted to breathe one another’s air, Nic felt exhausted, broken, a crazed piece of glasswork that had miraculously failed to shatter. Yet.
Dashiell held out the key. Long seconds it sat in the palm of his hand, a curse neither wanted to touch.
Brave, Dashiell had called him, yet knowing what it meant, Nic wished he didn’t have to be brave.
That perhaps, just this once, he could have chosen instead to be happy.
But the world outside would listen to no such pleas.
He took the key. And unable to resist the urge, he then took Dashiell’s hand and lifted it to his lips. “Good night, Dash,” he said, planting a light kiss upon his knuckles.
Having been released, the vowsmith’s hand hovered a moment before he let it fall and swallowed hard. “Good night, Nic.”