Chapter 11 #2
Aurelia was in the doorway of the shared sitting room, in a light blue night chemise, her hair loose. She held a candle and raised it so she could see. She looked at him across the room and waited.
“I hate storms,” she said. “I hate sleeping alone in it. And I hate men who say things they don’t mean. So now I’m here.”
Evander’s body tightened. He nodded, not dismissing her but not inviting her either, since he had already done that without thinking through it properly.
Just like that, he remembered and realised what had happened: the three weeks of accumulated proximity and his intense desire to kiss her, her hands on the piano keys, the way she laughed when something actually struck her as funny, her doting look from the gate of the Leeder cottage with mud on her skirts and a child on her hip…
All of it arriving simultaneously in his room, where they were alone and the storm was showing no signs of abating.
“Come in then,” he said.
She set the candle on the table and looked at his bed, a large dark thing that had been in this room since the second duke. In Evander's occupancy of the last few years, it had only ever been slept in by him.
“I don't know what I'm doing,” she said, to the bed rather than to him.
“Neither do I,” he said. “Not entirely. Did you think I did?”
“It’s quite easy to mistake everything you say for wisdom. You have that way about you when you speak. Or maybe I’m just gullible. I don’t know. Do you want me to leave?”
She looked at him then, and he thought about what she had said about children, which he had been thinking about at intervals since their wedding.
He wanted her to be here even though it shamed him to think of her in that way.
But he didn’t want that, not with things like this, on a night like this.
It was almost impossible to deny himself her company, the warmth of her body in the bed beside him.
But he didn’t trust himself, he thought, to do something that couldn’t be undone, even though he had proposed it in the first place.
So he got out of bed while she watched him, still in the middle of the room.
He took his pillow and a spare blanket from the table at the foot of the bed and walked to the long upholstered chair by the window.
“You take the bed,” he said, unable to look at her again.
“Evander…”
“I know what could happen. And perhaps you do or perhaps you do not,” he said, which was more direct than he had intended. “And I am not prepared to… I cannot…” He stopped and tried more simply, ignoring the pulsing heat inside him. “You should take the bed and sleep in this room but separately."
“Really?” She observed the long chair for a long moment. “That chair looks extraordinarily uncomfortable.”
“It is. But it doesn’t matter.”
She accepted this. She pulled back the covers of his bed and got in on his usual side, positioning herself and looking at the door.
He arranged himself on the long chair. His feet hung off the end, and the blanket was barely long enough to reach his shoulder.
But it was fine for a night as the storm worked its way around the house.
He closed his eyes and bid the fire she had set to pass.
“I'm sorry,” she whispered after a while. “About earlier. I shouldn’t have attacked you like I did.”
“But you were right,” he said. “I should not have done it. It was not your fault.”
“Then why did you?”
He looked at the ceiling. “Because sometimes I am less than a man who married you out of convenience. I am just a man.”
He heard rather than saw what happened on her side of the room: a small sound, somewhere between a breath and a laugh, that was quickly contained but sad.
He fell asleep eventually, which surprised him. And when he dreamed, the dreams were about her. And when he woke, it was still dark.
It took him a moment to orient himself. The storm had settled into its quiet aftermath, the grounds would have been thoroughly washed.
The room was grey and still. He was cold, which was expected because of the chair, and his neck already complained about the arrangement.
But he was aware, before he had turned his head, that something was different too.
There was more weight on the chair, and something hot against his back specifically. He turned his head slowly, half convinced that this was still a dream.
Aurelia was curled behind him on the long chair, her knees behind his, her face against his shoulder, deeply asleep.
She had brought her pillow. He did not know when she had done this or how, given how narrow the chaise was.
And he didn’t know how he had not woken when she had moved over to him, except that he had been sleeping more soundly than he had in years.
He shifted carefully so as not to disturb her, and looked at her for a long time over the ridge of his shoulder.
Her hair was on the cushion beside it. It had come undone from her braid.
Her breathing was even. She was completely asleep, and in doing so had made herself so completely real and beautiful that he had to look at the ceiling for a moment before he could look at her again.
Evander knew he should move – get up and have the fire made up and maybe be somewhere else when she woke. These were all correct things to do. Instead he reached carefully and pulled the edge of his blanket over her shoulder so it covered them both but not his legs.
She didn't wake and instead shifted slightly closer.
He peered at the morning coming through the window and felt something well in his throat and behind his eyes. What a mess he had made of this. So much had changed in three weeks, and he was going to have to think about all of it eventually when he was alone.
But he was still tired, and there was morning ahead of them. And it wasn’t such a crime, waking up beside her after all.