Chapter 21 #2
Aurelia nodded slowly at his silent agreement. She looked at the fire for a long moment, then took in a breath and turned toward him.
“Why didn't you tell me? When they arrived, or even before that… It feels important.”
“To you, maybe. I didn’t speak about it because it never occurred to me to speak about it. Perhaps I was wrong about that.”
“Yes,” she said. “To me, you were.”
He looked at her directly. “Then I can only ask for your forgiveness. Perhaps these secrets are what have been keeping you from me.”
She raised a brow, a half-smile pulling at her mouth. “I have not been keeping from you, Evander. By my estimation it has been precisely the opposite.”
Something shifted in her face. She looked back at the fire.
“The house party meant nothing,” he said.
“And anything I have done that you have found disagreeable has not been intentional. I know that is what I am supposed to say, but I am also saying it because it is true. Everything before our marriage only taught me what nothing felt like…” He stopped, considered what he was going to say next, found the rest of it in the part of his mind he tended to the least. “I have been trying to understand the difference ever since. There has been a difference… Am I even making sense?”
She looked at him and shook her head slowly back and forth.
He reached over the space between them and took her hand.
She let him adjust her fingers in his, finding the right way to hold her.
Nike opened one eye and closed it again, leaving them be.
It was the only audience he could tolerate while he made such a fool of himself.
“With you,” he said, “everything is different. So I am sorry for every time I have made it difficult to believe.” He looked at their hands.
“You were supposed to be my brother’s wife.
I was supposed to be with another woman to whom I was indifferent.
The fact that everything has changed, and that what should have been is so vivid in my mind, cemented there by months and years of expectation… I can’t… I cannot…”
“You keep waiting for it to feel wrong,” Aurelia said quietly. “Being with me, I mean. Because of… some moral law? Is that it? You keep waiting for the moment it feels like a transgression, and it doesn't come, and so that confuses you?”
He looked at her, surprised that his eyes were stinging with tears. “Yes,” he said, his voice light and fragile. “Yes, that is exactly it.”
“I know it is,” she said. “I had the same thoughts at first. But to me, they were not nearly as powerful as everything else I have been made to feel in this marriage.” She looked at their joined hands, stroked his knuckles with her thumb.
It almost made him sob. “Frederick never kissed me.
In two months of engagement he never kissed me on the mouth.
I didn't want him to. I understood that about myself quite early on, and I didn't know what to do with it either. You should know that. There has never been… Nothing about what I have experienced with you I have ever experienced before.”
He said nothing, couldn’t speak if he tried. The mere thought of her and Frederick made his head hurt, even if she was saying all the right things.
“There was a moment at his birthday dinner in Kent, the night he proposed to me,” she murmured.
“You came down late – which was so unlike you – and you came into the room in a hurry. I was standing with Frederick.” She stopped, and her jaw worked slightly.
“You were only supposed to be my future brother-in-law. It felt wrong to notice what I noticed. It felt like something expensive but vulgar I had found by accident in a shop, that I should put down immediately and not look at ever again.”
“What did you notice?” he asked.
“That I wanted you to come and stand near me instead of him,” she said.
“That when you looked across the room I hoped you were looking for me specifically, even though I barely knew you. That when you didn't come near me I was disappointed in a way I had no right to be. I told myself it was just nerves about the engagement, about Frederick, about everything. And that you did have this wildness to you, this pull… You were the Duke. Why shouldn’t I have looked at you? I thought it was normal until…”
“Until what?”
“Well, until it happened again and again. Even when I was waiting for Frederick at the altar. And especially when you walked into my aunt's parlour after I was jilted, with that proposition.” A small pause, a smaller smile. “And I thought: oh dear, there it is again. It’s not just his pull. It’s… him and me.”
He looked at her for a long moment. The room had turned warm and still. From outside, a soft breeze shook the window panes indoors. Nike was snoring faintly. The country was otherwise quiet, and the night was dark and starless.
It was not a perfect night, in that sense.
But it didn’t need to be. Because at that moment, she was perfect.
He leaned forward, and he kissed her. It was slow and deliberate.
He knew what he was doing and so did she.
There was no indifference between them, not in the way his lips locked with hers and made his throat close, his body coil pleasantly.
Her hand came up to his jaw, and he stayed there for a long moment before he pulled back.
She looked at him. Her cheeks were flushed. The shawl had slipped off one shoulder and she moved quickly to readjust it. He stopped her hand with his own, slipped the fabric back into place with her, his heart hammering so hard he could hear the blood pumping in his ears.
He slipped his hand up her neck and rested his thumb on her jaw, tilting her head just slightly to indulge himself in the view of her.
His lips found the soft patch of skin beneath her ear, and he kissed her there achingly slow and soft.
She sighed gently, and it was the most wonderful sound he had ever heard – more than the singing thrushes in the morning, the cicadas in summer, which had always been his favourite things.
There was another sound too, the soft creak of floorboards beyond the door, that neither of them heard. Instead Evander rested his forehead against Aurelia’s and breathed deeply.
“If it’s not easy,” she whispered, her breath ghosting against his chin, “that’s all right. It doesn’t need to be easy or natural. I won’t run away if you won’t.”
He nodded, relieved and more thankful for her than he had been for anything in his life. “I can manage that,” he said gently.
“We don’t need to share a bed. We don’t need to spend every moment together, though I may want to..
” She laughed softly. “I understand that laying the idea of a life to rest is not easy. So tonight…” She kissed his cheek and drew back.
“You should rest, and we will talk again in the morning. If that sounds convenable.”
He laughed. “More than convenable.”
“It shouldn’t kill us to be convenable.”
“No,” he agreed. “Not for one night at least.”
“And then tomorrow,” she rose and he missed her presence intently, “we will see whether convenable suits us. And if it doesn’t, that’s all right too. We’’ll make this work, you and I. So long as we stop running.”