Chapter Thirty-Four
It didn’t feel the way it had with Jem.
When Jem had kissed her, it had felt like a calculation.
A courtesy. A chaste brush of his lips that’d left Ava feeling as though she were standing in a slant of winter sunshine, wishing for warmth.
But back then, she’d not had anything to compare it to.
Jem was the first man – the only man – who’d ever kissed her, and so she could tell herself that love wasn’t fire.
That it wasn’t supposed to burn, and as long as you stood in its light, that was good enough.
Now she knew she was wrong.
Each movement of Damien’s lips against hers gripped her like a fever, hot and prickly and fast. There was nothing careful in his kiss, nothing calculated in the way his thumb brushed her cheek.
And then she remembered what had come afterwards. The way Jem had looked at her, when he’d stood on her doorstep. How he’d flinched from her, and the fluttering in her stomach had turned to twisting prickles. How her shame had grown thorns and lodged itself deep in her gut as he’d walked away.
And fear coiled within her anew.
‘Damien—’ She pulled back, heart thrumming in her throat.
‘Forgive me,’ he said – his eyes wide, his voice ragged. ‘That was …’
A mistake. He did not say it – but she could hear the words in the way his voice caught in his throat, and she found she couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t look anywhere but out – towards the roiling river, each wave a mirror for the sickening sloshing in her own stomach.
‘I’m sorry,’ he finished.
Ava’s hand curled around the railing, the iron cold beneath her gloves.
For if she accepted his apology, she would be admitting that what’d passed between them – that brief, bewildering moment – had been a misstep.
And yet if she didn’t accept his apology, she would be admitting it’d meant something.
And she wasn’t sure she could bear that, either. Because then she would be opening the same door she’d tried so desperately to close after Jem, and she wasn’t sure … she wasn’t sure she could do that again.
‘I shouldn’t have …’ Damien began – and then he stopped himself, shaking his head. ‘You were upset, and I-I shouldn’t have – Ava … I didn’t think.’
‘I don’t believe either of us did,’ she said feebly, for she had no idea how to turn the maelstrom of thoughts in her mind into words.
‘But I do not wish to mar our progress – with your sessions, I mean. If this arrangement we have is going to work, perhaps we have to be – perhaps we have to keep this—’
She glanced up at him then and saw how his lips had pressed into a thin, steady line.
‘… within its bounds,’ she finished.
‘Within its bounds …’ he repeated, his tone odd. Detached. ‘Yes.’
‘I feel as though we’ve taken a step forwards each time,’ she said, the words coming faster now. ‘And I do not want us to unravel that. I do not want to—’
Unravel again. Like I did, with Jem.
For a moment, they were both silent – the only sound coming from the river, the low groans of tugboats pulling at their mooring, the rhythmic slap of waves against the docks.
‘You should go,’ she said, her voice low.
They were only three words – but she saw them land. Saw the brief flicker in his expression – hurt – masked quickly with something else. Something sharper.
‘Is that what you want, Ava?’
For a moment he didn’t move. He stayed there, beside her, for one breath, two.
‘It’s for the best,’ she said – not daring to look at him again. And so, she didn’t see the way his expression softened before he reached to press the umbrella into her hand.
‘I’m sorry, Ava,’ he said.
And then he turned and walked away.