Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
“I’ll think about it,” she says, her fingers twisting together in front of her, knuckle over knuckle. “Tonight. Can I think tonight, and tell you in the morning?”
“That’s a reasonable request,” I tell her, and I mean to leave it there, the responsible thing said and the door to it left standing open. I tell her to rest. I pour two fingers of something I don’t especially want into a heavy glass and carry it to the far windows, putting the whole width of the room between us, and I let her go down the hall to shower, and I make the single error of the evening, which is believing the hard part of the night is behind me.
Then she comes back in silk.
I don’t know whose idea the nightgown was. Hers, or some well-meaning aunt who packed a trousseau for a marriage that was supposed to be a performance. It hardly matters. What matters is that she stops in the mouth of the hallway when she finds me still awake at the glass, and her whole face goes shy, color climbing up her throat into her cheeks, and underneath the shyness is the one thing she hasn’t yet learned the trick of hiding. She is looking at me the way I have spent six months refusing to admit I wanted to be looked at. Helplessly. As though the wanting embarrasses her and she can’t make it stop.
I should send her down the hall. The words are right there, cold and serviceable. Go to bed, Camilla. We’ll talk in the morning. Eight words, and I have built an entire life on my ability to say the disciplined thing in the place where the wanted thing lives.
What I do instead is set the glass down on the sill and crook a single finger toward her.
It isn’t a decision. I want to be clear with myself about that, here, while honesty is still on the table between us. It is the opposite of a decision, the one thing my whole discipline was built to prevent, and it slips the leash anyway, one small motion of one finger, and across the room her breath catches audibly and the pink in her cheeks deepens into something I feel answer low in my own chest.
She crosses to me slowly. Every step its own small argument, and I can watch her losing it the way I have already lost mine. I see the exact moment her body remembers to be bashful and nearly turns her back toward the safety of the hall. Her hands knot in the silk at her sides. Her gaze drops to the floor, lifts to my face, drops again, as though she can’t work out whether looking at me makes the wanting better or worse. A braver woman would have crossed the room in four strides. A colder one would never have left the doorway at all. She does neither. She wars with herself the whole short distance, flushed and shy and entirely unable to pretend she’d rather be anywhere on earth than here, and somehow that artless little struggle undoes me more completely than any practiced confidence could have.
I’ve had wives of a sort before. Not wives. Arrangements. Women as fluent in the terms as I was, who understood to the letter what was being traded and asked for nothing the contract didn’t name, and walked away clean when the term ended because neither of us had ever once pretended it was anything more. I have been comfortable in that whole cold economy my entire adult life. Not one of those women ever crossed a room to me as though it cost her something to do it. Not one of them ever blushed. She doesn’t know the terms. That is the thing that guts me, standing here watching her come. She is looking at me as though I’m a thing she wants and not a thing she has bargained for, and I haven’t the first idea in the world what to do with being wanted that way.
By the time she’s near enough that I can feel the warmth coming off her bare arms, I’ve stopped pretending either of us means to win.
I curve my hand around the back of her neck, her skin cool and her pulse going hard under my thumb, and she trembles, and it isn’t fear. I’d know fear. I’ve caused enough of it to tell the two apart in the dark. This is the other thing. The thing I’ve had no business turning over in my mind for half a year.
“If I touch you,” I tell her, and my voice has dropped lower than I meant to let it, “there’s no going back. I’ll see you as mine. And I’m not a man who shares what’s his.”
She catches her lower lip between her teeth, her gaze fluttering downward.