“I suppose,” she said.
“You’re drunk,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “And guilty, I suppose.”
“Guilty about what?”
“Because, as you keep pointing out, Fitz, he is dead.” Her voice cracked. “He is dead, my husband is dead, and I am drunk and laughing, and I don’t feel…” She got up from the couch.
He leaned forward.
It was her turn to go to the window now. He could see her dark form against the window, the shape of her. She was a shadow princess, perhaps, or a dark lithe seductress made only of the wisps of magic. She didn’t seem real. Maybe the moment didn’t seem real.
“How do you feel?” he asked her, his voice low and a little rough. In his trousers he was pulsing and eager.
“Glad,” she muttered, and she downed her drink. She turned to face him, but he couldn’t see her features in the dark. “So, that’s really awful, I think, don’t you? I should be punished for such things. I should… I should debase myself in some way, should do something unpleasant and difficult and—”
“Lizzy.” His voice was guttural.
She walked over, leaning over the couch, and set her empty glass down on the end table. Then she straightened, peering down at him.
“You are not going to suckle me as some way to punish yourself,” he said, and he shouldn’t have said that out loud, should not have spoken of her mouth and his body and—
Damnation.
She tipped forward, losing her balance, and then collapsed down onto the couch, next to him. She giggled again. “Oh, dear, I have had far, far too much to drink.”
“Another reason why nothing is going to happen,” he said. “You do not deserve punishment, Lizzy.”
“No, no, it is you, of course, then, who needs punishment,” she said, still laughing. “Because, as we both know,everythingis your fault.”
He groaned. “All right, Lizzy, all right. I do blame myself overmuch, and you are right to tease me for it, but you should not blame yourself.”
“No?” Suddenly, her hands were on him. She was pushing his jacket out of the way. She was trying to get at his trousers.
He could have stopped her easily enough. He was stronger than she was, and it would have been absolutely nothing to bat her small, graceful, feminine fingers away from the falls of his trousers. But he didn’t move at all.
“Have you ever thought about blaming me, Fitz?” she said, and she wasn’t laughing anymore. Her voice had grown low and almost urgent. It was the voice of some siren, he thought.
“No,” he breathed, but this was a lie, because he had blamed her, hadn’t he? He remembered being in that shack and thinking about how she had taken him apart when he proposed, cut him to his quick, and he had wondered how such a self-possessed woman got taken in by Wickham in that way. He had wondered why she hadn’t fought Wickham off. He knew these sorts of things were beneath him, though.
Her fingers nimbly worked at his buttons. “Have you thought to blame me for not accepting your proposal in the first place?”
He only made a noise in the back of his throat, because she was undoing histrousers.
“I acted entirely against my own self-interest, and it was only because I wanted to make you see what it was like for someone to refuse you. It was my prejudice, thinking you needed to be taught a lesson. Was that fair of me, Fitz? Perhaps you could blame me for that.”
His breath was noisy. She was still working at his buttons.
“They do put ever so many buttons on mens’ trousers, don’t they?” she said, finishing one line of them and going on to the other side. “What about when you got me to agree to marry you out in the woods? Then I took it back. Did you ever think of blaming me for that?”
“Lizzy, you… must stop that,” he wheezed.
She paused, meeting his gaze. “Because you don’t like it, Fitz, or because you think it’s wrong to do this to me?”
His lips parted as he tried to answer.
She undid another button. “No one has ever wanted me the way you have wanted me, Fitz, you know? Wanted me in a way wherein there is nothing even in itforhim, where it is all just a sacrifice for my benefit. You get nothing out of it. And this is the only righteous part of you that I find arresting, in the end, this is the part that moves me, and I wish I had noticed it in the beginning, but I didn’t, and I was foolish and I blame myself.”
