He looked at her, waiting for her to speak, but she said nothing.Not surprising. I know how she feels, just as I know that this is on me to fix.
“When this marriage began, I told you that all I wished for was a marriage of convenience. I spun you a line about expectation, butting heads with a life I had come to enjoy. I made it seem that the reason I wished for a distant marriage was because of who I am, that I did not want to give up my old life. That of a…” He grimaced. “Well, not a very nice fellow.”
She snorted. “That is one way of saying it.”
“It was hard for me to reckon with this,” he continued, stepping deeper into the room. “That first night especially, I was at pains to control myself. Again, the attraction I found for you…” His eyes flicked over her, pausing on her lips. “I wanted nothing more than to take you in my arms that night and make you my wife.”
“But you didn’t,” she said softly, as if with regret.
“I abstained,” he agreed. “And the reason was that I was scared…” He winced with shame. “I feared that if you and I… if there was more to this marriage than we originally anticipated, it would grow into something else. That we might learn to…” He laughed awkwardly, for he could not believe what he was about to say. “That we might develop feelings for one another.”
She frowned at the admittance. “And that is such a bad thing?”
“I thought so,” he admitted pathetically. “And it was made worse after the Marlow garden party. It was just a single evening, but you saw a side of me – I saw a side of you. It became clear to me that my original fears were justified, which was why I pulled away.”
“Yes…” She bit her lip as she studied him; there was a sense of anger behind her eyes, and he knew why. “You have told me this already. Nothing you are saying is new. But it changes nothing. Not until you tell me why.”
“That is why I am here.”
“Oh…” She blinked in surprise. “You… why? Why then?”
“You are going to think it is stupid.”
She laughed. “Likely. But…” She considered and then rose from the chair. She did not go to him, but that she was standing suggested that she was at least open to hearing the truth. “But I need to hear it, Sebastian. What is more, I sense that you need to say it. Something tells me that you have been fighting this for some time, and me?” She shook her head. “I am just unlucky enough to find myself in the middle.”
He could not help but smile. “I haven’t made it easy, have I?”
She snorted. “That is an understatement.”
He could feel the tension easing between them. He could sense her slowly coming closer, wanting to hear the words and accept them – that dim hope that whatever he told her would explain his situation, and from that they could fix the tear that existed between them.
And I need to believe it too. It is time that I finally left the past where it belongs.
“When you found my mother’s room last week, you asked me why,” he began solemnly. “Why I would keep a room like that. Why I would not decorate the house with her things as any son would surely do.”
“I remember,” she said. “I just assumed… not all sons have close relationships with their mother.”
He smiled. “I did. I loved my mother deeply. She was not just my mother, but my protector. In my eyes, a more perfect woman did not exist. Even my father…” His lips curled. “As cruel a man as existed, but even he could not help but be taken by her spell. She died when I was fourteen, and that room…” He shook his head. “I suppose it keeps me from remembering.”
“You don’t want to remember her?”
“I don’t want to remember what happened after she died,” he said. Then, he took a step closer to Margot, and she did not move back. “My father was always cruel, but he and my mother did love each other, and I never realized how their love kept him in check. I had always assumed that he was miserable, but I knownow that his love for her gave him a reason to live. It kept him sane.”
Her expression turned pained. “And then she…” She swallowed. “She passed?”
He nodded sadly. “It broke him. It shattered him. It turned him from a cruel man into a monster. My father was never one to show emotions, so rather than grieving as one might, he turned his wrath on me. He acted as if her death was my fault…”
“Oh, Sebastian…” She took a step toward him.
“I hated my father,” he said. “And I hated what my mother’s death did to him. Maybe a part of me blamed her. I am not sure. Regardless, it made me realize that love… as glorious as it can be, can be just as deadly.” A shake of the head as the words tumbled from his mouth, as the truth finally came out. “I wanted nothing to do with it. Nothing to do with my father – he always insisted that I wed. But I spurned him, partly to thumb my nose at him, partly because deep down I did not want to suffer as he had done.”
She was looking at him as if seeing him for the first time. “That is why…”
“I ran from love out of fear…” Another step closer, so they were less than three feet apart. “The fear that, as wonderful as love might be, it was fleeting. That it would leave me, and I would turn into my father.” A bitter chuckle. “The irony being that by running from it, I have become him.”
“No, Sebastian. You are not evil.”
“Not evil,” he said with a sigh. “But alone. That was what tore at my father, as it does me. I have been alone for so long, telling myself I am happy, knowing that I am not. But I am sick of it, Margot. I am sick of pretending. I am sick of…” The words caught in his throat.
