Then Isobelle’s fingers shifted slightly. The balled-up fists were gone—her slender hands had turned to cup Gwen’s in hers. Isobelle’s skin was warmer now, warmer in fact than her own. And it was Isobelle offering her that warmth.
Gwen kept her eyes on those hands, not sure she could tell Isobelle the truth if she had to watch each shift of her expression while she did. This was not a story you told to someone you wanted to... someone you wanted to respect you.
“The girls at the tea party,” Gwen managed finally. “When they asked if I’d ever kissed anyone? When I said no, I was giving them Céline’s answer. Not mine.”
Isobelle just waited, while the wind and the trees and the moon formed patterns on her skin for Gwen to focus on.
“She was only interested in me when she was fighting with her boyfriends. I knew she was only trying to make them jealous, but I kept thinking... every time she came to me, I thought maybe it was different.” Gwen shook her head, as much to buy herself time to breathe as to comment on her own foolishness. “It worked every time. She’d always make sure to let them see her kiss me. And they’d come sprinting back.”
Isobelle’s hands had gone still under hers. “And where did that leave you?”
“Waiting for their next fight, I suppose. I should’ve been stronger and stopped letting it happen, but...” Gwen lifted a shoulder, a trickle of shame coursing through her, making it hard to speak. “I did overhear her explaining it to one of them, though, and that’s what ended things between us once and for all. Just a bit of fun, I heard her tell him. A little show.” Gwen paused, snatches of that ill-fated tea party with Isobelle’s friends flashing through her mind.Then, softly, she added, “She called it practice.”
Isobelle uttered a soft sound, shades of feeling in it too numerous for Gwen to unpack. When Gwen raised her eyes, finally, Isobelle was studying her, her own eyes widened with sudden understanding, scanning Gwen’s features as if seeing her anew.
“You were right,” Isobelle said finally, her normally smooth and well-practiced voice low and a little rough. “What you said, after the tea party—you were right. When someone kisses you, it should be because they want to. Need to. Because they can’t take another second wondering, dreaming, about what it would be like.”
Gwen held very still—Isobelle had remembered every word she’d said that night. Fear told her to drop her eyes, to pull away, lest Isobelle see the truth of what she wondered and dreamed about—see how easily and deeply she could hurt Gwen if this fragile dance of theirs fell apart. Fear told her to end it herself, one way or another, before Isobelle could.
Instead Gwen sat, unmoving, watching Isobelle’s eyes, turned pale silver in the moonlight, the flutter of the pulse at her throat, the tiny sound her lips made when they parted. She saw Isobelle’s gaze dip, saw her breath quicken as she watched Gwen’s mouth.
The realization came, not like a bolt of lightning, but like the slow unclenching of tense muscles at the end of a long day—the soft and subtle remembering of home and safety, and of beingenough. Gwen felt something come free in her chest, a band of tightness she hadn’t noticed until suddenly she could exhale again with her full lungs, with her whole body.
It left her full and aching, the realization that Isobelle was longing to kiss her, too.
Isobelle’s hands were shaking a little, where they rested againstGwen’s. Her breathing was uneven. Uncertainty and confusion clouded the silver moonlit gaze.
She was scared. Her Isobelle, frightened. Or if notfrightened,at least... unsure. Caught up in something moving far too quickly for her, a wild horse of feeling and emotion, galloping out of control with no ravine to direct its course.
Gwen closed her fingers around Isobelle’s hands again, waiting until they calmed. She let out a long, slow, audible breath, until she felt Isobelle do the same, mirroring her body language automatically. Another breath, letting the tension singing between them drain, letting them both step back from the precipice.
When Isobelle’s eyes finally met hers, Gwen raised her eyebrows and gave her a smile. “It’s getting late,” she murmured. “I guess we should start making our way back before anyone notices you’re not there?”
Gwen had meant to make it a suggestion—to show Isobelle they could walk up to this cliff’s edge as many times as they needed to before she was ready to leap. Instead it was a question. Instead, it left room for Isobelle to make her own choice.
Isobelle took a tiny step back. When Gwen slid forward, she could feel a place on the stone where Isobelle’s thighs had pressed, warming the rock even through her skirts.
“Itisgetting late.” Isobelle turned to look back the way they’d come. The distant glow of the village bonfire was hidden by the trees, though it wouldn’t take long to retrace their steps back toward their abandoned finery.
“We’ll have to go back and get our dresses from the smithy,” Isobelle went on with a sigh. “And think of a reason why we took so long. And...” Her voice petered out.
Even though Gwen had made that choice to step back with Isobelle, and leave that cliff behind them for a while, her heart was still sinking. Despite her noblest intentions, she longed to stay in this place for a little while longer, where they were both free of their masks. To walk along the cliff’s edge, at least, even if they weren’t ready yet to leap.
Isobelle’s gaze swung back toward the creek, and then sidelong up to Gwen’s face. “Or... we could just keep walking?”
Gwen managed, with great difficulty, to answer in an even tone despite the thudding of her heart. “Or we could just keep walking.”
Isobelle tucked her arm through Gwen’s, and they kept walking. The silence between them hung like a warm, woolen wrap, comfortable and easy. Summer was coming to an end, and though the air was still balmy, there was the slightest hint of a sharper chill behind it, like an actor just offstage waiting to make her dramatic entrance.
By the time they reached the point where the creek joined up with its neighbor to form a wider stream, the breeze above the treetops had finished chasing the patchy clouds away from the full moon and had begun to sweep down into the forest, whistling through the trees. Isobelle gave a little shiver, and Gwen felt it as if her own body were chilled. Automatically, she turned her steps east, a path that would eventually bring them back to the road connecting the castle with the surrounding villages.
Isobelle glanced at her and then back at the stream, her steps slowing.
“You’re not cold?” Gwen said, and then cleared her throat, surprised to realize how long it had been since either of them had spoken.
Isobelle quirked a smile. “I am, a little, but...” She glanced back down the course of the stream, which joined with the river not too far away. The trees thinned out ahead, and with the full moon the meadows and more solitary trees beyond the thicker woods were visible. “Can we go see that massive tree? What kind of tree is that?”
Gwen already knew which tree she meant—the most ancient one in this part of the forest, standing alone in a field that bloomed furiously with wildflowers in spring. “It’s an oak,” she supplied as Isobelle tugged her onward.
