Emory kissed the tears off her cheeks. “You belong with me. We belong together.”
“Like we have been?”
He stiffened and pulled away enough to look at her. “You mean just us, without all this?”
Emory motioned to the heavenly strum of “Malafemmena”warbling from the great room. When Amelia nodded, he took her hands and hesitated before speaking.
“We can dream about it, a normal life where it’s just us two,” he said, a bit of tenderness before the fall, “but this is who I am and what I have to offer. I’ll give you everything, but I can’t give you that. It’s not how this works.”
“Then how does this work?” Amelia asked in what was clearly a bridge too far.
Emory removed himself from between her legs and paced to the center of the room. With his back to her, he had the answer, and the hollowness in Amelia’s chest warned it would tear her to pieces. Emory turned around and offered it carefully, quietly.
“It starts with you opening your eyes, Amelia. War’s on our doorstep, and we just buried one of our own. I’m needed here now more than ever. This is where I belong.”
Amelia hopped from the hutch and crossed the room. “Me open my eyes?” she asked incredulously.
With the glacial austerity of a bygone era, Emory folded his arms and clenched his jaw.
“Yes. You see what you want, what we’d be if I made this disappear. What makes you think I can do that?”
It had Jack’s fingerprints all over it. No wonder he’d returned victorious while Emory waved the white flag. He was a man at war with himself, and Amelia was collateral in the crossfire as he sorted out his allegiance.
“I had a plan, a life I wanted to live,” Amelia said with anger leaching into her words. The tears she’d fought to hide barreled down her cheeks. “Maybe it wasn’t prestigious or important, but it was the one I chose for myself, and that meant everything to me. And now here I am; lost again and wondering where I fit in. But I don’t fit in because this isn’t where I belong, and you know that.”
Amelia stood before Emory close enough that he could hold her. He didn’t. For all his burning passion, he went cold again.
She pointed to the noise down the hall and said, “Maybe they can’t separate the man you are from the monolith you’ve become,but I can, and I know you don’t belong here either. You can lie to yourself about that, but you can’t lie to me.”
Emory said nothing and refused her stare. It was the double-edge sword of being seen. He rejected the exposure and tended to the gaps in his armor. Amelia reached up and cradled his flushed cheeks.
“I know what I want,” she said. “It’s you. I want you. I want you out and free and mine, but it can’t be like this. You said it yourself. This world tears people apart. It’ll tear us apart.”
Emory relented and drew her close. A defeated smile formed, then promptly faded, but the agony in his eyes was his answer.
“You’re right. It does, and I never want that for you, but I can’t change who I am. I’ve been down this road before, and I know how it ends.”
Eyes glistening, Emory lifted her hand and held it against his chest that rose and fell with a rapid exchange of breath.
“It’s always fallen apart, and I can’t do it again. Not with you. I survived it the other times, but I don’t know if I’d survive it with you.”
In the corner, the parlor clock started its chimes. Emory tensed as he waited for the tolls to end.
“My captains are waiting for me downstairs,” he said and unwound his arm still at the small of her back. “We’ll talk more tomorrow night after everyone’s left. I promise I’ll get you home when it’s safe.That’swhere you belong.”
With that, he kissed her forehead and let her go. Rocked with a sudden wave of nauseous heat, Amelia closed her eyes and shook her head.
“You said I belong with you, that we belong together,” she cried, humiliated again at the swiftness of her tears and how childish she must seem.
Emory dropped his eyes as he reached the door, and he too seemed to straddle a divide that was ripping him apart. He glanced at the hall and then Amelia, weighing his options, and she wished he wouldn’t.
She’d done that before too and stitched her heart to her sleevewhere it went rejected. Unlike him, though, she’d do it again and again, no matter how much it hurt because some sweet day it’d be worth all the pain.
“We do belong together, sweetheart,” he said with infuriating sterility that gave her nothing. No tears shed. No hurt to share. “We met at the wrong time is all.”
Is that all?
Amelia bit her lip and put on a charade of strength with a hopeless nod. She watched him leave in case he relented. He didn’t, of course. Emory retreated from the room as everything they could’ve been spoiled on the vine.
