“How very flattering of him,” Griffin returned, her voice dry as the desert. She reached out one booted toe and knocked a moth into the box nearest her. “So why is it a problem?”
Because I know I’ll feel mortified if my husband and the woman I’m desperately lusting after are sleeping beneath the same roof.“Because I wanted to invite you and your family to come stay with me for the Christmas holiday.”
Griffin considered this. “And now you won’t have the room?”
Penelope swatted at more moths. “No, I just... I wasn’t sure you’d still want to come, if Harry and John were here, too. You’ve never met them, after all.” She sighed. “This isn’t at all how I imagined our conversation going.”
Griffin sat up, hands gripping the arms of the chair. “Flood, do you like your husband? I know you don’t love him—but do you enjoy his company? Do you find him a pleasant, sociable man in general?”
“I do.”
“Do you think he’ll dislike me, or Sydney? Or that we’ll dislike him?”
Penelope snorted, and carefully poked the fuzzy back of a lunar underwing to move the creature away from the trap. “Oh, he and Sydney will take to each other like two political ducks. John has very definite opinions about the Combination Laws that he will be only too happy to expound upon at some length.”
“Then is it your brother who’s the problem?”
“No, damn it all, it’s me!”
Griffin snapped her mouth shut, blinking. The silence of the night slammed down again, leaden and thick.
Penelope blew out an exasperated breath, and lowered her voice again. God, she was bad at untangling things. The secret of what she most refused to say burrowed beneath her skin like a worm in an apple.
But she had to try and explainsomething: Griffin was looking at her too closely, and Penelope had never been very good at subtlety or subterfuge. “When I was young...” she began, swallowed hard, and held out her hand.
Griffin gave her the brandy at once.
Penelope took a long draft, and braced herself. “When I was young, the house was always full of people, all of whom were older and bigger and busier than me. So I got used to just... going along with someone else’s idea of what we ought to be doing at any moment. Didn’t matter whether it was my mother, my father, any of my siblings. Or later, the vicar or Joanna or Isabella. I found myself behaving a little differently, depending on who I was with and what made it easiest for them to overlook me, or be amused by me, or not ask me to leave. The more I loved someone, the more I worked to please them—and the harder it was for me when pleasing one person meant disappointing someone else.”
Another flick of the switch, another moth into the box.
Griffin’s mouth had gone somber, the lip of the flask resting thoughtfully against one lip.
Penelope went on. “I wasn’t conscious of this for a long while, of course—and then I assumed it was something everyone did, if I thought about it at all. One by one, my siblings moved away. Owen died, then my parents. I started doing the bee circuit, as more and more families struggled to keep their homes. I got used to being on my own, to being myself. And then I married John.”
Griffin held out her hand; Penelope passed over the brandy.
She continued her story as Griffin raised the flask to her lips. “We only lived together for six months, but it was unpleasant in a way that took me at least that long again to understand. I had never been half of a pair before—not the kind of pair people could acknowledge, anyway.”
Griffin choked on the brandy.
Penelope chewed on her lip. She certainly wasn’t going to get intothattonight as well. One shameful confession per evening was more than enough, thank you very much. She hurried on. “Every time we went out, to church or the Four Swallows or anywhere, someone would make a perfectly ordinary remark—I knew how a wife was supposed to behave to her husband, and I knew how John and I behaved as friends, but because those things were different I wouldn’t be able to do anything. It was like my heart was a rope pulled in two directions at once. It tied me right up: I couldn’t move; I couldn’t speak. So I’d sit there, silent and sweating into my delicate Sunday gloves. For six months’ worth of Sundays.”
“That sounds terrible,” Griffin said.
“It was.” Penelope pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders, fending off the night’s chill. “It was easier with friends, somehow—you introduce your friends to each other, and then they become friends, and you don’t get pulled apart. But a husband? There was... a sense of being watched, as if every word and gesture meant something different and particular than what I intended. As if all my eccentric behavior reflected on him, too. It froze me right up, and I could tell John noticed and felt hurt by it, and then he and Harry left—but the next time they came back it happened again, but worse. It was years before I was able to put words around what I felt was happening.”
“That you weren’t good at being a wife in name only?”
Penelope stared into the burning heart of the light trap. “That I don’t always know who I am supposed to be.”
Griffin, bless her, didn’t scoff. She turned this over, while moths blissfully flirted with the flame. Blades of grass stood out sharply in the flickering, ghostly night. “What about those lovers you mentioned? Was it different with them?” One corner of her mouth lifted. “You were very emphatic about having been fucked, Flood.”
The way her voice turned low and smoky on the wordfucked—it made Penelope want to rub herself against it like a cat, and set up a thrumming heat low in her belly. “We were always discreet,” she said.And all women, was the thing she carefully didn’t say. “It didn’t feel like the same pressure, even when we were together amid larger, louder groups. Nobody knew, so we weren’t...consideredin the same way.”
Griffin snorted. “Because nobody ever notices illicit love affairs.”
Penelope laughed in spite of herself. “There wasn’t much time for anyone to notice anything: they were all very brief liaisons. Maybe I only have trouble with long connections.” She sobered. “Maybe I’m just not the sort of person who inspires a lifetime’s worth of passion.”
