She came into the dim light glowing from the deck above. She was dressed in pajamas now, her face scrubbed clean, and she was no less beautiful for it. Brave for standing there, facing him in spite of what he’d said. “I don’t want to fight with you,” she said.
“There may be no other option for us,” he said.
“But why? We’ve always been important to each other, and everything is going to change. So why can’t we be like we’ve always been to each other now.”
“You do not always touch me,” he said.
“No,” she agreed, sounding subdued. “I don’t have to do that again.”
“I will need you tonotdo it again.” His voice was hard, and he was aware of what he’d done here. That with this statement he’d exposed himself. His desire for her.
“Okay.” She came and sat down in the chair next to his, her hands folded in her lap. “Look. I’m behaving myself.” Her smile was almost impish, and it made the desire inside him rage.
He did his best to keep it on the inside, to not let it show. A memory rose to the surface, and he decided to speak it aloud. Anything to crush the desire that was threatening to stage an uprising inside him.
“I was on a lower deck when the ship began to sink when I was a child. And I remember the water coming in from above. Beginning to fill up the room. If we hadn’t been able to get to higher ground, we would’ve drowned then and there. I don’t like the feeling of being trapped in small spaces, and I particularly don’t like it when there is water all around. I am happy to sleep up here.”
“Oh. I’m so… Sorry. I don’t think we’ve ever talked about what you remember from that day.”
“Because none of the memories are good.”
“I know. But have you ever talked about it with anybody?”
“No. I remember everything about the shipwreck, until I passed out from not being able to breathe in the water. But I remember fighting with the water. I remember being certain that I was going to die, that the ocean was going to swallow me whole. I could hear the crew, my parents, other passengers, screaming before they went under.” She had asked, and so he was telling her, though there was no purpose to any of it. To either being cold to her or kind to her, because none of it would change anything.
None of it would change what he had to be to her, what she was intent on doing.
“I’m so sorry. I would touch you, but I’m forbidden from doing that.”
“Yes,” he said, his voice rough. “You are.”
“I think that if you weren’t here I would be very scared,” she said. “I think if I were doing this on my own… I would do it. I’m the one who signed the papers. I’m the one who made the agreement. I would do it. But you don’t know how much you being here matters to me. To think that all those years ago I could have lost you in the bottom of the sea…”
“You have to have me to lose me, Emerald. And it isn’t like that between us.”
He was being cruel to be kind.
Perhaps he was just being cruel to protect himself. As deadly as it was to want her, the deeper, emotional need for her was almost worse. He needed her to not touch him.
It would shatter him. Everything that he was, everything that he had styled himself to be.
“I don’t have you?” She squinted, looking at him as though she were trying to see him from a great distance. As though he were difficult to see clearly. “Yes, I do. You are with me all the time. Every day. You are my silent shadow, standing behind me, ready to put your life on the line for me.”
“For the Crown.”
“So, is it only my brother that you care about? Or is it the position. Your loyalty and allegiance to my parents, even in death.”
“All of those things.”
“But not me?”
“Not in the way that you are asking.”
He stood, but so did she. “Andrei,” she said. “I’m doing this for the country. Because this has always been my fate. There has never been another path for me. Just like Onyx.”
“I know that,” he said. “I know that. You must marry royalty, you must marry for the good of the Crown. Just as I must not marry, also for the good of the Crown.”
“And is that all we are?”
