Later, much later, when the house was quiet and Mrs. Bennet had finally exhausted her raptures, Elizabeth found Darcy in the Longbourn garden. He was standing by the low stone wall, looking out across the fields toward Oakham Mount, and in the fading light he looked less like the imperious master of Pemberley and more like a man who had been in a fight he did not know how to win.
She had not meant to come outside. She had meant to go to her room, to close the door, to think. But her feet had carried her here, to this garden, to this man, as though her body knew something her mind refused to admit.
"Mr. Darcy."
He turned. "Miss Bennet."
The formality was a wall between them, deliberate and necessary. She stopped three feet from him, close enough to see the tension in his jaw, far enough to maintain the fiction that proximity meant nothing.
"I wanted to say --" She paused. What did she want to say? That she was sorry? She was not. That she forgave him? She had not. That the kiss had been -- what? A mistake? An inevitability? The most honest thing that had happened to her in twenty years of life?
"You do not need to say anything," he said.
"I know. But I find that silence between us is -- difficult."
He looked at her then, really looked, and what she saw in his face made her chest ache: a vulnerability so raw it should have been hidden, a wanting so evident it should have been shameful. He did not look like a man who had offered marriage out of duty. He looked like a man who was burning and had no hope of rescue.
"I will do everything in my power to make this bearable for you," he said. "I know this is not what you wanted."
"What I wanted is immaterial now."
"It is not immaterial to me."
She stared at him. The garden was darkening around them, the roses losing their color in the twilight, the stone wall fading to grey. In the house behind them, a lamp was lit in the drawing room, casting a square of gold across the grass.
"Goodnight, Mr. Darcy," she said, because she could not stand here any longer, watching him look at her like that, feeling her treacherous body pull toward him like a compass toward north.
"Goodnight, Miss Bennet."
She walked back to the house. She did not look back. If she had, she would have seen him standing at the wall for a long time after she left, his hands braced against the stone, his head bowed, the evening closing around him like a fist.
In her room, in the dark, Elizabeth pressed her fingers to her lips and felt the ghost of his mouth.
She did not sleep for a very long time.
Chapter 3: Terms of Engagement
"He kissed you."
Jane said it the way she said everything: gently, without judgment, as though the words were made of something that might break if handled roughly. They were sitting on Elizabeth's bed, the door closed against the chaos of Longbourn's morning, their voices low enough that even Kitty, who had perfected the art of eavesdropping through keyholes, would hear nothing.
"He kissed me," Elizabeth confirmed.
"And you kissed him back."
Elizabeth pulled at a loose thread on her quilt. "I did."
"Lizzy." Jane's hand found hers. "What did it feel like?"
The question was so Jane -- not what happened or what were you thinking but what did it feel like -- that Elizabeth almost laughed. Almost. The laugh caught somewhere in her chest and became something else, something that burned.
"Like falling," she said. "Like stepping off a cliff and discovering, halfway down, that I did not want to stop."
Jane was quiet for a moment. Then: "That does not sound like a woman who despises the man she is engaged to."
"I do despise him. He is proud, and superior, and he looks at our mother as though she were a species he has not yetclassified. He insulted me the first night we met. He has spent every encounter since then cataloguing my family's deficiencies with those terrible, watchful eyes."
"And yet."
