He laughed before he kissed her. The laugh came first, genuine and unguarded, and then the kiss, which was brief and real, and neither of them was performing anything at all.
That night, Fitzwilliam stood at the door between their rooms and looked at it.
He had his hand on the handle. He had been standing there for some minutes, which was far longer than was dignified, but dignity had not served him especially well in recent months and he was not inclined to weight it heavily. The question before him was whether this was rushing. Whether, having arrived at the beginning of something this afternoon, he was now proposing to skip several steps.
Whether the door was even unlocked.
He had not tried it. He was thinking about trying it. He was also thinking about the three years on the other side of various doors and oceans, and the kiss they had shared earlier, and the way Lydia had looked up at him afterwards and smiled as she had once smiled at him three years ago on the promenade at Brighton.
His hand was on the handle, and then the handle turned under his fingers, from the other side, and the door opened, and Lydia looked up at him, wide-eyed, with a lamp in her hand and her hair down and an expression that was startled and then, immediately, something else.
She laughed.
Not the composed drawing room laugh, not the careful managed version; the real one, unguarded and bright, the one he had missed ever since Brighton and had been trying to produce for three months. The laugh he had given up trying to produce and had apparently produced anyway by standing on the wrong side of a door long enough for her to open it.
She stepped forward, into his arms, the lamp set aside somewhere. “Richard,” she said, and he kissed her, and there were no more oceans or doors or anything else at all left in between them.
