She left the bench and curled up in a chair, opening her sketchbook and setting a pencil to an empty page. She watched him as her hand moved deftly across the paper. “Stay still.”
“I’ll try,” he said with a little musical flourish.
“Not like that.” She laughed.
He froze. “Like this?”
“Exactly. Do not move.” Her hand curved and slashed, and her face flew through every expression to match her movements. “I haven’t done portraits in years. I settled into landscapes.”
A portrait had been what she’d won the competition with. “Why?”
Her hand paused. “I don’t know.”
“Are you enjoying sketching me?”
“I rather am.” She seemed to glow. Happiness suited her, and the fact that it was possibly Remmy who made her so happy, well, that suited him.
“You may sketch me as much as you like,” he said. “And once we’re married, you may sketch everyone at the theatre. You can sketch our actors and actresses, and we’ll put the sketches in the playbills. Everyone will love it.” Her sketches might bring in more people than his exploits had. And he’d have to find a replacement for his exploits because those stopped now.
“When we’re married?” The words floated across the room, taking up the space where the music used to be.
He stopped playing. “Of course. That’s what I want. Although you deserve a better proposal. I’ll do it again. With more finesse next time.”
She sat silent and still.
“What’s wrong?” When she didn’t look up from hernotebook, when she didn’t even move, he went to her side and knelt in front of her. “Tell me.”
She wrote on the paper instead, and he watched the curves of her letters as they took shape, gained meaning.
Three choices.
Beneath that she wrote three more words.
Companion.
Tilbury.
Remmy.
He stood rather too abruptly, and the world spun. Three choices, and he was just one of them. He somehow made it to the window and grasped onto the sill as the room continued to spin.
She was his everything and he was just one of three.
“Remmy,” she said softly.
He lifted a hand to cut off whatever she’d been about to say, but when she laid her hand on his back, he bit his tongue to let her speak.
“I think,” she said, a hefty pause between each word, “I want to choose you. In fact, the odds are decidedly in your favor.”
“How’s that?”
“You are two of the three options.”
Ah yes, he was the consolation prize for spinsterhood, too.
He pushed away from her, away from the window. “If you’re not going to choose me, choose something better than a life of celibacy.” He sat back down at the piano, trying not to act like a pouting child. He wasn’t pouting.
He was breaking. He’d given her all he was. And it wasn’t enough. He held his hands above the keys, but no songs came, so he let them drop, barely heard the discordant notes.
