“I know why you won’t say my name.”
And just like that he was rigidly wary. How about that. Drunk Keating was also dangerous.
Because an epiphany arrived like a slap: he suddenly realized why he wouldn’t say it, too.
Damn her and her unnerving astuteness all cunningly disguised in beautiful softness.
He felt cornered.
“Say it now,” she suggested softly. Insistently.
How ridiculous would it be if he refused? Or blustered and obfuscated? He was capable of arguing nearly anyone into the ground. He knew he wouldn’t do it to her, however. He just hadn’t it in him to lie to her.
After a moment he said, “Catherine.”
He felt at once raw and exposed. Because they both heard it: the softness, bordering on shyness. It was how the word would sound if he murmured it to her while she was one pillow over. The way he would speak to a woman he knew intimately, and cared for, and desired.
Stripped of glibness or caution or formality. Purely himself.
He knew he would never be able to say it another way.
The casual, chummy “Keating” was a sort of wall he’d instinctively erected between them from the very first.
As if there had ever been any safety behind it for him.
She would have been entitled to do it, but she didn’t raise her eyebrows.
But her expression was complicated: hurt and sympathetic, sorrowful and confused.
He felt as though his chest might crack in two. It ached from a sort of stifled, resentful fury at being stripped bare in a ballroom.
Finally, she said, “Horse Chestnut?” As she would turn to him and say, “Dominic?”
Drunk Keating was turning out to be one of his favorite things in the world. Also the most terrifying.
“Yes?” he said tersely.
“People fight when they’re afraid, is that not so? Isn’t that what you said?”
“That sounds like me.”
“But... you fight all the time.” She said it as though it had only just occurred to her.
He was speechless.
“What would happen if you didn’t fight everything?” It sounded like a serious question.
He stared at her. He could not think of a single thing to say.
But she moved away from him swiftly when she saw her dancing partner heading toward her.
She put on a bright smile for the young man.
Kirke remained frozen for a time, for a moment, unseeing.
And for the next few minutes, out of the corner of his eye, everywhere in the ballroom, it seemed, was goldenrod. Like the sun always rising on the periphery of his vision.
Chapter Seventeen
