That’s the trouble. I open my mouth to deliver the lie that would save us both, and what comes out instead is the worst possible truth, which is nothing at all, which is silence, which is my stupid honest face turned up to his.
So he kisses me.
There’s no audience out here, no Bettina, no cameras, no investors, no reason on earth for it except that he wants to and I’ve quit pretending I don’t, and his mouth comes down over mine and his hands leave the rail to frame my face like I’m something that might blow away, and the kiss goes from a question to an answer to something with no punctuation in it at all.
Some small broken noise climbs my throat before I can stop it. His arm bands around my back and gathers me up into him and I let him, I help him, I fist both hands in his shirt and climb, and the heat of it goes roaring through me like nothing I’ve a name for, like nothing I’ve ever in my life stood near enough to need to name.
And it’s that, the sheer uncharted strangeness of it, the black drop of not knowing, genuinely not knowing, what my own body means to do next, that sends a bolt of animal fright clean through the wanting.
I tear my mouth from his.
“Stop.” It comes out cracked, and I don’t mean it, and I mean it with my whole life, both at once. “Stop, I—”
He stops. Just like that, the whole roaring weight of him gone still against me, his hands going loose at my back the instant the word’s out, and the not-knowing rears up huge and dark in the space where his mouth was.
“I can’t.” My fingers are still fisted in his shirt. I notice this distantly, that I’m pushing him off and holding him to me in the same breath, that I can’t make either one obey. “You’ve got to stop, please, before I—”
His forehead drops to mine. He doesn’t pull away, doesn’t push in, just holds there, both of us wrecked and breathing like we’ve run the length of the train, and when he speaks his voice has gone to gravel.
“Tell me what’s wrong.” Not a demand. Almost the opposite. “Blythe. Tell me.”
“It isn’t that I don’t want, you absolute menace. It’s that I—”
And the words are out before my pride can wrestle them down, naked and humiliating and true.
“I’ve never done this before. Any of it. Ever. I’m forty years old and I’ve never once done this, so I need you to stop, before I find out I don’t want you to.”
Chapter Eight
HE DOESN’T LAUGH.
That’s the first of it, the moment I’ll hold onto later when I’m trying to work out how it all happened, that a man who’s spent eighteen years finding me ridiculous looks at me on that rear platform with my confession still hanging in the wind between us and doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t smirk. Doesn’t reach for a single one of the cutting things I’ve armored myself against since I was twenty-one.
He just looks at me for a long moment with something working behind his eyes, and then he says, very quietly, “All right.”
“All right,” I repeat. “That’s it? All right?”
“You told me to stop. I stopped.” He says it like the simplest arithmetic in the world, like a woman of forty announcing she’s never been touched is a thing that happens to him on Tuesdays. “And now I’m telling you something back, so we’re even. Whatever this is, whatever it turns into between here and the coast, there’s a line I won’t cross. Not won’t until you beg. Not won’t unless I forget myself. Won’t. You have my word, and you’ll find my word’s the one thing about me that’s never once been for sale.”
His voice drops, that Greek surfacing in it. “You decide everything else. But that part you don’t have to decide, ever. I’ve already decided it for the both of us.”
And here’s the trouble with a vow like that, the trouble nobody warns a careful woman about. It doesn’t make me feel safe and chaste and relieved. It makes me feel chosen, singled out, set apart, like the one creature in the world too precious to be rushed.
And that’s so much more dangerous than wanting, wanting being an appetite I can name and dismiss, where this, this reverence, this deliberate holding-back arranged around me like he arranged that chair on the porch, this I’ve no argument for at all.
The storm finds us somewhere past the last town, out where the country goes black and enormous on every side.
It comes down out of nothing the way they do out here, the way I’ve watched them come a hundred times over the sanctuary, a wall of weather you can see marching across open ground from miles off.
Except there’s no seeing it tonight. There’s only the sudden roar of it against the carriage, and the train slowing, slowing, and then the conductor’s voice through the wall regretting that we’ll be holding on a siding until the worst of it passes, the line ahead being prone to washing out, and would the guests please make themselves comfortable for the night.
So now there’s a storm, and a stalled train, and one bed, and a man who’s promised me the one thing that could possibly make this unbearable, which is restraint.
We don’t undress. That feels worth admitting too. We lie down on top of the white linen with the rain coming down like the sky has a grievance, both of us in our clothes like two teenagersterrified of a chaperone, a careful foot of expensive cotton between us.
We last, I’d estimate, eleven minutes.
I’m the one who closes the foot.
