I understood what he was waiting for.
He was waiting for the step. He was waiting for the small uncoerced articulated motion of a body moving toward him by its own decision.
I gave it to him, moved in closer, so close I could smell him. That warm, clean, metallic smell, spice underneath it, passion, forbidden lust, all mixed together.
His left hand came up.
He tilted my face up.
The mercury of his eyes. The pale gold along the cheekbone. The mouth I had not, until this moment, allowed myself to look at directly.
He kissed me.
It was not soft. It was the kiss of a man who had waited centuries for a mouth and had decided, on arriving at it, that the mouth would not be made small by the wait. Hot. Precise. Without theater. With absolute attention to the load-bearing point—the lower lip, the place where the lower lip met the upper, the small soft inside corner where the breath came out—and he found the load on the first try, the way he had found the line in another woman’s book with his thumb, and he held it.
I opened on the second pull.
The mirrors took us.
The mirrors took us from every angle, and because I had walked into a gallery mirrored on both walls, there was no panel I could look at that did not show me a woman in a charcoal shirt being kissed by a man in a long black coat. The panel directly beyond his right shoulder gave me the side of him and the front of me—the long line of his jaw under the pale gold, the small shocked open of my mouth on his. The panel beyond my own right shoulder gave me the back of him and the front of me—the spread of his gloved hand at the base of my skull, the tendons of my own neck. The polished black ceiling above us, which I had not, until now, registered as mirror, gave me the long line of the two of us from above, his gloved hand a black star at the back of my head, my own hands rising slowly into the front of his coat.
I did not look away.
The sigils along the inside of my left forearm, under the long charcoal cuff, flared gold.
I felt them go before I saw them. The cold seam went warm in one long unbroken pull, the way the wick of a lamp takes oil, and the gold ran the length of my forearm up under the cuff and into the back of my hand and into the fingers that were, at this moment, fisting in the front of his coat.
My knees gave.
They did not buckle. He felt it—I felt him feel it—and he did not hold me up. He went down with me. He went down with the same unhurried discipline with which he had crossed the gallery, both of us lowering together along the long axis of his arm, the gloved hand still at the back of my skull, the right hand still at his side, and the floor of the gallery—black, mirrored, cool—came up and met our knees.
We were kneeling.
Both of us, in the middle of the narrow mirrored gallery, kneeling. The mirrors took it from a hundred angles. The man in every panel held the woman in every panel by the back of herhead and kept his right hand at his side, and the woman in every panel had her hands fisted in the front of his coat, and the gold along her left forearm ran under her cuff, and her mouth was open on his.
I pulled him into me.
Both fists in the lapels.
The sound broke him.
He made a sound back—small, low, almost inaudible, the sound of a man losing a hand of his discipline—and pulled back.
An inch.
He did not let me go. He simply lifted his mouth one inch off mine and brought his forehead down to my forehead, and the bone of his brow met the bone of my brow, and the pulse at the base of my throat hammered against the underside of his jaw.
He breathed.
I breathed.
The mirrors held us there.
“Rachel.”
I felt his need, his want.
“I cannot have you like this,” he said. “Not yet.”
