I recoiled from him and did not meet his eyes. I did not want to see what was in them. Scorn would not have surprised me, nor disgust, although I imagined he would have tried to hide those for my sake. Kindness would have broken me, as would pity.
“What is the matter?” he asked.
“I am ashamed,” I said.
“You should not be,” he said.
He took my face in his long hands, closing it in like the frame around his old oil painting. I dreaded to think what I must look like, so encircled, and I pressed my eyes tighter shut. He stilled, however, and stayed unmoving for so long that, unwilling, my eyes started to open of their own accord.
I saw none of what I had feared. He looked back at me, open-faced, and, once again, there needed to be a new word for looking that didn’t just mean eyes pointed in a direction, because this new look, like the very first, reached down into my gut, turned me inside out, and made me someone different and surprising.
I had thought, before this, all the times I had imagined this, that his being so well formed would look laughable beside my poor body, a body that I had been told so often with words and with glances was ugly, pitiable, even disgusting. But now I found that nothing of the sort was true.
When I reached for him and touched the smooth, white plane of his stomach, he shivered. I could not believe that I—I, Foss! Foss Butcher!—could produce such an effect. It made me feel more powerful than the king himself, knowing that I could touch Sylvester and make him tremble with wanting me.
“Wait,” I said, as his hands traveled the length of my legs.
He paused.
“Just . . .” I said weakly.
“You are beautiful,” he said, and pressed his mouth to the inside of my ankle, then my knee, leaving bright flowers of sensation wherever he kissed.
“I have never done this before,” I confessed.
“Nor I,” he said, and did not stop.
I finally saw what my body could be for, other than a clumsy sack for bundling up my innards. It responded so sweetly, so neatly, that it was hard to remember how ugly I had always felt. How ugly I thought the world had always found me.
I had experienced pleasure before, of course, at my own hand, but comparing that to this was like comparing a lone flute to the whole orchestra playing together, singing and strumming and drumming and all. And no edge of shame or anger to it either, as there had been on my own, when I knew that the things I was picturing would never really happen to me.
Even inside my own head, when I had imagined myself receiving pleasure, I had pictured myself as different—smaller, prettier, a different person altogether. There was no need for that now. I was myself only, and wholly myself, and he was himself, and we were together, traveling upward together in excited discovery toward some new, sweet landing place that would leave us both breathless.
My imaginings of it had all been exterior, from the outside looking in, which is perhaps why I had been so nervous about the real thing.
I had not expected the startlinginteriorityof it. It was like the House, opening new rooms inside me in unexpected places. Inside me were whole worlds, it turned out, that people like Aron and his friends had never imagined.
I felt dizzy standing on the edge of my known self and looking into that vastness, seeing all the pinpricks of light that were little points of pleasure, placed all along every limb and nerve. The sorcerer worked a kind of magic in me, bringing all those separate lights together into one.
I was still not sure if he was entirely human, but all that meant was that we were discovering this together, how skin yielded to skin and opened, and I felt for the first time that I was made right, fit for my purpose, entirely well designed and engineered.
My hair was damp at the temples, and so was his. I was not aware of myself as ugly or beautiful, nor him. We were two creatures differently formed—unusually formed, maybe—but one no more wrong than the other.
I laughed, to feel myself so free.
22
I woke in the morning feeling both comfortable and excruciatingly uncomfortable all at once. The discomfort came from the hard, cold ground that seemed to have fused the bones of my hips together, and the prickle of sharp grass against any patch of exposed skin—of which there was rather a lot more than usual, for me.
The fire had long died, and all that was left was a brave, orange smolder, like a half-open eye in the soapy mess of the ashes. The smolder and I stared at each other as I came back to consciousness, and took stock of my surroundings and inventory of my body, making sure that all bits were present and accounted for.
The comfort that I felt, despite the cold and the aches from sleeping outside, came from Sylvester. His long, smooth body was wrapped around mine as neatly as if I were a parcel of herbs and he the string that tied it.
I felt the rise and fall of his chest against my spine, and the warm curl of his hips against my buttocks—and something else that made me blush to think about.
He had drawn my petticoat up over us in the night, but it had slipped down and now covered only the lower parts of our legs, leaving the rest exposed. I reddened, despite myself, and squirmed a little, and felt him huff out a breath against the nape of my neck as my movement made him stir before settling back into sleep.
Every inch of my skin, every ounce of my flesh, felt a delicious kind of surprise. The night before, I had awakened to myself in a new and unexpected way, and I felt as new as a fresh-born foal struggling to its feet.
