Page 51 of Beds and Blades

“But I was living inside the lines of a life that had been approved for me. Sensible. Productive. Defensible. A life nobody could object to, which is not the same thing as a life I had chosen.”

Skip was quiet.

“I ended an engagement eighteen months before I arrived here,” I said. “He was adequate. In the way things can be adequate and still be wrong. By every metric my parents applied, he was the correct choice. By every metric I actually cared about, he was…”

I searched for the word.

“Insufficient.”

“He was a fool for letting you go,” Skip said.

“He was not equipped for me,” I said. “That is a different thing.”

“You were making yourself small?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“You are not small.”

“I am aware of that,” I said.

Amusement moved through his face, brief and unguarded, before giving way to something more serious. He reached for my hand, turned it over in his, and studied it.

I could see the thought in his eyes. He was imagining where his ring would go.

“The ring,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I have not said yes.”

“I know.”

“I am…considering.”

“I know that too.” His thumb moved across my knuckles, the gesture so habitual I was no longer certain he knew he was doing it. “I am not asking you to decide this morning.”

“You are very patient,” I said, “for a man who I suspect has already decided.”

His eyes softened first. Then the hard line of his mouth eased.

“I have decided,” he said.

He held my hand and did not look away.

“But the bond is not only mine to choose.”

***

“Come,” he said, standing. “I am going to teach you something.”

He left the bed, and I was treated, in the full, unambiguous light of a Mytharo morning, to the unobstructed view of him that the previous evening’s firelight had only partially delivered.

He was extraordinary. And I say that as a woman who had conducted rigorous comparative research and believed in precise empirical assessment.

And even now, in the relaxed aftermath of our recent activities, he was impressive in the dimension that my research had flagged as the primary variable.

Impressive was, I was finding, a word that required significant upward revision in his case.