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He’d had no idea.
“Simon,” she whispered.
He let a hand slide down her torso, stopping briefly to make a lap around a breast. “Yes?”
“I don’t know!” She writhed. “Just … Simon.”
She knocked the breath right out of him. He didn’t know what to say, so he endeavored to ease the tension for her, sending his hand to its destination between her legs, seeking out the nub of flesh he found there.
“Oh!”
He stopped. “Is all well?”
“Yes!”
He resumed his ministrations.
“No!”
He stopped.
She laughed. “I am sorry! It’s just that while I was familiar with how this was meant to go theoretically, this is … not turning out the way I expected.”
This was not turning out the way Simon expected, either. It was … so much more. He tried not to think about it. “Would you care to register a complaint?”
“No!”
He appreciated that this experience had, at times, retained the kind of lightheartedness that sometimes characterized his interactions with Diantha. But he felt now that the time for lightheartedness was done.
She must have, too, for she looked up at him and just about cracked his heart in two when she said, “Will you come inside me now?”
He made to do as she asked.
“But will you … pull out at the right time? Is that how it works?”
He nodded again, and judging by the pang in his chest, his heart did break then. He supposed he was thinking of all the children who hadn’t been born: her sister’s, Frances and James’s.
He slid in, and dear God, he had never been this … what? Overwhelmed? Joyous? Devastated?
Yes. All of those things.
His breath hitched. To his mortification, he was swallowing a sob. Because he was thinking of his children, too, the ones who wouldn’t be born, at least not for a long time, because he couldn’t marry.
And even if he could, she couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.
She was moving beneath him, sighing, and he was thrusting his hips, the pleasure-pain growing.
He was overtaken by a kind of predetermined grief, a mourning for the life he would not get to have. He thought back to Diantha saying I want so very many things, but I can’t have any of them.
He began to understand why she characterized herself as rageful. He wasn’t angry at her but at … the world. The world that gave her so few choices and gave him dismal ones.
“Tell me what Mr. Hill has over you.” He thought to return his hand to the source of her pleasure.
She gasped as he pressed against it, but said, “I can’t.”
“Tell me.”
She moaned. He kept going. Of course he kept going. Was he meant to stop, because she wouldn’t tell him what he wanted to know? Impossible.
