Page 61 of Unearthing the Smuggler's Heart
The whole situation was absurd.
Didhe have a future with Jade? He had survived his entire life without thinking about the future, but the idea that he would ever be without her again was a horrifying one. It was hard enough not having her with him in the night. It wasn't just that he missed a shield from the things that tormented him in his sleep. No, it was far more than that, and he had realized it some days ago, back when he was still swinging in that solitary hammock aboard theHarpyevery night.
She was beautiful, yes, and her scent was intoxicating. Holding her in his arms was unlike anything he had ever known, but it was none of those things. It was something that couldn't be pointed out to others, something he had come to feel in her presence.
She was calmness and certainty while somehow still stimulating him, teaching him new and delicious ways to live each day. She was something he did not know had been missing, and that was terrifying, because she had no obligation to stay in place of the emptiness she had only just made him aware of.
It made him want to run to the ends of the earth and remember how to rely only on himself just as much as it made him want to ask her to swear she'd never leave his side.
He gave an irritated click of his tongue, halfway through restocking the paper and ink in the captain's quarters before realizing he was doing it for her and not himself. He stared down at the open drawer on the side table and the stack of clean parchment, willing himself to come up with some use for it that didn't require Jade and her incessant need to capture the spirit of a living day into neat, routine boxes.
He snatched up a sheet and dropped his weight onto the bed, squaring the paper up on the bedside table. He readied a quill and frowned at the paper, his mind buzzing with all the irritating things that had come to haunt him, somehow, in a life that had always seemed to him fairly carefree.
Dear Louis, he wrote, frowning.I am writing to apologize.
God help him.
* * *
He was late to dinner,but not late enough to have missed it entirely, which was worse. He was led into the dining room feeling like a wrung-out sponge, an awkwardly worded letter stuffed into his pocket and what felt like gallon bags of exhaustion under his eyes.
He had written agonizingly slowly, drawing his nose closer to the parchment as the sun began to sink instead of lighting a damned lamp. At least it had killed the time, he reasoned, which was what he had been after in the first place.
While the others all gave him looks ranging from curiosity to reproach at his tardy arrival, no one said anything about it. He was able to wolf down a serving of the food on offer without harassment, and due to his tardy arrival, he was also able to wave everyone else on their way so that he could finish alone while they moved to the sitting room.
It was only once they had vanished that he realized Jade still lingered behind, standing next to her chair as though she had simply gotten lost in a thought for a moment. However, when he looked at her, she smiled, and he knew that she had stayed intentionally, for him.
"Captain," she said softly, illuminated by a dancing candle flame between them. "You have been much away."
He nodded, reaching for a glass of wine before his hand could begin to shake. "There has been much to do," he said, suddenly desperate to proffer his apology letter at her and ask for her thoughts on it. "And there has been little need of me here."
"I always have need of you," she replied, almost shyly. "There is much I've wished to tell you about all that has happened here. Somuchhas happened."
He softened, realizing immediately how much he wished he had been here to hear those things she'd wanted to tell him. "I am sorry," he said gently. "Do you wish to tell me now?"
"Soon," she replied. "Just now, I only wanted to see that you were all right. I was beginning to worry."
He nodded, giving an apologetic little grimace. "Do not worry about me, love. You are the one whose life is changing by the day. Areyouall right?"
"Yes, I think so." She released the back of the chair she'd been sitting on and walked around to where he sat, drawing up the chair next to him. "It is all very strange, of course, and more than a little overwhelming. I wish we had more time."
"Well, you could always stay behind," he heard himself blurt out, sounding a bit petulant even to his own ear.
She blinked at him in surprise. "Oh. That's true. I suppose I could. Would you deliver Isabelle to Dover and then come back around to retrieve me?"
He shrugged, stabbing at the food on his plate. It was as though he was watching himself from a distance, observing this behavior with equal parts horror and a morbid strain of curiosity. "There are passenger ships back to England as well, if you wanted to stay indefinitely."
She was silent for so long that he realized that he was waiting for her to protest. He wanted her to shout at him for suggesting something so absurd, for forgetting how much they needed one another.
Instead, she wasthinking about it. That realization took his breath away.
He couldn't look at her, and instead shoved a bite of food into his mouth and forced himself to swallow it down, his heart beginning to thump hard against his ribs. Why had he suggested something she might actually consider? When had he become such a fruitless idiot?
"I suppose that's true," she said after a long, long time. She sounded far away.
"Well, alert me to your decision when you've made it," he said, pushing back from his own chair. He needed to be away from hereimmediately. He could not even look at her. "Good night."
He wasn't sure if she returned the sentiment. If she had, her voice had been lost in the roaring of blood in his ears. He was driven only by the immediate need to seal himself in his borrowed bedchamber. He needed the dark and he needed the silence.
