Page 46 of Bitten By Mr. Darcy
“We are really married,” he said.
And then he left.
When he returned some time later, he was less ruffled, and his presence in the bond was not as volatile. She had felt his drinking only as a good feeling, sated, full, less driven to give in to temptation.
Even so, he would not touch her.
He stayed on one side of the sitting room and she on the other. They talked.
At first the conversation went well, as they spoke of books they had read, and then Mr. Darcy told her a story about meeting William Shakespeare once. “Only a moment of time. I shook his hand and told him I liked his plays, that is all,” he said, laughing, but she was intrigued and enchanted, and she asked him all sorts of questions about what London was like back then and he told her it was strange how things changed. “You don’t notice it as it’s happening, often. You are just moving through year after year.Then you look back at some point, and it becomes very obvious how different things have become. You realize everything is altered, and that it was so incremental, it was barely noticeable.”
She thought that made a great deal of sense. She said it was much like that in her own life, actually. It was the way that she noticed her younger sisters had grown quite a bit, now that she thought about it, when something reminded her of the way things used to be, and she realized things had shifted a great deal.
Then, the conversation changed, because she said that he would be in London two hundred years hence, and she thought, with alarm, that it would be the year of our Lord 2012 in two hundred years, and she grew quite quiet.
“Lizzy, stop it,” he said.
“You must think of me as so very insignificant,” she said in a small voice. “You must barely register me as mattering. How many women have you loved in your long life, Ty?”
He sighed heavily. “Oh, Lizzy, my Lizzy, don’t compare this. It will not serve you, and it cannot be changed.”
“I have never loved anyone except you, did you know that? I have hardly found any other men attractive, truly.”
“Yes, this is why I thought to leave you be, of course. I feel a great deal of guilt for not having done it.”
“You probably don’t even know how many women you have loved.”
He sighed heavily. “Love is always unique, though. One never loves the same way twice. I have never felt about another woman the way I feel about you, I can swear that.”
“But I have never loved anyone but you. And I… I shall give you my whole life—”
“No, it is as I have told you, you will take a lover and have children. I shall claim them, and we shall make sure they are given a handsome inheritance of property and money, and—”
“But I have told you that I can’t see myself wanting a human man. Who could compare to you?”
“You will want someone who is alive and eager, someone who can tell you how many women he has loved before you, someone who—perhaps—hasonlyloved you,” he said. “You will notice a number of ways that I am lacking over the years we spend together. You will see that I am not what you want, not truly.” He was gentle as he said this, and he didn’t even sound as if he were sad about it, just as if he were imparting some truths to her, difficult truths, perhaps, but truths nonetheless.
She folded her arms over her chest. “I suppose there will come a time when I am too old for you to be interested in me.”
He swallowed. “Likely not, no. But I have…”
“You have loved some other woman in this way?”
“She grew to despise me,” he said. “There I was, still young-looking, and she was wasting away. She sent me off, saying she never wished to see me again, saying I had stolen her best years from her and left her with nothing, no children, no legacy, nothing at all. She was quite bitter. I still loved her, but I did as she asked, of course. I pined for her for a hundred years after she died. I would go to her grave and…” He shook himself. “What is wrong with me? One thing I should have learned a long time ago is not to tell the woman one is currently in love with how much one loved another woman.”
Elizabeth didn’t feel threatened by that woman or by his love for her, however. It seemed, instead, to reassure her. He was steadfast, then, her Mr. Darcy. He was truly trying to send her off to find a lover for her own good, because he did not wish her to experience this same pain. She bowed her head. “Of course you have loved other women,” she said softly. “You have been living lives, one after the other, for centuries before I was born. It would be foolish to think otherwise.” But the sheer magnitudeof this man being in love with her now seemed practically overwhelming.
“I think we must not spend too much time thinking of what will come,” said Mr. Darcy. “There will be pain in our future, but there is always pain, in all futures. We cannot avoid it, so let us not dwell on it. Let us, instead, look for the pleasantness we can have together now.”
“Now,” she said, “while you will not touch me.”
“I shall touch you,” he said, his voice hoarse. “But not tonight.”
She felt a ripple move through the center of her, the denial and the promise all twined up with some internal, weak, and feminine part of her. “Why didn’t you make her a vampire?”
“Ah,” said Mr. Darcy. “Well, I never have.”
“Can you not do it, then?”
