Her already tense body stiffened and she tried to pull away, but I didn’t let her. My hand tightened around hers, and the other tightened against her waist. “Don’t do this,” she said, angry and frail all at once.
“Yes, Mary Margaret, we are doing this and you are going to listen to me.” My voice left no room for question, and her lips parted ever so slightly.
She liked that voice.
We whirled past another couple and then I started talking again. “That day,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t have to clarify which day I meant. It would always be That Day for us, that defining and pivotal moment where everything had shifted from almost unbearable joy to unbearable pain. “That day, we woke up in bed together, and I looked at you…your body tangled in the sheets, your hair still knotted from the night before, and then you woke up and do you remember what happened?”
“You took me on a picnic,” she said quietly.
“We didn’t fuck, we didn’t fool around. I took you out in the sunshine, and I kissed you on that blanket for hours. Just kissed. Do you remember?”
“Yes, Silas,” she said, and she looked up to me. Her pulse pounded in her throat, her pupils wide and dilated. “I remember.”
“Kissing you is heaven,” I told her. “Your mouth is perfect, you know that? And Christ, I could have kept kissing you until the stars came out. But we were coming here, to the Baron’s for a party, and you needed to change into an evening dress and I needed to change into my tuxedo. So we went our separate ways. And it was on my lonely ride to the Baron’s that I panicked. Was I arriving at Castor’s a single man? Or was I now attached to you? And if so, it was the first time I had been anything other than unattached, and that was terrifying. That’s not who we were, Molly, not who we are. We fuck people. Lots of people. We don’t go into the sunshine and kiss for hours, we fuck and we move on, and what was happening to me? Who was I, if I wasn’t acting like the man I’d always been?”
We spun again, and she swallowed, but she didn’t say anything, her rapt expression encouraging me to continue.
“And so I got to the Baron’s already panicked, panicked but still desperately in love, and then I saw you and Gideon dancing already, and he leaned down and kissed you. Kissed that mouth like it wasn’t the same mouth I’d spent hours laying claim to just that afternoon, and you let him. You let him kiss you.”
Her face went white. “Silas…”
I gave a curt shake of my head to let her know she wasn’t allowed to speak yet. “You pushed him away, I know. I saw. But you hesitated before you did, and I thought to myself, what if she’s right to hesitate? What if we were making a mistake trying to bring this new thing between us into our old world? What if we were denying who we really were? And then Mercy was there, beckoning me upstairs, and I had to prove to myself that I didn’t care that you kissed Gideon. That I wouldn’t care if you went to bed with him. I had to prove that this meant nothing, because if it didn’t mean nothing then that meant that it would mean everything, and God, Molly, I was terrified of that. Terrified like a sinner about to convert. Terrified like a man about die and go to heaven, because the reward was paradise but the price…the price was me. My life. My soul. It would no longer belong to me alone.”
I took a deep breath and said what I should have said nine months ago. “I loved you and I betrayed you. I indulged the weakest, basest parts of me, I was selfish and despicable and disgusting. I was low. I am low. I don’t ever deserve your forgiveness, and I won’t presume to ask for it, but you deserve my groveling and my apology and so here it is. I am so sorry that it hurts. I am so sorry that when I look in the mirror at myself, all I feel is hatred. I am so sorry that sometimes I can’t sleep, and I pace the room and drink and cry until I’m so drunk and emotionally exhausted that I can’t remember why I started drinking in the first place.
“I am so sorry, and there’s nothing you could command me to do right now that I wouldn’t do, because you deserve that. You deserve my blood and my pain and my torture. You deserve to watch me branded with hot iron, and I would do it gladly, if only to spend that much more time with you.”
The music swelled and came to an end, but I didn’t let go of my partner, not caring that it was my second breach of etiquette that night, not caring that Hugh was surely glowering somewhere in the margins of the ballroom. Let him seethe, let him rage—he wouldn’t come out here to claim Molly, not tonight, because it would make him look weak. Even he knew that.
Instead, I kept hold of her until the next waltz began, watching her face. She had turned away from m
e again, allowing me to see the exquisite quivering in her lower lip, the rapid sweep of her long eyelashes as she tried to keep her tears to herself. I wanted to lean in and blot them away from her lashes with my lips, I wanted to kiss away every tremor in her chin and throat, and I fucking couldn’t. And I wanted to ask her what she was thinking, if she was crying out of rage or hurt or understanding or what, but I also knew she wouldn’t want to break down in front of everybody here, and I worried that interrogating her as to her feelings would push her closer to the edge…but fuck, I was desperate to know. Was I making everything worse by being honest?
No, I decided. It was time for honesty.
“Let me tell you what should have happened that night. What I wanted to happen, what I spend every night falling asleep wishing had happened,” I said, guiding her easily through the steps of the dance. Even looking away, even about to cry, her dancing was still flawless, her body still perfectly in tune with mine. This time, as my hand tightened against her waist, I did allow one finger to play with the laces there, tugging hard enough that she could feel it.
She blinked faster.
“I wish we had kept kissing in the park that day. I wish that I had pulled back and looked at your sweet face and had the courage to admit to myself that I didn’t want to see anybody else. I didn’t want to share my time with anybody else. I wanted only you, and there was no way in hell that I was going to go to a dinner party when the only place we belonged was in a bed together, just you and me.”
A tear finally slipped past her eyelashes, spilling gracefully. And then another and another, and I could feel her ribs seize and stutter under my hands as her breathing turned jagged.
“I should have taken you out of that park and back to your bed, and then I should have spent hours with my face between your legs, fucking you with my mouth until you couldn’t speak or think or even breathe, and then I should have asked you to marry me. Not because of your company or because I wanted a family, but because I wanted you. Because I wanted to spend every night of the rest of my life with you underneath me, every day counting the freckles on your stomach when we woke up.”
She was crying in earnest now, her face crumpled and her voice thick. “But why?” she asked. “Why did you love me?”
I moved my hand from her back to her delicate jaw, taking it in my fingers and tilting her face to mine.
I stared directly down into her eyes as I talked, feeling the words burning everywhere—my heart and my mind and my stomach. “Why do I love you, you mean. I love you right now, still…and more than ever. And it’s because you provoke me, because you provoke everyone. Because you’re strong and because you need someone you can be frail with…because you’re the smartest woman I know and sometimes also the stupidest, because you’re honest and determined and sometimes manipulative. Because I want to see Ireland with you, because I want to see everywhere with you, and I want you to read me novels in the evening with your adorable Irish lilt, and I want you to let me hold you when it’s all too much. Because I’ve known you for ten years, and it feels so desperately like no time at all, and I need more.”
I finally stopped talking, my own breathing coming fast now, my own tears close at hand. I felt suddenly naked, raw, like my skin had been flayed from my body, my rib cage cracked open and my beating heart exposed for all to see.
Molly’s dancing slowed until we both stood stock still, our hands clasped and her eyes pinned to mine, and despite the tears, her eyes had grown unreadable, hard-shelled like jewels.
“Say something,” I begged. “Please. Anything at all—tell me I’m an ass for saying this, a prick for still chasing after you when you’re engaged, a monster to beg for forgiveness. Tell me to get ready for the hot irons. I don’t care, just please speak.”
The other dancers moved awkwardly around us, and in the corner of my eye, I could see Hugh finally pushing his way toward us, his patience exhausted or his dignity overridden by his irritation, one of the two.
