I’ve surrendered to the experience. To what it means to feel. Only.
That night, our wedding night, when I fell asleep in his bed, I didn’t make the conscious decision to put away my concerns and suspicions. I didn’t decide to set it all aside and surrender. I just did. I woke up in his arms the next morning, and he claimed me, again and again. I spent that whole day in his bed.
Since then, we’ve done other things. He has a country to manage, and true to his word, he set me up with some online classes—they haven’t started yet, thus my reprieve on thought—and I’ve also been presented with some charities that I might throw my weight behind.
But mostly, this has been a honeymoon, even if it is inside a castle.
I’m almost embarrassed how eager I am to see him every day. But really marinating in that embarrassment would require thought, and I’m not doing that. Instead, I’m lying naked on the foot of my bed in a sunbeam. I’m reading a science book. I don’t consider that thought, because it isn’t planning or anything to do with myself. It’s just being in the moment. But I’m waiting for him.
So when I hear footsteps outside my door, I’m already setting the book aside when he opens it.
He sees me, and his eyes glow. The way that he wants me fills me with a kind of delight that I’ve never experienced before. I feel important in a way that I never have. It’s such a strange thing. To feel like sexuality is powerful, like my body matters, when honestly I’ve always felt like a brain floating in a skull jar. Not anymore. I’m very much connected to every part of myself now. He’s stripping his own clothes off before I can greet him, and he’s taken me to ecstasy before we exchanged two words.
And yet, as he finds his own pleasure, pours himself inside of me, I feel like the look in his eyes speaks to feelings and truths that words wouldn’t be sufficient for.
I feel like I’m perilously close to understanding something I thought I didn’t need to. The way that my sister falls so passionately into these kinds of relationships doesn’t seem like a mystery to me anymore. She and my mother no longer feel like alien creatures that I can’t understand.
Because before Lucian touched me, I didn’t understand, and that version of myself would look at this version of myself and find her to be sad and woefully misguided. While I look back at the version of myself who didn’t know this and I feel…she didn’t know.
There was so much she didn’t know.
It frightens more now than it did before, but I also understand why people decide to embrace it, terrifying and powerful though it is.
Which is part of why it compounds my fear.
“What do you have to do today?” I ask, my fingers tracing patterns on his chest.
“I’m finished for the day with everything but this,” he says.
He takes hold of my hand and lifts it, kissing my palm. Then he picks me up from the bed, along with a bundle of blankets, and moves us down to a sunny patch on the floor that’s big enough for the two of us. It’s right in front of the bookshelves, and it’s a cozy nook, but funny, because we could just stay on the bed. But I enjoy the strange things that he does. The ways in which he’s oddly romantic. I wouldn’t have ever said that I was a romantic person.
Maybe that’s why I like his version of it. It’s not hearts and flowers. It’s midnight feasts and nests of blankets. It’s endless orgasms and the way that he studies me like I’m a fascination.
“Have you read any of the novels that I’ve given you?”
“No,” I say.
The look he gives me is stern and it does something to me. Makes my insides feel like they’re melting. Makes my stomach drop. I curl into him, and he puts his arm around me. “Shall I read to you?”
“You want to…to read to me?”
“If it’s the only way I’m going to get you to discover the merits of fiction…”
That is how we spend the afternoon. Lying on the floor in blankets as he readsThe Secret Garden. It’s a children’s book. But it makes me cry. I watch his face as he reads, and I wonder what speaks to this man about that book. I wonder how it reaches him.
What it meant to him when he was a boy, and what it means to him now.
He looks up from the book, eyes connecting with mine. “What?”
“Which one are you?”
A crease appears between his brows as he considers this, and I can’t help but marvel at the hard-cut lines of his face. I see his scars differently now. They shocked me at first, and while they never detracted from his beauty they added to his beastliness.
Now I see them as part of him.
“Are you the girl who came to live there, the one who discovered the secret garden, or are you the boy?” I press.
He considers this for a moment, his large hands cradling the book, an expression on his face that’s almost…soft. Almost.
