Page 68 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy

The metaphor died that day. She was not a thing. She could not be acquired.

What was she to him, then? A haunting, a heartsickness, a bone nausea.

And if these longings were not Flights of Fancy, what were they?

The answer began to form, petrifying in its brevity.

The full realisation was interrupted by sudden pain across Osric’s chest, quite unrelated to his troubled heart. Fairhrim had ripped off the diffractor’s tentacles, which had affixed themselves vengefully upon his chest hair.

“Fuck,” declared Osric.

“Sorry—” began Fairhrim, but she cut herself off and, wide-eyed, gasped, “Wait.”

“Wait for what?” asked Osric, rubbing at his pectoral. “You to tear off my other nipple?”

Fairhrim held up the diffractor’s wire, at the tip of which a few of Osric’s chest hairs clung to the adhesive pad. “You’ve never felt that before.”

“No. You were unusually cruel today.”

Fairhrim stared at the plucked hairs as though they held the answers to life’s mysteries. Then she threw herself at Osric and ran fingertips up his bare thigh. A violent pivot, but Osric did not mind; in fact, he was pleased—she must, to be this bold, remember last night. He was quite prepared to spring an immediate erection under the doily, only—

“Your torpraxia used to end here,” said Fairhrim, dragging her fingers just above his knee. “Do you feel this?”

“I do feel that,” said Osric.

Because that’s what they were doing. Measuring his torpraxia—the numbness that crawled across his body in conjunction with the seith rot—as they had many times before. He informed his cock that there was no action required on its part. Stand down. False alarm. But it was too late: his cock didn’t want to stand down. It was attentive. Fairhrim was touching him. The doily was going to start tenting soon.

Fairhrim drew her finger down Osric’s shin and over the top of his foot, and did the same down his arms and forearms. He could feel everything. He said so. He did not advise Fairhrim that her touch was stimulating in other ways. The doily stirred and began to lift.

“Torpraxia receding,” muttered Fairhrim, returning to her notes. “This really is astonishing.”

“You really are a Phenomenon,” said Osric.

Fairhrim put away the chart and began to pack her things, and Osric knew that his audience was at an end.

He didn’t want her to go.

He dressed. His cock disagreed with the proceedings and rebelled by popping out of his underthings twice, because it wished to be examined for torpraxia, too. He camouflaged it with his trousers and untucked shirt.

“While you’re here, there’s something I still owe you,” said Osric.

“What is it?”

“The books on the Dreor.”

Upon Fairhrim’s face broke a smile of so sweet a loveliness thatOsric’s tormented heart stopped beating. It tugged in her direction instead.

“Oh,” she said. “I hadn’t dared ask again, after our—after I—”

“After you betrayed me, and threw me into a cupboard like a wretched mop?” said Osric.

Fairhrim did not have the grace to look contrite. The lovely smile persisted. Osric was no longer certain whether his chest housed a heart or a Fairhrim-obsessed compass.

She fell into step with him as they exited the sitting room. He was aware of everything to do with her: her nearness, the slight sway in her hips as she walked and the corresponding swish of soft pastel skirts, the sound of her heels on floorboards.

There were two libraries on the estate, loosely divided into arts and sciences. The Dreor material, consisting of a few historical accounts, lived in the arts library, in the east wing upstairs.

Osric unlocked the library doors and drew them open. After the darkness of Rosefell’s corridors, he and Fairhrim were briefly blinded by sun diffusing through long white curtains.