“You are.” Her voice didn’t shake. That was the thing that struck him most—it didn’t shake at all. “You decide I need reassurance. You decide I’m scared. You decide that if I sleep with you, I must be secretly worried that it means something I don’t want it to mean. You decide, you decide, you decide.” She threw up her hands. “Did you ever think to ask me?”
“I was trying to protect you.”
“From what?” She stared at him. “From feeling something? From wanting something? From making a choice you’re afraid I’ll regret?”
The words landed like blows, precisely because they weren’t wrong.
He rose slowly to his feet. He did it carefully, keeping his movements unhurried, keeping his voice calm even as something churned uneasily in his gut. “You have been hurt before,” he said. “By people who took choices from you. I will not be another?—”
“Then stop taking them from me!”
The shout rang off the stone walls. In the sudden silence that followed, they stared at each other across the space of a few feet that suddenly felt like a chasm.
Her chest heaved. Her hands had curled into fists at her sides. And those expressive grey eyes that had haunted him for a year were bright with anger and something that looked like hurt beneath it.
“Don’t you see?” she asked, quieter now but no less fierce. “You think you’re protecting my freedom. But you’re the one deciding what I want. You’ve decided I only want your hands. You’ve decided I’m too fragile to want more because I’m broken.”
“I have never thought you were broken.”
“Then stop treating me like I am!”
He fell silent. Because she was right. Gods help him, she was right, and he’d been so certain he was doing the honorable thing, the protective thing, the good thing, that he’d never once considered the fact that he’d taken her choice and made it his own.
“I want you to hear me,” she said, and her voice had dropped low and steady, all the childish tentativeness gone from it, burned away by the heat of her conviction. “I am not the woman who came here a year ago. I’ve changed, Njkall.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” She took a step towards him. “Because you keep treating me like I might shatter. I know you think you’re being kind.” Her voice cracked, just slightly, and steadied again. “But itdoesn’t feel kind, Njkall. It feels like a cage. A soft one. A gentle one. But a cage.”
A cage.
The one thing he’d sworn she would never feel with him. And he’d built it himself, bar by careful bar, out of his own fear and called it protection.
He was quiet for a long moment. The fire crackled between them. Somewhere deep in the mountain, the underground river rushed through the darkness.
“You’re right,” he said finally, his voice rough. “I thought I was protecting your choices. Instead I was making them for you.”
Some of the anger left her face.
“Why?”
He opened his mouth, and discovered he didn’t have an answer. Or perhaps he couldn’t face the answer.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
Her expression softened slightly.
“Then maybe you should figure it out.”
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The fire popped. The shadows shifted across the cave walls. Then, slowly, she crossed the space between them. She stopped just in front of him, close enough that he could see the firelight caught in her lashes, close enough that he had to look down to hold her gaze, and she reached up and pressed her small warm palm flat against his chest, over his heart.
“I want more than your hands, Njkall,” she said. “I don’t know exactly what I want yet. I’m not ready to say the big words. But I want more. And I need you to let me want it. I need you to stop deciding that I can’t.”
He looked down at her for a long moment.
“Then I will try.”
“Good.”
