Page 15 of The Language of Flowers

She makes a sound that is almost a laugh, almost undone already, and presses closer. “I want your hands,” she says, “where they are going. I want — Beatrice, I have imagined this so many times I hardly trust that it is happening.”

“It is happening.” I find the last fastening, and the gown loosens, and I take my time with what follows, learning her the way I learn a plant I mean to know completely — every response cataloged, every place that makes her breath catch filed away tobe returned to. “Tell me if I have this right,” I say, low, against her throat, and she gasps something that is not quite words and then, when I do it again, more deliberately, it becomes words after all — my name, andyes, andthere, andplease, the last of her careful English composure finally, entirely undone.

“You are allowed to ask for anything,” I tell her, drawing back just far enough to watch her face. “I want to hear you say it.”

“I want—“ She stops, flushed, astonished at her own wanting, and I wait, unwilling to make this easier for her, because I understand, watching her find the courage for it, that the asking matters as much as anything I could give her. “I want you to touch me properly. I want to stop being careful. I have been careful my whole life, Beatrice, I do not want to be careful tonight.”

“Then we won’t be,” I say, and I mean it as a promise, and I keep it.

What follows is not quick, and it is not quiet, and I do not once, in the better part of an hour, think of anything beyond this bed and this woman and the particular astonishment of being wanted this plainly, this completely, by someone who has learned, the same hard way I learned it, that wanting plainly is the most dangerous thing a woman can do. I learn the exact places that undo her and return to them without mercy. I tell her, in words I have never once used with anyone, precisely what I intend to do to her, and then I do it, and her answering sounds are the truest conversation I have ever had with another human being. She is not careful with me either, not once she finds her footing — her hands are sure where I did not expect them to be sure, and when she finally has me as undone as I have made her, she says my name like a discovery, like a woman finding out what her own voice is actually for, and I stop being able to think in sentences at all.

Afterward, we lie tangled together in the low lamplight, her head on my chest, my fingers moving idly through her loosened hair, and neither of us says anything for a long while, because there is nothing that needs saying that the last hour has not already made plain.

“I did not know,” she says eventually, her voice rough and quiet against my skin, “that it could be like that. That I could want it. To be asked for, rather than simply to endure.”

“Neither did I,” I say, which is true. Though I am eight-and-thirty, I had believed, until tonight, that I already knew everything there was to know about my own life. “You should know, I have never done this with a woman before. Been intimate. I know women who have, I am no stranger to it. However, I have spent ten years believing I had built a life that needed nothing more than what I put into it myself.”

“And now?”

I look down at her — at the dark fall of her hair against my skin, at the loose, unguarded line of her shoulder, at a woman who arrived at Wyndermere with a trunk and a secret and has, in three months, dismantled ten years of careful architecture without once meaning to — and I find, for the first time in longer than I can remember, that I do not want to reach for the careful answer.

“Now I think I was wrong,” I say. “I think I was always going to need you. That this house was going to need you. I simply did not know your name yet.”

She does not answer that in words. She only tightens her arm around me, and presses closer, and outside the banked fire settles with a small, contented sound.

I think, lying there, of the sum I told her I could not stop doing — the cost of wanting something, the calculation of what its loss would take from me. I find, for the first time since I began keeping that particular ledger, that I do not want to finish thearithmetic tonight. There will be time enough for caution. There will very likely be time enough for fear, later, when the letter and Pemberton and the whole unfinished business of the world outside this room reassert their claims on my attention, as I know they must. But not tonight. Tonight I have a woman asleep against my chest in a bed no one else has ever shared, in a room I built to need nothing from anyone, and the only sum I can bring myself to perform is the plain, unfrightening arithmetic of her breathing slowing into sleep, one steady count at a time.

I lie awake a long while afterward, my own bedroom entirely changed around me, thinking that I have spent ten years guarding a door I am, at last, glad to have opened. To have opened forher.

Chapter 14

Forget-Me-Not

ELIZA

I wake before the house does, in a bed that is not mine, in a room I have never once seen by daylight.

Beatrice sleeps the way she does everything else — without waste, without sprawl, one arm still loosely across me even in sleep, as though some part of her intends to notice immediately if I try to leave. I lie very still for a long while, watching the gray light come up slowly behind the curtains, and I let myself do the thing I have been telling myself for weeks I am not yet permitted to do.

I let myself believe this might be real.

I am careful with the thought, the way I am careful with everything now — turning it over, checking it for the flaw I have learned to expect in anything that feels this good this early. I have been careless with hope exactly once in my life and I spent seven years learning precisely what carelessness costs. I am not going to spend this hope carelessly. But I turn the thought over three times, four, and I cannot find the flaw in it, only the plain fact of Beatrice’s arm across me, and the plainer fact of what she told me last night, unprompted, unrepeatable, the kind of true thing a woman does not hand to someone she intends to let go of easily.

She told me something true. She moved first. Those are not nothing. I have spent my whole life being told what thingsmeant by people who had already decided the answer before they spoke, and I find I trust my own reading of this particular evidence more than I have trusted anything in years.

I think, too, of what she told me last night in the dark, the plain unadorned fact of it — that she had never done this with a woman before me, that she knew women who had, that she was no stranger to the shape of it even if she was a stranger to the doing. I did not ask her to say more, and she did not offer more, and I understood, even in the moment, that this was its own kind of gift: she had told me something that cost her something to say, and had trusted me not to require the rest of the accounting. I find I am glad, this morning, that I did not press. Some doors are meant to be left exactly as far open as a person chooses to leave them.

I slip out from under her arm as carefully as I can manage, though she stirs, murmurs something unintelligible, and settles again without waking. I dress quickly in the cool of the room, my own clothes from the night before, and let myself out before the house begins to stir — not from shame, but from the plain practical understanding that a household’s good opinion is a fragile thing, and I am not yet ready to spend Beatrice’s on my behalf, not until we have decided together what we mean to do with it.

The blue room is cold and unfamiliar in a way it has not felt in weeks, and I stand in the doorway for a moment before I go in, feeling, absurdly, like a guest again. I do not stay standing there long. I go to the illustration table instead, where the valerian is still pinned where I left it three days ago, finished now, and I take a fresh sheet and reach for my pencil, because I find I have too much feeling in me this morning to simply sit with it unoccupied.

I do not draw the valerian again. I draw the small blue flowers that grow along the greenhouse’s north path, the ones I askedBeatrice about weeks ago and she told me, without looking up from her work,forget-me-not—Myosotis, though she did not tell me then what it meant in the particular language the society speaks in tussie-mussies and pressed petals, and I did not think, at the time, to ask. I do not need to ask now. I understand it well enough on my own.

I work until the household wakes around me, the particular ordinary sounds of Wyndermere coming to life — the housemaids on the stairs, a door somewhere below, Mrs. Prentice’s voice giving some early instruction to the kitchen. I have learned this house’s morning the way I have learned everything else about it, thoroughly, without meaning to, and this morning it sounds exactly the same as every other morning, which strikes me as its own small miracle. The world did not require any announcement of what changed in it last night. It simply continued, ordinary and unhurried, as though it already knew.

I go down when I hear Beatrice’s step in the hall below — I know it now, the particular unhurried economy of it, the way I know a great many small things about this house I never troubled to learn about any other place I have lived. She is in the breakfast room already, pouring tea, and for one unsteady moment neither of us says anything at all, and I do not know which of us is meant to speak first, or what either of us is meant to say, in daylight, with the household moving around us.

“You take it without sugar,” Beatrice says, which is not what either of us is actually discussing, and pours my tea exactly as I like it, which she has apparently known for weeks without my ever having told her so.