Page 23 of The Language of Flowers

It takes me a moment. “He cannot know that.”

“He may not. Men of his sort are paid rather well not to look too closely at who is paying them.” She does not smile. “But he will know it the instant you set it in front of him. And he cannot lay a petition before three magistrates without one of them eventually reading the same page you did.”

“You do not have to be part of this,” she says, before I can speak. “I want to be entirely clear about that, because I have spent last night discovering exactly how much damage I do when I forget that your choices are yours to make and not mine to arrange around my own convenience. You could leave for London this morning, as you said you would, and I would use whatever else can be found, and you would owe this house nothing further. The choice belongs to you. All of it does.”

I am quiet for a long moment, not because I do not know my own answer, but because I want to give what I have to say the weight it deserves rather than offer it too quickly and have it mistaken for reflex.

“What would I need to do?” I say.

Something moves across Beatrice’s face that I have never seen there before — not relief, exactly, though relief is somewhere in it, but something closer to the particular unguarded look a person gives you when they understand, all at once, that theyhave been given something they did not think they still deserved to ask for.

She crosses the room. She does not ask permission this time.

“Eliza,” she says, my name alone, and I understand it as the whole of what she means to say — not a beginning, not a question, simply my name, offered the way a person offers the one thing they have left that is entirely their own.

“I am still angry with you,” I say, and it is true, and I say it with my hand already rising to the collar of her shirt.

“I know.” She does not step back. “You are permitted to be both at once. I intend to spend considerably more than one morning proving I understand the difference.”

I pull her down and crash my lips to hers before she finishes the sentence.

It is not gentle, not at first — three months of carefully guarded want and one entire night of thinking I had lost the right to it collapse into something with more urgency than either of us has previously allowed ourselves, her mouth hard against mine and my hands already working the buttons of her shirt with a haste that costs two of them their thread. She makes a sound against my mouth that I have never heard her make before, low and involuntary, and I find I want to hear it again, want to hear every sound she has spent ten years learning to keep silent, my lips at her jaw, her throat, the particular place below her ear that makes her hand fist in the sheet beside my head.

“I want to hear you. All of you.”

“Tell me what you want,” she says, her voice rough in a way I have never heard it, and I understand she means it as an offering rather than a question — that after last night, she needs to hear me say it as much as I need to say it.

“I want you to stop being careful with me,” I tell her. “Just for this morning. I have had a great many people be careful with me. I want you to want this the way you actually want it.”

Something in her breaks open at that — I feel it more than see it, the particular give of her whole body against mine — and what follows is nothing like the careful, quiet reverence of that first night in her bedroom, all those weeks ago, both of us still learning the shape of what we were permitted to want. It is loud. It is unhurried in the way that only comes from two people who have finally stopped rationing themselves.

She strips the rest of my nightgown from me with none of her usual patience, and when her mouth finds my breast I arch into it without deciding to, my hand coming up into her hair before I have any thought of putting it there. She works her way lower with a deliberateness that feels almost cruel, pressing open-mouthed kisses along my ribs, my stomach, the soft skin just above where I want her most, until I am saying her name, all but begging for her to give me more.

She settles between my thighs and looks up at me first, waiting, and I understand it is not hesitation — it is her asking, without words, for the same permission she just gave me.

“Please,” I say, and the word comes out cracked. “Ineedto feel you.”

She licks my cunt from bottom to top, slow and deliberate, and I hear myself make a sound I do not recognize as my own. She is not careful. She told me she would not be, and she keeps the promise thoroughly, her tongue circling the exact spot that makes my hips lift off the bed before she settles there properly, working it with a rhythm that builds rather than rushes, and when she slides two fingers inside me at the same unhurried pace I lose whatever thread of thought I had left. She curls them, testing, until she finds the place that makes me cry out — a spot I was not aware existed until this moment. She does notstop finding it, her mouth and her hand working together with a precision that undoes every careful thing I have ever taught myself to be.

“Look at me,” she says once, low, lifting her eyes to mine without lifting her mouth away, and I do, and the sight of her — my fingers woven into her hair without my ever having decided to put them there, her pins giving way under them, her mouth shining, watching me come apart with a look of certainty, as though I am the only thing she has ever wanted to look at — a look that nearly finishes me on its own.

“Beatrice,” I say, and then again, not as a beginning, not as a question, simply the whole of what I have left to offer, and she answers by pressing closer, by curling her fingers deeper, by telling me — her voice rough and low against my skin, filthy and tender in the same breath — exactly what she intends to do and exactly how she means to have me say her name when she does it. My thighs are shaking around her head. I have spent seven years learning to make myself small and quiet, and I find I have no interest whatsoever in remembering how, not this morning, not with her tongue moving against me like bringing me to my pinnacle is her one true goal in life. When it finally washes over me it does not feel like falling so much as being caught, her hand steady inside me through all of it, her mouth gentling only at the very last, until I am shaking apart beneath her with a thoroughness that leaves neither of us any doubt about what she meant bynot careful.

When I finally pull her up to me, her mouth is soft again, unhurried, and I taste myself on her tongue and do not look away from what that means.

“Again,” I say, when I have found enough breath to say anything at all, and she laughs — an actual laugh, low and surprised out of her, a sound I have wanted from her for three months and did not know, until now, how badly.

“You are going to be the death of my composure,” she says, against my throat.

“Good,” I say. “I have had quite enough of yourcomposurethis week.”

She takes her time the second time, deliberate where she had been urgent before. She turns me onto my side and fits herself along my back, her mouth at my shoulder, her hand sliding down the front of me with an unhurried thoroughness that has me pressing back against her within moments, and when her fingers finally move inside me again it is with a slow, steady pressure that she does not let me rush, no matter how I try, murmuring against my ear the whole while — what she wants, what she intends, how long she means to keep me exactly here before she allows either of us any mercy.

I find I have things to say to her too — plain, unguarded things, the words rising out of me with none of the careful management seven years of marriage once trained into me, telling her what I want and where and how, and she listens to every one of them with the particular attention I have come to recognize as the truest thing about her, and answers them, in kind, her hips rocking slow against my thigh, until neither of us has anything left of the careful architecture we arrived at this room still wearing.

Afterward, we lie tangled together in the gray early light, her fingers tracing an absent pattern along my spine, and I look past her shoulder at the trunk still standing half-packed against the wall, and I find that the sight of it no longer frightens me the way it did four hours ago.

The forget-me-not is in it, rolled the way she taught me to roll a specimen. I will take it out this afternoon, and I will not put it back on the wall above my own table. I will hang it in the library, where the society’s business gets done, where anyone who calls at this house will have to walk past it on the way in.