Page 111 of Faceless

“Is she?”

“She is insisting it is a matter of great intellectual stimulation, but I believe she is principally interested in beating Uncle Gardiner, who learned it at school and considers himself rather good.” She was quiet a moment. “She is apparently making excellent progress. Uncle Gardiner has stopped letting her win.”

The wine was in his limbs now, deep and warm. Her hand was in his, her thumb moving in slow circles against the back of it, and the sentences he had rehearsed all afternoon were gone from him entirely — had been gone since the wine on her finger and the laugh over Kitty’s drawing. What remained in their place was the dark and her voice and the warmth that had been building in him since she first took his hand, not urgent, something slower than urgency, the kind that takes hold in the bones and stays there.

He was not thinking about the sentences anymore. He was thinking about the curve of her shoulder and how she said his name in the small hours, and he had given up entirely on being sensible, and he knew it, and she knew it, and her thumb kept moving, and she went on talking and he held her hand and listened to her voice with the contentment that comes when a man has stopped arguing with himself.

She lifted the bottle one more time, and the trickle that came out was small and stopped quickly. She gave him what was left. When she set it down, the bottle sounded empty.

“There,” she said. “I am afraid we have come to the end of it.”

“More is the pity.”

“We shall have to find something else to do.”

He turned her hand over in his and kissed the inside of her wrist. “Can we not talk without the benefit of wine?”

“The very idea!” she scoffed. “Mr Carlisle, I begin to suspect you might be a revolutionary.”

“No, upon my word, my interests are far more domestic.”

“That is just what I was hoping to hear.”

She took his face between her palms and pressed her lips to his forehead and held them there, and he closed his eyes, and the answer his whole body had given to the question of the sentences was already plain to him, which was nothing, not tonight, and he could not summon a single objection to it at all.

“Come to bed,” she said, against his brow.

XLIII

The Light

He meant to say something when she drew him down beside her. He had the words somewhere — had carried them through supper and the wine and her hands on his face — and he meant to find them before this went further.

She put her mouth against his throat.

The words went.

“Elizabeth.” The whisper came out already wrong, too low, none of the firmness he had intended. “I need — there is something—”

Her hands were at his shirt. She knew his buttons in the dark by now as well as her own, and her fingers moved with a certainty that undid him before she reached the second one. He caught her hands.

“Stop for a minute and listen to me,” he said.

“I am listening,” she said, against his collarbone. “Whatever it is, I have heard nothing yet that ought to be said with one’s clothes still on.”

He released her hands. He could not have said when he had decided to do that.

She spread her palms against his chest, and the warmth of them went through him as the wine had gone through him at supper, deep and slow. Her hair was against his jaw, and she smelled of the cold she had brought in from the headland that morning and something beneath that, something entirely hers, and he had been breathing it for months, and it had not become anything other than what it was the first time.

“Elizabeth,” he said again, with considerably less conviction.

“Mm?” She pressed her lips to the hair of his chest, dead in the center.

He tried to reconstruct the sentences and found only fragments — the walls, Webb, she must go south — and they dissolved when she moved her mouth to the hollow of his throat and stayed there.

His hands found her. They had been doing this without his direction for weeks, had learned her with an independence of purpose he had given up resisting — the curve of her waist, the warmth of her back beneath the thin fabric of her chemise, her body’s turn towards him when he touched her there.

“Here,” she whispered, and he obliged. She guided his mouth to the side of her neck, her hand at the back of his head, and he went where she put him, and she made a sound low in her throat that loosed something in him entirely.