Page 112 of Faceless

She drew herself closer against him, slid one arm around his neck, and brought her mouth to his ear. He had been about to draw breath to try his protests again — the wise thing, the safe thing for her, sending her away —

“I love you.”

The whisper was almost nothing. It was breath shaped into three words. They seared into him and did not stop where words stopped; they burned the rest of the way down.

The breath died in his chest. His hand on her back went still. Whatever in him had laboured all evening to hold its course failed.

“Say that again.”

“I love you.” Her lips brushed the shell of his ear, nearer with each word. “I love you. I have for some while.”

He could not have produced a coherent sentence to save his life.

He had said it first, over a week ago, in this same dark, with a courage he had not known he possessed.

She had been quiet when he said it. She had kissed him, and let him have her hand against her cheek, and had not given him the words back, and he had told himself that was right — that he had said it because his heart would have burst if he had not, not because he was owed anything in return; that whatever she chose to do with it was hers to choose.

He had not let himself want this. He had not let himself picture her mouth at his ear, saying it back to him. He had refused himself the picture every time it had tried to form.

Some animal in him began to argue that she could not mean it. She did not know what she was loving. She loved a name that was not his name, a voice she had only heard at a whisper, a man she had not yet seen by daylight. She loved an arrangement. She loved her own kindness towards him.

And then she said it again.

Her hands climbed his shoulders, pulling him closer; her words were tender and without art, and he had never known Elizabeth Bennet to be anything but truthful. She was kissing his jaw now, and the animal stopped speaking, because the argument did not survive contact with her.

He turned his head and found her mouth in the dark and kissed her with none of the discipline he had been at such pains to keep all evening. Her hand tightened at the nape of his neck.

“I love you.” It came out of him, a word said by a man who had not been certain he would survive saying it. He drew breath and said it again against her mouth, as though he could not believe she was still there to receive it. “I love you. Elizabeth — I love you. God, I love you.”

He had been carrying it so long under such pressure that it came out now without ration. He said it into her hair when his mouth left hers; he said it against her temple; he said it at the hinge of her jaw. He could not stop saying it.

Every time he said it, she made a small sound that was not quite an answer and not quite a question, and every time she made it, he said it again. He had spent a fortnight measuring out the silence around the one declaration he had managed, and now the wall had failed at every fissure at once. He said it like a vow sworn under an open sky, with no one to witness it but himself. He said it because she had finally given it back, and he could not let another thing into the room until he had let her hear what hers had done to him.

“There,” she said, when he paused for breath. “Was that so very hard?”

He could not laugh. He was past laughing. He was past the speech he had brought down to supper, and past the speech he had been trying to make at the door of this room, and past every sentence he had constructed in the mural chamber that afternoon about what she must be made to do for her own safety. He had nothing left except her in his arms in the dark and her three words still in his ear, and the only honest answer he had to either was his mouth on hers and his hands at the laces of her chemise.

Her nails drew down his back, and his breath came in hard. Her hands were in his hair. She murmured something against his jaw, low and warm, not quite words, and the sound of it was in his chest and his throat and his bones.

She sighed his name under his ear and pulled him closer, and he held her with something always slipping in him and holding the only thing standing against it.

Then she pushed him down on the bed, and fell greedily on top of him.

She had done this once before. He had not forgotten. She had come up onto him nine nights ago and astonished him into surrender by going faster than he could think, and he had thought afterward that she had not quite known what she was doing then and had succeeded anyway. Tonight, she knew. He knew it the moment her hands went to his chest in the gesture they had used before — not a request, a notice — and pushed him onto his back.

He went over with no resistance at all.

She came up onto her knees over him, slower this time, in no hurry. The cold of the room was on her shoulders, and the warmth of her was everywhere else, and her hair fell down between them. She held him pinned with no force in it, only the small notice that he was to stay where she had put him, and he was not to move. He had no intention of moving.

She drew back from him just enough to break the contact, lifting his hands from where they had been at her hips and bringing them up between them. She turned one palm and pressed her lips into the centre of it. Then the other. Then she placed each hand, very deliberately, against her breasts — one and then the other — and held them there a moment to be sure he understood that she had put them where she meant them to be.

“Kiss me,” she whispered, and her voice was lower than he had heard it before, and unsteady, and entirely without doubt. She bent towards him and brought herself within reach of his mouth and stayed there. “Please. Kiss me.”

He understood her perfectly. He had her then before he had decided to, and she pressed herself into the kiss she had asked for as though it were owed her, and at the same moment her hand went down between them and closed around him — none of the hesitation of the first time in it now — and set about him with slow, deliberate intent.

He could not, after this, have given an account of where he was.

She kept him there. She gave herself to his mouth and kept her hand on him, the warmth of her palm and the slow, steady knowing of her grip, and she did not move it faster, and she did not let him move into it. She held him a long way short of where he was straining to be, and what she was doing to him was so far past anything that resembled being careful that he had stopped being able to remember the word.