Page 124 of Faceless

“I want my husband.”

She was looking at him with the expression he had learned in the dark and could now see plainly for the first time — the one that meant she had made up her mind, and the rest of the world would have to arrange itself around the fact. She reached up and took his face in her hands — his face, in the light, without flinching, as if there had never been anything in it to fear — and she kissed him.

For an instant, he could not answer it. The shock of being wanted in the light was different from being wanted in the dark. In the dark, he had always been able to imagine that some part of her desire belonged to mystery, to the facelessness of him, to all the things the room concealed.

But this was daylight, merciless and ordinary. Daylight showed the scars he had invented and the ones he had not, the whole of him, the human fact of him. And she had looked and come closer, and she kissed him as if none of those things had greater claim on her than he did.

Then he kissed her back.

XLVII

Precautions

One hand came to her waist, the other to the back of her neck, and he kissed her as if he had been starving for the sight of her while standing in front of her all morning. She moaned faintly against his mouth and rose into him, and the room with its desk and papers and legal peril ceased to matter for several breaths.

“Elizabeth,” he said at last, against her mouth.

“Mm?”

“It is no good. We have to discuss—”

“Hang what we were discussing.” She drew back just enough to look at him, her hands still on his face, and her eyes were dark and certain and entirely fixed on him. “We can finish discussing it later. I have never seen you in the light the way I have been permitted to see you in the dark, and I am not going to Geneva.” Her thumbs moved against his jaw with an intimacy so unstudied it nearly undid him. “Ask me to stay.”

He held her face with his eyes in the morning light. The curl at her nape. The flush in her cheek. The longing in her eyes he had been imagining since Hertfordshire. But it was not merely her beauty that struck him. It was the absence of recoil. The extraordinary, impossible fact that she had seen him entirely and was still standing here with her hands on his face, asking not for escape but for permission to remain.

“Stay.”

She came back to him at the word, her hands still on his face, and kissed him as though stay were itself the only thing she had wanted to hear. He took her by the waist with both hands and lifted her — she made a small, startled sound that turned at once into a laugh — and set her on the edge of the desk. The papers shifted under her, wrinkling and scattering. He did not care.

“Wait.” It came out against her mouth.

He stepped back half a pace, because if he did not, he was going to take her there on the desk amongst the columns of figures and Webb’s letters, and there was a thing he had wanted for four months and was not going to surrender now. “Wait. I want to look at you.”

“You have been looking at me all morning.”

“Not enough.”

She made a soft sound, almost a laugh, almost not, and her hands fell to her lap. She let him dismantle her — a button here, a pin there, a bit of lace that had no business blocking his view.

He took her in. The light from the slit fell across her shoulder and the side of her throat and the curve of her cheek. Hair coming loose at her temple — three pins gone, two more half out, the curl he had known against his jaw in the dark for months. The colour at her throat that he had only ever taken on faith of his fingers. The place under her ear that he had kissed a hundred times and never seen. He had touched all of it. He had carried the topography of her in his hands for four months. Now he was being permitted to set the map against the country.

“Fitzwilliam, I am going to begin to feel inspected.”

“You are being inspected.”

“Is it going well?”

“Extraordinarily.”

She laughed, low. He stepped to her and put his hand at the side of her throat — under her ear — and traced down to the hollow at the base of it with his thumb. Her eyes half-closed, and her mouth softened.

“That. I have wanted to see that.”

“Then keep doing it.”

He kept doing it. He undid two more of the small buttons on the front of her gown without looking down, because he did not want to take his eyes from her face. Then another. He let his hand rest at the last. Her colour rose under his hand in a slow tide up the side of her throat, and his eye followed it, and he wanted to put his mouth there at every stage.

She drew in a breath that lifted her against his hand. He drew the gown open at her shoulders and pulled it down her arms and let it fall about her waist. Her chemise was thin from washing, and the light went through it. The dark peaks of her nipples were more than suggested through the cloth, and something reached down inside him and pulled.