Page 68 of Faceless

“Elizabeth. A man does not charm his way into a family of reduced circumstances for love of the daughter. That is not—”

He could not finish it. The argument hardly made sense, anyway. He felt the next sentence forming and pulled it back; it had begun “He will defraud her of her settlement. Five thousand pounds gone to a gamester—” and each word was a word that knew too much.

All he could risk, all he could manage, was “I have seen what such men do.”

“Such men? Tell me, George Carlisle, you who hide your face and your voice from the one person legally and morally obligated to trust and depend on you. What can you know of ‘such men’?”

“I know what any thinking person—”

“Any thinking person does not beat his hand on a table to keep from saying something. You are not arguing from principle. You are arguing from somewhere else. Where?”

He tried to push the next sentence forward. “It is the kind of arrangement that—” The verb failed him. Conceals. Disguises. Hides. Every word he reached for carried his own situation inside it; he could not say any of them without saying the rest. He stopped.

“That what?”

“That does not — that ought not — be trusted!”

“That is a sentence with the spine taken out of it. Try again.”

“I cannot—” The word broke. He tried again. “I cannot put it to you the way I would wish to. Not as — not as I am. Not now.”

“Not as you are.” Her voice had gone flat with rage. “What does that mean?”

He did not answer. He could not. Every word he needed sat somewhere above the register he could safely use, and her last question hung in the dark between them with no answer he could give her.

She moved again, and he put out his hand and found her arm in the dark.

She stopped. And did not pull away in anger, as she might have done.

God only knew why he did it, but he took both her arms. He could feel the tension in her, the argument still live in her shoulders, and he held on and tried to find the words that would serve — some version of I have reason, I cannot give it to you, but I have it, please — and his mouth opened, and the whisper had nothing. There was no general argument. Every reason he had was specific. Every specific reason was a name.

“You are asking me,” she said, not without some heat still in it, “to distrust a man I have known for a year on the basis of a feeling you will not explain, from a room you will not leave, in a voice you will not raise. And you want me to set aside my sister’s happiness on those grounds.”

She was very close. He could feel the warmth of her even through the dark. “That is not reason. That is prejudice dressed up as concern, and I will not act on it.”

He opened his mouth. He had nothing. The whisper had nothing. He was holding her arms in the dark and she was two inches from him and every true thing he knew about Wickham required a voice he did not have and a name he could not say and an explanation that would unravel everything else, and she was looking at him — or looking towards him, which amounted to the same thing in this room — with the complete and devastating clarity of having won the argument and knowing it. And there was nothing he could do to convince her of his sincerity, the honest frustration of a husband who had nothing to say to his wife but the one thing he ached to say the most.

He pulled her towards him, and his mouth found hers in the dark.

It was not careful. It was not even entirely sane. Nearly three months of restraint surged up in him at once — the supper table, the arguments, her voice carrying across the dark, the discipline of sitting six feet from her while wanting every inch he had forbidden himself. He kissed her as if the wanting had been waiting with its hand at his throat and had finally been let loose. She made a startled sound against his mouth — not protest, only shock — and then her hands were at his chest, and she was kissing him back.

The answering of it struck him harder than the impulse had. He had thought, madly, disgracefully, that he might kiss her once and know the full extent of his offence. Instead, she came towards him — whether as a way to match the argument he was making or to make a new one for herself, the result was the same.

She rose onto her toes to reach him, one hand clutching his coat, the other sliding up as though she needed a surer hold, and the gasp she made when his hand found her waist had nothing uncertain in it. It had hunger in it. It had relief.

He had not known until that moment how starved he was for the feel of another human creature who knew him by mind before touch. Nor had he known that she was starved too — for company, for heat, for him specifically — until she opened her mouth more fully into the kiss and let him draw her body in until there was no space left between them at all.

The whole of her came to him through the dark — the warmth under the muslin, the quick rise and fall of her breath, the living line of her body not yielding but meeting him with equal force. It felt like a dam giving way.

He broke away with an effort that was nearly pain. His forehead came down to hers. Both of them were breathing hard.

“Forgive me.” The whisper was wrecked. “I should not have—”

She kissed him again.

Not blindly this time. Deliberately. Both hands came to his shoulders and pulled him back to her, and she kissed him the way she argued — with full conviction, without softening, as if once she had decided on a thing it was useless for the world to suggest moderation. He made a sound against her mouth that did not resemble speech. His hands went into her hair, to the back of her neck, to her waist again, and when she pressed closer, he stopped pretending he was restraining anything at all.

Her fingers found the skin at his collar. The touch of them there caught him like flame finding dry paper. His mouth opened against hers. Her breath caught and then deepened; she answered him with her whole body, her whole astonishing willingness, and the argument vanished entirely.