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Perhaps that was romance. So soft, so easy.
He did not take her arm.
They walked, with a healthy bit of space between them. It was dark now, and they were performing for no one.
She wondered if either of them actually knew how to perform. Or if so many years left to their own devices had made them...
Perhaps they were too much themselves.
Those people that walked together seem to blend into one. To curve around each other.
Perhaps there was an element of training in that. In learning how to bend.
Athena was a bit like a hothouse flower, if she thought about it. She had been left in the corner of the greenhouse, and left to grow on her own. She had never touched the elements. Had never truly been tested, but she had grown rigid, in her way.
Cameron on the other hand was a hearty thistle you might find out in the Highlands. Too remote, too stubbornly wild to be tamed. Too prickly for anyone to draw near.
She could curve herself around him, just maybe, if she could get herself to bend that way. There would be no way to miss all the thorns.
“This is beautiful.”
“Yes.” His voice was hard then.
“Is this better? Walking in the dark like this?”
He made a musing sound. “I suppose. I did not think I would ever see Paris again.”
“What did you like about Paris? The first time you were ever here.”
“That I was a man with means of my own. That I was never a whore here. I liked that about it.”
He spoke of that time as though it meant nothing. He spoke of selling its body as though it was something that mattered not at all.
She could tell that it did.
And she remembered the way that he had spoken of sex. How it was not romantic. And yet, she saw the way these people walked together. These people who undoubtedly went back to a bed somewhere and made love. It was physical, certainly. But surely connecting to another person like that was also romantic.
And yet, this man, for all of his experience, denied the existence of any romance whatsoever.
As though his body and soul were two completely separate entities, and what his body engaged in, his soul left the room for.
But now he had been sitting alone in his castle all that time. And she wondered. She wondered if it would be the same.
Or if now maybe that he had been so connected to his thoughts all these years if... If he would find it different now. If those things would align for him.
“You didn’t like being up...”
“You can say it. I was a whore. I sold myself.”
“You say that to degrade yourself. I don’t like it.”
“I cannot say anything to degrade myself. I am degraded under my soul. There is no more that can be done.”
“And yet you try. Every time you open your mouth. Every time you say things like that. You try.”
“Perhaps you should listen.”
“I don’t see why I should.”
