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So I continued. “Desmond and Richardson weren’t special. They weren’t even particularly inventive bullies. But I knew they were common because I was the target of everyone who ever needed someone to be small so they could feel big. My mother and sisters had seen me for me, and had let me be myself with them, so I had little practice in hiding myself from anyone but my father. When he banished me to school, I was different than the boy my classmates had expected …” I chuckled without humor at the word that popped into my head. “I could not be classified into something that made sense, so their answer was to beat that boy into me.”
The fingers at my scalp tensed, but then continued to stroke my hair, and I realized in surprise that Dhruv had reacted to them, not to me. I inhaled, and my words came more easily.
“They did not make me want to be more like them, and when I was finally allowed to leave that school, I left everything behind. My name, my family, the person I had been in the safety of my mother’s drawing room, and the one my father expected me to be in the world. I grew out my hair, made my own clothes, and I became … me.”
Dhruv draped my loose hair over one shoulder, and then he came around to straddle the bench next to me, turning me to face him. He picked up the red camellia and tucked it behind my ear so that my hair cascaded behind it.
His hand cupped my jaw, and his fingertips caressed my cheek. I wanted to lean into the gentleness of his touch, but I was afraid to move, afraid to even blink.
“I said you are the bravest person I know, but I didn’t realize how truly authentic you are. You didn’t default to Oliver MacKenzie because it might have been easier, nor did you hide yourself in Olivia. You became yourself on purpose, and that takes such courage and strength. I am in awe.”
I held his palm to my cheek and turned my face to kiss it, inhaling the scent of his skin as I closed my eyes. “I feel safer with you than I have ever felt in my life. You see me.”
I actually could feel his gaze on me as he spoke. “A red camellia symbolizes the flame in my heart for you. And there is a Polynesian culture in which women wear flowers behind their ears. Wearing one behind this ear,” he touched the flower he’d placed behind my left ear, “tells the world her heart is spoken for. It was presumptuous of me to place my heart’s flame there, but I hope I am not wrong.”
I smiled into his palm and lifted my eyes to meet his. “My heart, with all its wounds and twine and sticking plaster is yours if you’ll have it, Dhruv Lestrade.”
He kissed me so gently his warm breath played on my lips with the promise of so much more. “And mine belongs to you.”
