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Outside he took in the air, and his breath plumed around him. He strolled the cobbled path, his body tense and hunched in a fight to hold in some warmth. The house had many pockets of garden about it, and his favorite was a little walk away, where a bench at the end of the stretch overlooked the fields. Here he would sit and drift along, detached from his body and purging thoughts into the wind. Today the meadow, which had flooded with the week’s rainfall, was like marshland, and the bench was cast in the tree’s shadow. The twigs cracked under his boots. He had not expected to find the bench occupied by a man in a large black coat. Like a deer turning its head at the hunter, the man twisted to look at him. But it was no stranger.
“What are you doing here?” Bron heard himself ask.
Darcy was tossing stones into the flood; they didn’t so much skid, but rather sank into the waterlogged grass. He looked pale and ungainly, bent like a branch off the tree itself. Darcy clumsily waved him over, sat up straighter, but Bron was slow to move as their eyes interlocked for an infinite second.
“Bron, I hadn’t seen you coming—although I’m glad to see you.”
He shrugged, mimicking Darcy’s punctuated way of talking. “Glad … to see me?”
“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed that seeing me would cause such a feeling as gladness, let alone it being a matter of certainty.”
“Don’t tease me, Bron,” Darcy said. “It’s frankly annoying, if not despairing.”
They had fallen into the rhythm of this. Again. He felt it prick as though he’d been scolded.
“Well, if that’s all you have to say …”Stop it, stop.The walls were going up, his mode of defense ruining the moment. The last time he’d waited for something romantic to happen, with Harry, it had all gone wrong. And now that Darcy was here, this wasn’t the way he wanted it to go. But he couldn’t help himself. It waseasier to take himself out of the situation than take part in this indefinite banter. “I’ll be on my way.”
“You are allowed to be annoyed at me, you know. I know you are. I shouldn’t have disappeared for so long, but there were a few things I needed to sort out in my head, and I thought it best to keep myself to myself. I’m sure you understand?”
“Of course I do.”
“I knew you would.” Darcy dropped a couple of pebbles into his hand, and they chucked them into the water together, the splashy splodge bringing him unexpected delight. Afterward, Darcy brushed his hands on his coat and asked if he’d like to walk with him around the grounds: “Though I’ll understand if you’ve done enough walking for the morning.”
No, not at all—he’d love to take a stroll, and they did so in circles, around the house and its gardens and then in a loop again, always ensuring he kept enough distance and didn’t tread too closely. Darcy skimmed the side of him every few minutes, a slant to his walk. Bron slowed his pace to keep one step behind.
All through the week, his mind had been plagued with agonizing questions:Where did Darcy go? Why did he go? Was it because of me? Darcy, left alone in that room, and now he’s gone. And what caused the fire?But the questions remained unanswered, and with this came the realization that while he had been thinking so much of Darcy through his absence, it was unlikely that Darcy had been thinking of him at all.
He was stuck in this reverie when Darcy said, “Why did you do it?”
“Why did I do what?”
They stopped walking. “You went into the library during the fire. You knew you shouldn’t have done that. What a stupid thing to do. Why did you go inside?”
What was he supposed to say? That he’d just had a tingling feeling that somebody would be inside the burning room, all because he thought he’d seen his hand? It felt so stupid now, butin the moment it was in his blood—that Darcy was in there, that he needed to wake him up, save him.
“Were you looking for something?”
“I wasn’t looking for anything.”
“Are you sure?” Darcy pressed. “You can tell me.”
“I thought—” He wanted to be truthful. “I thought you might have still been in there. I thought I saw you lying in the chair among the flames.”
Darcy held his gaze a beat longer. “You thought I was in there? You went in there to save my life?”
“Yes.”
He threw his head back. Laughed. “Oh, I see. Who knew we had a hero among us?”
Bron’s lips almost trembled. Was he just a fool to him? “I wish I hadn’t said anything.”
“I’m joking, Bron. You know I am quite capable of making them.”
“Well, maybe you should stop,” he said, more harshly than he meant to.
“I’m sorry,” Darcy said, but he seemed somehow pleased by Bron’s unexpected severity. His lips tipped upward. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Go on.”
