Chapter 32

Time that week went topsy-turvy. She took naps at noon and watched meteorites shower down from midnight until dawn, lying in the grass, head on Kit's shoulder, every nerve wakeful and crackling. She ignored the inexorable sweep of the clock hands and instead divided portions of the day and night by her own unhurried transits, to the rock pools, the cove, the beach, the tennis club, the Towans, the engine house. The holiday felt endless.

And then, abruptly, she reached the end.

It was the final day. She packed her specimens and Kit's paintings. She picnicked with Kit, Lucy, Gwen, Nelly, Thomas, and James. She and James took a farewell walk on the beach while Kit and Thomas bathed.

"You told me you despised anything striped," she reminded James in a murmur, noting where his gaze tended. "And Thomas is always dressed like a barber's pole."

Thomas was at that very moment splashing with high knees through the surf in his red-and-white striped bathing costume.

"I must have been feeling contrary," sighed James. "Stripes are the very spice of life."

Kit tackled Thomas around the waist and down they both went. The splash sparkled.

She could stay longer. The thought was a sparkle.

She and James had their tickets, yes, and he was due back at the hospital, but she didn't strictly require the two full weeks she'd allotted in London to put her affairs in order. James wouldn't mind. Thomas had changed his ticket and planned to travel with them. If anything, she'd get in the way.

There was so much left to do here.

She and Kit hadn't yet gone to the lighthouse.

He hadn't shown her his old canvases.

They hadn't discussed the contents of the letter she intended to send the Satterlees.

She hadn't modeled for his picture, of Cynisca, princess and charioteer.

He hadn't climbed the trellis below the balcony of her hotel room.

She hadn't helped him overcome his fear of snakes.

He hadn't told her all his stories of Cornish giants.

They hadn't played cards, or dominoes.

They hadn't sung a duet.

They hadn't seen The Pirates of Penzance on the stage. Or gone ice-skating. Or boating on a river.

The thoughts kept coming, sparkle after sparkle, and things to do here became things to do in general, became a desire that a few additional days in St. Ives couldn't slake. Pointless to pursue. Besides, Kit hadn't asked her to stay.

Final day turned to final night.

The train departed in eleven hours, and she was breathing in gasps, sprawled naked on her back in his bed, the moonlight silvering the window.

He turned his head, and she felt his hair tickle her inner thigh, and then the heat of his lips, the swipe of tongue. And then he was filling her, and she was stretching around a warm, smooth hardness so big she knew she would break. She would break if he pushed any deeper. If she felt it press against the aching center of her being. He pushed. It pressed. She broke. Liquid burst from inside her.

She cried out, helplessly, in pleasure, and then she fisted the sheets in shame. Damp was spreading beneath her trembling thighs.

"God, that was glorious." He sounded reverent as he withdrew.

She pressed her hand over her eyes. "Your bed, it's ruined."

"Baptized." He stretched out alongside her. "I'm pleased as the pope."

"This isn't the moment to talk about the pope." She gave a weak laugh. "I can't believe I did…whatever that was."

"You like my stone cock." He kissed the side of her face, hand massaging her pubic bone. "It happens sometimes, at climax."

"People evacuate entire pitchers of liquid?" She wished she could sink through the wrinkled, wet sheets, like they were ocean waves. "It's obscene."

"Mm." His hand massaged lower. "Obscenely lovely."

Esmé's face hovered above her in the dark, lips thinned with revulsion at the very idea of her arousal. She blinked it away. Kit was the one looking down at her, at her flushed, bare body. Her breasts were swollen, and moisture glistened on her thighs, and lovely, he'd said, obscenely lovely, and his glowing eyes, his touch, made it true.

He was in his nightshirt, his own obscene loveliness shrouded from view, and she contented herself with fumbling her hand through his hair, stroking his brow and his nose, and his lips, until he sucked her finger into his mouth. She sighed, and he rolled on top of her.

"I'm going to miss you," he murmured.

Her lungs crumpled.

I'm going to miss you.How different that was from another five-word statement, the one she could imagine him saying instead.

I can't let you go.

She whispered against his mouth, the words nearly lost in his kiss. "I'm going to miss you too."

She slept and woke. The moon had moved to the corner of the window. She could feel that Kit was awake, on the other side of the bed, tense and restless.

She swallowed. "Would you like me to…" She didn't know what to offer, but she wouldn't let that stop her.

"I want to do anything you want," she whispered.

Kit lifted his head. His hair was tousled, and his eyes were heavy-lidded.

"Is that so?" The corner of his mouth tilted up as he regarded her. "In that case, perhaps you'd frig me with those lovely fingers."

Her excitement bloomed, a new variety. She reached out, pulled him back to her, hand working up beneath his nightshirt. She stroked his hard thighs, hesitated, and stroked higher. With a shuddering sigh, she put her palm on him, and then her fingers, reveling in his heat. He growled encouragement as her fingers moved, faster and faster. He backed off, straddled her legs and knelt, yanking the nightshirt over his head. His smile was wolfish now, sharp-edged in the moonlight. With another growl, this one pure exultancy, he fell upon her. She cried out at the gorgeous shock of skin on skin. He was hot and hard and smooth and rough and soft, and he rubbed himself against her, rocking his hips in a rhythm that had her writhing. She held his shoulders as they ground together. White-hot heat obliterated her sense of her body's boundaries. He threaded their thighs, their limbs an aching knot they pulled tighter and tighter together. Their motions slowed, but the pressure built and kept building. She sent her moans into his throat, and then the blaze went everywhere, sensation uncontained. He jerked, teeth on her neck, his own cry of release hoarse and so obscenely lovely she wanted to lap at it like cream.

At some point, they unthreaded, and he flopped onto his stomach, head turned toward her on the pillow. She lay on her side, running her fingers down his back, over his muscled rear, which summoned her attention more fully than could the rarest plant to ever give leaf. His beauty cramped her heart.

Her hand meandered, as they drifted in and out of speech, as the moon continued to inch away behind the window glass. It felt so good to lie with him naked in this moment, every part of each of them offered and received and honored.

"Thank you," he said in a low voice, after a long lull.

"For what?"

He rolled onto his back, trapped her hand against his breastbone. "For urging me to try, with Lucy. The estrangement had eaten away at me. In some ways, I'd begun to feel like a stranger." He touched their conjoined hands to his mouth, which curved in a smile. "A handsome stranger, but a stranger nonetheless."

His hot breath tickled.

Her heart cramped harder, and her words ghosted out. "It is such a beautiful thing, to know you."

He guided their hands down, rose on an elbow, and kissed her, a soft, slow kiss.

Sometime later, they lay on their sides, facing each other.

"Do you think you'll ever reform?" she asked, idly brushing the tousled locks back from his forehead.

His brows shifted, just a little.

"Me, a reformed rake?" He sounded playful, but his lower lip took on a brooding fullness, almost a pout. "My sweet, rakes don't really reform. They marry when it's expedient and give their wives the clap."

"But you're a good rake. You've followed a different rule book."

"I'm an honest rake," he said. "I know what I have to offer." He flung an arm over her waist, drew her closer, and this time, when he kissed her, it was wickedly lascivious.

"No," she said at last. "That's a fraction of what you have to offer."

"Perhaps," he conceded. "But marriage isn't in the cards."

"Why?"

"Please."

She flushed at his sardonic tone. "Marriage is in the stars, though. Jupiter is transiting your seventh house. And you have a Cancer moon."

"First algology, now astrology." He sounded sleepily amused. "I'm guessing this is Miranda's doing."

"She's the one who told me about Jupiter and the moon." She hesitated. "James told me about female husbands."

He made a noncommittal noise in his throat.

"You could marry," she insisted.

"Who?"

Her blood came to a complete stop in her veins, but it was a rhetorical question and he continued with hardly a pause.

"If they can, sapphists make their lives with each other. The ones who want me—well, as I've mentioned, I have difficulty trusting that they see who I am."

"If you're lumping all sapphists together, you're not seeing who they are, individually. A sapphist might very well want you for you." She drew a breath. "So might women who aren't sapphists."

He didn't refute either possibility. He looked more awake, but his gaze had gone dark.

"Anyone I married would find as much danger as security in the arrangement. The courts would strip her married name from her if my past were discovered. The public would castigate and pity her. That's not something I could rightly offer."

"Marriage is dangerous." Esmé's face was there again, above her, then gone. "There are rewards, but risk is always part of the equation. It can seem like a cage in the best of circumstances. And husbands are so often violent or unfaithful or disinterested. And wives have so little recourse."

"You're hardly recommending the institution."

"I'm not trying to recommend it." What was she trying to do? In any event, her mouth was still moving. "The only thing I recommend is…growing roots with someone."

"It's always plants with you." He was teasing, retreating into raillery. She shut her mouth, shut her eyes. The splinter in her chest reasserted itself, a little prick to the heart.

She willed herself to sleep, and as the silence extended, wondered if he'd drifted off himself.

"Children." His whisper floated between them. "Children are commonly considered chief among the rewards you mentioned."

She opened her eyes, looked into his.

"Did you want them?" he asked.

Her reply stuck in her windpipe. She had, and she hadn't.

"Do you? Want them?"

"I don't know," she said, truthfully.

"My wife would know she wouldn't know that particular joy."

Another diversion. Did he even realize?

"Kit." She curved her hand on the back of his neck. "Children are orphaned and deserted at horrifying rates. You can create whatever kind of home you wish, with whomever else you invite into your life."

He let her draw his head close.

"You claimed you don't trust your lovers to see who you are. I think you're afraid they will see who you are. You keep your attachments brief to prevent the possibility. If you're not seen fully, rejection can't touch you fully. If you were seen—it would brutalize. It would hurt so badly you might feel it wasn't survivable. I know. I felt it once. I felt like I'd flayed myself, peeled layer after layer, showed everything, wanting him to want me. And he didn't." She felt it now, a ghostly trace of the panicked agony that had ripped through her in the days and weeks following her wedding, before she'd understood and made peace with the terms of the marriage. "But it is survivable. You must hazard it. Not to love. You're good at loving. To be loved."

He pulled back, hard, and she dropped her hand.

She'd crossed a line. They were down to a fistful of hours, and she'd become reckless.

"Or maybe you truly do prefer summer flings," she said.

His voice didn't rupture the hush. It was the barest scrap of breath.

"Is that what this is?"

She didn't answer. Her heart pounded in her ears as she waited for his answer. After a few moments, she turned, putting her back to him. She heard him sigh, and a few moments after that, he pulled her against his chest, wrapping her in an embrace. When the sun replaced the moon in the window, they were still lying in each other's arms.

The sun stroked her cheek. What if she were a plant, nourished by light? Light was more ubiquitous than love. It warmed her, and so did Kit's skin, his breath, his hand heavy on her hip. The awareness that had struggled up at the first touch of gold subsided into the darkness. And this was where the roots grew—in the sweet, deep, dark. She burrowed down, blissfully mindless. Plantlike. When her lashes fluttered next, Kit was cradling her closer. The sun was high. It was high, and the birds were chirping, and…

She shot up with a gasp. "I'm late!"

She arrived at the platform uncombed and out of breath. James and Thomas left off pleading with the conductor.

"Here she is," said James, relief and concern on his face as he looked her over.

The conductor's expression was sour.

She turned to Kit, who'd raced with her through the fields and through the narrow, winding streets of St. Ives, and there was so much more to say, and do, but the time had run out. A few rote words were exchanged. A hand was extended and clasped. They might have been strangers. Her face felt like rubber. Kit's eyes told her nothing.

"Muriel," murmured James. "Not to rush things, but we're well past all aboard."

She nodded. She boarded. By early evening, she was back in London.