She gestured vaguely at the room, the canvas, the oil paint on her fingers, and knew she was not talking only about those things.
The tears flowed then, quietly, arriving without permission, and she pressed a hand over her mouth and found that insufficient. Then Anthony pulled her against him with the uncomplicated, certain quality of a man who had made a decision and was not second-guessing it.
She turned her face into his shoulder. He was warm, and the sheet was still at his hips, and she was faintly aware of the absurdity of this—crying in the arms of a half-dressed man, in a borrowed studio, at nearly four in the morning—and also completely unable to care about it.
He held her with both arms, not speaking, not doing the thing some people did of offering comfort through language when language was precisely not the point. She cried with the contained, exhausted quality of someone releasing something they had been carrying for rather longer than the present evening.
He said, against her hair: “You are not finished.”
She did not answer.
“The list may be complete,” he said, and his voice was careful in the way that careful could be a form of force, of insistence. “But you are not.” His hand moved on her back in slow, deliberate motions, meaning to comfort. “The woman who sneaked out of that house in March and stood in a boxing tavern in men’s clothes and—” She felt him stop. “She does not simply cease to exist because the Season requires a different version of her in the drawing room. Those are not the same thing.”
“They are,” she said. “They will be. That is how it works.”
“No,” he said, and the word was so unqualified, so absent of the usual tone he used to soften his opinions, that she lifted her head and looked at him.
He was looking down at her with the stripped, direct expression she had given him in the painting without entirely meaning to, the one she found unavoidable and compelling.
The candles were low, and there was paint on her fingers. His hair was disordered from the evening, and the sheet was at his hips, and she had never in her life felt less alone in a room than she did at this exact moment, and that fact was the most frightening and the truest thing she had encountered in twenty-one years of attempting to live carefully.
She reached up and put her hand against his face, and he went very still.
“Caroline,” he said, her name coming out on a wondering breath, a pleading breath.
“Don’t,” she said quietly.
It was notdon’t do this, butdon’t say what you were about to say, which was the sensible thing, the correct thing, the thing that would put the distance back where it belonged.
He looked at her for a moment that had no particular length.
Then he kissed her.
Not the way the kiss had been at the circus; that one had arrived with the quality of a thing that had been inevitable for a long time and had finally stopped waiting.
This was different…slower. He kissed her with concentration, both hands at her face now, tilting her toward him gently. He was not asking permission exactly, but he was also notdemanding anything she was not already giving. She made a small sound that was not a protest.
She brought both of her hands up without deciding to and laid both palms flat against the warm skin of his chest. She felt his heartbeat there, faster than she would have expected. The solidity of him, the particular reality of a person who was made of more than the impression they produced in public, overwhelmed her.
Her fingers moved across the plane of his chest, along the line of his shoulder, and the smooth, hard surface of his arm where it curved toward her.
He deepened the kiss, and she let him. The studio, the dying candles, and the painting on the easel receded into irrelevance. She could feel the warmth of him through her palms, as well as the slight, involuntary catch in his breathing where her hands moved.
She traced the shape of his shoulder and felt the muscle shift beneath her touch and heard, somewhere in the part of her that was still registering information, the sound he made that was not quite a word and not quite a breath.
His forehead came to rest against hers, and he was breathing, and she was breathing, and the room was very quiet.
“Caroline.” He breathed, then he pulled back, and she felt him manage the distance back into place between them with the quality of something requiring effort.
His hands moved from her face, but he did not step away. He stood with his forehead still close to hers, his eyes closed for a moment, and she watched him locate his composure from wherever it had gone and bring it back piece by piece.
“I should not—” he began.
“You don’t have to apologize,” she said quickly, her heart pounding in her throat. She did not think she had it in her to hear him say that again.
He looked at her then, directly, with the expression she had given him in the painting.
“I know,” he said.