“If this desire is causing you to suffer... I cannot claim to fully understand why, but I would take the suffering from you, if I could, and leave only the pleasure of anticipation. Believe me. But God help me, in this instance, I cannot regret your wanting. It seems only fair, you see. Because the nights alone in my bed—by curfew, naturally... Angelique... are haunted by you.”
He heard the little catch in her breathing.
He knew her heart had skipped.
And his soared.
She was absolutely motionless. She seemed enthralled.
“And it’s a funny thing,” he continued. “Lately, now and again, when I see my hand...” He turned his palm up, then down. “So mundane and familiar, going about its business splashing water on my face or lifting a drink or scratching my bum or moving a chess piece... suddenly I stop. And marvel at the fact that it knows what it is to touch your skin. That it holds that magic, that memory. And when I remember...” He gave a short humorless laugh. “I cannot breathe for lust. It slashes like a sword.”
Her face suffused with a dazzling, fleeting radiance. He could all but see the light rush the surface of her skin.
Her hand went up as if to shade her eyes again. He was beginning to realize it was because it was an unconscious gesture, a protection against the glare of some emotion too brilliant to bear. She brought it down again.
“Lucien.” She managed to make his name an ache, a regret, an accusation, a hosanna. As if there were a million things she wanted to say, but his name was synonymous with all of them.
He smiled faintly. But unapologetically.
“There is but one cure for wanting, after all.” It was a struggle to keep all of his words light. He felt anything but light. His every cell seemed to pulse. His heart beat against his rib cage as if armed with a truncheon. Every part of him wanted her, wanted her. But every part of him wanted her to choose this for herself.
“What you’re thinking is hardly a cure.” She said this dryly. She sounded more like herself.
“Very well, then. Then it’s a... momentary forgetting. And surely it’s surcease for something that has no cure? Which is I suppose the best we can hope for.”
The following moments were wordless. But his senses were so raw even the silence abraded him, like sharp cold air.
He knew he could seduce her with the slightest touch right now. To stroke a strand of hair behind her ear. To take her face in his hands.
And even in the wordless sitting he was somehow happier than he could remember being.
Finally she spoke.
“Lucien... do you still feel hopeful about things?”
He was stunned.
He could truthfully say he hadn’t been expecting that particular question at all.
There was something tentative about the way she asked it. Something that started an ache inside him. In it he saw a glimmer of the girl she must have been when he was a boy staring out the window of his father’s house, scarcely daring to believe his luck at the turn life had taken. And then life had of course taken other turns for both of them.
He wanted to give that girl a proper answer. Not an ironic one.
And yet he realized the answer was fraught.
“For many years... I did not indulge in anything so frivolous as hope. I had no use for the word. I lived day to day, you see. And now I find that the word... might be of some use to me again.”
Oh, the language of irony. How useful the two of them found it. It was the shield they held up to circle whatever had long been simmering between them, as if it were an animal with fangs or quills instead of something new and possibly miraculous.
He could run a man through with a sword with precision, if necessary. And he would, if necessary. And yet nothing seemed riskier than saying what he felt right now. He could not imagine ever laying down his pride the way he might lay down his weapons. Surely it was pride, not fear, that kept him from saying anything more ardent.
“The reason I was at White’s tonight,” he began, slowly, hesitantly, “and the reason I’ve gone there on other days and nights these past few weeks... is because I am renewing acquaintances. Making amends. To those with whom I may have quarreled when I was young and hot of head. I want them to come to know the man I am now. Because, Angelique, I do not want a gaming hell. I want an extraordinary, ordinary, respectable, operatic life and to never be a source of gossip again.”
She stared at him.
Wonderstruck.
Then she smiled. Slowly, radiantly, and fully.