A moment later, thoroughly, unequivocally ravished this time and forever changed, she returned to the ball, and he remained in the dark.
Chapter Nineteen
Kirke went straight from the Shillingford ball back to the boardinghouse.
In bed before curfew with an arm draped across his eyes, he thought about the gigantic misshapen flower that bloomed once every few years.
Which made him think of his own misshapen heart, grown gnarled around the lightning-struck, hollowed-out, wounded part.
He exhaled roughly. His heart had not seemed to slow its speed since those moments in the garden.
When he dragged his hands down his face, he fancied he could still smell Catherine on his fingers. And desire lanced him so swiftly it tore the breath from him.
He growled and hurled the very fine pillow beneath his head across the room. It struck his desk chair, which wobbled.
He wished he could cut his heart out and throw it, too.
He didn’t want to be in love.
He wanted to be left in peace. He’d survived love’s devastation once, and he could not live through it again. He thought he’d arranged his life so that he would be safe from it.
Little by little, so gently, so subtly, so effortlessly she had peeled back layers of him until the greenidiot he’d been at seventeen was exposed at the center of the man he thought he’d become.
And that boy was terrified.
It was the piss-yourself terror Delacorte described in the face of a genie.
It was the threat he’d felt shimmering on the edge of his awareness since he’d met her.
Seventeen. The age at which his heart had been destroyed.
The age at which he had forfeited his right to love and be loved ever again.
This was only just. And if he believed in anything, it was justice.
All these years since, he’d thought he had outfoxed love. Lived successfully on its outskirts. He was bemused to discover that all along he’d never had any say in it at all. The way a breeze will find a chink in armor, the way wildflowers will eventually carpet blood-soaked battlefields, it had overrun the stupid ruins of his heart anyway. He simply possessed no defenses against Catherine Keating. He’d wanted to be left alone, in peace, for the rest of his life, but love had no respect for the pain that had leveled him years ago.
For him, the notion of love was strangled by the prospect of terrible loss.
And thanks to Keating he saw other things clearly now, too. He’d called the brusqueness with which he’d ended his storied, succinct affairs over the years “honesty.” This was utter shite.
He’d done it to protect himself from any whiff of pain. Because the whole of his life he’d been a walking wound. And no one ever suspected.
And Lady Pilcher had been able to hurt Keating,no doubt at least in part because he’d been short with Lady Pilcher when he’d ended things.
The shame of this realization was now caustic.
For there was no point to this love.
For how could Catherine Keating love him, knowing what she knew about him? And when she didn’t fully know him at all?
What if you didn’t fight everything?she’d asked him.
He’d suspected she meant the desire he’d kept leashed. He ought to have fought it tonight, but it was an unfamiliar foe, like a genie. He’d reacted instead, and he was ashamed. Oh God. But the feel of her in his arms, and in his mouth...
The thing was, he was in love with her. And loving Catherine Keating meant telling her the whole truth of him.
So she could be free of him and move on to the life she deserved.