it was a stained glass variation of the truth
"I'm sorry. I thought, perhaps, you might feel-"
She cuts him off, unable to hear him say anymore.
"I might," she says, the admission, or near admission, hanging over them, weighing them down with its painful truth. "But I can't."
He looks away, and so does she. She tries to think of the past, of the man who is now only a shadow in the halls - her husband - instead of the dangerous line she is playing with now, with Nick so close to her, temptation palpable in the air.
But then the moment passes, and he leaves. She stays in the doorway, watching the car move away, and her eyes flicker closed. She has no clue what is happening to her, to her carefully organised life - first Adam running away to war, breaking her heart, and then the dashing RAF pilot with the kind eyes and wonderful cooking who seemed to come in and pick up the pieces.
Nick makes her smile, makes her feel happy even in the darkness of the war and Adam's absence, but she tries not to think about why, or what it means.
She watches the car as it finally disappears from sight and promises herself she will never let herself sail so close to temptation again.
...
Maybe it's the war, maybe that's what's giving her these strange thoughts, and making her ache inside when she runs into Nick on the street. She can almost see it written on his face, in his kind eyes and strained smile; there is something on his tongue he is finding hard to say.
She follows his eyes and her gaze falls on the school house, on the wisp of a red coat, and it is then she knows what he cannot tell her. She looks back at him, hopes her eyes convey her understanding, because she cannot find the words either.
She has no claim on him - just that brief moment when he had reached to her and she had rejected him. There is nothing she can say to him, no way she can communicate the way this realisation has made her feel, but then again she doesn't know that herself.
He nods at her, and she turns away. She has nothing to say.
...
Teresa announces the happy news at the WI meeting. There is an empty feeling inside, dull and yet sharp at the same time, pulling at her insides, but she has no right to feel this way. Adam is out there, serving his country - their country - trapped in some camp, witnessing and suffering untold horrors and she is what? Upset that a man she barely knows is marrying one of her friends? How dare she?
How dare she?
...
When she was young, she used go running in the fields behind the vicarage, chasing her sister through the grass, screaming and playing.
She never imagined that when she was twenty years old, a striking young man would appear and take her heart, and she would end up living in that house, happy and loved within those four walls.
She fell in love one gorgeous summer with a man whose faith captivated her, despite not believing herself, and their life together had been near on idyllic, so she should have expected things to go wrong.
He has been taken by the enemy and as much as she wishes to have the faith that so attracted her to Adam all those years before, she can't, and there is a lead weight in her chest, one that screams - he's never coming home.
And yet that doesn't soothe her fears, because Nick - because that moment, whatever it was, with Nick occurred before the man on the motorbike roared down her drive and caught her as she walked home in the pale sunshine. So what excuse does she have?
She doesn't have one, and it hurts her to think that even in her head, she is betraying the man she fell in love with when she was young and carefree and things like wars were just a game played with tin soldiers on the living room rug.
Because these feelings, inside, that wreak havoc in her chest as she watches a bride dressed in white stride purposefully down the aisle towards a man dressed in his military best, they remind her of her youth, and stolen moments and soft exchanges in the dark of the night, and of smiling eyes and the joy of new beginnings. She can recognise these feelings, and yet she doesn't want to, because what would be the point?
She made vows - til death do us part. And now he is at the front of a church making the exact same vows. There is no changing that, and she hopes that when Adam returns (because she cannot entertain the possibility he will not, not properly, despite the lead weight that screams at her that he's gone, that's he's dead) that things will right themselves, things will go back to the way they were and she will forget about the dashing airman in his best blue.
...
He is dancing with his wife and she sits to the side, and lets the happy couple dance.
She drops her face; she cannot watch any longer. Just watching him dance is forcing her to remember her first dance, the feel of Adam's safe arms around her, the happiness she had felt, and it hurts her to remember that moment with everything that has happened since then, frozen in time in her head.
"May I have this dance?"
Her head snaps up, and he is there, a twinkle in his eye, and a smile tugging at his lips and she wants to yell at him to go away, to damn him to Adam's Hell, but she doesn't.
"Of course," she finds herself saying, despite everything.
She takes his hand, and he puts his arms around her, the feeling of his arms so different to Adam's so many years before. They twirl to the soft beat of a waltz, and she makes sure she leans away from his embrace, so that when they are observed no one questions them. It would be unfair - it is his wedding day after all, and he has clearly moved on from whatever feelings he had asked her about that day in her doorway.
She wants to drop her head and let it rest on his shoulder. She wants to reach her hand out and touch his face. She wants to kiss him, damn the rest of the world.
But she does neither. She continues in his embrace, innocent, and they dance, because that is all it ever can be.
She is married, and now so is he.
This is all there ever can be.
...
a/n The title is from Neptune by Sleeping at Last