A Fateful Evening

Mary and Charles had already said their goodbyes, technically. There had been no need to meet once more. But when Mary's plans had gotten cancelled at the last minute and Charles had reached out to her just then, asking her to have one final drink with him, she had not refused. It was not because of him. She simply didn't like an evening to go to waste just because friends of her aunt had fallen ill. She was still young enough to be out on a Thursday evening, when the city was coming to life. And she had just bought that exquisite new dress and the chic evening coat that went so perfectly with it. It would have been a shame not to seize this opportunity to wear it.

But apart from this, nothing good had come out of the evening so far. They had talked, they had taunted and joked, but there was a distance between them that had never been there before.

As the hour grew late and Charles mentioned once again his journey to Poland that he would start in two days time, Mary realised that this was her last opportunity to get some closure. It didn't matter what Charles would think of her anymore. He would be gone for at least three months afterwards, she would quite probably be married when he came back. If he came back at all. If he didn't find some less opionated Polish woman that liked pigs and accounting and listening to him drone on and on about financial matters. No reason at all to hold back, therefore.

"Why did you end things?" She raised her dark eyes from her glass and her inquisitive look pierced him. Charles had not missed this. Or perhaps he had.

"It was getting rather crowded for my taste." He tried to soften the bitterness with a smile and failed.

"You cannot withstand competition?" There was daring in her voice, he thought, but she also looked ever so slightly abashed. It wasn't an expression he was familiar with.

Charles shrugged. "I never saw the appeal, really, in squabbling over a woman. You are perfectly capable of making your own choice without me declaring my passionate love for you in a dozen pathetic love letters."

"No, you are not the type," she agreed, and lifted her glass, swirled the liquid around in it once, twice, before taking a sip. It was just like her to play with her cocktail a little before actually drinking it. "Still. The competition was rather thinning out at the time."

"It was," Charles agreed. "Although there was one other variable left…And I removed myself from the equation."

She raised her brows. "How technical."

"Is it so unfathomable that I might just not be a sore loser?"

"Certainly." Mary swirled her glass once more, her gaze focused entirely on the liquid, "I only wonder what made you so certain that you would lose?"

"Why, was there a chance you might have chosen me? Despite your sketching trip?" At the last two words, his voice climbed up an octave into a slightly mocking tone.

She did seem surprised that he knew. "Well, we will never know now."

For a moment, they both pretended to watch the dancers, determined not to speak first.

If Charles had been less wrapped up in his own emotions, he would have noticed how telling it was that Mary broke the silence after a while, her tone bored, en passant: "Of course you think me indecent now."

She kept her eyes on the dancers but couldn't resist a quick sideway glance, only to be disappointed. Charles was not looking at her. It seemed as if he had found a fly in his martini, judging by the way he frowned at his glass.

"I think you are a modern woman who does not let society-imposed rules dictate her every step. If you would like to brand me an old-fashioned misogynist, I must disappoint you."

"I am not disappointed. Not by that, at any rate."

The question burned on his lips more than the liquor in his throat but he had sworn not to dance to her tune again so he kept silent on that subject.

"What will you do now? How many suitors remain to be disappointed?"

"Not as many as most people think," she said, with that careless arrogance he loved. "But it is for the better. I know what I want now."

"And you haven't found it yet."

She looked at him, took her time. "No."

"When I return from Poland, you will be married."

"Perhaps," she replied, as if she couldn't care less. "I'll see."

"I'm willing to bet on it."

"Perhaps we should make it a bet then."

"I have enough sense not to bet against you, Mary."

That made her smile. "I knew you were a coward."

"Sensible, it is called. You would never let me win."

"No," she agreed, the word drawn out in a cold drawl, "I wouldn't." Her smile told him they were on the same side, in on the same joke, the same secret.

Charles felt his resolve weaken. Had not a part of him wanted this very conversation to happen? He had told himself that their brief reconnection had all been because of Tony but whom was he kidding? His own ferocious heart was calling him a liar.

"It is late," he said, although neither of them had finished their drinks. "I have a lot to prepare for my departure."

Mary was not one to linger when told to leave. She did not gulp down her margarita in a rush but pushed it back with a smooth, determined motion, and the saggy lime slice that swam in the glass swirled around sadly.

"I wouldn't want to keep you." She had half risen before he could even pull her chair back. Mary Crawley would flee the scene before she could ever feel unwanted. He knew that. He had played with that. And now, he would miss that. Terribly.

Charles followed her to the door. They attracted attention, she attracted attention. Charles had never seen a person who walked like this, as if the world lay at her feet, as if everyone was bowing in front of her, and Charles knew the king personally. Mary Crawley looked as if she had been born to be an Empress but to pass her time, she'd taken up modelling fashion.

It was best for him that he'd soon see nothing of her, not even her very straight back, but as he helped her into her evening coat, his fingers brushed against her cold shoulder and her head turned to the side, ever so slightly, as if she had stopped herself just before she could meet his gaze.

"Chilly," she commented, and her voice was just that.

But the air that came inside through the double doors promised snow.

"Take my scarf." He handed it to her, not trusting himself with wrapping it around her slender white neck. They had been close enough this evening. Too close.

"Thank you."

Red had always been her colour and it did go well with her silver-grey evening coat.

Only one lonely black car waited in front of the entrance door. It had gotten rather late without either of them noticing.

"We can share a cab," she offered, as if the care belonged to her, "otherwise you would have to walk, I fear."

Spending ten minutes in close confinement with her was not the sort of test of strength he meant to undergo, yet walking home was out of the question. His silence annoyed her and she raised a brow.

I promise, I won't tear you to shreds, Charles," she said with her usual patronising tone.

"You are welcome to try," he smiled. She had tried. And she had almost succeeded.

Charles followed her into the back of the car, knowing already that this had been a foolish decision.

"So," Mary's tone was casual, though her eyes betrayed her for once, "this is it then."

"It seems so," he agreed, although he wanted to say something else.

"Well, you'll be glad to see the back of me." There was the usual hardness in her smile but her eyes were asking him to contradict her.

"Would it surprise you terribly if I told you I'm not?" he complied, this once, this last time.

"Very." She directed the word at the window behind him, eyes guarded, her voice subtly inflected to suggest incredulity, but he read her well enough to see that his confession had moved her.

"Will you miss me?" he asked, venturing that final step too far.

"I might." She might as well have agreed to uphold some form of polite and infrequent written correspondence if it wasn't too much of a bother, judging by her tone.

"You'll have enough diversion, I am certain of it."

"Careful, Charles. That almost sounded like jealousy." A smile played around her lips. She was always someone who relished gaining the upper hand.

But she was not as immune to the topic of conversation as she would have liked him to believe, he thought, as she raised a hand to her scarf-clad neck, subconsciously, tugging at the fabric as if it was wound too tightly.

Charles felt his upper body leaning over to her, pulled by some unknown force.

"Don't play with me, Mary." His tone was pathetic, pleading, but her gaze snapped towards him at his words.

"You played with me. Do you truly think it all meant so little to me that I didn't care when you just left?"

Her face was mere inches from his then, he felt her breath on his skin, smelled the slightly bitter lime note of her cocktail.

Charles did something very foolish then but he couldn't find it in him to regret it, not when her lips replied with such readiness, not when he felt her hands on his shoulders, then on his hips.

"What's it gonna be, lovebirds?" asked the cab driver, annoyed. Charles smiled at his Yorkshire accent but he looked to Mary for the answer. When she said nothing, he felt emboldened.

"We could have a last drink. Before I leave."

"That doesn't sound too bad," she replied but her smile was a little too bright and her voice a little too breathy to hide her enthusiasm.

They managed the way up to his hotel room rather well-behaved and discreetly, too. Mary didn't need any talk reaching Papa, or worse, Granny, and Charles could imagine better things than leaving her with such vicious gossip circulating.

As soon as the door was closed and locked behind them, however, the pretence of having one last drink was forgotten and Charles pressed her against the door, his lips on hers, unbuttoning her coat and sliding it down her shoulders to feel her skin under his hands.

His jacket followed, only to be joined by the rest of their garments in quick succession. She pushed him towards the bed.

Charles had thought about this more often than he cared to admit. Sometimes, when he was particularly angry with her, he liked to imagine that she was as cold as a fish and as haughty as a queen in bed too. To his delight, he was proven wrong.

Mary, on the other hand, had only occasionally given the matter some thought. She was a lady after all. And Charles, she had sometimes suspected, especially once he had rejected her, would be a cold and indifferent lover, one who gave only when begged, and much too little then. This one time, she conceded, as he kissed her neck just right, she had been wrong and she was glad for it. She almost regretting taking the ostensible sketching trip with Tony instead of Charles, but who could have known that he would turn out to be this hot-blooded?

Afterwards, they lay between the tangled sheets in an intimate embrace, gazing into each other's eyes in the state of blissful haze that would ebb away much too soon.

Charles was the first to come to his senses. He realised that, if he said nothing now and nothing changed, he would leave for Poland in two days and not see her again for months. But, being Charles, he didn't find it easy to communicate his feelings quite as he felt them.

Therefore, he said, with some urgency that would have betrayed his true sentiments to the inclined listener, "I have to marry you."

He found the thought rather enticing. He would not have offered her his hand just like that, too great was the risk to be refused by her once again but now, after what had happened between them just now, he was not feeling vulnerable at all. As her face fell at his words, however, he noticed that he had worded his proposal too harshly, even for his standards.

"Mary –" he started, but she had already gotten up and retrieved some of her undergarments from the floor.

"I'm sorry if I –" but she wasn't listening. She was putting her clothes back on in a rather frantic manner.

"I didn't mean to say –" he started again but now that she was at least partly dressed, her usual haughty manner came back to her.

"Golly, you don't have to marry me. This is 1924." She smiled a little, as if the notion was absurd, as if he was some backwards, provincial stick-in-the-mud whose strange views she found slightly amusing.

"What if I wanted to?" he said, pouring his soul into this semantically strictly hypothetical question.

She reacted to his question with a joyless laugh as she put the dress back on that he had unbuttoned with great care just an hour earlier.

"Will we wed in Poland?" She was back to mocking him. Whatever they had had was gone the moment he had misphrased that sentence.

"Why are you like this now? Only because I said "have to"?"

"Not only because of that," she declared haughtily.

"Am I not grovelling enough?"

She raised a brow at that. "Oh, please."

There was no one else Charles knew who could end a conversation with "Oh, please" in just this tone. Mary was used to winning every argument with a raised brow and a stretched out oh, please. Not this time.

As she put on her evening gloves – for the look of propriety as much as for the show of resolve to leave – Charles countered her final phrase: "It is that, isn't it? You want me to ask you. On my knees, with my head turned up expectantly."

She was irritated by his precise conjecture.

"I don't want you to do anything." She remembered to stress the first four words into a pointed rejection but its meaning was starkly contrasted by the state of the sheets behind her and the remainder of her clothing on the floor of his hotel room.

"Good."

He coaxed her. She knew he threw her a curt reply to draw her out, to make her reveal more of her heart than she wanted.

"Good."

She only needed to retrieve her coat now. She was fully dressed and there was evidently nothing here that she should stay for. Of course, Mary hadn't hoped for an emotional admittance of his feelings. She hadn't hoped for some romance from his side. This was Charles Blake, he was a practical man. But somehow, despite the sinking temperature in the room, she didn't put on her coat. And as the silence stretched out between them, it only served to daze her more. She couldn't move now. The tension between them kept them firmly in their places, unable to act as the night around them grew darker. At some point, it would be too dark for her to return home. The prospect of staying here with him, while absolutely damaging to her reputation, didn't fail to excite her, a feeling Mary was well-practised at suppressing.

"You will catch a cold," Charles said at last. It was never intended to be an olive branch but she took it nonetheless. She was cold. And in the quiet contemplation of the last quarter of an hour, Mary had come to the realisation that Charles would leave for Poland in two days time – if she'd do nothing to stop him. A more impressionable man would have been swayed by her display of attraction tonight, and definitely at the sight of her between his sheets. But Charles was very much a rock. And just like Sisyphus, Mary was beginning to feel the exertion that came with trying to move it. Perhaps it was time for a more overt strategy.

"I wasn't cold half an hour ago." She gave him a rare smile to coax him. This time, it worked. As she watched him, his eyes darted to the unmade bed, the tumble of sheets, his evening shirt crumpled on the floor next to his jacket. It might have been the dim light but she was almost certain that his cheeks had reddened adorably.

"Is this an invitation?" he asked and rewarded Mary with the certainty that if she replied 'yes' now, he would have to tell her to marry him once again in about twenty minutes.

"An invitation? Oh, no. I was just referring to your decreasing attentiveness."

She had him. She knew it from the beaten smile and the way he turned his head away ever so slightly, as if to hide his admission of defeat.

Charles got up deliberately slowly, as if to prove to her that he was acting on his own volition. A futile attempt but she respected him for the effort. He made his way over to her slowly, picking up his own scarf from the back of a chair and put it around her shoulders. She knew he couldn't retreat again now, not without admitting that she had an effect on him he would rather ignore.

So Mary shuffled to the side. It was more of a gesture than a movement, a silent invitation to take the empty place next to her on the settee. And Charles knew that an invitation from Lady Mary Crawley – silent or otherwise – was not to be refused. His warmth against her side was welcome.

"I can hardly refuse the post in Poland." He got straight to the point though they both knew that his choice of words acknowledged the possibility of refusal.

"Hardly," she agreed. She had to tread carefully with Charles: Too much coaxing and he would stop like a mad donkey in the middle of the road, refusing to take another step. Too little and his sense of pride would prevent him from taking a step towards her.

"What would I tell my supervisor?"

They were no longer talking about abstract possibilities but about concrete courses of action.

The path ahead of them was cleared. Mary smiled and turned towards him, a silent invitation. Charles seized his chance.

This is technically a one shot to give them happiness, so I marked the story as complete. I have written a second chapter, however, and if I feel the muse calling, I might turn this into a proper fic. Please review if you liked the one shot. xx