Ch 8 – Speech Disappears Into Silence

I have a hard time explaining the next part, even to myself.

I stood up, slowly, and took the ring from his outstretched hand.

I closed the distance between us, and looking directly into his eyes, I slipped the ring on the third finger of my left hand, as I'd done once before.

And kissed him directly on the lips.

I stepped back and saw that he looked as confused as I felt. I hadn't known what I was going to do in advance, nor why – only that I wanted to do it as I have wanted few things in my life. And I obeyed that instinct.

I kissed him again. This time, he returned it. His arms closed around me again, at first tentatively, then firmly. I reached up to caress his face, but my fingers struck his mask. I dared not remove it without permission; not again.

He reached up himself, but hesitated. "My face…"

"I know what you look like," I said.

That was enough. The disguise was discarded, as was the dressing gown, and I was in his arms again, kissing him running my hands over his face, through his hair, past his broad shoulders and down his strong back. He held me so tightly I feared I'd break. We clung to one another. We had been starving for each other.

When my knees buckled again, but from a different sort of hunger, he picked me up easily.

"Christine…?" he said, in a voice that sounded as though he were choking.

"It's all right," I said.

He carried me to the swan bed once again and set me down gently, all that strength tightly controlled so that he could put me down as lightly as a feather. I could feel him shaking.

I slid to one side, holding his eyes with me.

He looked at me with that nameless expression again, in which fear, wonder, gratitude, disbelief…and love, were commingled. Slowly, as if he feared I'd run away, he lowered his long frame down beside me.

"Look," I said. "I'm trembling…" I held out my hand to demonstrate. It fluttered like a leaf.

"I am, as well."

He kissed my hand as a gentleman formally kisses the hand of a lady to whom he has just been introduced, which made me smile. Then, turning it over, he lightly kissed the center of my palm.

I drew my breath in sharply, my eyes wide. It was an unexpected and romantic gesture. He continued the kisses to my wrist and up my arm, pushing up my sleeve as he went. He stopped at the soft inside of my elbow and did something with his tongue that made a small moan escape me.

He looked up, questioningly.

"Oh," I said. "Don't stop. Please." I drew my free hand through his hair again as he continued on to the upper part of my arm, and then moved to my throat, murmuring my name.

And now it was fire in my mind again. Not the fire of my nightmares, the fire of destruction; but the fire that cleanses and purifies; the heat of his breath, lips and tongue, on my throat, and then gently, softly, on the top button of my shirt. It was more than I could bear. I felt as though I were going to burn up from the inside. I pulled back.

He looked up. "No?"

"No – yes - I don't – what are we doing?"

I was in the grip of forces beyond my control, beyond my imagining, and if I'd been capable of thought, I might have thought that nothing R. had done had ever roused the same passions in me, which thought should have shamed me.

I was beyond shame. And beyond caring, but not yet beyond fear. He saw this.

"You're afraid of me," he said, sadly.

"No," I said. "I'm afraid of myself."

"You don't want me to – ruin you."

"Indeed, I don't want you to ruin me."

He began to turn away until I finished my thought: "I want you to make me whole. But I don't know why or how and I'm frightened of what I think and what I want and why what I think I should want and what I do want are so different."

Gently, he put a finger to my lips.

"Tell me you want me and it will be all right."

"That's one of the only things I do know."

"Tell me."

"I know that I want you."

"And I want you, here and now, in this moment, more than I have ever wanted anything," he said.