Between The Lines
After the Kiss: Part 2: Alexander
Mr. Alexander Colbourne watched a familiar carriage pull from his drive, as a tug from the invisible string that connected the reluctant occupant and himself jerked acutely. He took a responsive step forward, hoping it might soothe his profound ache to be nearer to her once more. But without relief, all he had to draw from was her wide eyes and flushed face staring back at him through the reflective carriage glass. He felt a contented smile linger on his face as he recalled her essence. This woman that had surprised and entranced him from the start, had become persistently embedded into his being with every passing day. This connection that snuck up on him, had culminated into something most surprising that very night.
Tonight, her presence both calmed and excited him. He recounted with astute clarity what it was, to look into her deep brown eyes, cradle her face in his hands and feel his lips find hers. How instinctively their hearts moved in step crafting their vulnerable exchange. Every part of his being responded to the memory that only a moment ago was his reality. He stood silent, watching the carriage ardently. Wanting to feel her warmth and light ignite him once more but this heart that accelerated his, on every level had turned the corner towards Sanditon town and faded into the salty summer night.
He looked up to the moonlit sky, reflected its light, and sighed breathlessly, "What now?"
He looked out across the estate and took a calming breath in and out, trying deliberately, to slow his racing heart. He shook his head slightly to force thought, but only these emerging feelings remained palpable. But he knew exactly what his next move would be. There would be no going back to the rhythms of, "normal life" after tonight. Normal must be transformed to include Miss Charlotte Heywood as a permanent member of Heyrick Park. No longer as its beloved governess but as mistress of the house.
"Charlotte… " Alexander whispered to himself as he closed his eyes, relaxing his head as he tilted it upward once more to the moonlit night.
Just saying her given name out loud satisfied him to no end. He had said it in his waking dreams many a time but to recall the experience of tonight was another matter. To speak so intimately to the women who had engulfed his thoughts affected him deeply, and to call up their intermingling was an experience no memory could fully embody. But he tried, as his mind lingered again on her. Her cheek against his, warmly and tenderly breathing her name as he kissed the delicate skin of her neck..."Charlotte." He imagined saying her name in other more intimate places and in other more familiar ways. Recalling her response that night and his urgent need for her sent him straight to thoughts of a swift wedding and honeymoon…He immediately pictured her illuminated face staring back at his, flushed after a prolonged kiss that would seal their union. His future imagining became his present reality as he heard their names proclaimed together in his mind, "Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Colbourne…" A remaining heat and lightness filled his mind and body as he savored the thought of their inevitable merger into one.
But suddenly as he heard the latter name echo again, he felt a familiar gravity that pulled his growing lightness to the ground. He stepped back and recoiled reflexively. He searched again for the moon, face tilted straight to the sky. But the light dimmed as clouds rolled in with a summer downpour that met his once ruddy cheeks instead. This sudden storm threatened to engulf his solitary figure.
The drop that started this familiar torrent was a name. The buried connection to prior, Mrs. Alexander Colbourne halted in his mind as his whole body stiffened in an effort to hold back the flood of emotions barging in.
But as quickly as rain dripped off the tip of his nose and slipped to the ground, that name pulled him down. His heart sank to the drenched earth, as he seemed to watch his shell standing lifeless. It wasn't the former occupant of the name that haunted him as much as all the failures associated with the name. That title was latent with… pain. The harsh self-accusations that began to attack in darkness were by no means new but tonight they were louder somehow and pulled harder. The dark seemed even darker in the light of tonight's illuminations.
"How could I give Charlotte a title wrought with so much weight and torment? I could never…" He fought back with himself as he tried to scrutinize the choice that only moments ago seemed an exciting reality.
As he battled inside he stood motionless, the light drained from his eyes and the color of his face paled. He knew what his next choice must be… to silence any notions that they could be so intimately bound. Forgetting the idea that his name would ever be intertwined with hers. The stirring of his being these past many months, tonight's overwhelming bond, and their foreseeable future became but a dream in an instant. Waking up from such a dream was excruciating.
So he held his eyes shut and tried desperately to hold on to tonight, the warmth and the light. He tried to pull Charlotte's face from the shadows, for her presence seemed to forge a new path of sorts in him, a new way to be in the world. This branched path, pieced from their moments together was full of the light of being known and accepted. It inspired him to go where he had never been. He thought of how impossible yet so available her offer seemed to be. The offer she held in her eyes each time she looked at him. He couldn't quite name this offer but he wanted to embrace it with his whole self, as he did her. All he knew was that with her, the light of hope began to shine brighter than fear…
But here…now, his eyes shocked awake and he was left, standing stiff in the night without her. Here where the depth of his vulnerable admission was overtaking any warmth and light they once shared. The flood of failures he leaked out tonight began to drown him as the darkness descended over him. With every emitting breath was the cold, numb reality of his mistakes, the man he tried to hide and escape from.
The possibility that he could fail, "Charlotte…" drowned him with unfathomable pain as his wet face met the rain straight on. Those he had already failed created this hole but now he sank into the deep.
It was all too much, as his heart had not been this exposed in his adult life. He swallowed sharply and stared down at the rivers under his feet as he forced the last flashes of, "the dream" to fade from his mind's eye. As with the rain, it all seemed to wash away.
At that very moment, Alexander heard a heralding voice beckoning him inside. It was Mrs. Wheatley, motioning him to the house as she moved towards his location covering him in a large blanket. He looked up, willing himself to step towards the house as he had momentarily lost connection with his ability to move. With his head held low, he walked towards the house past the threshold as his eyes adjusted slowly to the dim candlelight present in the foyer.
Trying to block the past moments from his mind, he handed Mrs. Wheatley the soggy blanket. "Thank you," He faintly got out.
She placed the covering over one arm as she teased him slightly. "Glad to see Miss Heywood got off home well enough tonight…" She said with a knowing smile.
But as Alexander responded with a stilted nod she pressed in, "You were out in the rain quite a while Mr. Colbourne." She added in a motherly tone as she looked at him with concern.
He bowed his head, taking in a sharp breath, getting ready to speak, as he was determined to soothe those concerns. But Mrs. Wheatley, being a steady companion since boyhood could see through his veiled attempts to pacify her.
"Xander, what happened?" She interrupted in a comforting voice. But he paused unable to answer for he was asking himself the same question, "What happened?"
One minute he was enraptured, on the edge of a marriage proposal, the next in the depths of self-loathing and despair. What happened moments ago can only be answered by what had been happening… But at this moment he could not go there. The pain of recounting the path to this night was too much.
He reported back stiffly, " Nothing happened, I'm fine, Mrs. Wheatley. Nothing a good night's sleep won't remedy I'm sure."
"And when was the last time you had one of those?" she retorted.
Alexander forced a slight curve at the corner of his mouth as he passively stepped around her, then mechanically made his way up to his bed-chamber. As he entered the dark space, without the need for a light he habitually climbed into his bedclothes and then walked lifeless to his window. His hair was still damp and his heart was still numb. He watched the night clear and the moonlight shine once again over the estate. But this did not affect him in the slightest. He pressed down all thoughts and feelings from this revealing night and turned to his bed. His ability to numb like this had become part of his survival. His heart, long stowed away had been open tonight, vulnerable as it had never been before and he found it harder to keep his feelings at bay.
He turned around and moved to stand by the window once again. He stared down at the remaining puddle he had been standing in as his feelings tumbled up in a jumble. Feelings like guilt and fear seemed to be woven together in a sort of old, comfortable blanket that covered him. While other new flickering feelings, like hope, unsettled him immensely. The flash of longing, joy, and excitement made an effort to stay but in desperation to quite the prevailing self-hate, he had to put them all to sleep. Stealing from him, the peace that had been waking up inside him as well.
"Sleep." He said to himself in an insipid tone. He turned back to his bed and lay down on the duvet as he forced his heart and mind to cease circling in the usual fashion. It took quite some time before Alexander could find sleep as he pushed his eyes shut and slipped into the void.
His sleep was fitful and he woke with a start. He inhaled abruptly in the dark recalling the images that had bombarded his sleep without his will. New, pleasant images of kisses and eyes looking longingly turned into his painful, common nightmares. He saw flashes of his mother's eyes fading from life, long before the laudanum and pneumonia took her. His little hands holding her limp delicate ones, begging her to try, begging her to live. He saw his father rage, hurling insults and glass at his small guarded frame. He looked down at a baby he held, crying for her mother not knowing she had slipped from this earth too soon. But what captured his sleep so often was not an image or a thought but a feeling, one he could never shake and could not name.
But he heard himself say in the dark, "I wasn't enough to save them, I failed... I failed them all…"
Alexander could not put a finger on the exact feelings that grew from these unhealed wounds that woke him tonight. But it was his shame that kept him from sleeping more nights than not and what kept him asleep to himself during the day. He did know, that he had to get away from these thoughts, these memories that sought to encase him in pain.
As usual, he needed another space to try and shake off his familiar ghosts. He got up suddenly and lit a candle. He was drawn downstairs to the front sitting room, the same room he had sat with Charlotte earlier that evening. He placed the flickering candle on the table by the door and sat in the exact spot he had occupied earlier but in a much-altered state. He looked into the wavering darkness and directed his attention to the spot where Charlotte's shadow still faced him. In the stillness he saw her, eyes full of compassion, hands full of his, lips speaking truth directly to his heart but could he hear it?
"You bear no blame…" he heard her say. Her words, her eyes, and her heart were so full of compassion, lacking any form of the judgment he now touted over himself.
Alexander looked down trying to fight the building force of her words that beckoned him out of hiding, "But I am to blame, Charlotte! I wasn't enough for them, I am not enough for you…" His hands held his distorted face as he voiced an honest confession, " I don't deserve to have you and I won't add you to the faces in my nightmares."
In the dark, he heard Charlotte's freeing words to his long-held, self-imprisonment of shame." Forgive yourself…else the past will thwart the future, a future that I imagine could be very dear, indeed…"
"I cannot." Is all he said yet again.
But this time there were no eyes to see into his soul, no hands to hold him, and no kiss to draw him out into life. He only sat there with the need to put those fanciful feelings away as quickly as possible, before he became any more exposed and that exposure caused any more agony.
He looked to her shadow, sitting beside him in the dark, lowered his head, and thought, "But maybe you can forgive me for saying too much tonight and placing this burden at your feet? I don't expect you to hold this for me; it is mine and mine alone. I only hope that you will be able to forgive my weakness in sharing too much. Please forget this entire night occurred… as I must."
The night had caught up to him, his body longed for rest, as did his ravaged heart. He let his feelings make an entrance and for that, he would seek forgiveness. He thought out a disciplined plan to formally address this blunder with Miss Heywood. He had put his heart away, in its familiar place. But as he tried to keep his feelings in their old worn hiding spot deep inside, they were not as comfortable there as they had once been. Exhausted and growing foggier by the minute he leaned heavily on the couch behind him and slide unknowingly down to the cushion beside him. The lone candle burnt down and extinguished itself as he collapsed into eventual sleep. But before his view blackened fully, he spoke reflexively to a vision in his muddled mind. "The dream" had resurfaced to push back the night and echoed gently as he murmured hazily to the turning dawn, "Until tomorrow, Miss Heywood…"
