A/N: Hullo! I don't have much to say except thank you x a million for all the lovely reviews and thoughts. Your ideas about honor and duty were really well thought out...I tend to agree with most of you. It's just that Matthew had one belief about what being an honorable man meant and well...that belief is now crumbled to bits. How could he have gotten it so wrong so on and so forth...Remember this is the beginning of Part II of the story. I believe there will be 4 to 5 parts of varying lengths. Oh, (I always say I have nothing to say and then I do), please remember that in the last chapter, that entire scene was from Matthew's point of view. He could only hear what Mary said, not what she was thinking. Thanks in advance...The updates will probably start to slow down, I'm sorry to say
Chapter Fourteen
Mary runs the nail of her finger around and around the button of Mack's shirt. They brought a blanket but it is a waste in the summer wind, on the night before her family will descend for the wedding, on the night he convinces her to sneak away after midnight. He is always convincing her of things.
It will be our last chance to be alone until I watch you come down the aisle, he begs.
You'll be facing forward, she informs him as she twists his hair between her fingers, debating if she should take the risk of sneaking out and around her Grandmother. That's how it's done in England.
That's silly, he replies and kisses her hand, how will I know the right girl is walking towards me?
Her eyebrows rise: How will you know whether to run away?
He grins. I do want to run away. Now, with you. Let's go.
So he convinces her.
There is sand in Mary's hair and when she lifts her mouth to kiss her soon-to-be-husband, his lips taste of salt and memories and she knows he still sometimes keeps her stockings in his pockets from that first night from when she did pirouettes in the sand, a champagne bottle in her hand. "Where's the champagne?" she murmurs against those lips.
He rubs his nose to hers. "I only promise to tell you where it is...if you promise not to drink it all this time."
She smiles and kisses him again–a long, lingering kiss that goes on and on, her hair whipping out of her pins in ribbons. A part of her feels completely invincible. "Of course not. My family is coming tomorrow. I can't be walking around with an aching head."
She's practically in his lap when they sit up so he can pop the cork and he lifts the bottle to her lips for her. "Do you want to make a bet that one of your family members does have an aching head tomorrow?" Mack jokes. "And which one too?"
She hands the bottle to him though a wrinkle appears on her forehead. She knows he means it to be funny but to her... "That's not very kind."
"I meant it to be a joke," he insists as he he presses his lips to the skin of her neck. They are clothed; they waited but that doesn't mean Mack isn't eager for the wedding vows to be said either. Mary knows it and anticipation makes her belly hum while she fears the honeymoon at the same time. She tries to bring it up, halfheartedly really, but it's too hard and the words won't come out. You've been with so many women...
"It's just that he–" Mary begins and stops when she feels Mack stop kissing her neck.
"What?"
"I just don't like when you make jokes about him," Mary replies softly. She doesn't say his name, not out of protection of her own heart as it would have been before, but to respect Mack, who goes rigid when his name is murmured aloud.
"Do I talk about him that often?" Mack retorts.
"No," Mary admits and shrugs her shoulders. "No, you don't. But when you do...It isn't exactly complimentary."
Mack pulls back further and looks her in the eye. She can practically see the heart of him there, searching her for something he may have missed before. Ever since he met Matthew, Mack looks at her this way more often. It's that look that keeps Mary from telling Mack of the scene in the library–so he won't worry. "He didn't exactly make a complimentary impression. I didn't enjoy hearing him talk to the woman I love that way and–," he pauses. "You know, I don't think we escaped the mayhem of the house one last time before the wedding to talk about him."
"You're right," she whispers and slides her hand into the thickness of his dark hair and tries her best to convince him with her mouth. It isn't as if she is very confident in her abilities. She's kissed three men in her life, other than Mack, the first died, and the second is the very reason for the kissing, to remind Mack that Mary did not choose Matthew but Mackenzie, and the third–Sir Richard–with his dry lips barely warrants a mention.
She is sitting in Mackenzie's lap and no one else's; she is tasting champagne on Mackenzie's lips and no one else's. Still, Mack has never asked her the question she knows he would like to: what if Matthew did not have a wife...who would she choose then?
He shifts so they are rolling and laughing, the blanket completely superfluous now. His hands are everywhere and nowhere at once. "Mary," he whispers. She can feel that he wants her, she knows that much of anatomy. They roll again and his fingers (so dexterous) unbutton the tiny buttons at her back. She arches into him because she does love him, she does want him; there are only stupid insecurities that bat at her every now and then. His fingers loosen the corset beneath and the ease at which he performs the act–his bare hand against her bare back–makes her gasp in pleasure and pull away at the same time.
"Mack," she tells him and struggles to speak. Her voice is hoarse with desire and need and bits of fear.
"You're right," he replies. "Plenty of time for that in a few days." He smiles at her, endearingly so, a piece of hair flopping onto his his forehead. But then he pulls back further. "What is it? Did I hurt you?"
"No," she assures him as they sit up together. She reaches for the champagne to wet her tongue. "It's only...Oh, Mack."
"Don't tell me you're backing out on me now, Mary Jo," he jokes but she sees real nerves there, in his dark eyes, the nerves he so rarely, if ever, let's anyone other than her see and she wonders if this is by choice or simply because he cannot hide from her like he hides from all the others. Is that what makes her different from the other girls like Emily?
"Mackenzie," her hand fits to his cheek, over the stubble of his day. When they are married, will she ever see him shave? She would like to, knowing that if she asks, he would let her and laugh at her all in the same breath. She can imagine him, cream on his face, gently wrestling her to the bed until she is shrieking in laughter. It has always been this way with Mack–since she realized she loved him. She can imagine the smallest of moments and they almost always come true."I'm not backing out on you. I couldn't. You must know that."
"I do," he replies slowly.
"Oh," she cries out. "It's just that you have so much more experience than I do in this area. I'm worried...When we're together, a part of me wants," she hesitates, "you as much as you want me. But another part of me is so very worried, just so nervous–"
Mack takes her hands and kisses the back of each one of them. "You can tell me anything, Mary. You know that."
"I don't hold all the other girls against you," she murmurs at last, staring at his chest. "I really don't. And I never have. It's only, you'll be so good at this and I...the only time I came close to this...a man died."
Mack laughs and tries to quiet it against her shoulder.
"I mean it," she says, her eyes lifting to his. "I know I'm not the first girl you've brought to this beach...I knew it the first time you brought me too..."
She sees the admission, the guilt in his eyes. "Mary–"
"You don't need to feel badly," she tells him immediately. "I don't want you to feel guilty. That's not what I'm asking. I'm trying to tell you...I'm nervous. What if I do the wrong thing? What if I'm a disappointment?"
"You couldn't be." One dimple appears, one side of his smiles slides up. "You couldn't be."
"I could be," she insists. "What if?"
"No," he murmurs against her lips and he stays there, his hands in her hair, kissing her, until her lips are plump, until she realizes that his hands move to the back of her dress. She is laced back into her corset; the buttons are all done up.
"I love you," he whispers into the shell of her ear.
Yes, she thinks. You do.
She turns away from the memory of Matthew saying more than she dared in the library: I miss you.
"I love you too," she replies to the man she will marry in just a few days time, the man who waited for her, the man who knows her, the man who will rub shaving cream on to her own face and wrestle her onto the bed until she shrieks with laughter.
At night, Mary worries about Matthew. She does not worry over his attendance at the wedding, that he will become a stumbling drunken buffoon and embarrass her. No, the worrying began when she saw him those few months ago and saw how changed he could be in less than a single year, less than three hundred sixty five days a year.
She lies awake and worries over him, as she used to do during the war. She even prays for him again, though she does not do so on bended knee with his photograph in front of her (which would feel more like a betrayal to Mack for reasons she will not explain to herself). She doesn't need a photograph–the red rimmed eyes, the swollen face is burned into her memory–to touch and caress and wish for. She does not pray against Germans and bullets but his own hand and the bottle he lifts to lips.
She does not blame herself. She cannot. When she decided to leave home a year ago, she could only think of keeping herself above water and if there was anything tying her down, pulling her beneath the waves, she escaped it. She wanted to live. She wanted to live. Even if it hurt. She learned to live in the pain and with it, every day waking up and pressing her hands to her chest, to her heart where it hurt. But Matthew cannot learn to live in the pain; he needs the numbness. Or perhaps men are less inclined to learn to live in the pain, to grow out of it, when they hold all the cards and can make all the choices.
In the library, she could have yelled at him and shouted and told him he made his bed and now the drinking and mockery behind his back is what he must lie down in. She didn't and doesn't have the heart to tell him that. She never did. She cannot see him hurt. She still remembers the stillness he had in his hospital bed, unawake, no one sure if he would wake, and her eyes so brutally dry. Brutally dry. It isn't as if Lady Mary Crawley, soon to be Lady Mary Banks Duncan, is afraid to say a biting thing, to tell him he deserves all he's been dealt. But to Matthew...a hurting Matthew...
Even now she dreams he drinks and falls and hits his head and dies. Or he drinks and takes a bath only to drown. Or he drinks...(there are any number of scenarios and she never knows which one will come to her when she closes her eyes to sleep, but one will come)...and he dies.
He dies.
She cannot imagine a world without Matthew Crawley in it.
It doesn't have to be her world. Just the world.
Sometimes, she wonders what will happen when she sleeps beside Mack in a few days. When she wakes from her dreams, or nightmares, will he see Matthew's face in the pupil of her eye? Will he know the truth–that though she loves Mack, she loved Matthew once too and it was not her choice to stop loving him?
I'll wait for you, Mack said.
Somehow Mary thinks it is easier to wait for someone who is sad instead of someone who is still in love with someone else. But she isn't in love with Matthew–not the old version or the new version, either.
You miss someone else, she told him. You miss the girl you knew and I'm not her anymore. I'm not.
She tells herself the same things now: You miss someone else. You miss the boy you knew and he is not him anymore. He isn't.
He isn't.
And Mack makes her laugh. He makes her laugh so hard.
But he doesn't understand everything. He doesn't understand that Sybil, Tom, and Baby Dec cannot come for the wedding. She talks around it for as long as she can: Mack, it's not convenient for them now. We'll see them in six months when they go to Downton.
But Mack does not understand. It's your wedding, Mary. She's your sister. And from what I can tell, you're closer to her than to Edith. You would think she would want to be here for you.
How do you explain a lifetime of family dynamics to a man like Mack? It is impossible and the weight of it hurts her chest.
She does want to be here for me, Mary insists.
Then she would be here, Mackenzie retorts.
She snaps: Oh, Mack! They can't afford both trips!
He shrugs. Just shrugs. I can pay for them to come. It's nothing. I can pay.
Mary presses her fingers to her forehead. Sybil and Tom would never allow it. They have pride, you know.
He doesn't understand, does not see her shoulders sink. What's more important pride or family? he asks.
She grumbles and stomps away and tells him not to do a single thing and he can meet Sybil in six months. But the whole time she can only think: Mack does not understand at all. But Matthew would.
But now it is time for sleep and she wonders which nightmare she will dream. Will he slip and fall from his bike? Will he hit his head coming down the train steps? How many ways can the drink kill him?
She cannot imagine a world without Matthew Crawley in it.
It doesn't have to be her world. Just the world.
I'll wait for you, Mack said.
Only now, she raises a hand to wipe the tears streaming from her eyes. They don't count if you shed them in the dark. They don't count at all.
In the morning, just before midday, she walks to the front door of Mackenzie's house, where everyone from the family will be staying. She watches her mother step from the car and then her father. When she sees Granny's cane, handled in that steel grip, and then Granny herself, Mary grins, her whole face alit with something mixed with joy and anxiety. The next car holds Lavinia, so very pretty as always, and Matthew, blinking blearily at the sun.
She barely gazes at him. She cannot afford it.
I'll wait for you, Mack said.
"Hello," she cries and walks over to Granny. "Oh, thank you so very much for coming!" When she embraces her grandmother, she swallows the lump in her throat. "I can't believe you're here for my wedding."
A/N: And let the games begin, I say...In the meantime, please let me know your thoughts on this chapter. It was interesting to write and get inside of the heart of Mary at this point. Love to you all. XX