Chapter 31: Not Tonight

The study was dark when I finally came downstairs.

I hadn't meant to. I'd spent an hour staring at the ceiling in my room, running my fingers over the places on my shoulders where his hands had been, replaying the way his breathing had changed, the way his forehead had almost touched mine. The way he'd pulled back like I'd burned him.

Not like this, he'd said.

What did that mean? Not like this. Like this was wrong, or like this wasn't the right moment, or like he was one breath away from something he couldn't take back and he knew it?

I gave up on sleep around midnight and wrapped a cardigan around myself and went downstairs, not thinking about where I was going until I was already standing in the hallway outside his study door.

The light was on underneath it.

I almost turned around. I told myself to turn around. My feet didn't move.

I knocked twice, light, like I wasn't sure I wanted an answer.

"Come in."

His voice was rough. Tired. I pushed the door open.

He was at his desk, jacket discarded, the top two buttons of his shirt open, papers spread in front of him that he clearly wasn't reading. The security screen on the wall to his left was dark. He'd turned it off, or maybe he hadn't turned it on yet. When he looked up and saw me, something moved through his expression that he controlled too quickly for me to name.

"You should be asleep," he said.

"You should be too."

He leaned back in the chair slowly, watching me. I stayed near the door, one hand on the frame, not quite committing to being in the room.

"I can't stop thinking about what you said," I told him. Quietly. The house was so silent that my voice sounded too loud even at this volume. "In the music room."

"Aurora…"

"I'm not asking you to explain it." I pressed on before he could redirect the conversation the way he always did, controlled, measured, impossible to get underneath. "I just wanted you to know that I heard you. What you said about fighting this. I heard it."

He said nothing. He was watching me with those grey eyes that gave away so little and somehow communicated everything, and I could see the muscle in his jaw working slowly.

"I'm scared too," I said. "If that matters."

The chair shifted as he stood. He didn't come toward me, he moved to the window instead, putting distance between us the way he always did when he was losing the argument with himself. I watched his shoulders rise and fall with a slow breath. Outside, the grounds were dark and very still.

"What are you scared of?" he asked. His back was to me. His voice came out lower than he probably intended.

I thought about lying. I was good at that, at packaging my real feelings into something safer, something that wouldn't cost me as much if he rejected it. I'd learned that from years of living with people who used vulnerability as leverage.

But I was so tired of being careful.

"I'm scared that I'm already past the point of pretending I don't feel this," I said. "And that you're going to keep pulling away every time it gets too real. And I'll just be standing here." I exhaled. "Like I was in the music room."

He turned around.

I hadn't expected that. I'd expected him to stay at the window and give me something controlled and insufficient and send me back upstairs. Instead he crossed the room in slow, deliberate steps and stopped in front of me, close, not touching, close enough that I had to tilt my chin up to hold his gaze.

"You think I pulled away because I don't want you," he said.

My heart knocked against my ribs.

"Didn't you?"

"No." The word was quiet and absolute. "I pulled away because I want you too much and the reasons I shouldn't haven't disappeared just because my body has decided to ignore them."

The air between us felt thin. I was aware of every inch of space or lack of it between my body and his. The warmth he put off. The smell of him, something dark and clean underneath the late hour.

"What reasons," I whispered.

His hand came up. Slowly, like he was giving himself time to stop, he traced the back of two fingers down my jaw, barely touching, barely pressure, more suggestion than contact. My breath stuttered completely.

"Not tonight," he said.

"You keep saying that. Not now. Not like this. Not tonight." My voice came out unsteady. I hated that. "When, Lucian?"

Something cracked open in his expression. Just for a second. Just long enough that I saw beneath the control, the exhaustion of it, the cost of maintaining it, the way he was holding himself together around something that wanted very badly to come apart.

"When I can give you all of it," he said. "Not just this."

I didn't know what that meant. He didn't explain. He dropped his hand from my jaw and stepped back, and I felt the loss of his warmth like something physical.

"Go to sleep," he said. Back to the window. Back to the careful distance.

I stood in the doorway for a moment longer than I should have. Then I turned and went upstairs.

I didn't sleep. I lay in the dark and pressed my fingers to the place on my jaw where his had been, and I thought about a man who claimed he wanted me too much and kept finding reasons to want me from a distance, and I wondered how long either of us could survive this particular kind of almost.

In the study below me, the light stayed on until morning.

I know because I checked. Twice.