AN:// spicy scene ahead, you have been warned
The last guests departed at the midnight bell.
The household staff was clearing the hall with the practiced efficiency of people who have done this before and who understand that the best time to restore a room is immediately rather than in the morning, when the evidence of the evening has hardened into something more resistant.
Gorgina stood in the main hall doorway watching the clearance with the expression she wore when she was thinking about something that had nothing to do with what she was looking at.
The evening had been — she was honest with herself about this, since she was always honest with herself — better than she had expected.
Not the logistics of it. She had expected the logistics to be fine; Lady Elowen had managed the logistics with her usual unsparing competence and the household had performed with the thoroughness that nineteen years of Orreth's management had produced. The logistics had been, predictably, fine.
What she had not expected was the room.
The room had had something in it that the Wadee estate's social occasions had not had in a very long time — something that she could not immediately name but that she recognized from memory, from the early years of her tenure when the estate had been a social center rather than a retreat. Life, possibly. Or something that functioned like it.
She thought about Chapter seven contradicts itself on page ninety-four.
She thought about the margin note she had found on page ninety-four when she had checked, discreetly and immediately after the gift presentation, and which was precise and correct and which had also included a secondary annotation three pages later pointing out where the contradiction resolved itself, so that what had been presented as an argument to have turned out to also be a small, complete solution.
She had a feeling about this.
She did not examine the feeling.
She turned from the hall doorway and moved through the corridor toward the east wing, where the household's family rooms were, and where the event of the evening that she had been managing since the first hour of the banquet was going to require a conclusion.
Teivel was in the rose garden.
She had known he would be.
He had a habit of finding the outdoor spaces at the end of social occasions — had always had it, something about the way enclosed rooms accumulated pressure for him that required the release of open air. She had known him long enough to know all his habits. This had been, for a long time, a form of intimacy.
She crossed the garden.
He was standing near the south wall, looking at the cleared beds in the moonlight with the distant expression of someone who has been thinking for a long time and is not done thinking.
He turned at the sound of her footsteps.
"There she is," he said. "The birthday Duke."
"Teivel."
He looked at her in the moonlight for a moment.
"You looked beautiful tonight," he said.
"You said that inside."
"I'm saying it again." He moved toward her. "I have a surplus of the sentiment."
She stood her ground.
The garden was cold — properly cold, the first real bite of autumn arriving in the night air — and the moonlight made everything sharp and shadowless in the way that moonlight did, stripping the world of its daytime softness and leaving the bones of things.
"The necklace was too much," she said.
"It was a gift."
"It was a statement."
He stopped a few feet from her.
"Isn't that what gifts are?"
She looked at him.
Teivel Scougall, the Crown Prince of the Zenos empire, was thirty-three years old and had the face of a man who had been attractive since adolescence and had never had to develop anything more than surface charm to achieve what he wanted from other people, with the specific exception of the woman standing in front of him who had, from the beginning, required the effort that surfaces alone could not achieve.
He had put in the effort.
He put it in now.
"I miss you," he said. And the quality of it was different from the performed version — lower, more private, with the specific gravity of something that is true. "I am not — I know what I did. I am not pretending it was nothing. But I miss you."
She was quiet for a moment.
The garden was very still.
"What you did," she said carefully, "had consequences that are still—"
"I know."
"That investigation is still—"
"Gorgina." His voice had a quality it sometimes had — the quality of a man who is abandoning the strategy and going to the thing underneath it. "I am not asking you to forget it. I am standing in your garden on your birthday telling you that I miss you and asking whether there is any — any — version of this in which that has a meaning."
The honest answer was complicated.
She had been managing the honest answer for six months.
The honest answer contained several things that coexisted without resolving: the fact that Teivel had ordered a man's death and she had captured the proof of it and it had widened something between them that was not nothing; the fact that she had known Teivel for seven years and the knowing had an accumulated weight that was not the same as love but was not the same as its absence; the fact that something else had been shifting in her world over the past two years, slowly and without announcement, that was connected to a man in her library who wrote margin notes and tended rose beds and had said once, in a fever, I just wanted someone to stay.
She had not finished calculating.
But the garden was cold and he was standing very close and his voice had been real and sometimes the body makes its decisions before the mind is ready.
She let him close the distance.
The kiss was not what it had been a year ago — not the same charge, not the same clarity on either side about what it meant. It was a complicated kiss, which was the only honest kind available to them, and she let it be complicated and let herself want it anyway, briefly, in the cold garden on the night of her twenty-seventh birthday. They broke away to breathe only to clash again with an insatiable hunger. The kiss continued for a few more minutes, until she felt her legs being swooped up into a princess carry.
When she broke away to breathe again, she found herself straddling the crown prince on a stone bench behind a large rose bush. She couldn't decipher her surroundings much for Teivel attacked her neck and collarbone, making her head fall backwards as a pleasurable chill ran down her spine deliciously. She clutched his blonde hair with one hand and another tried to stifle her moan that threatened to come out of her mouth.
Teivel smirked at how this strong duke becomes absolute putty in his hands. He decided to take things a step further as he lowered her gown and took one mound of her flesh in his mouth-sucking, teasing, biting, squeezing both alternatively, giving each equal attention.
With his rock hard on threatening to tear up his pants, Gorgina started to roll her hips teasingly.
"You are playing with fire, Gina." Teivel spoke hoarsely.
"It is exactly what I excel at." Came her breathy moan. He laughed on her chest before sliding his hands under the purple gown, finding her luscious hips and slamming them down on the pant-clad hard on. Both moaned in pure ecstasy. The thrill of getting caught by guests, dry humping the crown prince in her own rose garden, made Gorgina leak immensely down there. Her clitoris burned with an ache, and she rubbed herself even more on his crotch. Her sex life always had penetration, be it with Teivel or with her husband--upon remembering her husband, she stilled. But she was pulled back when Teivel teased her nipples relentlessly, making her moan out his name.
"Teivel, more. Harder."
Her words were barely registered when Teivel started to push his crotch on her gown clad wet vagina even more aggresively. They climbed an immesurable height together and collapsed against each other, gasping for air.
When it ended, she stepped back.
"This doesn't resolve anything," she said.
"No." he said.
"I'm not—" she stopped. Chose. "I'm not making any decisions tonight."
"I'm not asking for decisions."
She looked at him.
"Then what are you asking for?"
He looked back.
"Just this," he said. "Just this one thing tonight."
She should have said no.
She didn't say no.
Gerffron had been looking for his gloves.
This was the actual, unglamorous reason he was in the east corridor at twenty minutes past midnight when the household was winding down and the staff were clearing the hall and the last of the guests were being seen to their carriages. He had left them in the coat room at the beginning of the evening and had gone to retrieve them and had taken the route through the east corridor because it was the shorter one.
The garden door was ajar.
He would have walked past it. He had no particular reason to stop at a garden door in the cold at midnight when he had his gloves and his bed was waiting and the evening had been long in the specific way of social occasions that require sustained performance.
But the moonlight was coming through the gap and the garden was visible and he was Gerffron Wadee, which meant his instinct for the available information was stronger than his interest in going to bed.
He looked through the gap.
He saw the garden.
He saw Gorgina.
He saw the Crown Prince.
He watched for approximately four seconds.
Then he continued down the corridor.
He found his gloves in the coat room where he had left them. He put them on. He went upstairs.
He stood in the cedar bedroom in his coat with his gloves on and looked at the far wall.
Something had twisted in his chest.
He examined this with the clinical attention he gave everything that arrived unexpectedly.
He was, by his own clear-eyed assessment, gay. He had known this since he was fourteen as Deepak Sehwal and it had been one of the defining conditions of his life — the thing that had made him a target, the thing that had been used against him, the thing that had also, eventually and in the specific way of things that you learn to inhabit rather than hide, become a form of clarity. He was gay. He did not desire women. He had performed, for two years as consort, the appropriate social surface of a married man without finding it difficult to manage because there was nothing underneath the performance that needed managing.
He was gay.
He did not desire Gorgina.
He stood in the cedar bedroom and turned the feeling over with the honest, unsparing attention of a man who has committed, across two lifetimes, to the practice of not lying to himself about what he actually feels.
It was not desire.
It was not jealousy in the romantic sense.
It was — he held it — something more specific than either of those. Something that had to do with the margin note and the late-evening conversation over the library hearth and the way she had looked at him when she opened the book, the brief unmanaged thing in her expression before she put it back.
It was the feeling of watching a door you had not known was open close.
He was surprised by his own capacity to feel this.
He blamed the body.
Not entirely without basis — the original Gerffron Wadee had been a man in a different relationship with Gorgina than Deepak Sehwal's relationship with anyone, and there were things that bodies remembered in their bones and blood that souls carried over them like different weather.
He took his coat off.
He put his gloves on the nightstand.
He lay on the bed and looked at the ceiling.
He is gay.
Something had twisted in his chest.
He would sit with this and work it out in the morning when it wasn't midnight and he wasn't tired and the sound of the garden door creaking in the night wind wasn't audible from two floors up.
He closed his eyes.
He thought about Styrmir.
In the specific, grounded way he had learned to think about Styrmir — not the aching, reaching longing of the east tower days, but the settled, patient certainty of a man who knows where his fixed point is and trusts that the distance between them is temporary.
The feeling in his chest was still there.
But it was smaller now, next to the fixed point.