← Lantern's Glow

Back by Choice

Back by Choice

The door was solid at her back and Liam was solid at her front, and for a few seconds those were the only two facts Caitlin had, and they were excellent facts. She kissed him until she had to breathe. When she did, she breathed him in, and he smelled of wet leaves and cider and salt, because he'd spent half the night scared out of his mind in a wool tailcoat. It was the best thing she'd ever smelled. She was going to have to think about what that said about her later. Much later.

Her hands were still shaking. She'd noticed it on the stairs and decided it didn't count, and it still didn't, because now they were shaking at his collar, and that was a completely different kind of shaking. His were shaking too. She could feel it where he held her face.

"Hi," she said against his mouth, which was a ridiculous thing to say to a man she'd been kissing this long.

"Hi."

He was breathing as hard as she was. There was sweat at his hairline and a damp curl stuck to his temple, and when she pushed it back with her thumb, his skin was hot. So was hers. The velvet had been sticking to her back since the red corridor, and she'd been too busy being terrified to hate it properly, and now she hated it, because it was between them.

"I was so scared," she said. It came out before she could dress it up. "Up there. I've never been that scared in my life, Liam, and I've done story hour with a whole kindergarten class during a fire drill."

He put his forehead against hers. "So was I."

She hadn't known that. All night he'd been the one with the steady pencil and the plan, and she'd been the one losing doors, and it had not once occurred to her that his hands had been shaking for the same reason hers were. She'd felt his pulse racing under her fingers in the red corridor and thought it was only the stairs. They were shaking now. She took both of them and pressed them flat against her chest, where he could feel her heart going, and they stood there shaking together against a door that opened. It was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to her, and she was including the pumpkin.

He laughed, unsteadily, right against her mouth, and kissed her again, slower, checking that she was really there, and she kissed him back until neither of them was checking anything.

Downstairs the party hit a chorus. Behind her, through a door she could open with one hand, somebody called for more cider. She didn't open it. She grabbed his cravat instead.

That cravat had been making fun of her all night. It had been crooked in the side parlor and she'd fixed it, and it had had pumpkin seeds on it at the carving table and she'd left them, and on the stairs she'd used it as a handle. She found the end and pulled. The knot gave all at once, the whole silly thing slid loose around his neck, his eyebrows shot up, and then he grinned at her, slow, and she thought, oh, I'm in trouble.

She dropped the cravat on the floor. His collar was open at the throat. She kissed him there, because it was there and it was warm and it tasted of salt, and he made a low sound she wanted to hear again immediately.

"Caitlin."

"Mm."

"The door's not locked." He said it into her hair, and his voice had gone rough. "In case you want—"

"I know. I've been leaning on it." She pulled back far enough to look at him. His mouth was red, his eyes were very dark, and he looked about as calm as she felt, which was not calm at all. "I'm not going anywhere. Are you?"

"No."

"Good. Because I'd have to chase you, and I've done enough running around this inn tonight to last me till next Halloween."

He laughed, and she kissed the laugh off his mouth, and they started across the sitting room without either of them steering. Her heel caught the rug. His shin found the settee. "Shit," she said, which was a word she would never say at story hour, and then said it again on behalf of his shin, and got his tailcoat halfway off his shoulders before she backed straight into the settee herself.

Her skirt stopped. She kept going. Something ripped, or nearly ripped, and she looked down to find a fold of red hem hooked over a carved wooden rose on the leg of the settee, because of course the Rose Room had carved roses in places no rose needed to be. Next to the rose, somebody had carved two tiny figures running through tiny trees. She knew them. She'd dusted them on the lantern downstairs every October since she was a girl. She decided she was not looking at them right now.

"Ow. No. Wait."

He let go of her at once.

"It's the furniture," she said. "It attacked first."

"I believe you." He shrugged the tailcoat the rest of the way off and dropped it on the settee. "Hold still."

He went down on one knee to work the hem loose, and there was Liam, on one knee in front of her with his cravat gone and his collar open and his hair in his eyes, and her entire brain went oh. Oh no. Oh, I am so gone. He looked up at her. There was a gray smudge of dust on his cheekbone from the stair rail, and she wanted to lick it off, which was a sentence she had never once thought in her life.

Every Halloween she climbed that hill from the road with her arms full, and every year some stupid part of her looked up at the porch expecting somebody to come down and take half. Nobody had, not once, not since her grandmother. And here was Liam on one knee on the rug, working her skirt off a carved rose with his tongue caught between his teeth, taking half of the dumbest problem she'd had all night, and her throat did something she was not prepared for. Her eyes stung. She blinked hard and let them.

The hem came free. He didn't stand up right away. His hand stayed on her ankle, over the grinning skulls on her sock, and his thumb moved once across the bone.

"You're still wearing the skulls," he said.

"I'm a professional."

He stood up slowly, all the way up, close enough that she had to tip her head back, and she stopped laughing.

The bookshelf was right there. The last time she'd seen that catch, it had clicked shut on its own while they both stood there with their hearts in their throats, and she'd hated this room for it. She put her thumb on it now. Nobody else got to open this one. It gave under her thumb, and the whole case swung inward on the bedroom, roses climbing every wall. It stayed open. She took two fistfuls of his shirt and walked backward through the gap, towing him with her. The bedroom was dim and warm and smelled of old perfume and dust, and the four-poster took up nearly all of it.

She turned them around. She put both hands flat on his chest and pushed, and Liam went down on his back across the bed with a thump of old velvet and a startled laugh. The bed curtains shuddered in their ties.

He propped himself up on his elbows and looked at her. He didn't try to get up.

Her heart was pounding hard enough that he could probably see it through the velvet, which was fine. Let him look. She reached up and hooked one finger under the strap on her shoulder, and let it slide down her arm, slowly, watching his face the whole time.

He stopped breathing. She saw it happen.

So she did the other one.

She stood at the foot of the bed with both straps down around her arms and the velvet held up by nothing but the hooks down her back. She was breathing hard enough that Liam could see it in her shoulders. Her hair had come mostly out of its pins, and a flush ran from her collarbone up her throat. He'd been drawing her since the afternoon, and he hadn't had any of this.

"Come here," he said. It came out rougher than he meant.

He dropped back onto the bed. She put one knee on it, then the other, and climbed up over him. The mattress dipped. Her skirt spilled across his legs, heavy and warm, her hands landed on either side of his head, and her hair came down around them both. She kissed him hard, all teeth and cider, and he kissed her back just as hard. He got his hands on her waist and then her back, where the velvet was damp and hot from her skin, and found the top hook by feel.

"Maggie did those," she said against his mouth.

"I'll thank her."

"You will not. She'll never let me live it down."

The hooks were small, and there were a lot of them, and his fingers still weren't steady. He got the first one. He got the second one wrong and had to go back. She laughed, breathless, and pressed her forehead to his, and didn't help.

Somewhere in the middle of the hooks, he noticed he wasn't listening for anything. No music in the walls, no footsteps on a stair that shouldn't have any, no click from a shelf. There was her breathing and the party far below and the hooks, and that was all there was. His shoulders came down. He hadn't known they were up. He hadn't known they'd been up, if he was honest, since spring.

"You're very slow," she said.

"I draw for a living. I'm thorough."

The last hook gave. The bodice loosened all at once, and she sat back on his hips and let it fall to her waist. The window behind her was black. The roses went all the way up the wall. She was flushed and damp at the temples and a little shaky, and she was looking down at him with her chin up, daring him to say something clever.

That lasted about a second before she lost her nerve. He watched it happen. Her chin dropped, one arm came up across her chest, and she laughed at herself, too high.

"Sorry," she said. "I'm usually the one collecting paper plates. Nobody looks at me at this party."

"I've been looking at you since you dropped a ghost on me."

"That was an accident."

"I drew you before dinner," he said. "I kept getting your mouth wrong."

She stared down at him. Her face had gone red to the ears, and slowly she lowered her arm and left it down, and the grin that came over her was small and shy, and then not shy at all.

He didn't say anything else. He sat up with her in his lap and put his mouth on her throat, where she tasted of salt, and she grabbed a fistful of his hair and said his name.

She pulled his shirt out of his pants and got her hands under it. Her palms were hot on his back, and his back was slick from the stairs. She pushed the shirt up, and he lost it over his head, and she was already kissing his shoulder, his chest, his neck. "Oh my God," she said to nobody in particular, and then again, to him.

He laughed, and it turned into something else halfway out, and he heard himself say, "I haven't let anybody this close in a long time."

She went still against him. He hadn't meant to say it. He didn't take it back.

"How long?" she asked.

"Long enough that there are two blocks in Boston I still walk around so I don't run into somebody."

She lifted her head and looked at him, flushed and serious, a strand of hair stuck to her damp cheek.

"Glensford barely has two blocks," she said. "You'd run out of places to hide."

Before he could answer, she kissed him slower than she had all night, with her hand on the back of his neck, and she didn't move it.

They rolled. One of the velvet curtains came loose from its tie and dropped half across them, and she laughed up at him through it. He pushed it back and kissed her harder, and she arched up into him and hooked a leg around the back of his and held on.

He moved his hand down her side, over the velvet bunched at her waist. She caught his wrist.

He stopped.

She held his wrist and looked at him, breathing fast, until a laugh broke out of her, a little wild.

"I'm not stopping you," she said. "I'm steering."

She took his hand and put it where she wanted it, under the heavy skirt, high on the bare skin of her thigh, and held it there with hers.

"Look at me," she said. "Look at me while you do."

He looked at her. He kept going.