Chapter 222: Something like falling 1

BONNIE

It came out of me immediately, fierce, before I had even finished hearing the question.

"Not for a second," I said. "You are not him. You are nothing like him. It would not matter if..."

I stopped.

He was watching me with a small, patient smile, and I heard my own sentence arrive at its destination.

"Then why," he asked gently, "are you so confused by the way it turned out?"

I opened my mouth, and nothing came.

The wind stirred the reeds. A fish jumped somewhere in the shadow of the far bank, and the ripples came running toward us in widening rings.

"I do not know," I said at last. It was an honest answer and a little embarrassing. "I think I was ready for it to go wrong. I had been ready for so long that I do not know what to do now that it has not. It is like pushing on a door that opens before you lean on it, and I am still falling forward."

"I know."

"Do you?"

"A little." His eyes were warm. "I spent years bracing for my father’s temper. Even now, when someone raises their voice in a room, I check where the doors are." He shrugged. "It takes longer than you would think for the body to believe the news."

Something loosened in my chest.

"So," Lysander went on, and the lightness returned to his voice as though he had never put it down, "trust me when I say that everything that was in my head just washed away when I entered this water. I did not plan it. I only wanted to be rid of the day. The heaviness. The nobility of it all." He lifted a dripping hand and beckoned me with two fingers. "Join me."

"Naked?"

"I was not going to suggest it, but now that you have said it..."

"I did not say it."

"You said it and with some feeling too."

I laughed in spite of myself. It burst out of me, short and surprised, and he looked so absurdly pleased that I laughed again.

I looked around.

The lawn rose behind us in a long green slope. The house sat at the top of it, honey-colored windows glowing one by one against the dusk. A thread of woodsmoke rose from the kitchen chimney. On the roof, against the pale sky, I could just make out the shape of a figure kneeling beside a long dark line that I knew was a rifle. Across the water, the pines had gone black.

"There are sentinels," I whispered. "Everywhere. They are all watching."

"They are not."

"Lysander."

"They are not, Bonnie. Look properly." He did not turn his head. "They are around, certainly, to protect us. But they know better than to show their faces. They have been trained in the old way. Out of sight, out of mind. They watch the woods and the lane and the water, not the water’s occupants."

"One of them is on the roof."

"With his back to the lake. I gave the order myself."

I frowned. "When?"

"Over lunch. Under the table. While you were not looking at my hand." The corner of his mouth twitched. "I am a very organized Regent."

I stared at him, and the absurd, blossoming warmth that had been rising in me for the last ten minutes finally spilled over.

"You planned this."

"I wouldn’t go that far."

"You are shameless."

"I am a man who knows what he wants and has been told it is permitted." He tilted his head back, resting it on his arm, and let the last of the sun fall across his face. "But I will not push you. If you want to sit on that dock until the stars come out, I will keep you company. I will swim in circles and maybe sing very badly. Do you like music?"

"No, I do not."

"Well, we have to fix that."

I looked at the water, a plate of dark glass tinted pink and gold. I looked at the man in it, grinning up at me with his chin on his arm and his hair stuck to his forehead, the most impossible person I had ever loved.

...Loved...

The word slid into my mind without a ripple. I did not flinch from it. I only looked at it for a moment, like a stone I had found at the bottom of a pool, and then I put it away to examine later.

I stood.

The dock creaked under my feet. Lysander’s eyes followed me up, and I watched them go still.

"If you laugh," I told him, "I will push you under and hold you there."

"I would never."

"If you so much as smirk."

"My face is perfectly serious." It was not. "Do you require me to turn around?"

"Yes."

"Truly?"

"Turn around, Lysander."

He sighed theatrically, but he rolled in the water and presented me with the long wet line of his back, and I stood there and fumbled with the buttons of my dress.

My fingers were clumsy. The cotton was damp where the splash had caught it, and it clung, and I had to peel it away. I laid it over a post. I stood for a long moment in the cooling air with nothing but my skin and the evening, feeling absurdly small and enormously alive, my arms folded across my chest. The wind found every inch of me. Goose pimples rose along my arms.

"This is ridiculous," I thought. "You are a grown woman. You have nearly died four times this month."

I took a breath and ran.

The dock boards drummed under my heels. For one suspended instant I hung over the water, weightless, with the whole copper sky wheeling above me. Then the lake closed over my head.

It was cold.

It was not freezing, and it was not the bone-deep cold of the morning. It was a clean cold, a shock that rushed up from my ankles to my scalp and scoured every thought out of my head. I came up spluttering, gasping, pushing hair out of my eyes, my heart going like a trapped bird.