A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [172]
Jamie’s head jerked up, startled, and I realized that I was standing on the other side of the chair from him, the towel wadded and pressed against my mouth. My elbows moved like rusty hinges, stiff and slow, but I got the towel down. My lips were nearly as stiff, but I spoke, too.
“I am a little shaken, yes,” I said very clearly. “I’ll be all right. Don’t worry. I don’t want you to worry.”
The troubled scrutiny in his eyes wavered suddenly, like the glass of a window struck by a stone, in the split second before it shatters, and he shut his eyes. He swallowed once, and opened them again.
“Claire,” he said very softly, and the smashed and splintered fragments showed clear, sharp and jagged in his eyes. “I have been raped. And ye say I must not worry for ye?”
“Oh, God damn it!” I flung the towel on the floor, and immediately wished I had it back again. I felt naked, standing in my shift, and hated the crawling of my skin with a sudden passion that made me slap my thigh to kill it.
“Damn, damn, damn it! I don’t want you to have to think of that again. I don’t!” And yet I had known from the first that this would happen.
I took hold of the chairback with both hands and held tight, and tried to force my own gaze into his, wanting so badly to throw myself upon those glittering shards, to shield him from them.
“Look,” I said, steadying my voice. “I don’t want—I don’t want to make you recall things better left forgotten.”
The corner of his mouth actually twitched at that.
“God,” he said, in something like wonder. “Ye think I’d forgot any of it?”
“Maybe not,” I said, surrendering. I looked at him through swimming eyes. “But—oh, Jamie, I so wanted you to forget!”
He put out a hand, very delicately, and touched the tip of his index finger to the tip of mine, where I clutched the chair.
“Dinna mind it,” he said softly, and withdrew the finger. “It’s no matter now. Will ye rest a bit, Sassenach? Or eat, maybe?”
“No. I don’t want . . . no.” In fact, I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to do anything at all. Other than unzip my skin, climb out, and run—and that didn’t seem feasible. I took a few deep breaths, hoping to settle myself and go back to that nice sense of utter exhaustion.
Should I ask him about Donner? But what was there to ask? “Did you happen to kill a man with long, tangled hair?” They’d all looked like that, to some extent. Donner had been—or possibly still was—an Indian, but no one would have noticed that in the dark, in the heat of fighting.
“How—how is Roger?” I asked, for lack of anything better to say. “And Ian? Fergus?”
He looked a little startled, as though he had forgotten their existence.
“Them? The lads are well enough. No one took any hurt in the fight. We had luck.”
He hesitated, then took a careful step toward me, watching my face. I didn’t scream or bolt, and he took another, coming close enough that I could feel the warmth of his body. Not startled this time, and chilly in my damp shift, I relaxed a little, swaying toward him, and saw the tension in his own shoulders let go slightly, seeing it.
He touched my face, very gently. The blood throbbed just below the surface, tender, and I had to brace myself not to flinch away from his touch. He saw it, and drew back his hand a little, so that it hovered just above my skin—I could feel the heat of his palm.
“Will it heal?” he asked, fingertips moving over the split in my left brow, then down the minefield of my cheek to the scrape on my jaw where Harley Boble’s boot had just missed making a solid connection that would have broken my neck.
“Of course it will. You know that; you’ve seen worse on battlefields.” I would have smiled in reassurance, but didn’t want to open the deep split in my lip again, and so made a sort of pouting goldfish mouth, which took him by surprise and made him smile.
“Aye, I know.” He ducked his head a little, shy. “It’s only . . .” His hand still hovered near my face, an expression of troubled anxiety on his own. “Oh, God, mo nighean donn,” he said softly. “Oh, Christ, your