Crown of Shadows - C. S. Friedman [137]
“Look,” Gresham said gently. “You can’t go through all this and pretend it isn’t happening. I’ve seen what it’s doing to you these past few days, trying to work as if everything’s normal while your soul’s all tied up in knots. Why don’t you take a few days off? Go somewhere maybe, take a break. Try to relax. You need it, Nari. Trust me.”
She turned and looked into his eyes. For a long, long time she was silent, as his words echoed softly in her brain. “Yes,” she said at last. Her voice was a mere whisper. “You’re right.”
“You’re not alone, you know. In every war there are women left behind ... and men, of course, and children, friends and lovers and relatives who care ... sometimes you can lose yourself in work, and sometimes you can’t. It’s never easy, honey.” He touched the side of her face lightly, lovingly; his finger smeared a tear across her cheek. “I think maybe for you a change would be best. Go somewhere peaceful, cut out the stress. That way you won’t have to put on a show all the time, pretend that nothing’s wrong.”
She stared at him for a long time, then whispered—almost soundlessly—“Yes.” She nodded slowly, very slowly. “A change. Somewhere fresh.”
She leaned forward and kissed him gently on the cheek, trembling as she did so, loving him as much in that moment as she ever had her father. What would he say if she told him what his few words had inspired? How would he react if she told him right now what she was thinking?
She didn’t dare. He’d talk her out of it, surely.
“Thank you,” she whispered softly. “I’ll do that.”
As she gathered up her things, she wondered if she would ever see him or his shop again.
The apartment was just as Andrys had left it, and she stood in the doorway for a minute just drinking it in, remembering their short time together. In his weeks in Jaggonath he had trained housekeeping to come when he called, and at no other time. Now, with the apartment permanently silenced, the scattered glasses and rumpled bedding stood as a monument to the man who had lived here, and the few days she had shared with him.
Her lover.
How strange that word seemed. How odd to apply it in this case, where their time together seemed like a brief bout of passion between one tragedy and the next. They had not even made love in the traditional sense, although he’d known enough close variations to make the time pass pleasurably enough. Now, though, she ached for that shortcoming, and wished she had held him inside her once, just once, in that embrace which was so intimate that echoes of it lasted forever in one’s flesh. But he’d been terrified of making her pregnant, and though the intensity of that fear was incomprehensible to her—like so much else about him—she had indulged him, stifling all the arguments that she might otherwise have raised about the efficacy of birth control, the predictability of her fertility cycle, the availability of abortion should all other things fail ... those were things you said to other men, not him. His soul was too tender, too bruised, too vulnerable. If intercourse would increase his anxiety, then it would have to be avoided. There’d be time enough for it later, when his soul had a chance to heal.
If that time ever came.
She walked to the bed and sat down upon it, breathing in deeply; their scents were mixed together on the sheets, along with the sweat of love and the sharp tang of fear. Here he had trembled as she held him, shaking like a child lost in a storm as bloody memories enveloped him, images so horrible that he couldn’t even talk to her about them, could only whimper as they flooded his brain, overwhelming his fledgling defenses. He’d tried to pull away from her when it happened, to run away from her so that she wouldn’t see him fall apart; she hadn’t let him go. That was a bond even more intimate than their passion, now, that she had seen his fit of weakness