Obsidian Throne: Villainess's Husband-Chapter 41 - 16 Part II: What Follows

She did not pull away.

This was the first thing she noted, in the part of her mind that kept noting things regardless of circumstances — the part that had kept running commentary through three years of a story trying to happen around her, through drainage reports and supply negotiations and the slow, methodical work of becoming someone other than the villain the game had written.

That part of her mind noted: she was not pulling away.

The rest of her was not thinking at all.

His hand was at her waist and the other was still flat against the wall beside her head, and he was kissing her with the same quality he brought to everything — complete, unhurried, without the sense that this was a beginning or an end but simply something that was occurring and had his full attention. She had her hand against his chest without knowing when she had put it there. The cold of the courtyard stone was at her back and the warmth of him was in front of her and somewhere in the distance the eagle on the gatehouse watched the road and felt nothing about any of it.

She leaned into him.

’You are leaning into him,’ noted the commentary, accurately and uselessly.

She did not correct it.

His mouth was thorough and unhurried and she had spent three weeks cataloguing him — the flat affect, the filed observations, the gold eyes at temperatures she had not yet named — and none of it had prepared her for the fact that he kissed the way he did everything else: as though he had already decided, and the decision was complete, and there was no version of this where he was uncertain about what he was doing.

It was, she thought distantly, deeply inconvenient.

She kissed him back.

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

More than a minute passed.

She was not counting. She had stopped counting at some point — stopped the running commentary, stopped the careful notation of data, stopped everything except the pressure of the wall and his hand at her waist and the particular quality of his stillness, which was not passive but the opposite of passive, the stillness of someone entirely present and entirely deliberate.

When he finally drew back it was slow. Not abrupt. The way you concluded something you had intended to conclude, on your own schedule, for your own reasons.

He looked at her.

She looked at him.

Her breath was not even. This was observable and she was observing it without being able to do anything about it — her chest rising and falling with more frequency than it had during the third form, which she had run three times in sequence without losing composure, and she was finding this deeply irritating. She let out a breath. Ragged at the edges. Unmanaged.

The gold eyes were very close.

’Say something,’ she thought.

Nothing came.

This was, she noted, a first. She had been in Eiswald for three years and she had always had something to say — had always had the next calculation, the next deflection, the next precise and carefully constructed sentence. She was the Cold Villainess of Eiswald. She had administrative fluency for every situation.

She had nothing.

Her face was warm. The courtyard was cold. The contrast was not helping.

He looked at her — at the warmth in her face, at her breath still uneven, at the hand she had put against his chest and had apparently not moved — with the expression that was not quite anything she had a category for.

"Your spear," he said.

She blinked.

He looked briefly at the ground, where the spear had come to rest against the courtyard stone. Then back at her.

The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. The motion adjacent to one.

’He is amused,’ she thought, and the warmth in her face intensified, and the irritation intensified alongside it, and she was aware that this was not improving her composure, which was currently in pieces on the courtyard floor next to the spear.

"I know where my spear is," she said.

"I know you do," he said.

This was delivered without inflection, which was worse, somehow, than if he had laughed.

She stepped back. The wall was no longer at her back — she had not noticed when that had changed either, which was a pattern she was finding alarming. Her body kept doing things before she had finished deciding whether they were appropriate, and the commentary kept arriving after the fact, and she was beginning to suspect that the problem predated this morning by several weeks and she had simply been categorising it incorrectly.

She bent and retrieved the spear.

Held it. Gripped it. Let the familiar weight of it do the thing familiar weights were for.

’That happened,’ she thought.

Then, because she was precise: ’You made it happen. You kissed his neck and then that happened. In sequence. As a consequence.’

She looked at him.

He was watching her with the gold eyes at a temperature she still did not have a name for, and she was going to need a name for it eventually, because it kept appearing and she was running out of available categories.

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

The silence had content again.

This was the thing about silence with him — it was never empty. It had texture. It had weight. She had spent three weeks learning to read its different registers and she had thought she was making progress and then this morning had occurred and now she was not certain what she knew.

She opened her mouth.

"I—"

"Don’t," he said.

She closed her mouth.

He looked at her, unhurried. "Don’t explain it."

’I wasn’t going to explain it,’ she thought, which was not entirely true. She had been about to say something calibrated and reasonable and slightly distant that would have functioned as an explanation, and he had known this before she had finished knowing it herself, and she was finding this pattern — his habit of completing the picture before she had — increasingly difficult to manage.

"I wasn’t," she said.

"Good," he said.

A pause.

The eagle on the gatehouse watched the road. The pale Eiswald dawn had finished arriving and become morning proper — the light harder now, less forgiving, the kind that showed things as they were rather than as they might be.

She looked at him in the morning light.

’He knows I was transmigrated into a game,’ she thought. ’He knows about the ice affinity and the wrong weapon and three years of thirty percent accuracy. He knows everything I told him last night and he has not said a word about it this morning and he just kissed me against a courtyard wall and told me not to explain it.’

She filed this.

The filing cabinet was getting very full.

"The correspondence arrives at seven," she said.

"I know," he said.

"It is approaching seven."

"I know that too."

She looked at him. He looked at her. The morning light was very honest and neither of them moved immediately.

’You are going to have to do something about the filing cabinet,’ said the commentary.

’Not today,’ she told it.

’Relatively soon,’ it said.

She picked up her water and her coat from the bench and turned toward the manor doors. Composed. Or the version of composed available to her in the present moment, which was about sixty percent of her usual standard and would have to serve.

She paused at the threshold.

Did not turn around.

"Alistair."

A beat.

"Yes," he said.

She had not decided what she was going to say. She had stopped herself from explaining, had stopped herself from cataloguing, had stopped most of the mechanisms she normally operated through, and was left with the thing underneath — the thing that had been accumulating in the filing cabinet for three weeks and had apparently reached critical density.

"I didn’t regret it," she said. "The courtyard. Last night. What I told you."

She said it to the doorway.

She heard nothing for a moment.

Then, from behind her, in the register that cost something — the quiet one, the one she had only heard a few times, the one she was increasingly convinced he reserved for things that were true:

"I know."

She walked into the manor.

The courtyard was quiet behind her.

He stood in the Eiswald morning with the pale light on his coat and looked at the doorway where she had been, and at the eagle on the gatehouse watching the road, and at the space she had occupied against the wall.

The filing cabinet was very full.

He put his hands in his pockets.

’Interesting,’ he thought.

It was, he reflected, the third time he had thought that word and meant something considerably larger.

— End of Chapter 16 —