The Chosen One (The First Book)

Chapter 30

He did not move away.

His hand was still flat on my shoulder. His face was still where it had come to when he put me down, close enough that I could see the mark on his chin.

I got it in order, slowly.

That he was above me.

That his hand was holding me to the bed.

That I had stopped trying to get up some time ago, and he had not let go.

I knew I should move away.

I wanted to move away.

I did not want him to move away.

All three were in me at the same time.

I could feel each one separately, the way you feel three different aches.

His thumb was on my collarbone. Not moving.

He was holding me down with about a tenth of the strength he had, and even that much was more of him than had ever been on me at once.

I lifted my head off the pillow.

It was not far. It was two inches, maybe three.

He felt it, because his hand tightened very slightly and then did not push me back.

He knew.

I watched him know it. Something went through his face.

He did not do anything about it. In the small piece of time while he was not doing anything about it, I put my lips on his.

He did not move.

Not toward me. Not away from me.

There is a length of time that is nothing at all, that is over before it has started.

This was longer than that.

I have counted it since. I have lain awake and counted it. I still cannot make it shorter than it was.

Then both his hands came onto my shoulders, and he put me back down on the pillow.

"You don't know what you're doing."

"I do."

"No."

He said it flatly, without any weight on it, the way you say a thing you have already seen proved.

I did not understand that until much later.

I got my hand into the front of his shirt.

He took my wrist. He took the other one before I had thought of using it.

He put them both down on the blanket, one on each side of me, and held them there.

He was not gentle about it this time.

"Stop."

I stopped.

He waited a moment. Then he let go of me and stood up off the bed. The mattress came back level. The whole side of my body where he had been sitting went cold at once.

I turned over.

I got my knees up. I put my arms around them and lay with my face toward the wall. I did not look at him again for a long time.

The fire had got low. There was a line of light along the floor from somewhere and I looked at that.

His hand at my waist.

It came into me the way a splinter comes out, all at once, from a place I had not been touching.

Julian's hand.

Not on my dress. Under it.

I put my face into the pillow.

Cassian moved behind me. I heard the chair take his weight. Then I heard it move a second time. From the sound of it, he had turned it to face the window instead of the bed.

He did not say anything about it. He just did it.

The wall. Cold stone through the back of my dress.

My own hand.

That was the one that would not leave. Not his hand. Mine.

My own hand going up inside a man's shirt, flat against his back, pulling.

I had done that.

I lay on that bed with my arms around my knees. I made myself go back and look at it. The more of it I got, the worse it was. There was no part of it where I was being held down.

I had wanted it.

I had wanted it while it was happening, and I had wanted more of it than I got.

Somewhere behind me, Cassian breathed out.

That was all.

A man let a breath go in a chair eight feet away. I heard it. Every part of me knew where he was in that room.

That would have been the best thing in the world an hour ago.

Then I lay with my back to it and could not stand it.

I could hear his sleeve when he moved his arm. I could hear the fire. I could hear, underneath both, the sound I had made when he put the cloth on my throat, which I had made in that room, in front of that man, on purpose.

He got up once.

He put something over me. A blanket off the end of the bed, laid across my shoulder and down over my hip. He did it from arm's length, without touching me at all.

Then he sat down again and turned the chair back to the window.

I had never been sorrier for anything in my life than I was for that blanket.

It went on a long time after that.

I do not know how long. The line of light on the floor moved, so it was long enough for that. Neither of us said one word.

I went through it the way my mother goes through accounts, item by item, because that is the only way I know how to do anything.

I should not have wanted Julian.

I did.

I should not have wanted this one.

I did.

I have been in a room with a man before. I have been in a barn. I was in a hayloft, and behind the church at midsummer, at seventeen, with a boy I had known my whole life.

I said no to him. I meant it. It cost me nothing to mean it.

That was what I had always known about myself.

That was the whole of what I have always known about myself.

Tonight I said no to nobody.

I put it together as the only way it would go together. There was nothing in the wine and nothing in the food, because I would have tasted it, because I tasted everything.

Nobody had done anything to me.

I had walked out of that hall on my own legs and gone down a passage nobody made me go down.

Which left one thing.

I looked at my own hands on top of the blanket. They looked like my hands. They had the same marks on them. The bowstring calluses were where they have been since I was twelve.

I thought: there is something in me that was always going to do that, and tonight is only the night it got out.

I have been afraid a few times in my life. I know what that feels like in the body.

This was not that.

This was worse, because there was nowhere to put it.

You cannot get away from the thing if it is the one carrying you.

The fire went down another stage. He did not get up to see it.

.

I lay there and let the whole night go through me again, from dinner to the wall to this bed.

Every part of it had me in it.

Doing something.

Wanting something.

I got the words as far as my mouth twice and could not make them go.

The third time they came out.

"What is wrong with me?"

Cassian was quiet for so long that I opened my eyes.

He was still looking at me.

"I don't know."

I turned my face back toward the wall.

I had wanted him to tell me there was something wrong with the wine.

Something wrong with the food.

Something someone had done.

Anything that would leave me where I had been yesterday.

He had nothing.

Neither did I.