Like with all their kisses when alone, soon even a sweet, lingering, loving kiss heated up. Deepened. Got them both a little stupid.
Just when she got breathless and grabby, he curled his fingers into the back of her hair, which was now long enough to pull, and gave a tiny tug. He leaned back enough that his nose touched hers. “What’s the reason?”
“For?” She didn’t follow.
“Your hair.” He tugged lightly again at the three-plus centimeters of length that had been previously razored to her neck for as long as he’d known her—practically a military cut in the back.
She could’ve laughed, just to hear they were on the same page. His question led right into the things she’d been thinking about, things they’d have to talk about if they were going to be able to have a relationship. And sudden, unexpected kisses almost as soon as they were alone.
“Short pixie is too edgy for village life. They expect a lady hairstyle.” She didn’t actually make air quotes around the word, her hands were too busy holding on to him, but she eye rolled some implied air quotes to him. “Ironic since they prefer to follow a man, but if it’s got to be a woman, she shouldn’t have a manly cut. I was advised.”
Again she made use of the eye punctuation.
“So if you don’t grow your hair, they want you to sell the vineyard?”
“No one said that, but the way things are, the way I’m expected to be there? Exactly opposite to how you know me.” She was still pinned to the door, and it was hard to do serious talking like that, and it could get out of hand quickly. She stopped grabbing and patted his shoulders instead. “I’ll explain more, but I need to say something else first because I totally forgot I was going to say it before you kissed me. I had a plan, see?”
He grinned and leaned back, then stepped cleanly away, so they were no longer touching, and things wouldn’t get out of hand. “Of course you did. So what was your plan?”
“Eat these ham sandwiches, then turn off the lights and watch the aurora through the big window.”
“Is ‘watch the aurora’ a euphemism?” he asked, cheeky smile back.
She smiled, but pretended she didn’t want to grin at him. “That was the other bit. The avoiding euphemism and innuendo-related activities. For now.”
“No sex?”
“For a bit?” she requested, then crawled onto the bed to sit against the wall, and tucked her feet in atop the blankets, careful of the food. “I had a plan when I came to Antarctica, for after the people who know me to be a certain way—you and Jordan—left. And it’s the reason I never invited you home with me. Why I don’t feel like I know myself. I want to know who I am, and I want you to know who I am before we start tearing one another’s clothes off again. Because once we start that... Like a first date. Sort of.”
“Right.” West stayed standing for a time, a little of his natural broodiness returning to the furrow of his brow. “Tell me the boundaries. You invited me to this wee room, and I’m supposed to sit on your bed? First date? I wouldn’t, well, I mean I would’ve done far more than sit on your bed on our first date. But generally...boundaries?”
She shook her head in a bit of a tsk. “It’s the only furniture here. You can sit on the bed.” There was a pause to discuss how taking his boots and suit off would be the only civilized thing to do, lest he mess up the bedding. And that it didn’t mean sex was happening.
Once he was in his thermals and sitting opposite her on the bed, he waved a hand, but looked far more relaxed. “Continue.”
“It’s a very long story, but the short version is I was raised to be a certain way—demure, proper, sweet, ladylike, et cetera. When I went away to school in a different country, I’d already become exceptionally frustrated and I went as far the other way as was in me to go, not thinking about what I wanted so much as what boundaries I could push that I could’ve never pushed in Monterrosa. I decided that was the new me, made some friends and that was established. Me and Opposite Me. Hair was one thing I could easily change while I was away. Or continue changing. I began growing it out at home. But if I keep it up, I can return home with longer hair.”
“Is that what you want?” West asked, looking skeptical of her plan in a way that made her want to throw her sandwich at him.
“I have no idea what I want. But hair affects how people see you, doesn’t it? If it’s a bold cut, it projects strength. Long bouncy waves project femininity and grace. It’s two very different images. So what I’m trying to figure out, my plan for myself, was stop making decisions according to the expectations of others.”
“I see.” He said one more word before taking a bite of his sandwich. “Pink, too?”
“Ophelia wore lots of pink.”
* * *
West almost choked when Lia referred to herself as Ophelia. And in the third person. In five words, he understood exactly what she’d been trying to tell him about not knowing herself. And how much it dismayed her.
“What happened if you didn’t do as was expected?” he asked, and then realized he might be making her think of the kind of things he didn’t like to think about, and changed his question. “Or now. How does it affect things now with the vineyard? Do they call you Ophelia?”
“They call me Dona Monterrosa,” she said, her eyes getting a little buggy.
“Not following.”
“Lady Monterrosa,” she said in English. “It’s over a century since the time of titles, but if you want to understand how traditional the people are, they still call the heads of my family Don and Dona. And before you ask, I don’t know how it makes me feel to have them call me that. Besides being responsible for their welfare.”
Drastically different from his childhood. And he wanted to hide it again, the exact same feeling that had led to him hiding Charlie on a fake adventure in the US. All he wanted to do was change the subject. Turn off the lights. Watch the aurora, which might not even happen tonight. Or distract her by proving how much he had missed her...despite her rules.
“You’re quiet,” she said, then ate the last bite of her sandwich, her eyes still full of concern but tangled with a fair amount of wariness. “You think it’s shameful to not correct them when they call me Dona?”
“No,” he said, having gathered that she had trouble getting them to listen to her enough as it was, so she probably needed the built-in respect of a fake title to give her words a little more weight. “I guess I was trying to figure out how I can help you with this quest to know yourself.”
Not really what he was thinking, but if he told her the truth, this would all get very personal, very fast. Her problems, while definite problems, weren’t bitter and twisted. She had the kind of childhood problems that weren’t so ugly they couldn’t be discussed. Her problem had been parents that gave her what she wanted, but only if it came with a price tag, not support. Not time. Not love...
And that’s probably where this all came from, he realized. Definitely a problem, but not as ugly as a mother who’d abandoned him at nine, expecting him to take care of his little brother, age four, and the progressively worse foster homes they’d been shuffled between because of his behavior and scheming.
“You’re supposed to tell me if the things I change make me unlovable,” she said softly. “And, I hope, tell me your sad secrets, too.”
“I don’t...” He started to say no, but watched her mouth thin and twist to the side. That had been her complaint, hadn’t it? And he’d said he wanted to dig out the ashes around them. “My sad secrets are...bad, love.”
“I know.” She cleared everything else off the bed and crawled down to sit beside him, leaning to turn off the light as she did. “Know how I know?”
“Because I likened them to famous catastrophes?”
She lifted his arm and tucked in at his left side, and just the act of touching helped him push some of the bile back down that always rose in his
throat when he got too close to those thoughts. He contracted his arm to pull her closer, but she didn’t settle until she’d taken his right hand in hers, and weaved her fingers in between. “It was pretty indicative.”
“I don’t know where to begin,” he whispered, because saying the words out loud felt wrong in the small dark room. “Or what might be too much. We all change as we age, and things I did...”
“If the things you did are no longer secrets, they don’t hold as much power to hurt you anymore.” She lowered her voice, too, and he was grateful. Painful words shouldn’t ever have the strength of a full throat. Painful words whispered could still bruise, but words shouted or given force could tear out big holes.
“It’s not that simple.”
“It is.”
He shook his head.
“You don’t look in the rearview mirror because something bad happened, and you want to leave it behind. Something you said was your fault?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re afraid of me knowing?”
He didn’t immediately answer; the more she prodded at it, the faster he felt his heart rate going. It didn’t take long before she felt it, too, or heard it, with her ear against his chest.
“That’s why you need to tell me. And we need to take the physical stuff slow, o namorado.”
The endearment made him smile a little. There weren’t many Portuguese words he knew; most of them were endearments that sounded beautiful from her soft lips, and comforted him somehow.
He had taught her less Gaelic, but the one she preferred came out on its own on reflex. “Leannán sídhe.”
She released his hand and turned his chin, gentle but insistent, until he was gazing down at her in the low light. “You think I’m not going to love you? I think you don’t really love me. You say that’s not true and want me to believe you, right?”
“You still don’t believe me?”
“I’m...” She struggled for words, then said, “Faith is a choice. It’s your job to prove my faith. And it’s my job to prove yours. If you tell me the bad things now, and I don’t go anywhere, you don’t have to be afraid of them anymore. You can trust me. And if I change something, a few things—if I cry when things hurt me and don’t feel like I have to hide it from the world and be strong all the time—and you don’t go anywhere, I don’t have to be afraid of that anymore, either.”
He closed his eyes, suddenly very tired. “It sounds so easy when you say it that way.”
The last word uttered, he opened his eyes to look at her again, and found her face lit in soft blue light, and both of them turned to look out the wide bubble glass at the blue whispers across the starry black sky, pale and ghostly waves that stretched to brilliant, almost neon blue.
She clutched at his hand, anchoring herself to him in that way they’d never really done outside of these aurora sightings. In that moment, such peace settled over him that the heart, which had been threatening to pound out of his chest, slowed, and then slowed some more. He almost wanted to tell her everything, to empty himself out to see if that would make room for more of this peace.
“Where do I begin? I don’t know how many moves yet,” he whispered.
She pulled her gaze from the dancing sky to look up at him again. “Then tell me your saddest memory. I’m not going anywhere. Watch the skies with me and we’ll let it go.”
His saddest memory. He didn’t have to think to know what that was, and he could tell her that. He didn’t have it in him to say those words yet. To tell her it was his fault Charlie was gone. But he could tell her about that night. Even without his guilt, it would’ve been his saddest memory. The faster he got it out, the more time he’d have to win her back, if he did accidentally say more again than he meant to, and she found out how disgusting he could be.
Pulling her closer, in as few words as he could, while they both watched the serene seas swirling above them, he told her about a six-hour train ride north to a Scottish morgue to identify and claim his baby brother’s emaciated body.
CHAPTER TWELVE
WHEN LIA HAD invited West to view the aurora in her cabin, she hadn’t really intended on him sleeping there. Sleeping beside him made it harder to avoid sex. Although she knew that boundary wouldn’t last long with them, she wanted to lead back into that physical intimacy more naturally, as an emotional progression, not just because it was difficult to keep their hands and mouths from taking over when they were alone. Those kinds of distractions would allow them to duck the other things they needed to do. The important emotional excavating they were doing.
He’d told her one story about his brother, just one, and it had already changed things. When he looked at her now, that confidence she always saw was just a little dimmed. Whatever he was hiding scared the devil out of him, and he hadn’t told her all of it. The only way she knew how to prove to him that she wasn’t going to walk away was to dig down to the bottom of whatever was eating at him, and just accept it. Whatever it was. Whatever he felt such guilt and contrition over that he’d run from her. Because that’s what he’d done. Charlie had died, and West had fled to one of the world’s harshest climates, and away from the bright, sunny future they’d planned.
She’d worked out before his trip to Dallas that Charlie had been the trigger, but at that time, she’d thought his decision had been about wasting time with someone you didn’t really love. A life is short epiphany. But if she accepted that he loved her, and that he’d lied to her as a way of putting distance between them for a reason, his unannounced flight took on more meaning.
He’d thought he was protecting her. He’d still thought that when he left with Jordan and Zeke. Saying sempre to him couldn’t have changed that much, could it? She hadn’t made that connection yet, or figured out whatever he’d decided meant he could come back. And that was okay. Like he said, they had some time. It was enough that they were talking.
But tonight they weren’t going to do any of that. No sex. No emotional excavation, at least not for him. Her own digging was obviously less painful than his, and could be done in some fun ways. She wasn’t racked with guilt, she was just living a life of faux confidence to hide from the world. To protect old hurts, but not the same kind of hurts. Hers came from people telling her she wasn’t good enough, and her believing them.
“Why are we dancing in the lifeboat again?” West asked, closing the secure, water-and weather-tight door behind them as Lia went about setting up speakers and her phone to play the music she’d set to download this morning.
“Because I don’t know if I like to dance,” she answered. “Well, I know I say I don’t like to dance, and I know that I’m a terrible dancer, but I don’t actually know if I like it. It’s possible to like things that you’re just terrible at, right?”
“I suppose.” He shrugged, but he’d taken part in scheduling their deep dives, as well, and he knew this was a no-torture zone. He wouldn’t have to bare any parts of his soul tonight, unless there was some part of the soul that showed whether you could or couldn’t dance.
“Help me move the furniture back.” It mostly consisted of oversize ottomans pushed together in clumps to act like elevated platforms. Easy to move out of the way in all directions to make a dance floor. Even a dance floor for terrible dancers.
“Tomorrow are we going to practice kickboxing to see if you like it? Gates didn’t seem to think much of it.” West made a goofy face at her.
She felt her face wrinkle in dismay, remembering the strange fight between Nigel and a very angry guy called Wilson in the dining hall earlier. “I can already tell you I don’t want to be punched in the face. We should probably have stuck around to ask what was going on with those two.”
“It’s not a medical problem until security refers them for violent behavior,” he said, urging her out of the way and taking over sliding the big weird ottomans.
She wasn’t
sure. “I can’t see Nigel being violent. Just mostly inspiring it.”
“There’s that.” West offered her a hand in his most debonair pose once the floor had been cleared.
There were several lifeboats littering Fletcher, which weren’t exactly boats, but were designed to protect those inside in the case of catastrophe. Fire being the big worry, it could grow wildly out of control in moments on the Earth’s driest continent. The lifeboats had separate ventilation systems, separate power, separate heat and water and meager food supplies. Basically, large capsules that could hold and keep alive a few dozen souls until evacuations could ensue.
So maybe they were useless in the winter; Lia wasn’t sure. What she did know was how very unlikely they were to be interrupted by anyone, especially two people squabbling about whatever and throwing punches, or even just throwing shade. Only West would have to suffer through her attempts to dance, and probable further attempts to enjoy the terrible dancing.
Once that was done, he nosed into the bag she’d also brought and pulled out a bottle of vintage Monterrosa Port proudly dated 1985. “Am I holding a small fortune here?”
“Aye, lad.” She tried to Scottish at him, and then amended, “Laddie? What do you call a big handsome fellow?”
“You call him West—or I believe you have other special names for him.” He gestured to ask if he could open it, and she gestured in return to the bag.
“I decided Monterrosa Port had probably never made it to Antarctica before, and if I was going to bring it, then I should bring one of the best vintages. Spirited it from the family cellar while packing.”
“Spirited, eh? Have you already been into your cups or does dancing inspire terrible puns in ya?”
“We haven’t danced yet.” But they were going to. “I brought lots of different styles of music, so we can go about this in a thorough and scientific manner. This is a research station, after all.”
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