Downstairs he heard someone walking around, and he imagined the good doctor packing up his things and leaving in the dark of night like the coward he was.
Steven comforted the rage in his belly by imagining all the quick deaths that were too good for the doctor. Madison needed something slow. And awful.
Tomorrow was going to be hard. Anne would wake up to a different life than she’d had yesterday. Everything would seem different. The air. The light. The wind. Everything would be different, because she was different. This night took something from her. The sense of safety she’d cobbled together with her lies and the money he gave her and whatever thin protection being Dr. Madison’s assistant made her feel.
But on top of that, there was a good chance the doctor would be gone—and that purpose she so relished would go with him.
That, knowing Anne, would be the harshest blow of all.
And what will you do in the morning? he thought. Visit another whorehouse to find out if you can ever be worthy of her?
Christ, that was unworthy of her.
There was more than one coward in this house.
He would stay here, if she would let him. And he would help her—as much as she would allow.
But he knew, with the secrets he kept, with the distance Delilah’s put between them, she would not allow him to stay long. Or remain close.
This night in her bed would not be repeated.
And the realization was a sad one. Devastating.
Unless you do something to change it.
The truth, he decided. She wanted him to talk, and so he would. There was nothing else to do, if he wanted to stay close to her—and he did. For her sake and for his own. He would just have to find the strength to tell her. She was too brave, too powerful for anything else. Lies or half-truths would not protect her.
He could not protect her by shielding her from the worst of himself. The worst of his memories.
He would tell her everything, and then she would decide.
Behind him the bed creaked as she moved.
“Sam,” she moaned. “No—”
The first nightmare.
He crossed the room to her side.
Chapter 9
Anne woke up with a start. She blinked from the total darkness of sleep into a sunlight-filled room.
Sam. He was here. Where? She sat up, panting, her robe slipping off her shoulder. Oh God, where did he go?
“Anne?”
There was a tall, wide blob in front of her.
“Steven?”
“It’s me,” he said, leaning over the side of the bed. He handed her her glasses, and she slipped them over her nose. Her ears. The world came into comforting focus.
It was him. Steven. She took another breath. Another that didn’t shudder in her chest.
“It wasn’t a bad dream, was it? Stella and Sam?” she whispered. She closed her eyes, wishing it were a dream. Wishing it didn’t happen. “It was real.”
“It was real.”
Her eyes blinked open. “What are you doing here?”
“I slept here.”
“You slept…” She pushed her hair off her face, gathering her robe back to her neck. “Here?” she breathed.
“On the chair.”
“That couldn’t have been comfortable.” She glanced down and saw his stockinged feet. He wiggled his toes at her.
“I have spent worse nights.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Again. That seems to be all I keep saying to you.”
She wanted the fact that he’d spent the night by her bed to mean…more. To mean something. And it was awkward that it didn’t. It was awkward to want more than he could give.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“After noon.”
“After—” She was aghast. She hadn't slept past six in months. But it also seemed she hadn't slept through the night in a consistent way since Dr. Madison started his practice in her house.
“You needed it,” he said. “Are you hungry?”
“I am.” She felt empty and fuzzy-headed.
“I'll get you some breakfast,” he said and left the room.
She lay back down in her bed, staring up at the bright sun across her ceiling.
Somehow she'd gone from a nightmare to some kind of dream.
And she didn't want to wake up.
Later, she thought. I will wake up later.
Her eyes slipped shut.
When she awoke again the sunlight was fading.
“My lord,” she breathed, peering into the dark corners of her bedroom. She'd been sleeping with her glasses on, and the world was in focus. “I slept the whole day?”
“It was an impressive commitment,” Steven said, standing up from the rocking chair in the corner.
“You've been here the whole time?” She sat up. “You must be exhausted.”
“I slept,” he said with a weary smile, indicating he hadn't.
The sensation in her chest at the sight of that smile. At the sight of him, rumpled and shaggy in her bedroom. So unkempt. Undone. It was startling.
She understood in a heartbeat that if she accepted this comfort, her attachment to him would become unbearable. It would be so much a part of her that she would never separate herself from her feelings.
Already it felt like too much. This moment felt like too much.
Her affection and her gratitude. The way her eyes continued to return to the sight of his wrists, revealed by the rolled cuffs of his shirt.
“You have done more than enough.” She was suddenly deeply aware of her undress. She wore her wrapper with nothing beneath it. Her breasts felt conspicuous. “You should go,” she said.
He just stared at her, unspeaking, from the corner.
“Steven. I really...I think you should leave.”
“Why?” he asked.
She blinked, astonished he would ask. “The railroad—”
“Doesn't need me.”
He said it with such surety she couldn't argue. “You... you were the one worried about my reputation.”
“And you were the one unconcerned. I find it hard to believe that after last night you're suddenly distressed about what people think of you. From all reports, you are a cross between a saint and a warrior.”
She pulled the quilt her mother made higher over her lap. I only care what you think of me, she could say. And you made it clear what you think of me when you went to Delilah's last night.
Or she could tell him she loved him.
That would scare him right out the door.
“Please,” she whispered. “Go.” He did nothing. “GO!” she yelled.
“I went for you,” he said, softly. “To Delilah’s.”
Her mouth shut so hard her teeth clattered. She blinked, utterly still. Not even breathing. “What?”
“I went for you. So you wouldn’t have to marry the doctor.”
She sat up and tried to kick off her sheets, tried to get out of the bed, but she was caught in them. Like a fish in a net. “That is the worst excuse for going to a whorehouse that I have ever heard,” she snapped. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
His hand touched hers on the bed. Not a glancing touch, but he gripped her hand in his. Tightly.
She tried to pull her hand free, but he held on. Heat filled her body. She was mortified and excited. He'd touched her so much in the last twenty-four hours, it was like the parched earth in a driving rain. Her body could not absorb it all fast enough.
“I've done this wrong,” he said.
“What are you doing?” She was shrill and she kept trying to slap her wild hair out of her eyes.
“If you are to marry,” he whispered, “I would like to be the man you marry.”
Her heart beat so hard that she couldn't be sure she heard him.
“Marry?”
“Yes.”
“This isn’t funny,” she said. Forget her pride—she was furious.
“I’m not joking.”
> “I don’t need your sympathy. I will get over last night. I have, in fact, gotten over worse.”
“This isn't about last night.”
“I'm suspicious of your timing.”
“You asked me why I went to Delilah’s, and the answer, though I understand it to be misguided, is because of you. Because”—he glanced down at their hands, his palm over her fingers—“I fear those things you want in a marriage. That… closeness… I may not be able to give you. I went to Delilah’s to see if I was wrong.”
“And what happened?”
“Sam Garrity happened.”
“You didn’t….” have sex with a whore. For all her fraudulent bravery and desperate bravado, she could not get the question out. It was funny, where she was shy and where she was bold. She was lying in her wrapper in her bed with a man, and she could not say sex.
“I touched Delilah’s wrist,” Steven said.
Anne’s own wrist tingled with jealousy.
“And when she touched me I flinched so hard I nearly broke a vase.” He tried to smile, but it was awful and she had to look away. “I am not unaware of your feelings.”
Wonderful, she thought, so far past embarrassment she could only be caustic.
“And I have my own, for you.” Their eyes met, and for the first time in her experience with Steven—despite having saved his life, despite those months in his clearing and the nights by the fire, despite all the ways she knew and understood he cared about her—he had never revealed so much of himself to her. Not ever.
Embarrassment burned away, replaced by hope. And he must have seen it, because he stepped away, dropping her hand.
“But you want something… I don’t know if I have it in me to give to you,” he said.
“You don't know that!” she cried, feeling him slip away.
“You're not listening to me, Anne. You are curious about sex, and you should be. You should never be playing at being a widow, or considering a man who is beneath you to have those questions answered. You should have the whole experience because it’s… it’s a good experience. The best. But I can’t give it to you.”
The wall Steven had around him was not just cracked, it was falling down, and she didn’t know entirely what to do. How to help him.
“Why?” she asked. “Why do you believe that?”
“I don’t want to do what your father did,” he said. “I don’t want to ask you to hold onto these memories for me.”
“That’s not what my father was doing. He didn’t want me to hold those things instead of him, he just needed someone to help him hold them.”
“I’m afraid that if I let these memories out, I'll be like Sam,” he said. “And there will be nothing for me to do but blow my head off.”
“Don’t say that!’ she cried, aghast and terrified that the demons would drive him that far. But he was silent, rigid, beside her. “You are nothing like Sam.”
“Because I have money? Because I don’t look for escape in a bottle? Those are superficial differences, Anne.”
“You have all these things to hold you up. You have your work, your brother. You have me.” You have me, she thought again. She willed him to believe her. She sent the words on wings, on arrows toward him, so they could pierce that thick skin of his. So they could find those wounds, old and festered, and help them heal.
He stood and paced to the fireplace, where he put his hands against the mantel, looking down at the coals, the dying embers of the fire he’d stoked for her all night and through the day.
The silence grew around them until she felt as if they might drown in it. She had to glance away, out the window, and tilt her head back just to breathe.
Please, she thought. Please bend before you break, Steven.
“I wasn’t in Andersonville for two days before I knew I had to escape. There were rumors that prisoners had dug under the blockade and tunneled to the tree line. But the guards had reinforced the fencing, digging underground so far that there was no way a man could dig that much and not be noticed. Or crushed by a collapse. I was in good health and strong, so I was often on burial duty. We took the dead out every morning and buried them in mass graves. There was one guard, Jimmy.” He glanced over his shoulder at Anne. She knew Jimmy—Melody had been married to him for some time. She understood Jimmy’s animal nature. His cowardice. “He was not well liked by the other guards. He was scared by news of Sherman’s march. He was scared that the prisoners would rise up and kill the guards, which was frankly impossible considering the state of the prisoners.”
“You were starving?” Everyone had heard rumors about Andersonville. They heard the rumors and crossed themselves. They heard rumors and prayed that no one they loved or knew or met in passing was ever inside that blockade.
“We were starving. We were dying of thirst. Exposure. Dysentery ran through the prison like wildfire. We were the walking dead—many of us couldn’t have held a rifle if we had to.”
“What did Jimmy do?”
“He took my bribe.”
“You had money to bribe him?”
“I sold wood that I gathered on burial duty to other prisoners.”
“Wood?” She wasn't following.
“To build fires to boil water. It was the only way to avoid sickness. It wasn’t much money. But it was enough for him to agree to my plan. I would pretend to be dead, and I would be heaped onto the cart with the rest of the bodies, and then when we were outside and I was tossed into the grave, I would get out. We would knock the prisoner on burial duty unconscious and escape.”
“Steven,” she sighed.
“It was a good plan. The only one with a gun was Jimmy. And all I had to do was lie there.”
“In a cart full of dead bodies.”
“Yes. It was a good plan if I could stomach it. And I could stomach anything at that point. I was nearly feral. As we planned, Jimmy picked the boy next to me for burial duty, because he was new and scared and small and could be easily overpowered, and I… pretended to be dead. So that morning it was just Jimmy and this boy feeling for pulses, kicking the unconscious to see if they would stir. They grabbed my arms and my legs and tossed me on the bottom of the cart. I had not thought of that. That because I was right next to the boy he would notice my body first, and I would… I would be at the bottom of that cart. I don’t know how many bodies there were. But it took hours. Hours beneath those bodies. And the sun was hot and it became hard to breathe and it became nearly impossible to hold still and I wished, at some point, buried under the dead, covered in their excrement and their blood and disease—”
He stopped suddenly, sucking in a deep breath, and she realized that she was holding her breath. She was dizzy and lightheaded, and she let that breath out very slowly, very carefully.
The sound of his throat clearing was so loud in the room she jumped.
“But then I heard the cry for the gates to be opened, and then the cart was moving down the road to the graves. And one by one I felt the bodies being lifted off me, and I was… I was not myself, Anne. I was something else entirely, and when I could get up I did—it didn’t matter how many bodies were still there, when I could move. I jumped up. There were two other men with the boy we picked. Because of all the dead. I didn’t care. I was an animal, and they were weak and scared, and I beat them until they weren’t standing. Until they weren’t moving.” His eyes weren’t closed, but they weren’t open either. “I hit them until they couldn’t come after us. I might have killed them—I don’t know. I didn’t care. I was an animal.”
“Oh sweet lord, Steven.”
“But when I was sure they couldn’t follow I ran for the woods. Jimmy followed. I was free, and I told myself it was worth it. Those hours under the bodies, what I did to those boys—I told myself it was all worth it. I had to tell myself that. I had to.”
“Of course you did. No one judges you, Steven.”
“That’s not true,” he said. “And you know it.”
“It was war. You
had to survive.”
He nodded. “That’s what I believed too. That’s what I told myself when I thought of those three boys, so scared they probably would have let me go without a fight—but I beat them anyway. I got away from Jimmy not too long after that, because he was a fool and would get us both caught, and I had not survived the morning at the bottom of that cart to be captured by some home guard.”
“I can't believe you survived.”
He closed his eyes.
“It is a miracle, Steven. You being here right now, it is a miracle.” She circled around the room to where he stood. As she got closer he withdrew. Not physically, not with his body, but he distanced himself all the same. And she stopped, just on the edge of some unseen boundary. She longed to touch him, now more than ever, but it would only hurt him.
“It doesn’t feel like it,” he whispered. “It feels sometimes like surviving is another kind of prison. And I can’t determine how to escape it. I am half a man on good days, Anne.” He turned to face her. He hadn’t shaved in a few days, and in the light his beard was silver and gold. “And I wish I was more, for your sake. That is why I went to Delilah’s. I never meant to hurt you. It was the farthest thing from what I wanted. You’re going to go downstairs soon, and everything might be different. The doctor might be gone, the town might treat you differently, I don’t know. But I think you’ll need me, Anne. And I want to be what you need, but I…don't know if I can be what you want.”
Steven left without looking at her, the door closing quietly behind him, and she took two shaky steps back to her bed and sat. Her mind tumbling over itself. She reached for her clothes to get dressed, but found herself staring at her stocking in her hand as if she didn’t know what to do with it.
Everything is different, she thought.
And she might have spent the rest of the day that way—frozen in her own mind—if there hadn’t been a cry and a crash from downstairs.
Tempted Page 9