6.2 — The Ache, and Why She's Not Speaking

It was the ache that had finally driven her into silence, I think — not the closeness itself, which she'd wanted plainly and asked for openly, with a kind of focused intensity I'd rarely seen from her before — but what wanting it that thoroughly had cost her afterward, low and unfamiliar and a little embarrassing in its persistence.

She had been more insistent tonight than I think either of us had quite expected going in. Tonight hadn't been the first time between us, not by a wide measure — we had crossed that particular threshold together years ago, not long after she'd first found her footing enough to understand that wanting something was not a sin, that it was not something she needed to earn, that it was simply allowed, as natural to her as it would be to anyone else, once she'd learned the language for it. The Roster has never pretended to be only about conversation and company, and Flora herself had come to understand that physical intimacy, like almost everything else in our complicated, deliberately constructed family, was a thing that could happen between two people who cared for each other without needing to lead anywhere or mean anything beyond the simple, honest connection of it.

But tonight she had wanted something more than the familiar shape of what we usually shared. Tonight she had wanted, I came to understand as the hours deepened, to feel like enough.

I had watched it building, if I'm honest — a specific kind of intention beneath the wanting, something slightly fraught underneath the tenderness. She'd been quieter through the shared meal than usual, more thoughtful, and when the others had eventually drifted away toward their own evenings and their own private corners, I had seen the moment she'd gathered herself, the specific deliberate quality with which she'd moved closer to me as the light began to shift.

Somewhere in the middle of it, she had asked me — quietly, her voice a little uncertain in a way my name had stopped being, years ago, but which it still could be for her, occasionally, in moments of particular vulnerability — whether it felt to me the way it must feel with Ilyrisse. With Vesalia. Whether she felt, to me, like enough, measured against women who had ruled empires and commanded armies and carried themselves, even now, with the settled, unshakeable confidence of people who had never once doubted their own worth in a room, or in a world, or in the eyes of someone they had chosen to love.

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I hadn't fully understood, in the moment, what she was actually asking for beneath the question — only realized it now, watching the flush along the back of her neck, the particular tension still holding in her shoulders even in stillness, that she had spent the following hours trying, with her whole unguarded heart, to prove an answer to herself that she had never actually needed proving. She had been trying to make her body say things that only a voice, or a lifetime of security, could ever truly make clear, and she had done it with an intensity born entirely out of her own doubt rather than out of anything lacking in what she actually offered me.

The result was a soreness now settling low and unmistakable through her, the particular tender ache of a body that had given more of itself than it was accustomed to giving, moving in ways that were slightly beyond her usual range, chasing a reassurance that had nothing to do with what her body could actually offer and everything to do with what she believed, in some old, unexamined corner of herself, she still needed to earn.

She had gone quiet somewhere in the last hour — I couldn't pinpoint exactly when, the moment had been too subtle, too gradual — and then quieter still, and now, wrapped tight in pale gauze with her face angled fully away from me, she had both hands pressed flat against her own cheeks, not from any physical discomfort I'd caused her, but from the particular, mortified realization of a woman confronting exactly how much of herself she had just handed over, and to what private, unspoken comparison.

I suspected, watching her, that she intended not to speak to me again for the length of a day at minimum. Perhaps considerably longer. I understood, too, with absolute certainty, that the intention would not survive contact with how much she actually wanted to be near me, and that whatever silence she was currently building around herself was less a wall and more a very short, very fragile bridge she hadn't yet worked up the nerve to cross back over.