T H E A G E O F D I S S O N A N C E (7/9)dan, blair, serena, others.
5848 words. a re-working of edith wharton's
the age of innocence.
summary: They see one another at almost the same moment, Blair lagging a mere breath behind, and the sharp, vivid recognition in her face seems to stop the progress of Dan's pulse and start it again.
Dan is sent to retrieve Blair from the station.
Two days have passed since he sent the family mandated telegram, and they were two days of increasing indignation amongst the Rhodes, who seemed to feel ever more slighted in the wake of Cece's insistence upon having Blair at her bedside. Dan thought even Serena was a little miffed, for though she was determined to honor her grandmother's wishes, she must have felt snubbed in favor of her cousin.
"Granny thinks she's dying," Serena said bluntly the night before Blair's arrival. She sat at her dressing table, cheek nestled against the ruffles of her ivory dressing gown, and studied her reflection despondently. "That's all it is. She wants her family around her because she suspects it is the end."
"Don't say that," Dan said, gentle, coaxing. "She'll live forever, just watch."
Serena smiled but her eyes were distant and already mournful.
Dan didn't truly think Mrs. Rhodes, formidable as she was frail, was in danger of passing any time soon. She had recovered her fire even if she seemed changed in other ways – noticeably weaker, more sentimental – and she complained at length that everyone was fussing over her much too much, even though privately Dan believed she enjoyed it. Her first act upon improving enough to enact legislation was to ban all talk of Charlotte or her husband, which seemed to leave the family with very little to say.
Gossip of the Bass failure had overshadowed news of Cece's stroke, though no one in wider society thought to connect the two events. There was merely a great deal of speculation as to what the Basses would do or should do, not that anyone thought to ask the couple in question (which Dan suggested snidely at the club one night to resounding silence).
Things being as they were, none of the Rhodes wanted to be responsible for collecting Blair and bringing her home once again – for even if New York could no longer be considered her home, her grandmother's house certainly counted regardless. Serena herself wouldn't leave her grandmother's side, so Dan had offered, expression blank but heart beating hard in his chest. Serena was grateful but also, he could tell, not surprised.
All this passes through his mind as he paces on the train platform, leaving dusty footprints in the falling snow. Night is coming on quickly, though the dense clouds and gleaming snow prevent the darkness from suffocating. The gas-lamps burn hazily around Dan as he moves back and forth between them, light to shadow to light. He glances skyward once, flakes alighting coldly on his face, and finds the obscured sky a deep jewel blue not unlike the stone in Serena's engagement ring. These things feel potent and significant, like omens, but Dan cannot suppress the thin pleasure that has begun to wind through him.
In his thoughts, Dan travels the distance from the station in Jersey City to Cece's uptown estate over and over again. It should take two hours, maybe more in this weather. Two hours or more.
He imagines her arrival, a slender figure stepping from the train and moving along the platform, dressed in a green cloak with her hands tucked in a white muff. The light snowfall would catch in the curls of her hair. From his position, he would be able to see her long before she noticed him, and there is something appealing about the idea, as though she's there just for him: the only person he recognizes in a sea of strangers.
Even still, picturing and anticipating her, he's still startled by the pale oval of her familiar face appearing suddenly in his field of vision. She's clad in black, not green, and the fur at her neck and hands is black-tipped gray. They see one another at almost the same moment, Blair lagging a mere breath behind, and the sharp, vivid recognition in her face seems to stop the progress of Dan's pulse and start it again. When she's close enough to touch, he offers her his arm and she takes it wordlessly. They don't speak until the doors of the brougham have securely closed them in.
Blair asks about Mrs. Rhodes first and Dan goes through the dutiful assurances. "But," he adds, "She refuses to address the cause of it at all, and won't even allow Mrs. Bass' name to be spoken in her presence."
Appearing somewhat amused by this, Blair says, "Ah, that sounds like Granny." She gives Dan a sidelong look. "You'll find me ridiculous, but even I must fight my natural impulses on this score. My very first thought was that she had gotten what was coming to her for marrying a man like Bass, but then I remembered and chided myself for how intolerant I was. I now endeavor to have nothing but the utmost sympathy for Charlotte, even if I always did despair of her taste in hats."
Dan is unprepared for the laugh that escapes him and it catches in his throat, a choking amusement. Blair gives him a spare smile in response and it is all, for a moment, too much: her prickly nearness, her mean spirit, her humor. He would like to kiss her but instead merely takes her gloved hand in his. "You didn't expect me today?"
"No." Her fingers move along his with something akin to reluctance, but she doesn't pull away. "Did you know I hardly remembered you?"
"Hardly remembered?"
Again she gives him that cool, spare smile, brittle as dark-branched winter trees. "Isn't it just the same for you?"
He recalls the bracing shock of seeing her again and how it happens every time he sees her, even when he knows it's coming. "Yes," he allows, turning her hand over in his and opening the little button at the wrist. He tugs the glove over the heel of her hand, bends, and kisses her palm. "I almost came to Washington to see you, you know."
Blair doesn't reply except to gently disentangle her hand from his. "I suppose Serena sent you to fetch me?"
Dan wonders at such veiled remarks and meaningless chatter, as though there were no deeper connection between them now than there was a decade past. Was this to be the rest of his life, all the time pretending, even in private? Everything he had wanted to say to her now seems trite and even embarrassing, and it's with childish, defiant frustration that he tells her, "I saw Carter Baizen in New York."
It's a small, petty retaliation for bringing up the wife neither of them forgot, and Dan feels a little ashamed of saying it as soon as it leaves his mouth. He had not intended to allude to Baizen and his knotty history with both Blair and Dan's wife, but once spoken it cannot be unsaid.
She betrays no reaction. "What did he tell you?"
Being made to elaborate, even though the shift of topic was his doing, only serves to frustrate Dan further. "That he helped you once, as a favor to your cousin."
Blair lifts her unreadable gaze to his. "Yes. It was quite the caper; Carter never pulls off anything without some style, even such a thing as stealing a wife away from her husband. Does the idea worry you?" Her dark eyes seem to challenge:
or is it that it doesn't?He presses his lips together and ignores her implication. "He did you a great service."
"Mm, in a manner of speaking," she says, voice going sharp with mocking. "An adventure, a last little bit of revenge against everyone who purported to love me – slipping on Blair Waldorf's skin a final time. Once you told me I was changed every time you saw me, and I was perhaps the most changed then, flush with my escape. I'd never felt such agonizing guilt and joy at once – until now. I never shared it with Serena; I think it might hurt her even now that she's put Carter aside for good." She still has those challenging eyes on his, alight with new passion. "How is it she and I always know the best ways to hurt one another?"
"Blair," he murmurs, but is uncertain how to proceed from there. The carriage jostles as it clambers onto the ferry and Blair allows herself to be carried by the motion until a hand pressed firmly against his chest stops her. Her face is close to his, emotion marring her brow and twisting her lips. "You know this can't last."
"What can't?" she questions petulantly.
"Our being together – and not being together."
Her brow furrows further before she says, "You ought not have come today." And then her mouth is against his, open and fast, gone before he can fully realize the sensation. When she pulls away, she pulls far as she can manage, tucked tight in the opposite corner of the seat.
Dan's mind feels muddy, but that has never stopped his mouth working before, so words come tumbling out regardless. "You needn't fear action from me; I won't touch your hand if you don't want me to. Being with you is enough. It's the waiting that's cruel, biding the time until –"
"Until what?" She shakes her head with a soundless laugh. "You have to accept your reality, Dan. You can't spend all your life looking at visions. I've learned the trouble that comes from doing that."
Stubbornly, Dan says, "I don't know any reality but this."
"I can't be your wife." Her lower lip shines from their kiss but she smothers it with her fingertips, shaking her head once more. "So is it your idea, then, that I should be your mistress?"
The bluntness of the question drives him to silence, feeling shamed for his idealism. Finally he says, "I only want to be with you. I don't want anything else to matter."
Blair's expression intermingles affection with contempt. "And yet everything else is all that does."
He turns away, looking sullenly out the window where the city is passing by at a surprisingly rapid clip. "Then what, exactly, is your plan for us?"
"There is no
us in that sense," she says. "I won't try to be happy behind the backs of the people who trust us."
Impatient, Dan counters, "I'm beyond that."
"No, you're not! You've never been beyond. I have," her voice sounds momentarily stifled, "and I know what it looks like there."
It occurs to Dan that he is merely a hand to hold for Blair: a bit of comfort and support in a lonely world. When only one hand is offered to you, what can you do but clutch it? Any time he attempts to clutch back, she retreats; it could simply be that he wants more, yearns for more than she is capable of offering anymore. That is her right, whatever pain it causes him.
Dan feels for the bell that signals the coachman, ringing twice to alert the man to stop. Then he wraps a hand around the door handle.
"This isn't Granny's." Blair peers out the window, frowning. "Why have we stopped?"
"I'm getting out," he says before he does just that, stepping down onto the slushy pavement. He looks up once to see her confused and watching him. "You're right; I ought not to have come today."
Before she can speak, he calls for the driver to go on, moving aside as the brougham starts off once more, carrying her away from him. He stands there until the chill begins to bite through his wool coat, then turns and walks in the opposite direction, towards home.
* * *
"You didn't come tonight," Serena says.
Though her tone is even and far from accusatory, and there is nothing in her carriage or countenance to suggest such a thing, Dan feels the tender needling of interrogation anyway. They are sitting down to a late dinner together, the room dark except for the pulsing shimmer of candlelight.
"You have my apologies," Dan says. "I thought the excitement over the Countess would more than make up for my absence."
It is hardly even an excuse as far as excuses go, and he offers no alternate explanation for why he had not gone on to Mrs. Rhodes' house to meet his wife and her family. Their family, he should say.
Serena looks at him for a moment over the tabletop cluttered with silver candlestick holders and wedding gift china, the cooling food on silver platters. She holds a knife and fork in either hand but they don't touch her meal, and her fingers grip the decorated metal tightly. Her jaw is set, mouth downturned; she looks years older like this, pale and wan. For the length of that unhappy moment, panic and hope war in Dan's chest and he's suddenly, terribly certain that she is finally going to address his wandering heart.
Then she says, "It was good to see Blair again," and drops her gaze to her plate. And that is that.
Dan retreats to the library after dinner. The cool silence of the room is his only escape in the entire luxurious madhouse, the only place where the sensation of asphyxiation abates. But tonight he is gifted no such freedom, for after a little while Serena comes in to join him. She sits a few feet off to practice her sewing, though she has little patience or skill for it; she keeps pricking her fingers with exaggerated little huffs of annoyance. It's terribly endearing, and all the worse for it. The closer she is to him, the more acute Dan's pain.
Usually when she pierces the solitude of the library, it's to ask him to read aloud to her as he used to when they were first courting. Tonight she doesn't. It is a mild surprise in a life with so few of them left, each moment following a script full of such trite sentimental nonsense that it might be one of Dan's father's silly musicals. Dan fears he is becoming his father at times, distant and always yearning for the fantasy of a life that doesn't exist; and sitting there with her golden hair in its low knot, her pinched expression, Serena resembles no one so much as her own mother. Soon enough they will produce children in their own images, tiny little versions of themselves made duller by the repetition, as they are dull copies of their own parents. On and on it will go until everyone they know is dust, and no one living will even be aware of their own tedious history.
The ability to breathe deserts Dan entirely just then and he finds himself on his feet, crossing to the window and throwing it open before plunging his head and shoulders out into the icy night. He gulps the freezing air as though it were water.
He can hear Serena in the room. He can hear the abrupt way she stands up, startled, her skirts swishing. "Dan?"
He doesn't answer.
"Dan," she says. "You'll catch your death!"
How satisfying it might be to catch! On occasion he thinks it has already caught him, and the ghostly drifting he does now is just a miraculously disappointing afterlife.
Then he thinks, fleeting and cruel – what if Death caught
her? He looks out over the dark rooftops, winter wind biting at his cheeks and throat, and detaches utterly from the room and the woman in it. Serena could die. People did. Young, healthy people like herself: she might die, and then Dan wouldn't be anyone's husband.
Dan turns back into the room, open window at his back. His gaze alights on Serena standing there uncertainly, her brows arranged in the very picture of worry. Bile rises in his throat and he loathes himself with such intensity in that moment that he does wish he was truly dead. "Poor Serena," he says, strained, and means it. "I shall never be able to open a window without worrying you."
She softens a little, looking back at him. "I shall never worry if you're happy."
At that, he must turn away from her, if only to close the window. "If you'll forgive me, I think I'll go to bed. I'm not feeling so well."
Quietly, she answers, "Alright."
He makes sure to kiss her cheek as he passes her, but a chill passes between them at the touch, a marriage contaminated by the cold.
* * *
The days pass until an entire week is swallowed up, spent mostly on following the dialogue cues and stage directions of Dan's predetermined life. He wiles away hours sitting behind his desk at the job he hates, ignoring his stack of paperwork in favor of scratching out depressing little scenes in his unpublished novel. He neglects visiting the club with Nate, happily using Mrs. Rhodes' continuing health concerns as an excuse; indeed, he does spend much of his time with Serena at her grandmother's, each by turn entertaining the bedridden old woman.
Blair has developed a remarkable talent for being out every time Dan calls, and he does not inquire about her if he can help it. Today is no different. Dan has been invited specifically by Mrs. Rhodes, sans Serena, and arrives to find the visiting Countess absent again. This time she is on a charitable mission to see poor cousin Charlotte.
"Truly?" Dan is somewhat taken aback. "I wasn't aware Madame Grimaldi had much use for charity."
Cece's eyes sparkle with affectionate meanness. "Nor I, but the blame for today's excursion can be laid at the feet of your lovely wife, my Serena. Or didn't you know?"
"Serena?" he repeats, as though it is a foreign tongue. "Serena went along to see Mrs. Bass?"
"Darling Serena orchestrated the entire affair! She thinks I'm being an obstinate old lady about Charlotte and has enlisted Blair in her little revolutionary acts of sympathy." Watching him intently, Mrs. Rhodes adds, "One would think you and your wife didn't live under the same roof, Mr. Humphrey. Don't you talk at breakfast?"
The honest answer would give her too much pleasure, so Dan cracks a wry smile instead. "You must forgive your absentminded grandson-in-law just as Serena must forgive her absentminded husband. I merely forgot."
"Hm," Cece murmurs, still watching him with visible deliberation. "I think your mind is not as absent as you would like me to believe, but it's no matter – it isn't family without some intrigue, is it, Daniel?"
"So I've learned in my stint as a Rhodes," he answers jokingly, and she laughs.
"Blair was never a generous girl," Cece says. "Serena too much – to a fault. Yet time has been kinder to her than her cousin, so perhaps she had the right idea all along!"
Has it been? Dan wonders idly. Each girl had found her way into a singularly unhappy marriage, though circumstances varied wildly. "Serena is the most tenderhearted girl I've ever met," he says, which has the decency of not being a lie. "If she were any other way, she wouldn't be Serena."
Cece acknowledges this with a nod, but goes on to say, "As much as it may amuse me to be overruled, I'm not sure I approve of this whole business with Charlotte. I suppose they wouldn't be my girls if they didn't disobey me, but for everyone to get the idea that I might
condone Charlotte's behavior –" She makes a tsking noise, shaking her head.
"What behavior is that?" Dan asks daringly. "Remaining by the side of a detestable husband as she's been told to do, or not putting on a happier mask to do it?"
The old woman laughs again, a distinct witchiness to it that borders on cackling. "Ah, my dear Daniel. It's no wonder Serena insisted upon you as a husband. Her mother thought her a fool, but she chose better than any of my other granddaughters, that's for certain. Imagine Charlotte or Blair had her luck!"
Dan averts his gaze, feeling shamed by such unwarranted praise. Mrs. Rhodes must think him humble, and the thought is all the more shaming.
"Since you are so ignorant of news, I'll tell you something else," she says. Dan is grateful for the change of topic. "I have demanded Blair remain here with me, and she's agreed, finally. I need some youth and vitality about the place, and soon enough my Serena will be too busy with your little ones to have the time – don't blush, young man! If I don't have at least one great-grandchild before I'm in the ground, I shall haunt you for all eternity. So instead I shall have Blair, though the family is against it, of course. But who am I to listen to them, when it's I who holds the purse strings? I'll have her here so long as she has a granny to nurse, and I've reinstated her allowance besides. That's why I've asked you here, really."
Dan blinks, stirring. "Me?"
Emotions are warring within him. There is relief for Blair's sake but also a deep, painful curiosity: could this mean, perhaps, that she has chosen to meet him halfway?
"You have been her supporter from the outset," Mrs. Rhodes says. "And if I'm to fight with my family about it again, I'll need your backing once more – yours and your wife's. For all the work their mothers did to put them at each other's throats, those girls have found a way to one another all the same. I've always liked courage above everything, and they've all got it – though of course courage and foolishness are often wed. And you, my boy, you work at the law office, so you can tackle it from that angle for me. Work on old William."
"Yes." Dan's thoughts have already fled, traveled on ahead to the resultant possibilities of Blair's remaining in New York. "You know I'll do whatever I can, whatever."
Despite the cold and the distance, Dan chooses to walk home so as better to collect his thoughts. He cannot deny that Blair's decision to remain in New York confounds him. She had been so definite in keeping the barrier between them insurmountable that he had been anticipating her flight even amidst her arrival. In the carriage she had kissed him in one breath and told him there was to be nothing between them in the next. He didn't think Blair coquettish, so perhaps she is merely as tormented as he. She did not want to hurt Serena, this he knew, but he had the feeling the wound had already been inflicted.
What now? he wonders. Will they fall prey to Blair's fears, and become the type of people who try to be happy behind the backs of those that trust them? Dan has always found cheating abhorrent, and while his affair with Rachel Carr hadn't progressed to the altar, he at least had the comfort of not having double-crossed anyone – unlike Nate, who had had a love affair with a married duchess prior to Penelope, not to mention his actions with Dan's own future wife. It was the betrayal that kept Dan passive and prevented him from acting on his inclinations.
Now hypocrisy has become a daily routine. For all Dan's moral objections, a part of him feels his and Blair's case is exceptional. They are individuals caught up in individual circumstances, and surely not all rules are made to fit every occasion.
A twisting in Dan's stomach belies his rationalizations. He has become nothing more or less than a liar – it's a lie by day, a lie by night, a lie in every touch and every look; a lie in every caress and every quarrel; a lie in every word and every silence.
To reach his own home, he must first pass by the Basses'. The condition of the large, stately house has been greatly changed since the scandal; where there was always light and music and company, people spilling out onto the street any given night, now there is only stillness and quiet. The windows are unlit, like a building left abandoned. Outside stands a gleaming navy carriage. Serena's.
Inside that house, Serena once stole a kiss from Dan that made him blush. How innocent they were then, how untouched.
The doors open, a shaft of yellow light spilling onto the gray pavement. Dan's steps falter and he finds himself hanging back far enough to remain out of sight. Shadows cross the yellow square first: two women, one very tall, with full skirts. Then Serena emerges, still tying a hat over her tousled golden hair, and laughing a little – beautiful Serena as carefree in that one moment as she hasn't been in years, utterly unaware of Dan's eyes upon her. Blair follows a moment later, and is as always more reserved.
He studies them a moment, the tender way they clasp hands to say goodbye and the uncomfortable way they hold themselves apart. There is never less than a foot of space between them and they don't embrace or even climb into the carriage together. Blair hands Serena up and then moves back along the sidewalk as though borne away by her own unease. She watches Serena's carriage clatter off and adjusts her cloak before she turns to walk back to her grandmother's. Her gaze catches Dan's immediately and they both go still, startled. It is a surprise every time, even when it isn't.
Blair unawares is always a little sweet to Dan; for a woman who builds around herself such an impenetrable fortress, it is certainly something to get a glimpse behind her walls, even for a moment. "Dan," she says, familiar and full of feeling.
"I must see you," Dan breaks out, without salutations or introductions. "Tomorrow. Somewhere we can be alone."
She smiles just a little and walks towards him slowly in the misty evening. "In New York?"
Dan casts about for somewhere, anywhere, with a hint of privacy. He thinks of his old home in Brooklyn, where no one ever thought to look, and his father's theatres, and then finally – "The Art Museum in the Park. If you'll meet me."
She is at his shoulder now, near parallel to him, and she doesn't seem to have any plan to cease her steady pace. But she does nod near-imperceptibly before continuing on her way, down along the dark street. Dan looks over his shoulder to watch her, fearless as the heroine of some novella, protected for some greater narrative purpose and therefore having no need of apprehension.
But then she's had no fear since her return, has she? She has seen greater darkness than this.
* * *
Despite having been open to the public for several years now, the Metropolitan Museum of Art remains relatively untrafficked – or at least it's so on this clouded-over, colorless day, the day that luck has led Dan to choose. Who else would be venturing out on such a dreary afternoon but two secretive would-be lovers?
Blair is waiting on the steps when Dan arrives, looking not unlike a piece of art herself, the ruffled cascade of her muted pink skirts like little brush strokes. Their eyes meet for a long moment, her above and him below, and then she turns to go inside without bothering to wait. Dan understands the subterfuge, even with no one else around to be privy to it.
He finds Blair again amongst antiquities, an oddly cheerful figure in her pink and white against the browning deterioration around them. Her expression is shuttered until she glances his way and it suddenly lifts, gaze so warm and clear it's nearly unspeakably intimate. "I've never been here before."
"It will be a great museum one day, I'll wager."
Blair half-nods, uninterested, and continues making her way across the room. She takes in each ancient scrap of pottery and labeled tool until she stops and gently touches her fingertips to the glass in front of a pair of torturous-looking earrings. "It's cruel to think that after a while nothing matters," she muses. "How important all these things were to someone once. I take such pleasure in things. In a hundred years, some little lady might be pressing her face in at one of my hat-pins, or a comb, some silly little bauble I thought necessary enough to own, rendered useless by time."
"Do you think it's the same with people?" Dan wonders. He sinks onto one of the benches. "With affection?"
Her attention returns to him, this time more assessing. He had brought her a handful of violets today because he couldn't find roses and now she snaps one off its stem so she can tuck it into his pocket, its little purple face peeping out. "Perhaps. But I imagine it takes longer."
Blair sets the flowers aside as she joins him. Somewhere else in the museum, there is the distant sound of scuffling footsteps, reminding them that even this privacy is merely an illusion, another game of pretend.
"I spoke with your grandmother," Dan says finally. "She told me you've decided to stay."
"Yes," Blair replies. "It's what you want, isn't it?"
"What I want?" He stares at her, uncomprehending, and then shakes his head. "To have you here – in reach and yet out of reach? To meet you like this, in secret? That isn't what I want. To tell you the truth, I find it detestable."
Her relief is visible. "It is detestable, isn't it? To be like Eva Coupeau, bought and paid for, an open secret. To be just like all the others."
His brow knits. It seems every time he attempts to speak of their relationship with one another, she finds a way to make it immediately sordid. He isn't a fool; he knows his behavior is far from honorable, but the love between them remains untouched by any such darkness in his mind. It has caused him incredible pain but even to fall, to give in – he thinks there is something grand and literary in it.
The words come to him again, unbidden: perhaps he should not have come today.
It's a petty anger, but it spurs him to say, "I don't profess to be different from my kind. I'm consumed by the same wants and the same longings."
Her eyes, dark and somehow luminous, meet his with such bold steadiness that he feels heat rise in his neck and cheeks. "Shall I come to you once and then go home?"
The thought inspires such divine agony that it takes a few moments' sinful imaginings before the second half of her statement reaches him. "Home? What do you mean by home?"
"Back to my husband," Blair says. "I couldn't remain here after that. I couldn't face Serena."
The disillusionment of frustrated love has undeniably made Dan more disingenuous; he still dwells with shame on some of his more callous passing thoughts. Even now he thinks, fleeting and brutal, that he could agree, knowing that after they have been together it would be much easier to persuade her to stay. But the only thing keeping him in any way connected to the idealistic young man he had been is refusing to cross the line between thought and action. He would not do that to her.
Dan begins to say as much but falls silent before words can be vocalized. The warmth with which she looks at him, reserved for him solely, and the knowledge that no matter what he does she is likely lost to him conspire to trip up his tongue. He thinks of all their abortive little caresses, the roughly denied passion of her kiss. He can imagine what it would be like to have her.
"Well, then," Dan says. "Come to me once."
Blair's expression is unreadable. "When?"
"Tomorrow?"
Her hand covers his, thumb sliding past the barrier of his cuff and glove to stroke the underside of his wrist. It leaves a trail of sensation like a cool brand. "The day after."
Dan pulls his gaze from their joined hands to her face, expecting to find something other than the resolve that meets him. It is more than resolve, he realizes, heart beating faster at the thought – it's longing. It's the same longing that is reflected on his face, and he supposes if he felt her heartbeat it would be just as hurried. "The day after," he repeats softly.
* * *
After returning home following an afternoon and evening spent daydreaming at his desk, Dan goes to sit in his library. The lamps are low, a diffused glow illuminating little pockets of the otherwise darkened room. What will it be like, he wonders, afterwards? To touch her skin and then come home to this library, to sit in this chair, to turn the pages of these books? What will it be like to sit across the table from his wife at dinner?
"Dan?"
He starts at Serena's voice, looking up wildly to see her there in the doorway, uncertain about crossing into his domain. Then he looks more closely and sees there is something different about her. She's as tired as she's been since her grandmother took ill, but there is something nearly vivid in her eyes and mouth, a brightness he is no longer accustomed to seeing in Serena's face.
"Yes?" he says.
"I've just returned from Granny's." He's embarrassed not to have realized she was out. "It was lovely. Blair came in as I was there and we had a long talk – perhaps the first real talk we've had in ages." Smiling, she finally breaches the entry and crosses to sit in the chair opposite him. "She was so dear – just like the old Blair. I'm afraid I haven't been fair to her lately. I've sometimes thought –"
Dan is reminded abruptly of their frank talk in St. Augustine; Serena has the same restless energy tonight. "You've thought…?"
She waves a hand. "Well, she and I have both been unfair to one another. We would have been better suited as sisters instead of cousins, for how we bickered and competed." She laughs a little. "Or perhaps I should say unsuited."
"Perhaps," he murmurs.
He can feel her watching him over the few feet between them, her eyes that particular shade of dark blue that he will never be able to associate with anyone else. "Dan," she says, so gently. "You haven't kissed me today."
He knows the cue when he hears it. He knows he ought to rise and take her in his arms and kiss her, so that is what he does, even though he knows that his true betrayal of her will happen in less than two days' time. How will he manage to kiss her after that?
She puts her arms around his neck, her cheek warm against his cool skin. He feels a tremor run through her. How will they manage any more artifice, after that?
PART EIGHT
