Delphine Dryden - Gossamer Wing

Damn . Damn!

“Damn!” he repeated aloud.

“Language, sweetiekins.”

DEXTER SIGHED AS he turned around to face her. “Your bags were put in my berth by mistake. I was just going to find a steward to move them. Which cabin are you in?”

Charlotte steadied herself against the force of his glare. She saw this flash of honest irritation as an improvement over not seeing him at all. Avoiding her hadn’t seemed like him at all. Anything was better than Dexter not being himself.

“I’m in this one.”

“You’re in—no, this is mine. Oh, never mind. Let’s both go. The bursar can sort it out.”

“No. There’s nothing to sort out. We’re both in this one.”

“Bloody hell.”

She pressed forward, forcing him to back up, and closed the hatch behind her. “You’ve been avoiding me for days. This will give us a chance to talk.”

With no room to maneuver, Dexter gave up and sat on the bunk. “You arranged this? On purpose ?”

“You sound horrified. That’s not entirely flattering.” She threw her hat atop the nearest trunk and pulled her gloves off in relief. It was another unusually warm day in Le Havre, and Charlotte was eager for the ship to cast off so she could enjoy the cool ocean breeze.

Her reticule still hung on her wrist, and before she set it aside she pulled Murcheson’s curio box from it, presenting it to Dexter atop her palm. He took it and turned it around in his fingers, not saying anything.

Charlotte swallowed nervously, unsure how to proceed.

Best to just jump in, start talking and something will come to me , she decided at last. “I’m no good at those things, and you are. Will you show me how to open it?”

Dexter raised his eyebrows. “Just like that? You’re through trying?”

“It’s not my strength,” she shrugged. “I don’t really care about how it’s done, I just like the result. Show me, please?”

Dexter turned the ornate little cube over once more and pointed to an inlaid starburst pattern on one face. “You see this? The circle around the star? Look here, there’s a seam.”

Charlotte bent to scrutinize the wooden box, tracing a fingertip where he indicated. She couldn’t see it but she could feel it, an indentation slightly greater than that of the inlay itself.

“You take two fingers and press, then twist,” Dexter demonstrated, “and it opens.”

The curio box fanned out into its star-like pattern on his hand; he started the music and handed the box over to Charlotte.

It seemed so easy now that she knew the trick. “I wasn’t even close,” she admitted, “I never would have thought to try that. Have you worked out some secret spy use for it yet?”

“No. I like it just as it is.”

They listened to the Mozart for a few measures, then Dexter cupped a hand over the box and closed it up again to silence it, setting it aside on the railed shelf over the bunk.

“So this is our last hurrah?”

Charlotte ignored his question and asked one of her own. “Do you know what I think I’ll do when we get back home?” She continued once Dexter had shaken his head. “I think I’m going to quit the Agency and try my hand at being a dauntless society matron who embraces charitable causes and spends a great deal of time and effort cultivating roses that win awards in local flower shows.”

“I see.”

“I’m tired, is the thing. Tired of pretending to be one thing and secretly being another. Tired of never knowing where people stand on anything. All this pretense, it’s exhausting after a while. I don’t know how my mother’s managed it all these years.”

Dexter was starting to eye her as if she’d sprouted a horn in her forehead or an extra nose, but Charlotte pressed forward, though even she wasn’t quite sure where she was headed.

“My mother has pretended all her life not to know what my father’s profession is. And he’s always pretended to be a silly stuffed shirt peer who simply travels a great deal. It’s ridiculous. She knows, why pretend? I’ve never understood it.

“Even Reginald, telling me he hated sport when in reality he was apparently a gifted lemur. I mean acrobat. He even lied about being good at cricket, all because he thought that was what I wanted in a man. Because I didn’t like those things.”

Dexter coughed into his hand. “Reginald was a lemur?”

“No, no. He just . . . I praised him for his mind, but I would have loved the rest too. I would have even cheered him on. I could have been that wife to him, that wife who tolerates a lot of talk about googlies and innings. But I never had the chance, because he never showed me all of who he was.”

“All right. I agree, that does sound silly. I’m still not clear on why your bags are here.”

He shifted his weight forward as if to stand, and Charlotte panicked. She put a hand on each of his shoulders and pressed back, tipping herself halfway into his lap in the effort to keep him from leaving.

“I’m doing a terrible job of explaining,” she said. Then she kissed him, leaning into it until, like a switch flipping on, he started kissing her back.

Kissing felt right, kissing made sense, and when Dexter pulled her down to the bed and rolled her under him that made even more sense. Touching him again was like a cool drink of water after a long, hot day; it restored some parched part of her spirit.

“You always show people all of who you are,” Charlotte said when they came up for air and lay panting, staring at one another. “Except this past week, you’ve been avoiding me and I haven’t known what you were thinking, and I’ve hated it.”

“You said you didn’t want to talk about what happened when we got home,” he reminded her. “I couldn’t face you when that was all I wanted to talk about.”

“I was wrong,” Charlotte admitted. “I was stupid. I want the other Dexter back, the one who fixes my ears, and cares whether I come back when I’m expected, and holds me in the dark and makes me want to feel things for the first time in years.” Saying it aloud took a weight from her heart.

He grinned and brushed his lips against hers. “It really was also that I was just so busy. The whole team was. It was quite an undertaking, getting the whole system installed in such a short time. I’ll probably have to return within the next year or so to make adjustments and take some readings. Particularly if I want to duplicate it elsewhere.”

“I’ll try harder to remember the name. Hardison’s Multi-hypercordal Photophosphorescent—no, I’ve got it wrong again, I can tell by the look on your face.”

Dexter bit his lip, then said the name again for her. “Multi-hyalchordate Phototransphorinating Seismograph.”

“I do know the seismograph part,” she assured him. “If I can ever get that far.”

“You won’t need to. The men have already given it another name, and I suspect that’s the one that will stick.” He sounded resigned, but not too upset about it.

“What do they call it?”

Dexter sighed. “The Glass Octopus.” She snickered before she could help it, and he shook his head with a mock frown. “For shame, Charlotte. If people could only be bothered to remember their Greek and Latin roots . . .”

“You are like a balm to my soul,” she murmured at him, stroking a hand up his cheek then feathering her fingers through his forelock. Dexter closed his eyes for a moment, leaning into the caress. Free from his gaze, Charlotte felt brave enough to take her final leap.

“I love you,” she whispered, “and I want to keep being your wife. I want to go home with you and clutter up your bedroom with negligees and dancing slippers and frivolous hats.”