The sight of him like that always sent a frisson through her. Hot and cold chills, a quickening of her pulse that wasn’t fear.
“I’ll be back late,” he would say, and his expression fell short of even his smallest smiles – though his eyes sparked with an intensity that Rose half-expected to set the drapes alight.
“See ya,” Kay would call, flapping a hand his direction without tearing her eyes from the screen.
But Rose would say, “Be safe,” and he would give her a fast glimpse of teeth that still didn’t manage to be a smile. She never heard him get home, but he was always in the kitchen the next morning, dressed and hair shining clean, making magic with a pan and asking her to fetch the butter or milk or the sugar cannister.
One night, Rose was still up when he returned.
A bitter, driving rain pounded the windows, loud enough to make her feel restless and too awake. Kay went to bed, but Rose built up a fire in the library hearth and settled into what she’d come to think of as her chair with a fresh book. This was one from Beck’s suggestion list: Jane Eyre.
She’d looked it up on her phone, and found a dizzying array of opinion-sharing, critiquing, and downright demonizing of the novel. It was an old book, written in a far different time, but from the first page, she loved Jane. She was Jane; right there in her shoes with her horrible family, and at the horrible boarding school.
And then came Rochester.
Rochester was rude, and cutting, a terrible conversationalist – but he didn’t frighten her. No, far from it.
So entranced in the story, she didn’t realize that hours had passed. Didn’t realize that she was up far later than normal until she heard footsteps in the hall.
She lifted her head, nearly startled to find that she was still in her chair, the fire all but died down, rain still beating the window, and not out on the heath with a fleeing, heartbroken Jane. She held her breath, listening as the steps came closer.
She knew the sound of Kay’s gait by now, and this was definitely not hers.
A moment later, a black wraith filled the doorway.
Rose didn’t startle. All the ugly, frightening things that had happened to her had never begun with tall, slender shadows filling doorways.
The figure stepped into the room, rain drops pattering off its long coat onto the carpet, and into the puddle of light cast by her single lamp and the dying coals of the fire. The warm glow slid up a slender, black-clad torso, and carved Beck’s familiar features in sharp relief.
His eyes, though, the gleam in them – that was less familiar. As was the tight set of his mouth. The way his wet hair clung to his face and throat.
Rochester, she thought.
But, no, worse, and more beautiful. Better, too.
The cold of the outdoors poured off of him, and something else, an intangible air that left goosebumps breaking out beneath her clothes.
“Hello, Rose.” His voice was perfectly polite, as always. “You’re up late.”
“I got caught up in my book and didn’t realize it had been so long.” Her pulse fluttered, throbbing in wrists and temples, leaving her a touch lightheaded.
He nodded. “Always a danger with a good book. What are you reading?”
His eyes. She swallowed. “Jane Eyre.”
“Ah. One of my recommendations.”
“Yes, sir.”
One corner of his mouth lifted, the light gleaming on his teeth, and it wasn’t a smile at all, not close. Voice still calm: “What did I say about ‘sir’?”
“Oh. Sorry.”
He turned and crossed the room, wet boots squeaking faintly. A sideboard sat along one wall, and she listened to the clink of glass-on-glass.
Rose got up to feed the fire, and resettled in her chair.
Beck returned a moment later, loosely holding a tumbler of amber liquid. He set it down on the table beside his chair, shucked off his jacket, tossed it on the rug, and sat.
Rose had never been to a zoo, but that was the thought that popped into her head as she watched him: being on the other side of the glass from a lion or tiger. Only there was no glass; she was in the enclosure with the animal. And the quickness in her pulse had nothing to do with wanting to run away.
He kicked one boot up onto his other knee, and brought his glass to his lips, gaze trained on the fire. The new log caught with a rush and a pop, fresh orange flames leaping. Their glimmer shined on the whiskey in his glass, and on the smooth leather of the holsters on each of his shoulders, black leather on the black cotton of his shirt.
Rose didn’t speak. She had the distinct sense that he couldn’t talk at the moment; not to have a polite conversation, anyway.
He sipped his drink, and after a few long moments she saw the line of his shoulders relax; saw him sink down deeper in his chair. His fingers drummed on his glass, and his nostrils flared as he let out a deep breath that had the firelight leaping down the holster straps on his chest.
Then he turned to her. With eyes that weren’t honey, or burnt sugar, no, not now. Gold eyes. Lion’s eyes. The firelight licked over them, carved dark shadows beneath his cheekbones. His hair was already starting to dry, faintly curling at the ends, framing his sharp jaw.
“Are you alright?” she asked, softly.
He dipped his head, a nod of thanks. “Yes. It just takes me a moment – after.”
After what? She didn’t ask.
He set his drink aside. “Will it bother you if I smoke?”
All of her foster parents over the years had smoked, and none of them had ever asked if she minded. “No.”
Another nod, and he produced a miraculously dry pack and lighter from his pocket. When the cigarette was on his lip, and he clicked the lighter to life, she saw that his hands, bathed fully in the light of the fire, were not clean. Dark smudges marred the fingers and palms.
He noticed, too, pausing a moment, staring at his own long, elegant fingers. Then he lit the cig and pocketed the lighter.
She watched him take his first drag, the way his cheeks sucked in, the way his jaw flexed when he exhaled. She’d never wanted to sit and watch anyone smoke before. It had always repelled her, in fact. But with Beck, she found herself transfixed – so much so she missed the question he asked her.
“I’m sorry?”
“How far along in the book are you?” He gestured toward it with the end of his cigarette.
She glanced down at the leather cover to keep from staring at him any longer. Smoothed her hand across the cover – and returned to the moors. To Jane and her grief. The lightning-struck chestnut tree and the wife in the attic.
“I love it,” she said, “even if it’s making me sad right now.”
He chuckled, and she glanced up again. He had the rim of his glass to his lips, eyes dancing above it. “I find that’s always true of the best books. The sweet parts are always sweeter if it’s hurt a little along the way.”
She smiled, and knew it was wistful. “That’s true of books, anyway.”
He nodded and lowered his glass, growing somber. “It’s certainly more palatable in a book. It can be difficult to be hopeful about real life.”
“Yeah.”
“But.” He sucked down the last of his cigarette and flicked it expertly into the fire. Dropped his boot to the carpet and sat forward, elbows on his knee. He was looser, now, his body relaxed, and it was a kindly sort of earnestness pouring off of him now, and not whatever he’d brought into the room with him at first. “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still hope, Rose. At least a little, even if it’s only for small things.”
Simple words, but they carried weight. Dropped heavily into the space that separated them.
She nodded.
The fire crackled.
Beck sat back, less earnest. Inquisitive, she decided, brows lifting. “What do you think of Rochester?”
She hesitated, tongue pressed to her lip, wanting to phrase it in a way that would sound meaningful, and not young and hormonal.
> He took her hesitation for answer, though, chuckling. “I can see you don’t dislike him.”
“Well. No.”
“You’re blushing.”
“It’s just the fire.”
He smiled – wider than usual, wide like right after he’d killed Tabitha. When he’d cut her loose from the cabinet and first found her. Teeth glinting in the firelight, eyes shiny from the whiskey – gone now, she saw, as he ran a fingertip around the rim of the glass.
“You can pretend if you want to,” he said, “but you don’t have to. I won’t ever think less of you.”
She wondered if they were still talking about blushing.
“Don’t you find it surprising that Jane fell in love with Rochester?” He sounded genuinely curious, and not as though he were laying a trap. It wasn’t a challenge, not like Claire’s opinions had been. “They’re so very different, after all.”
“I don’t think they’re that different at all.”
“Really?”
“Everyone thinks Jane’s meek, but she’s just quiet. Careful isn’t the same as afraid. She’s smart. And – and a person can’t help trembling, sometimes. It happens whether we want it to or not.”
He pressed the tip of his tongue to his top lip and stared at her fixedly, listening, really listening.
“And Rochester is gruff and impolite – but it’s to cover up that he’s awkward. He feels a great deal more than he says, but he isn’t very good at putting any of it into words. Really, he’s meeker than Jane, with his secrets, refusing to allow himself to…”
“To what?”
“Love her.”
The firelight bathed his throat, highlighting the movement of it as he swallowed. “But how can Jane love him in return? What about the wife in the attic? The cruelty of it? He’s cruel and he’s ugly.”
“Not to her.”
His brows went up, and then he became very still, before his head cocked to the side. “The lamb fell in love with the lion, I suppose.”
“Who says Jane’s a lamb?” She heard the quiet rush of his exhale. “I think – I think Jane has cruelty and ugliness, too. She’d have to, or they wouldn’t suit each other so well.”
He glanced toward the fire again. “Yes. Yes, I guess you’re right,” he mused. “Some find fault with the book, for failing to serve as a morality play at the end.”
She shrugged. “It’s a love story. Love doesn’t require morality, does it?”
He didn’t turn his head, but his eyes cut toward her, a wet gleam in the dimness. “No, I don’t guess it does.” He smiled again, a flash of a canine like a fang, before he schooled his expression with what looked like real effort, and studied the dancing flames. “You ought to go to bed, Rose,” he said, gently. “It’s late, and you’ll be sleepy tomorrow.”
It was a logical statement, but a clear dismissal, too. It stung, maybe more than it should have. “Right.” She stood and left the book behind on the chair.
When she was at the door, he called after her: “I think tomorrow we’ll start with some lessons. History, language, science. The normal sorts of things. You can’t have gleaned anything worthwhile in whatever bit of schooling you’ve had.”
She glanced back over her shoulder, but his profile was still toward her, half-hidden by a screen of his hair.
“Alright,” she said. “I’d like that.”
“Goodnight, Rose.”
“Goodnight, Beck.”
That night she dreamed of a rain-soaked beast sprawled across a chair, claws digging into the upholstery, golden, slitted eyes with tall pupils, and fangs as long as her fingers.
SIX
The next day after breakfast, Beck carried in an unused table and chairs from one of the fancier parlors and set them up in the center of the library rug. He brought her a stack of new spiral notebooks with crisp, white pages, and six pens with fresh black ink: untold luxurious the likes of which she’d never owned, like everything else he’d given her so far.
He wore a soft-looking blue shirt today, open at the throat, white undershirt peeking from beneath, tucked into olive corduroys and a pair of battered old loafers. Truth told, she liked him best in the stark, fitted blacks he’d had on last night, but there was something about his during-the-day clothes that made him feel more tangible. She studied him, while he had his back to her, pulling books down off the shelves. Appreciated the way his lean, hard shape was still evident beneath the softer, looser fabrics. He looked touchable like this.
At breakfast, he’d shown no signs that he wished to discuss their conversation in the library last night. Hair soft, dry, gleaming, his manner mild and warm, she’d realized he wasn’t going to address the side of him she’d glimpsed in the firelight: the whiskey, and cigarette, and tension of it all.
Today he was playing professor.
Last night he’d been something entirely different, and not playing at all, she didn’t think.
He turned, and she glanced hastily away so he wouldn’t catch her staring.
“I thought we’d start with a little bit of everything.” He set a hefty stack of books down on the table with a solid thump. The dainty table legs creaked a protest. “Then we’ll have a baseline for continuing.” He settled in across from her, pulled a book off the stack, and sent her one of his small, close-lipped smiles, his eyes warm. Honey this morning, again, safe and approachable. “How does that sound?”
“It sounds good.”
~*~
It turned out she’d managed to learn a great deal more at school than either of them had counted on. When she’d been admitted to Tabitha’s care, she hadn’t been able to stay in school full-time; only here and there, and the principal was one of Tabitha’s “special friends,” as she liked to call them, so Child Services had never heard about the truancy.
But she’d gone to public school her whole life before that, and not only had she been a model student – other children had bewildered and intimidated her, one of the many reasons she’d felt such an immediate attachment to poor Jane Eyre – and she’d loved reading besides. She’d taken lunch and recess in the library. Had checked out books to take home.
“Self-taught,” Beck said with a warm approval that left her grinning like an idiot. “Just like me.” He winked, and her skin tingled pleasantly.
“You were born after the Atmospheric Rift,” he continued, “so I say we go back to before then and work our way forward, filling in the gaps.”
They were discussing Leonidas and his Spartans when Kay harrumphed loudly from the threshold, rapped on the doorjamb, and said, “Are you gonna make that poor thing read about old, dead people all day, or are we ever gonna eat lunch?”
Ripped from the text, and Beck’s mellifluous analysis of it, Rose was startled to find that they had both leaned low over the table, heads bent together. When he lifted his head, she could count all the dark striations in his eyes; smell the tea on his breath. They were so close, and she was keenly aware of it.
For a moment, he looked lost: eyes wide, pupils enlarged, mouth half-open, caught mid-sentence. Then he sat back, composed again, and turned to Kay.
Rose dropped belatedly back into her own chair; she’d been half-out of it, balanced on her elbows and toes, like his voice was a rope that had pulled her up out of her seat.
“Lunch would be perfect,” Beck said. “What are you making?”
Kay snorted. “You leave it up to me and that’s how you get canned Spaghetti-Os.”
“We don’t have any canned Spaghetti-Os,” Beck said in the voice of someone who’d just picked up someone else’s used tissue.
“You haven’t seen my closet.”
“I shudder to think. We’ll have hot sandwiches, I think,” he said, pushing his chair back. “To go with the leftover soup from last night. Sound good?” The last he directed at Rose, along with a look softer than she’d dared hope to receive.
“Sounds good.”
~*~
They settled into an every-other-day
rhythm with her lessons. One day of lectures that were more like conversations, and the next day off so Beck could work in his study and Rose could read the passages he’d assigned to her and catch up on household chores. In the mornings, when she was freshest, they worked on science: studied electricity, and rudimentary chemistry, and the ways the Atmospheric Rift had affected everything from the energy industry to the ocean’s ecosystems. Hydroponics, and efforts to reduce pollution, though they’d yet to touch on the Rift itself. Rose had the impression Beck kept sidestepping it on purpose; the great unspoken elephant in the room.
Before lunch it was world history, from the fall of Constantinople to the fall of the Reichstag. Everything up to the geopolitical upheaval of the world just before the Rift, and the crash after.
After lunch, it was mythology, and literature. She gobbled novels like candy, and he teased her opinions of them out, one gentle prompt at a time; offering counterpoints occasionally, but never dismissing, never ridiculing. Literature isn’t full of hidden meanings, he told her, but there’s no limit to individual interpretations of a work once you strip away the author’s intent.
She took to languages shockingly well, or so he told her. You have an ear for them. Spanish, and French, and the start of Latin. Beck also spoke Dutch, German, and a little Russian. You never know what might come in handy, depending where life takes you.
Rose’s head felt overfull; she dreamed of verb conjugations and the periodic table. By dinnertime, she was drowsing over her plate, glazed and overwhelmed by the amount of information she’d consumed. But she was hungry, too. The more she learned, the more she wanted to learn.
Beck would quiz her in French at the table, and Kay would grumble about it. “It’s rude to talk about people right in front of them when they don’t even know what to defend themselves about.”
“Kay, what makes you think you’re an interesting topic of conversation?” Beck asked sweetly, and Rose stifled choking laughter into her napkin.
It was a routine in which Rose thrived. She was awake before the alarm in the morning, tossing the covers off with relish, no matter how exhausted she’d been the night before. She took the stairs two at a time, and found herself humming as she vacuumed and dusted. “What’s that?” Kay asked her one night as they did the dishes. She’d been whistling a bit of Bach, one of the old vinyls Beck had been playing during their lessons.
King Among the Dead (Hell Theory Book 1) Page 5
