Previously Spurned Ideas

When Kroe opened the door, he found the man who had broken his daughter's heart standing in the rain looking half-drowned. There was a brief impasse as they absorbed each other; Lera broke it with as much timidity as an avalanche, galloping through the house and into Shad's arms. He gathered her up, looking away from Kroe only briefly to do so. The thunder growled from some indiscernible place behind the sheet of white rain and the older man shifted, opened the door wider.

"I don't think I expected you to come," he said finally. Shad had no reply, so he only walked into the familiar room, scanning it with his eyes. It was empty. Kroe confirmed, "She's not here."

Lera, curled against Shad's chest, flopped in the cradle of his arms a few times without leaving them, and then sighed, tucking her paws under her arms. He thought of sitting down but was too restless to hold still; he paced with Lera as though he were trying to soothe an infant, taking off his streaked glasses and setting them on the table as he passed it. The fire roared, but he didn't feel its heat. He was chilled to the bone from a sudden coldness more penetrating than the rain. Kroe sat on the couch and watched him, impassive, half obscured in shadow.

Finally Shad grew too restless even to pace and he sat quickly next to Kroe, jostling Lera in the process who wriggled out of his arms petulantly. Her father's expression was emotionless, stony and unfamiliar as a stranger's, like the face of a featureless mountain. He asked, "Will she even talk to me?"

"I have no idea." He turned in the firelight, inspected Shad more carefully; the blackness in his eyes was unwelcoming and curious, a raven's gaze. "Where did you get that scar?"

Shad winced unconsciously, turning towards the window to stare at his reflection. It was prominent, but he hadn't felt self-conscious about it until just then; he wondered what Ashei might think of it and felt color rise in his face. When he remembered to answer, he said, "I was trampled by a pair of horses. I would've been here so much sooner if it hadn't been for that. I would've come weeks ago. But I couldn't ride. People convinced me to stay on and get well. But it's taken so long. It's taken too long—"

Surprise broke through Kroe's immovable expression and Shad broke off at the sudden familiarity of him, as though he'd only just then recognized who he was sitting next to. Kroe whispered, incredulous, "Why didn't you tell us?"

Shad paused uncertainly and then muttered, "I didn't want to worry her." He felt his eyes widen as he stitched Kroe's heavy, conflicted silence with the struggle of the last few burdening weeks. It was a question: "She couldn't have misconstrued my absence."

He answered, his voice partly flustered and partly disbelieving, "What do you suppose she would've begun to assume when she received letters but no other indication of your interest?"

He stood again, frustrated, irrationally angry, and paced to the hearth. He stared into the fire, ran one hand through his hair. He knew the question had been rhetorical, but he felt the need to answer it anyway. "It would make her doubt permanence. And my sincerity, probably."

"She hasn't said as much. She hasn't said anything to me about you at all. But it seems a logical conclusion, doesn't it?"

"So many stupid mistakes," he muttered absently, running his hand over the stonework in the hearth without seeing. He felt his heart pounding in his throat as he sorted through the implications of his decisions from a new perspective. A man writing to a woman with clear emotion and desire but little else; no measurable fortitude, no demonstrations to back up his promises; nothing but words that, in the absence of his action, became less and less believable until they were absolutely hollow. He could say he loved her all he wanted, but when his feeling was nothing more than words on a sheet of paper how could he expect her to full appreciate the depth of it? "When will she be back?"

"I honestly don't know."

Shad measured seconds on his heartbeat while he watched the fire; those turned to minutes filled with charged silence. He moved, stood at the window and followed the amorphous patterns the water shaped on the glass; he paced, counted eight strides across the room and checked his assessment again and again, from wall to wall, until the length of it was burned into his brain. He worried, he played scenarios, he dissected, he drove himself mad with questions. When he had completely exhausted himself mentally, he went to sit by the fire, and just as he eased himself down he scrambled back to his feet as the door swung open.

The rain hadn't let up any, but it was too dark to discern it against the night. Ashei, soaked, stopped at the threshold and stared detachedly, as though she were expecting to look right through him. Shad was struck again by her, by the boundless draw of her, of the eyes he knew so well. She didn't move; finally he did, wordless, breathless, and tried to read her as he closed the distance. There was a deliberate blankness in her expression, but her eyes were anything but void. She harnessed his gaze and drew him closer by it, as though by an unbreakable thread; he felt his heartbeat in his eyes. By some spellbinding or an unjustifiable need, he couldn't look away; he let himself burn.

Finally, he breathed, "Ashei, I—"

"Don't speak," she interrupted coldly, and the dangerous edge in her demand silenced him at once. Though his shock had muted him, she still commanded his eyes with hers, and they seared even deeper into him. Ashei set her jaw and finally broke their connection, turning her fury on Kroe. "What is he doing here?"

Kroe's lips parted while he found his voice, visibly caught off guard. He demanded, trying to match her stubbornness with debatable success, "What makes you think I have anything to do with it?"

"I'm not stupid," she hissed, her voice growing charged with emotion despite her earlier attempts at vacuity.

Kroe kept trying; against another opponent, his resolve would've been more impressive. "Do you want me to ask him to leave?"

"Would you?" she challenged icily.

"No."

Shad tried again quietly, futilely, "Ashei—"

She turned at him in a snake-strike movement and shouted, "Don't!"

But rather than shock him into another silence, her unguarded eyes sparked his determination. He saw beneath her anger in them and drank deep of what they revealed. He watched the vague impressions of fear and panic as they broke on the surface of her eyes like bubbles on boiling water, the more prominent shadow of a defensive perimeter bent to the point of snapping, and most perceptibly the intensification of her readiness to fight off an imminent threat even as her control was gradually slipping. Shad felt himself mapping that intensity and emulating it. Those glimpses of her weakness were causing a proportional increase in his strength, and untapped instincts to protect her in whatever way he could were pushing him forward in ways he didn't recognize. Frustration at her inability to be anything but completely self-sufficient merged with those feelings, and in consequence all his concerns and doubts about how this confrontation would end promptly evaporated.

As though reading the sudden impassiveness of his resolve in his hardening expression, Ashei switched strategies from paralyzing him with her eyes to abandoning the situation all together. She turned fiercely and marched back into the rain, slamming the front door behind her.

Shad growled to no one in particular, "She is totally impossible!"

Before Kroe could agree, Shad had already followed her into the downpour.

He called after her into the cacophony of the white sheet of rain as he attempted to close the distance between them, but her pace was even as she ignored him and she had one hand braced on her temple like she was using it to tune him out. When he caught up, he said her name again and reached for her shoulder to halt her progress.

She spun, batting his arm away, and took an intimidating step towards him. "What? What do you want from me?"

"I came back to tell you I'm sorry," he insisted ardently, desperate to use every moment of her attention that he could get to its fullest. "I'm sorry I left, I'm sorry I didn't tell you why I was gone for so long, I'm sorry I was too stupid and clumsy to see what I was doing to you and fix it sooner."

She stared, dripping hair clinging to the sides of her face, shook her head like she was disoriented and then rejected him breathlessly, "Apology not accepted!"

She tried to turn from him again, but the thought of losing her a second time motivated him powerfully, unexpectedly, and he acted without conscious permission. He threw one hand to take her by her waist and used the other to grab the wrist closest to him as she tried to shove him away with it. He had no doubt that she could've broken his hold, but she seemed too mixed-up to fight him off effectively and instead struggled in a way he could contain. She protested, outraged, "Stop it!"

"Ashei, please," he begged her, feeling her struggle out of his reach in more ways than one, "I know I've hurt you, but I want to fix it, I want to fix everything! Please let me try, let me—"

She argued fervently, still wrestling with his grip, "I don't want you anymore!"

Shad felt a cold jolt pierce his core, like she had driven a sword through him.

There was a gaping hole in his middle where her words had ripped him apart, but he was too preoccupied with looking at her, for what he was suddenly realizing might be the last time, to see it. He expected to fall when he felt his legs cut out from under him, but somehow he still stood. He was panting from holding her and from the rush of pain that he knew would crush him soon. She had stilled in his hands. He breathed quietly, searching her face in the near blackness through the rain, "Is that true? It would be fair of you to have forgotten me."

She looked startled. Her free hand was curled over a fistful of material at his shoulder that she had tried to use to shove him away before. They were almost standing as if to dance. She asked, dumbfounded, "Hadn't you expected that answer at all?"

"Yes," he admitted, the throbbing around his fresh wound beginning to break through the numbness of his shock and seeping like dread into his voice. "Yes, I'd expected it."

"Then why did you do this?" she demanded, shouting at him again with unfair ire and finally breaking his grip. His hands felt like ice in her absence. "Why did you come back?"

Hopelessly, he raised his own voice to meet hers against her stubbornness, against the rain, against the Gods; he shouted, "Because I love you!"

Ashei's expression melted, utterly disarmed by his words, and he heard her breath leave her.

He said again, barely audible above the rain, tenderly, cupping one side of her face with his hand without thinking and receiving no resistance, "Because I love you."

For a moment, she seemed stunned under his touch. Then, suddenly, her eyes, connected to his, brimmed with tears and spilled over, and he exhaled under the weight of a thousand different reasons: Because of his relief, because of how beautiful she looked, because he couldn't catch his breath with her so close, because he was being crippled by urges he no longer had any intentions of resisting. He closed what little distance was left between them, free from nervousness or hesitation. He weighed her reactions as he approached her more intimately: the subtle ease of her shoulders, her bated breath, the moment when her eyes finally closed. He drifted as close to her as he dared, only stopping when he felt his lips graze hers.

He murmured again against her lips, each word making his brush them, "I love you."

Her mouth parted under his and her breath shuddered out, but her eyes were still closed. Then he let his own heavy eyes shut and took her mouth in his.

The time and the season and the rainstorm all blurred together into insignificance and dissolved behind him, as he lost all ability to focus on existence outside this pivotal moment, as he was completely consumed by his need to live in this second, this experience, with his entire body and mind. He gently gathered the material of her shirt that hung at her hip bone and pulled her closer by it, immersed in the sensations he was slowly processing. When his mouth moved, hers moved with it in a pleasurable, alien synchrony. Her hands had slid onto his shoulders, and when he combed through the soaked hair at her temple with one hand she knotted her fingers in his hair and raked them up his scalp, creating a new web of phenomena that threatened to cripple him. He was falling, and yet he had never felt so grounded. A sound left him, and then they were apart, and she was hugging him close, panting, her face resting on the side of his neck.

"If you ever leave me again—" she threatened.

He was curious how that sentence would end, but he interrupted to promise her, tightening his grip around her waist for emphasis, "I won't."

She only breathed in his arms for a moment, but it sounded as though her breath wouldn't come to her. Then she turned her face gently into him and said against his ear, "I love you, too."

The intense pleasure it had given him to say those words to her paled in comparison to the entanglement of light and fire she sent spiraling into him when she said them. He pulled her away so he could look into her eyes again in the dark and begged, "Then marry me."

She looked defeated, and it made his determination falter. She sighed, "I can't."

He stopped briefly, weighing his options. He brushed her bangs aside while he thought, searching for answers to a thousand questions in her eyes and not finding any. Finally he just asked, "Why?"

She shook her head minutely, put her fingertips on his lower lip before she answered. "I can't just leave him."

The feeling that washed over him wasn't unlike landing on the ground from a high jump. He took her hand from his mouth and kissed the back of it while he mulled. He wasn't going to leave without her, that much was certain. But he couldn't ask her to abandon her father, either. "Then I'll stay here."

A breathless smile flashed over her face for an instant, but she put it away. "You hate it here."

"I don't hate it here," he tried to reason, but she threw her hands up, suddenly frustrated, and turned away from him to walk in another direction.

She said exasperatedly, "Shad! Try to be serious."

He caught her hand as it came back down so he could hold it while he walked beside her and insisted, "I am being serious."

She stopped walking just as suddenly as she had started and he stepped in front of her again. "No," she said, so quietly the rain nearly drowned her words out completely. "I want to go with you."

"I can't make you choose between us," he told her, his mind being pulled apart by his warring euphoria over her reciprocation, disappointment over their circumstances, and concern over how increasingly soaked she was becoming. He decided to just be happy that he was with her and let his other emotions wait on the sidelines for their turn.

Suddenly her voice was curious. She asked quietly, "Why were you gone for so long?"

"I was trampled," he answered dismissively, more concerned with her conundrum than those sorts of details. He steered them back to her devotedly, "I'm not leaving again without you."

Ashei studied his face in the dark and then rain for a while before she said, pulling him along by the hand towards the house, "Come inside with me."

She paused at the door to turn into his arms and kiss him again, and he put one hand on the doorframe so he wouldn't fall off the stairs from the intoxication of it. She held his face in her hands, using her position of control to explore his mouth uninhibitedly. When she finally released him she sighed and turned the doorknob, heading into the house, and he floatingly followed.

"Put on something dry," she commanded as she disappeared down the hall while he closed the front door.

Shad took his pack and changed in the room where he had slept before. When he returned to the hallway he heard soft murmurs coming from Kroe's room; he took his glasses from where he had left them on the table and set himself on the couch near the fireplace to wait for a verdict. Lera sprinted to him out of nowhere and curled on the cushions between him and his arm. He lived the encounter over and over again: the release in her expression when she had cried, the feeling of her against him, the chilling and yet warm sensation when she said she loved him. Through his euphoric ruminations, the implications of what had transpired managed to break into his thoughts.

Ashei wanted to be with him nearly as much, if not entirely as much, as he wanted to be with her, and regardless of the decision she made he wasn't going to separate them again. Hypothetically, he could be married soon. That hadn't struck him as weighty before – being with Ashei felt as right and as natural as breathing – but just then he felt the immensity of that. Notions of "true love" and "destiny" and other previously spurned ideas flooded through him unexpectedly. Soon he might be a husband to her, and she might be his wife. He could hardly wrap his mind around the tangibility of the idea. For all his pining and proposing, he had never felt the reality of it until that moment. It frightened him a little, but he decided that it felt good.

Finally Kroe's door opened and Ashei came out alone. She had been crying again. He stood when she came to meet him and she wrapped her arms tightly around him when he accepted her into his waiting arms. She didn't speak for a long time, gently brushing the hair at the nape of his neck with one hand while she was tangled in her own thoughts. Finally she took a soft breath against his shoulder and said, "I'll go with you."

Shad pulled away slowly to gauge her expression and measure how much of a sacrifice it was for her to utter those words. But she didn't look deprived, she looked decided.

"Yes, I'll marry you."