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Immediately after meeting Perrin for the first time, she had wept.
It hadn’t even been for a good reason, such as the realization that sweet boy who was to be her betrothed would grow up into a man she would be deeply incompatible with—one that she would find she deeply disliked, even. No, Mon had wept because at the age of 14, Perrin had not yet attained his adult height and stood a head shorter than her. Her first, immediate comparison of him had been to the boy she had been seeing until just a few days before, Tay, who was a whole year older than both she and Perrin and therefore seemed to her young eyes much more adult.
Her mother had tried very hard to hide her laughter as she consoled her, but Mon had still noticed the effort and wept even harder when she did. Still, her mother had been right: by the time Perrin and Mon had married not quite a year later, Perrin had shot up in height. He would never be a tall man, but he now stood several inches taller than her and at the time, it was enough.
Tay, who had come to the wedding, just as all of her friends had, had noticed her contentment with the match, and been gracious about it—even happy for her. Perrin, however, had been noticeably cool toward Tay, clearly jealous of her former paramour despite the fact that on that day, she’d been completely focused on him. He knew who Tay had been to her and she supposed his own hold on her must have seemed tenuous in comparison. She had chosen Tay while Perrin had been chosen for her.
It had been a hint of who Perrin would turn into, although she hadn’t realized it at the time. At the time, she’d naively taken it as a sign of his affection. She’d even gone out of her way to assuage his fears, to show him that, as her husband, she had eyes only for him. In retrospect, it hadn’t actually worked to quell Perrin’s barely-concealed jealousy—instead Perrin had used it as an opportunity to lord over Tay what he had gained.
Mon wasn’t certain she’d ever loved Perrin, even in the beginning, but she’d certainly been happy enough with him. As much as the adolescent Perrin had seemed like a man to the equally callow Mon, he had still been a boy and a sweet enough one at that. She couldn’t be sure if he’d ever loved her either, even in the beginning, but he’d certainly been quite infatuated with her. He’d been willing to do nearly anything to make his new bride happy.
He’d picked up his whole young life in a heartbeat to move with her to Coruscant without a second thought.
That boy was well and truly gone now, and even if Mon had never been in love with him, she did miss him. If Perrin the man were more like Perrin the boy had been, she thought they might have really been happy.
It was hard for her to fathom how it was that the sweet boy she’d married, the one who tried so very hard to get her to smile as often as he possibly could, had turned into such a self-centered, petty shell of a man.
Meanwhile, that handsome older boy to whom the young Perrin had once compared so poorly, was once again putting Perrin to shame. Except now the differences between them were much less petty than height—although Mon had not failed to notice that Tay was still the taller of the two.
No, where Perrin had grown up into a man concerned only with himself and his own material comforts, perfectly happy to embrace the Empire and ignore its atrocities in pursuit of the advantages it could bring him, here was Tay telling her that he was so firmly against that very same institution that she might find him to be an extremist. Tay had grown into a man of character and principle while Perrin had decayed into something one could hardly call a man at all.
That comparison was leading Mon down a dangerous path. As she’d told Vel, who knew her well enough to sense the danger immediately upon hearing Tay’s name, she had enough to worry about without contemplating the merits of an old boyfriend in comparison to her utterly disappointing husband. An affair would be a dangerous distraction.
Which didn’t stop her from contemplating it. And he was too, she thought. He wouldn’t push, not Tay, he never had, but she’d begun to dress for him at the embassy parties and the way his eyes lingered on her told her he’d noticed.
Perrin noticed too, of course—not how she looked, he hadn’t done that in years, thank the Force—but he certainly noticed that she’d been dressing for Tay and he was livid about it. Not because he was jealous, but because his ego couldn’t stand the slight of an unfaithful wife. He felt emasculated enough by her position as senator, his fragile manhood certainly couldn’t survive the blow of an affair.
It was what she’d wanted Perrin thinking, of course. He and anyone else—like the ISB—who might be paying attention. It was a delicate game: to drop just enough hints of an affair that anyone suspecting her of anything more than being a bleeding heart would jump to that conclusion without doing anything so brazen that it would destroy her carefully maintained reputation.
Which was why an actual affair was such a bad idea. That certainly counted as brazen, at least if they got caught, and she was constantly being watched.
In the beginning, it was easy to maintain decorum. She and Tay conducted their business within view but out of earshot. In such circumstances, impropriety was relatively easily restrained to warm smiles and thoughts of how he’d aged like a fine wine—that silver hair suited him.
But they couldn’t keep conducting business like that forever. Eventually, the needs of the enterprise had required at least some private meetings.
She never struggled in the beginning of these meetings. She was a professional with a lot on the line. She was easily able to note how well he looked and put those thoughts aside while they got down to business. No, it was when things were winding down and conversation turned to more banal, friendly things that she struggled.
Eventually, as one of their meetings wound down and turned to less sensitive topics, Tay had finally asked about Perrin.
“What happened to him, Mon? I remember him from when you two married and he was... very different. The Academy firebrand, I think you called him?”
Mon smiled a little bit and stared at the floor. “I wish I knew. I think maybe it’s what you said before, all those weeks ago. This place... Coruscant... being this close to the heart of the Empire. It can change you, seep into your bones.”
“It hasn’t changed you.”
“Hasn’t it?” she asked, looking up at him. “I don’t think I’m that same dutiful girl who broke up with her boyfriend because she was told she was to be engaged to a boy she’d never met.”
“Not changed. Grown up.”
He was staring right at her then. Almost through her, she thought, right into her soul.
And he was very, very close.
She hadn’t been thinking, of course. If she had, she wouldn’t have done anything. But it had felt like the natural thing to do to just lean in those extra few centimeters and kiss him, so she had.
If she’d had any doubts about whether Tay had been thinking of her the way she’d been thinking of him, she had them no longer. There was no hesitation in his response, he kissed her back immediately though slowly, seeming to savor the experience. She savored it too, until her rational brain reasserted itself.
She pulled away from the kiss, looking down to loose her lips from his because she couldn’t quite bring herself to pull away from him entirely. She could feel his breathe, quicker now than it had been, on her forehead.
“We shouldn’t do this,” she said and knew she was trying to convince herself more than him.
She felt gentle fingers reach under her chin and tug her face up so that her eyes were locked with his.
“Do you want me to stop?” he asked, and she knew he would if she asked. He would do anything she asked.
“No.”