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A cool breeze wound through the streets of Newfaire, carrying with it the sounds of humanity. Even at this late hour, the streets of The Varnish were full of people making their way to and from all manner of business and pleasure.
Away from the crowds, two people more used to avoiding company than enjoying it strolled along a poorly lit side street. Distant, but still audible, the burble of conversations mingled with the music drifting out from restaurants and dance halls. It all flowed distantly into the gentle lapping of the Stentorian River, embellishing the night with a hundred different vignettes of city life. The whole tapestry was lost to Charles, who only had ears for the woman next to him.
“-so then I had to act like I was so sad and shocked to hear the news, as if she hadn’t been keeping me awake all week wailing about him being an ungrateful son who didn't deserve a single piece of his inheritance!”
Primrose had one arm hooked around Charles’ elbow and his suit jacket over her shoulders. She gestured with her free hand while she regaled him with a tale of secrets learned from the dead. Hidden from the public eye on their carefully chosen route, she had pulled her veil aside, leaving her whole face visible. It was a rare sight to see out of doors since she had been sublimed by the ritual at the memorial. With her luminous eyes and the pale scar tracing along her cheekbone, he couldn't help but stare. He felt lucky beyond belief to be able to look upon someone so singularly lovely while listening to something absolutely fascinating.
Now that she was done hunting down details about him and the revelations that came out over dinner, and Charles was done divulging secrets he hadn’t known were secrets, it was his turn to examine her right back. He had no idea how she could listen to him talk about himself for as long as she’d pushed him to, not when she was so much more captivating than him.
Two decades of keeping all of it a secret must have weighed on her heavily. She walked so lightly now that she could chatter about her life with the unquiet dead. A wellspring of stories about all manner of spirits flowed as freely as the extraordinarily expensive wine they’d shared at Silk and Stars. He wished it wasn’t rude to take notes on a date, he had so much to put down as soon as he got home.
She didn’t really seem to understand the significance of what she was saying most of the time. A revelation that would have started fistfights at theological conferences was thrown around casually before flowing breezily into focusing on the social fallout of the incident in question. Charles was left stumbling in the wake of her instinctive understanding of high society to deconstruct his entire understanding of the occult principle of the soul.
“I mean, can you imagine saying something like that? And to his face?”
“Er, yes?” Answered Charles, who was thinking about how he was going to have to re-annotate everything he had on Pre-Ascendancy necromantic practices. “I probably would have said something similar. Is that rude?”
She laughed like a crystal bell, and grasped his arm with her free hand “Yes, Charles, it was regarded as rude by everyone in attendance.”
He couldn't help but be a little embarrassed, even though he hadn't even been the one to commit the faux-pas in question. Add another item to the list of reasons he avoided social gatherings as often as possible.
Charles felt twin pangs of disappointment when they reached the end of the street. It wasn’t as crowded as the one they’d left, but with a handful of people visible at the end of the block, Primrose started hastily adjusting her hat to bring down her veil. The gossamer shadow fell across her face, like a curtain pulled over the night sky.
More of a shame, it meant the evening was coming to an end. Once they left that alley, they’d be on Overlook Street, just a few terraces away from the chapter house where they would part for the night. Even with the horrible misunderstandings that almost brought everything crashing down around them, even with Charles making everything worse by trying to abscond like he always did, even with Amelia coming out of nowhere and almost bowling them over with a panther, it had been one of the finest evenings he could remember in a long time. He didn’t want it to end quite yet.
After more fussing with the placement of her veil than usual, Primrose stepped out fully onto the promenade, and took his breath away all over again.
She shimmered under the streetlights like she was cut from crystal. Her dress clung to her just as it had in the shadows, but it was transformed in the light. Every fold, every crease, every place where it wrapped around her chest and waist and hips before flowing down her legs, was aglow. The rich red silk somehow shone with the same green as her eyes, painting her into a fauvist portrait of herself in ruby and arsenic.
Charles forgot how to speak. He forgot how to do anything but look at her. The colours danced as she moved, highlighting every stroke of her figure. It was magical. She was magical. She was the most magnificent thing he’d ever seen. He was utterly awestruck that someone like her was even real, let alone that she was willing to spend time putting up with him making an utter fool of himself.
“Aren’t you comin’?”
He could have stood there for hours, looking at her in reverie. But that wasn't how it was supposed to go, so he gave himself just one more moment.
“Yes, of course.”
She once again linked her arm with his as he stepped forward to join her under the steady glow of electric lights. Her determination to have a lovely evening was contagious. He wasn't going to ruin it by dreading its end before it happened. Besides, he had so much research to do when he got home! Every time he talked to her it changed so much about what he thought he knew, he didn't know if there was enough ink in the city to rewrite it all. But that was a concern for later, right then he was there for her, not for his studies
He couldn't say how(or indeed if) he responded to whatever Primrose said next. He was trying too hard to stay in the moment, his focus on his intentions ended up drowning out the very thing he was trying to pay attention to. With a head full of good intentions and eyes full of red and green, he accompanied her the rest of the way home without picking up a single word.
The last few steps took them up the slope that led to the front door of the chapter house. It was at least a safer location for him to be than her previous home.
“Thank you for the lovely evening.”
Say something nice back “Thank you for accompanying me, the pleasure was all mine.” Child walk with him, this was the worst part. The awkward lingering right before the end, not knowing when the polite moment to say goodbye was. He almost preferred it when dates ended in disaster. It was easier than fighting the urge to abruptly turn and leave while waiting for the other person to gracefully end the conversation.
She wasn't even looking at him. He couldn't see her eyes, but the lines of her posture were pointed away from him, towards the street. What was she looking at?
“Primrose, if I turn around, will I see something behind me?”
After a familiar period of silent processing, she eventually heard him. The feathers on her hat danced as she shook her head clear.
“I sure hope not, or we're going to have to call an ambulance. Maybe a priest.” She cracked a little sideways grin despite the unseeable sight in front of her.
“Do you want to tell me what you see?”
“Not really, hate to put a downer on such a lovely night. Looked old though. Lot of very old ghosts in this neighborhood.”
Charles immediately forgot that he was supposed to be saying goodnight. “How old?” he asked. “Are they from the basilica? That would be remarkable! Can you make out what they're saying?”
He hadn't even considered that she might hear spirits from the exposed ruins by the river. To have first-hand access to history without delving underground, to be able to hear the people of Oldfaire, maybe even to talk to them, sounded like a dream. The amount she could learn without even leaving her room!
After a long moment of silence, she started slightly and lifted her veil so he could see her looking at him with one eyebrow raised in an expression he couldn't parse. Her eyes like stars were no less bright as they narrowed onto what he was starting to think might have been one question too many.
“Yeah. There's usually a whole crowd on what's left of the old roof. They mostly just scream. Sometimes wail in Ancient Fairen, not that I can understand what they're wailin’ about. Makes it hard to sleep.” Her voice had gone as flat as her expression. All the dreamy breathy lilt of the evening vanished entirely. It wasn't enough to quell Charles’ excitement in time though.
“You say that like it isn't the most incredible thing in the world, like you aren't the-” with uncharacteristic reflexes, he caught himself mid-sentence before he made even more of a fool of himself, but he hadn't been fast enough to stop the awe she instilled in him from washing over it all. One day he would learn how to stop talking about things that no one wanted to hear about.
Her smile crept back like the slow break of dawn.
“You really are quite singular, aren't you Charlie?”
“It's Charles-” Father forgive him; he was going to have to change his name if that kept happening. He followed it quickly with a mumbled “I’m sorry.”
“I know,” she responded softly, and did him the kindness of shutting him up.
The moment her lips touched his, nothing else mattered. All his uncertainty melted away as he forgot about ghosts and society and the formal customs of courting rituals. The only thing in the world was the scent of her perfume, the sound of her breath, the press of her mouth. All he had to do was meet it.
He was still expecting her to end it, to tire of him and step away, make a graceful exit. But she didn't. She stayed there, impossibly soft and sweet, anchoring him where he stood.
Hearts beat again, and then again.
A motorcar full of revelers coursed down the street. The roof was flung open, and their laughter-dappled singing carried far and wide through the night. It pelted them with a sudden cacophony of humanity, pulling them from their endless moment before careering off once again into the night.
Primrose looked as startled as he felt. Her head whipped around to follow the already disappearing car. Her mouth moved as if to form words, but only breath came out from her parted lips. He realized that his hands – which he never knew what to do with unless they were holding a pen or balled into fists – had come to rest just barely above her hips. Immediately he pulled them away. That wasn’t proper, wasn’t polite. There were so few rules from his etiquette classes that he could rely on nowadays, but he was pretty damn sure he’d just broken several important ones.
His hands didn’t quite return to his sides, instead hovering in the air halfway between because he still didn’t know what to do with them. He didn’t know where to look either, or what to say. He grabbed on to the back of his neck and cleared his throat.
Primrose was once again not looking at him. There was a flush to her cheeks that shone through her rouge. She plucked at the collar of his suit jacket, pulling it a little tighter around her bare shoulders.
“It’s, ah, quite a chill night.” It wasn't. The breeze had wandered off, leaving them in a still and sultry summer evening. “You must be cold without your jacket.”
She made no move to give it back, and he wasn't going to take it. There was something happening, and he did not trust himself not to knock it all over.
“You know, the kitchen here is just full of different kinds of tea. You could come inside and warm up a little before you go home.”
Somewhere in the back of Charles’ brain, a pencil that had been taking harried notes full of question marks snapped mid stroke. The sound echoed down the empty street. Sparks flickered in his stomach.
“If you'd like me to” he said, rubbing the back of his neck and trying to suppress a nervous grin.
“Yes, I think I would.” said Primrose, who was doing better at the same thing.
She opened the door, for which he was grateful. It would have felt incorrect to open the door of the chapter house without knocking.
The chapter house was cooler than the street outside. The front door closed with a soft click. The languid heat of a summer evening was replaced by the warmth of bodies in close proximity.
Charles reached for the lock out of muscle memory, then stopped. They weren't on an investigation. He wasn't entering his chapter house and locking the door as a basic precaution. He was coming into Primrose's house, at her invitation, and locking the door behind him would probably send some kind of unintended message. Probably a bad one, with his luck. Best to leave it. If she wanted it locked she would surely do it herself.
On his other side, Primrose had turned herself away, half looking at him over her shoulder. It took him a long moment to realize that he was supposed to be helping her off with her jacket. His jacket.
He lifted it off of her with a soft rustle of wool against silk, being careful not to touch her for reasons he couldn't quite explain. With the proper procedure observed, she turned back to face him.
He looked down at her with something that felt a lot like reverence. Her pale skin was rendered ghostly in the dim, her eyes carving out the shadows of shoulders and collarbones. It was easy to believe, in the green-lit dark, that she was something otherworldly, beyond his mundane existence. Had he seen her in any other dark hallway, he likely would have thought her an entirely different type of vision in green, a beautiful phantasm. But she was there in the flesh. Close enough to hear her breathing.
Instinctively his hand rose to her face, stopped just short of contact by propriety. He looked like another shadow against her. Was that a breath or a laugh? She didn't look like she was laughing at him, but it was too quiet to tell. Slowly and without a word she touched his arm, moving it forcelessly to the end of its path. He cupped her cheek like she might break on contact, running his thumb along the length of her scar so lightly he almost couldn't feel it. He could feel it when she leaned into his touch though, closing her eyes slowly before looking up at him through thick, dark lashes.
“Can I...” It was difficult to find the words. They didn't come easily to him at the simplest of times. The question lingered in the air as he struggled to pin his desires down long enough to wrap language around them.
“Please,” she answered.
One simple word, impossible to misunderstand. He grabbed the back of her head and kissed her without worrying about what was proper.
What followed next was easy. Touch was so much simpler. There was no secret judgement or second guessing, just bodies moving seriatim. Her hand came to land on his chest, lighting up an electric trail in his mind's eye, even when it moved across the parts he couldn't feel anymore. She tilted her head back, and his grip loosened smoothly, running down, running down, stopping at her neck and the small of her back. When she opened her mouth with a soft little gasp, he didn't have to wonder if the invitation was genuine, didn't have to stop and think before pulling her close against him. The resultant noises Primrose made were a siren song that pulled him even closer, capturing him in a spiral of grasping hands and muffled sounds.
It registered to him dimly that her own motions were lacking in her usual confidence. In an odd reversal of where they normally stood she was eager, but unsure. He could tell what she was chasing though, and he knew how to guide her to it. She found her way eventually. Her fingers tangled in his hair, keeping him fixed on her – a little too hard, but he couldn't hold it against her, not when she sounded so proud of what it pulled from his throat – while she seemed determined to map out his mouth with hers. His own map blossomed under his fingertips as he explored from the sharp line of her jaw to the violin curve of her hips, redrawing the frontiers each time the boundaries between them shifted.
The deliberate clearing of a throat – more speech than cough – hit them at the same time as the blinding brightness of the light in the stairwell. Something in Charles' ribs flinched hard, scrabbling to stand to attention while simultaneously needing to hide. They each took a hurried step back from each other, which didn't work well in the tiny front hallway. Primrose threw an arm over her eyes, sending him stumbling backwards into the line of coats hung up in the hallway. Irritation, resigned exasperation and an old dread all fought for the forefront of his brain while he fought to extricate himself from two tangled fur coats - why were they even hung up here it was Latesummer for the Mother's sake!
Standing at the top of stairs was not his father, no matter how many of the same buttons he had pushed in Charles' hindbrain as he announced his presence. No, standing at the top of the stairs and holding a- was that a baseball bat? Yes, yes it was. With a baseball bat in hand and the other still pushing the light button, was his colleague, Morgan.
If Morgan had said something, Charles had missed it while he was swearing into old fur. He and Primrose shot glances at each other. Her flush had spread from her cheeks all the way down to her neckline. There was something on his face. He touched his cheek and his finger came away crimson. He didn't know where to look, found it even harder to meet Morgan's eye than usual.
Primrose pulled her gloves back up her arms and smoothed down a few stray hair. Something in the set of her face and shoulders shifted, taking on a very different countenance. She was proud and intimidating, any embarrassment evaporated. He once again wished he had even a fraction of her poise. With her nose held in the air, she cleared her throat and turned her incandescent gaze towards their colleague.
“Gideon Morgan!” she thundered. “What in the name of the Mother, the Father, and the Child do I even pay you for?!” She reached the stairs and ascended, one Furious finger shaking in front of her. “To not tell me about Charles fucking Bannister?”
What followed next was difficult. Charles waited in the entryway while they argued. He tucked his tie back into his waistcoat, noticing for the first time how it was shot through with the same scintillating hues as her dress. He should have tipped his tailor more.
So that was how Morgan and Primrose had met?
Interesting.
Both his jacket and Primrose’s hat were on the floor, having ended up there at some point without either of them noticing. He bent down, ostensibly to pick them up, but mostly to hide his face while he wiped his cheek with his sleeve, leaving a crimson streak on the cuff. They were talking about receipts now.
He decided that after tonight he didn't want to have any more revelations about anyone he knew. It never ended well. He could stick to his books and his ruins and only learn things about people who were already dead.
Primrose's hat was too big for him to keep holding, so he turned to hang it up right as a quiet admission rang out.
“I’m dying,” said Morgan.
A stunned silence dropped over the house.
“Even I know that wasn't the right time to say that.”
Charles broke it without looking, making sure the hat was secure on the hatstand before he turned back. Now this was coming out too. Now he had to admit that yes, he did know about this; and no, he hadn't been planning to tell her; and no he didn't really have a reason as to why not, other than a hesitancy to share that had hung on him like a lead chain as long as he could remember. He left out the last part.
And now he had to try and fail to listen quietly while people were wrong about Bleed.
He should leave. He wanted to leave. He wanted to go back to when he was kissing Primrose in the darkened entryway. He wanted to be alone to think about what he'd just learned about Primrose and Morgan(Gideon? Why did she call him that? Should he call him that? Why did names have to complicate things so much?). He wanted to go back to when everyone was yelling so he could also do some yelling. He wanted Primrose, right there on the stairwell if needs be. He wanted an entire pot of coffee. He wanted to be at home in his study.
“We are going to address this later,” said Primrose in a tone that brooked no quarrel. “For now, I have had a lovely evening, and I am going to continue to have a lovely evening. Goodnight”
Charles, who by that point was on the verge of physically restraining himself from opening the front door and walking out, felt a momentary relief when Morgan left the landing. All of them had said enough words to each other and learned enough about each other to fill a dozen pages of shorthand, and he was so tired.
“Alright, I'll um, I’ll leave you be. Have a pleasant rest of your night.”
“What? No,” she grabbed at her skirts and hurried down the stairs, stopping just before the bottom step. “Charles, why are you leaving now?”
He had a lot of reasons. Instead of giving her any of them he rubbed the back of his neck and said “Because I keep making things difficult for you?”
“Don't be foolish Charles,” she smoothed out the wrinkles in her skirt, sending ripples of color with each brush of her hand. “It wasn't your job to tell me those things, it was Morgan’s. Literally, that was his actual job.”
“With the way tonight has gone, the next time I kiss you I'll probably get interrupted by a monster bursting through the window, or perhaps the roof caving in.”
“That sounds like a risk worth taking. After all, we handled the last horror just fine. Please stay?” She held out a hand toward him, eyes bright and shining and fixed on his face. “I want you to be here.”
“Are you sure?” With the unlocked door a few paces behind him, he was effectively cornered. It was unnerving how tightly she could pin him down.
She took the last step down off the staircase with a beckoning hand and a kind, delicate smile that cleft open his chest. It is one thing to feel wanted. It is quite another to know, with the surety of a deer in a rifle scope.
“I promise.”