And so she did.
After they had pleased each other, and laughed, and held and been held, in the moment where Kip was torn between ramping up the passion again or maybe just admitting it had been a damn long day and maybe they could make love again in the morning, Tisis said, “I need to talk to you about something.”
“You can’t,” Kip said. “I’m asleep.”
Very subtly, he wiggled deeper under the blankets.
“Kip,” she said plaintively.
“Oooh, what have we here?” he asked her chest.
“Kip—oh! Kip, I’m—mm… serious.”
He sighed. If he was learning anything about marriage, it was that talks must come. Putting them off did nothing good.
He poked his head back above the covers.
She looked mildly disappointed—not fair! But then she gathered her wits. “Um…” She blew out a breath. “Kip, I want to make love tonight. I mean, I want to try again.”
Kip dropped his head onto his pillow with a groan. They had fresh bread and fine cheeses, and she was going to complain that they didn’t have wine? “Tonight? When everything is so perfect? You’re doing this now?” Eat the fucking bread and cheese, woman!
“I want—”
“We’ve talked about this! We agreed! Can’t you just leave well enough—”
“I knew you were going to do this,” she said.
“Hold you to your word?!” he said.
“That is not fair!”
Yes, it was. But Kip bit his lip.
A man who’d just been pleasured by a woman so beautiful shouldn’t feel the depths of rage Kip felt now. “I have made my peace with this,” Kip said.
“I haven’t,” she said.
“Well, you’ll save yourself more heartache the sooner you do,” Kip said. “This is how things work in my life. Nothing can be all good; there always has to be birdshit floating in the mead. If I have a friend, I have to know he’s going to die. If I love a girl, she’ll fall for someone else. If—against all odds!—I have something as good as what you and I have, there’s no way it can be whole. This is as good as it gets.” He waved a hand at the rippling, polished grains of the masterpiece above them. “I don’t understand why the hell you’re looking at this marriage and calling it a dead ceiling.”
“Oh, Kip,” she said, but she couldn’t find words.
They lay beside each other, still in the midst of wealth and beauty, but Kip felt as if all the mud and shit at the bottom of Kip Pond had been swirled back up, and he didn’t trust himself to find words that didn’t reek of bitterness. He just needed time for all that shit to settle down again. Just let it be.
“Maybe, maybe you’ve noticed me working with Evie Cairn?” she asked, still lying on her back, speaking as if to the ceiling.
“Yes?” The healer?
She rolled her eyes. “And here my first plan was to wait until you asked me about it.” It was an attempt at levity, but a weak one.
Kip didn’t say, ‘You meet with people all day long, and most of them are your sources for something or other, why would I even—’ Instead he said, “So, honey, why were you meeting with a healer?” It was an attempt at sincerity, but a weak one.
And lo and behold, that question didn’t lead to a fight.
Damn, this controlling-his-tongue thing was seeming like a better and better idea all the time.
“She said she’d seen this before. Especially in girls under incredible pressure or who’d had bad early experiences.”
Kip wasn’t understanding. He propped himself up on an elbow.
Tisis continued, “Or women who have a lot of negative attitudes about lovemaking, but obviously that’s not really my case, ha. But the first two…”
“What? What?”
“So I’ve been talking through some things with her,” Tisis said.
Kip felt like the time when Ramir and Sanson and Isa and he had gone swimming. Ramir’s idea, of course, and when Isa had balked at taking off her tunic by pointing out that Kip was wearing his, Ramir had been furious with him. He’d cornered Kip, and forcibly stripped off his tunic. Then he’d mocked Kip for being fat, as Kip had known he would.
That sensation of being stripped naked for someone else’s commentary came rushing back. “You’ve been telling some stranger about what we do and don’t do in our bed—”
“Kip, dammit! You think it was easy for me? Don’t you trust me at all? And she’s not a stranger now.”
It wasn’t just embarrassment, it was bigger than that. “Do you realize what could happen if my grandfather or your sister finds out? Orholam’s balls, Tisis, your cousin could take a quarter of our army away—”
“I wasn’t thinking about them! I was thinking about us!”
He didn’t say, ‘And you put everything at risk to do so!’
He didn’t say, ‘That’s the problem, you didn’t think at all!’
Instead he took a breath.
And in his momentary hesitation, she spoke again. “It was supposed be a surprise. A good thing, Kip. I can’t—I can’t live like this. I’m sorry you’re angry, but I’m not sorry I did it.”
“Great. So you’ve risked the entire war so that you can have girl talk with someone who—for all we know—could be an enemy agent. Do you feel better after talking it out?” Kip demanded.
He was being an asshole. He knew it; he couldn’t stop it.
“Gods! I don’t understand you at all sometimes. I don’t know how you can be that magnificent giant I see bending the world to his will one day and then the next day be this, this dwarf.”
“Oh, come, look at it another way,” Kip said. “If I were smaller—much, much smaller—we wouldn’t be having this problem at all.”
“Orholam dammit, Kip!” she said. “I don’t know why you’re embarrassed. You feel exposed, ashamed? It’s not even your fault! She told me all the things men often do and say that make it even worse, and you’ve done none of those. You’ve been perfect. This is all on me.”
And she was silent, and she was hurting, and Kip’s heart opened to her because he knew what being silent and hurting and trying to suck it up and not complain felt like when it seemed everything was your fault.
“Don’t be like that. Don’t do that,” Kip said.
“What?”
“There’s no your problem or my problem here. There’s only our problems. There’s only things we each have to do for our marriage to thrive.”
“Yeah?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“I’ve been trying. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but… I thought you’d forbid it, and we’d just have to endure good for the rest of our marriage. I don’t want good with you, Kip. I want amazing. I won’t settle for less than that.”
“I just don’t…” He stopped. Tried again. “I appreciate that. And you’re right. I would have been an asshole, and I would have tried to stop you, and… and I would have been wrong.” Because the entire fucking war is totally worth risking for my personal happiness, right?
Shit.
No, it was because it’s never good to give up. He had, and she hadn’t, and he was wrong to ask her to be more like him in this.
“So what now?” he asked.
“So… I’ve been, um, practicing? Training?”
“Practicing? Practicing—wait, with who?”
“Orholam’s beard, Kip, no, come on! I haven’t been seeking out men with small penises.”
“Well, I… okay, maybe that was kind of stupid. What did you mean, then?”
She looked awkward. “I don’t really know how much you want to know. I mean, some wine beforehand and olive oil and, uh, graduated cylinders.”
“Graduated cylinders?” Then he thought of cones he’d seen in her luggage. And then he thought about them again. “Ooooh.”
“And with your constant late nights, I haven’t had much privacy to work on it.”
“Oh. Uh, sorry? That does sound… awkward.”
“You walked in on me once, don’t you remember?”
“Was that when you had the coughing fit?”
“And you came over to comfort me. I thought the smell would… Anyway…” She was blushing hard.
“I thought you Foresters were supposed to be unembarrassable with, ahem, matters of the root and cave.”