“Well, I want to know what’s been going on. Tell me later,” Lizzie told Angelika on a whisper, and the table fell silent.
Arlo scraped his knife and fork on his plate to keep up appearances. When the big green eyes opposite turned back to him, he forked up a hearty mouthful and chewed. Satisfied, Angelika wrinkled her nose at him fondly. Arlo imagined her questions later: Was your dinner nice? Are your hands all right? Are you feeling so much better?
He answered now, in his mind. I will lie to your beautiful face and tell you what you want to hear, because I would die to make you happy.
Perhaps I should rephrase that thought.
He didn’t think himself so clever that he could guess her every question, because in bed she’d asked him things that had left him floundering for a reply.
(When you do that, can you put your fingers in me . . . here? If I touch you there, would that be all right? What about if I suck you while you lick—)
“They’ve both gone glassy-eyed again,” Lizzie complained. “It’s like sitting with a pair of corpses. No offense, Will.”
Arlo laughed. “None taken. Eat a little more,” he encouraged Angelika, and felt a new glow in his chest as she took a bite. Who looked after her, really? With Mary gone, it was up to him now. “Are you cold?”
Angelika shook her head, and pointed her fork at Lizzie, then her brother. “Now you can see what you pair have been like to live with.” (They were suitably contrite.) “I am perfectly entitled to sit here in an exhausted puddle and replenish my strength. I’m surprised that Ar—my love doesn’t need a second plate.”
Nobody noticed the slipup with his name. She’d made Arlo swear to keep his news to himself, but it felt like a pressure in his chest. How could he transition from I’m your blank-page houseguest to I’m a missing, presumed-dead priest? Would he even live long enough to deal with the consequences of it? Some days he felt like he’d live to see his sixtieth birthday. Other days, next Sunday seemed optimistic.
He knew one thing: he was an asset that the church would seek to recover.
“Will, you know what I told you that very first day,” Victor said in a warning tone, and Arlo’s stomach made a nervous flip. Then he grinned. “If you deflowered my sister, you would be stuck with her.”
“Oh, he’s stuck with me all right.” Angelika rolled her gaze over to Arlo, and with her second blink, her eyes were full of remembering. She’d done just as much deflowering as he had.
She occupied her exhausted puddle in the most delightful way, with her blouse slipping off her satin shoulder. He fancied he could see the lines his fingers had made when he ran them through her hair; and right there, at the nape of her neck, he’d wrapped it around his fist like a honey-red rope. It made her gasp and shiver. What audacity to put a wealthy girl on her knees.
“Corpses again,” Lizzie said in a dark tone.
Angelika looked around, preparing to make an effort, then jolted with surprise as she remembered something. “Where is Clara?”
“She is very tired, and perhaps a bit unwell,” Lizzie replied. “She is eating in her cottage. Don’t worry, the cook mashed up something for our little friend. He’s a big eater, apparently.”
“Smashing lad,” Victor chipped in quickly. Lizzie passed a hand down her stomach and smiled.
“He’ll be asleep by now,” Angelika replied on a sigh. Her appetite was abandoned and she put her napkin on her plate. She was fighting her way out of their bedroom fog. “What a fine host I’ve been. And Christopher? When did he leave?”
The man’s name had always given Arlo’s stomach a pinch, because Angelika’s voice had a throaty catch whenever she said it.
Never mind his own fate amongst the earthworms; if those two had met a month earlier at some country dance, she would now be Mrs. Angelika Keatings, and she would be dining in a post-sex stupor beside Christopher’s fireplace, with a swelling belly.
“I really should have said goodbye to him,” Angelika added, staring into the fire. “Was he very angry with me?”
“His heart and pride are very injured,” Lizzie said. “But all is not lost.”
Arlo handled his base emotions with care, like a man removing a snake from a box; otherwise, he could find himself poisoned and exhausted. But tonight he wasn’t deft enough. The fangs sank deep, and jealousy spread outward from his heart. Next came the doomed grief that he felt whenever he saw Angelika with the baby. But this time, the bad emotions were smothered by a new sensation. It took him a moment to identify it.
Smug, male, fist-tight possession. It might be time to take her back to bed.
“Don’t ask about Christopher anymore,” Arlo told Angelika with the new feeling in his tone. “It is not your concern when he comes and goes.”
“He finally said it,” Lizzie said with admiration and a laugh. “Jelly, I do believe Will has claimed you once and for all.” She turned her dancing eyes back to Arlo. “Correct?”
“He has,” Victor confirmed in the short silence that followed. “Remember? Stuck with her for good.” The man was prompting him again for a reply, and Angelika was running back through the last minute or two in her mind, searching for a confirmation he had not made.
His new memories were of himself as a young boy; would tomorrow bring him his teens and his early seminary life? By next week would he be repeating Scripture under his breath to delay himself as Angelika begged his body for faster, harder friction?
“We should talk,” Arlo said to the table at large, and received a kick on his shin under the table.
“We shan’t talk,” Angelika said, huffing herself up straighter in her seat. “Until you tell us all that you are going to love me until the day I die.”
Arlo pondered, “Why must everything be until death in this household?”
“Because that is how we Frankensteins love,” Angelika told him. “We love until death parts us, and then we die of sadness.”
“Terribly dramatic,” Lizzie said with a smile, but Arlo did not miss the chill of fear in her eyes as she looked at him. Victor, too, averted his gaze with tight lips. Only Angelika sat oblivious to the truth that was sitting across from her now: Arlo was a man running out of time. Fast.
“You’re about to find out if you can survive a second death, Will,” Victor said after an awkward cough, observing the fraught tension between the two new lovers. “Answer us now, or I will invite Christopher for dinner tomorrow. He’s starting to look at Clara’s rear end whenever she bends down for Edwin, but we can nip that in the bud.”
Angelika’s knuckles went white on the tablecloth, but she did not blink. “You are stuck with me.”
Arlo did not know the future, or most of his past, but there was only one honorable thing he should say in this exact moment. “Angelika, please marry me.”
She did not scream joyfully. With a solemn mouth she replied, “Why?”
“Why?” Arlo echoed in confusion. “Why ask you the one thing you’ve wished to hear from the moment we met?”
She said too quietly, “You’ve just been prodded by everyone to ask me.”
Infuriating. “You wish me to beg on my knees?”
“I know you are asking me because you are obligated to. You can’t see a way out of it.” She picked up her wine and swallowed the rest in a gulp. “No, I want something heartfelt. Not just something my brother forced you to say at the table, over our empty plates.” Her eyes glowed with temper as she gestured in front of her. “Don’t I deserve a little more than bones and scraps?”
Lizzie backed her friend. “It was rather lackluster, Will.” Her favor had always been with the commander. “Vic proposed to me on a cliff at sunset.”
“A romantic story to tell our children,” Angelika said with new resolution. “That’s what I want.”
“You want a lot of things,” Arlo countered. “And what you always forget is that I have nothing to give you. May I speak plainly? There may be no children. We all know it.”
He hurt his own feelings with this statement, because witnessing Angelika hold a baby made his bones ache with want. But still, he forced himself to add another horror: “And we wouldn’t even know who that baby looked like.”
“We’ll see, won’t we,” she replied, her complexion white. She stood abruptly, her expression tight and her eyes averted. “My courses are due in sixteen days. You may count each day as a prison sentence, if that is how you feel.”
She left the room, and Arlo remained motionless under the twin stares of Victor and Lizzie.
“My friend,” Victor said with equal parts kindness and warning. “Now is the time to choose.”
“I don’t believe I can.”
Like it explained everything, Victor told him, “You are alive.”
Arlo replied, “For how long?”