“My mother would have loved a painful illness,” Robin said, bitter. “She could have raised hundreds of pounds in her own name, and had someone wheel her around the hospital wing with her name on it while she looked brave and interesting. God. That probably sounds—sorry.”
Edwin looked at Robin’s head, now buried in his hands. It had been, yet again, a long tense day, and they still had the evening to get through. He went over and touched the nape of Robin’s neck, two fingers tucked beneath the rise of the starched collar. Robin went still at the contact. Edwin moved his fingers, a light brushing back and forth, somewhere between comfort and invitation and apology.
And admission, even in his own head: I am nothing like you, and yet I feel more myself with you.
The word inked by a certain hand on Edwin’s heart was affinity. It was almost enough to make him bolt from the room.
But Robin’s skin was warm and Robin was looking up at him, now, with eyes like unshielded flame. Robin took hold of Edwin’s forearm, a thumbprint at the wrist, moving it until he could press an open-mouthed kiss to the dip of Edwin’s palm.
Edwin pulled his hand free. Robin let him.
There was a silence crowded with the sound of Edwin’s pulse, and the tightening of all his nerves, and the throb of blood in his cock.
“Come down here?” Robin said, a bit rough. “I want to kiss you.”
“It’s not long until dinner.” Edwin gestured to his clothes, though a small howling part of him despised the rest for a spoilsport and a coward. His knees were weak. He wanted to climb astride Robin’s lap and rip Robin’s buttons open and kiss him until both of their mouths were far too wrecked and obscene to be seen in public.
Robin stood and took Edwin’s face in his hands, raising his eyebrows. “My deepest apologies. If I promise not to crease so much as an inch of sir’s clothing, does sir think I might possibly—”
“Oh, stop being an ass,” said Edwin, feeling his lips twitch.
The kiss was careful enough to be a tease in itself. Like all of Robin’s teases, it made warmth spill down through Edwin. Edwin let himself feel the heat, let himself lean in only a very little. He could remain in control of this much.
Robin held Edwin in the cradle of his fingers like a spell that would snap into nothing unless handled with care. Edwin heard the first breath of sound, a musical whine, try to escape with his own breath. He made the mistake of trying to crush it by letting the kiss get looser, more urgent, closer to the roar of desire that he was refusing to give in to in any other way.
Robin muttered a curse against Edwin’s lips and released him. Edwin stared at him, rendered mute by hunger. If he turned to the mirror he was almost certain he’d see Robin’s handprints there, white as Flora Sutton’s had been, marking him.
“Later tonight,” Robin said, a low promise. “Now, as you said, dinner.”
Maud’s assigned bedroom in Penhallick House really was covered in strawberries. The wallpaper was a Morris design that Robin had once seen on a cushion, all greens and blues and curious birds, with eye-catching blobs of red. The four-poster bed and dresser were made of glowing walnut. Maud looked oddly at home there, taking pins from her hair and dropping them one by one into a jar with tinkling sounds like the overture of rain.
Robin, remembering that the strangeness of magic had given him whiplash long after he’d thought himself accustomed to it, lingered in the room.
“Are you sure you’re all right, Maudie?” he asked when she raised her eyebrows in clear invitation for him to leave her alone.
“You’re waiting for me to declare that I’m dying to be a magician,” she said. “You needn’t worry. Mrs. Walcott—Belinda—explained the lay of the land. And I don’t need magic. University, remember?”
“I’m taking you back to London,” Robin said. “As soon as . . .” He raised his cursed arm. Maud’s eyes softened.
“I’m sorry I barged up here,” she said. An unusual offering.
“I’m sorry it looked like—I’m sorry I was running away.”
Robin felt more lighthearted than he had in a while, as he left Maud’s room with his own guidelight bobbing above his shoulder. The things were convenient, you had to admit. Anticipation tingled within him. He undressed down to socks and shirt and trousers in the fire-warmed willow room, then knocked at Edwin’s door.
A longish pause met him before Edwin said, “Yes?”
Edwin looked over his shoulder when Robin entered. He was seated on the edge of the bed; his shirt was all the way off, and Robin had a good view of his pale back and the nearly elegant thinness of his arms. His face was a curtain rapidly drawing over an expression of wan misery, and it furrowed into apology at whatever he saw in Robin’s. He stood.
“What is it?” Robin asked.
He watched Edwin’s mouth try to form the word nothing, and fail. “I think it just hit me all at once,” Edwin said. “That I’m never going to see him again. Reggie.”
“You really . . .” Robin tried to adjust course, tried to remember the conversation about Gatling they’d had in the car. “Had feelings for him?”
A neutral twitch of Edwin’s head.
“Wanted him?”
Edwin swallowed. “He was . . . safe.”
When Robin had first been coming to terms with who he was and who he wanted, there’d been an older boy at school he’d thought of like that. A glorious, impossible, untouchable fantasy. And when Robin thought about something more than physical release, someone to be with—
But he’d never in his life let it get past the thought. For men like them, only the impossible was absolutely safe.
“I understand how that goes,” Robin said.
“Yes,” said Edwin. He was holding his own elbows. The look on his face struck Robin like the withdrawal of a knife so sharp that the entry had gone unnoticed. “I believe you actually do.”
“I’m sorry,” Robin said, feeling a heel. “I’ll go.”
“Don’t,” Edwin said quickly.
“I don’t want to intrude.”
“You’re not. You can’t. It’s extremely irritating.” Edwin stepped close, very close indeed.
“What’s irritating?”
Edwin said, “Every time you touch me it’s exactly what I want.”
Robin’s heart pounded as the anticipation took hold of him again, redoubled and delighted. He laid his thumb in the hollow of Edwin’s throat, beneath the scratched lines, his fingers light at the side of Edwin’s neck. Edwin closed his eyes and tipped back his chin. Robin could feel the movement of Edwin’s breath, the almost-shudder of his body.
“Really?”
“Yes. Exactly.” Edwin sounded cross. Robin pulled him in gently, leaned in himself. He watched the line of Edwin’s mouth, then brushed over it with his own lips, wanting to savour the moment when Edwin’s tension melted into eagerness. He slid his other hand around Edwin’s back, greedy for the expanse of bare skin. Edwin had his hands between them, unbuttoning Robin’s shirt, the softness of his mouth surrendering fraction by fraction by fraction.
As ever, there was no warning before the pain started.
“Bloody fucking hell,” Robin managed just before agony closed his throat on speech. He jerked himself away. He saw Edwin’s face, kiss-smudged mouth and naked surprise, and then crumpled to the floor as his vision greyed out and the curse took over.
What scared him the most was that when he opened his eyes again, he had no idea how long it had been. He’d actually blacked out this time. And how long since the last attack, which had overlapped with the foresight? Hours only.
“Robin.” Edwin was crouched by his side, paused halfway through a cradle.
“Ow.” Robin squeezed his eyes against tears, satisfied himself they weren’t about to spill down, and pushed himself to sit upright against the side of the bed.
Edwin lowered the string. His face was white and taut. “It’s lasting longer,” he said. “Isn’t it? I thought you might not come back from it this time.”