Under that handsome scruff, his face is rather red. I smile, and Percy laughs again, then swings his arm around my neck and pulls me against him, pressing his lips to my forehead.
The street is still shiny with the afternoon rain, and the canals are jumping as the first soft drops of a new rainstorm strike them. The lantern light shafts across the black water in cords and whorls. And Percy is right there beside me on that beautiful, glowing street and he is just as beautiful and glowing as it is. The stars dust gold leafing on his skin. And we are looking at each other, just looking, and I swear there are whole lifetimes lived in those small, shared seconds.
It takes a moment—an embarrassingly long moment—of resting in his gaze and mentally encouraging myself before I lay my hand upon his cheek and bring my face up to his. It is remarkable how much courage it takes to kiss someone, even when you are almost certain that person would very much like to be kissed by you. Doubt will knock you from the sky every time.
I nearly start to cry when his lips touch mine in return. Pain and ecstasy live tight-knit in my heart. It’s a very gentle kiss at first—closemouthed and chaste, one of his hands rising to cradle my chin, as if each of us wants to be certain the other is in earnest. Then his lips part a smidge, and I nearly lose my head. I grab him by the front of his shirt and pull him against me, so forcefully that I hear the seam at the neck pop. He takes a deep breath as his hands go under my coat, his mouth firm for a moment before it softens and then opens against mine. His tongue snakes between my teeth.
We’re so wrapped up in each other that we stumble a bit, and he presses me backward against the alley wall, bending down so I don’t have to stand quite as high on my toes to reach his mouth. The bricks tear at my coat like briars as I pull his hips to mine so I can feel him going stiff. We’re so close that there’s not a thing between us but the rain, each drop feeling like it might sizzle and spark on my skin—a spitting quench against molten metal.
He’s fiddling with the waistband of my trousers, and a shock goes through me when his cold fingers meet the bare skin along my stomach. “Do you want to . . . ?” His voice comes out ragged and breathless, and he doesn’t finish, just hooks his finger in my waistband and tugs.
“Yes,” I reply.
“Yes?”
“Yes, yes, absolutely, yes.”
I’m already fumbling with the buttons along the flap, cursing everything I drank that’s now making my fingers fat and awkward, but Percy stops me. “Not here, you tomcat. There are people about.”
“There are no people about.”
As though prompted, someone calls to his mate from the other end of the street. A few dark silhouettes run through a barrel of lamplight. I reach for the buttons anyway, but Percy threads his fingers between mine and pulls my hand away. “Stop. I won’t let you take your trousers off in the middle of the street. That is a terrible idea.”
“Right. Well. Shall we keep kissing until we think of a better one?”
He brushes his mouth against the corner of mine, and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it takes every ounce of the not-inconsiderable restraint I’ve spent years exercising around Percy not to rip all my clothes off right then, passersby be damned. But I am nothing if not a gentleman, and a gentleman does not take his trousers off in a public place, particularly if the great love of his life is asking him to refrain.
“What if we went away together?” he says.
“Back to the inn? Because I could certainly take my trousers off there.”
“No, I mean after this is over.”
“What’s over?”
“This Tour. This year.” He kisses me on the forehead—a soft, breathy peck. His face is bright. “What if you didn’t go home and I didn’t go to Holland and instead we went somewhere together?”
“Where somewhere?”
“London. Paris. Jakarta, Constantinople, anywhere—I don’t care.”
“And what would we do there?”
“Make a life together.”
“You mean leave forever? We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’d have nothing.”
“We’d have each other. Isn’t that enough?”
“It’s not.” I don’t mean for it to come out so abrupt, but it slaps that dreamy excitement off Percy’s face. His brow furrows.
“But if we left together, I wouldn’t have to be put away. If I was with you . . .”
I can’t quite wrap my head around this strange reversal between us, because it is always Percy who is the sensible one and me with the feverish notions. But here he is, proposing we run away together with nothing but each other like some sort of star-crossed pair in a broadside ballad, and while my heart is ready to burst for loving him, love is not a thing you survive upon. You can’t eat love.
“Think it through, Perce. We’d have no money. No livelihood. I’d lose my title, I’d lose my inheritance. We’d ruin our reputations—we could never go back.”
“I can’t go back, no matter what.” When I don’t say anything to that, he takes a step away from me, our hands falling apart. “And what about your father? You’d go back—to him, and that estate work, English society—before you’d go away with me? God, Monty, what are you more afraid of—him or not having all the privilege his money buys you?”
Now it’s my turn to step away. I’m not certain how we’ve slid from his hands down my trousers to the sharpest Percy’s ever spoken to me. It makes my head spin. “Come on, Perce, be sensible.”
“Sensible? I’m being put away in a madhouse at the end of this year and you’re telling me to be sensible?”
“Or—” I almost reach for his hand, like touching him will somehow tamp the anger and panic puncturing his words. “Or we find the panacea and it works and you can come home with me because you’ve been cured.”
“I don’t want it.”
“What?”
“I don’t want the cure-all. If we find it, I’m not going to use it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not going to take this woman’s life so I can be well again. And I don’t think I have to be well to be happy. God.” He takes another step away from me, head tipped back to the sky. “I should have said that ages ago.”
“Ages? How long have you been thinking this?”
“Since Dante told us about his mother—before that, even. Monty, I’ve never wanted it.”
“Never?”
“Not never—at first, the idea of finding Mateu Robles and him having something that could make these fits easier to manage was appealing, because epilepsy is hard. It is so hard to be ill. But I’m not going to take someone else’s life—it’s not worth that.”
“So, why did you let us come all this way?”
“Let you?” he repeats, the words feathered by an astonished laugh. “I didn’t let you—you never gave me a choice. You never gave me a choice about anything—about speaking to Mateu Robles or taking the key or going with the pirates. You never think what anyone else might want but you! And now you’re only interested in being together if it doesn’t require any sacrifices on your part.”