What Did I Say Last Night?

"What did I say to you last night?"

The words scraped out of my throat before I'd even opened my eyes properly, and the ceiling above me was not mine — it was the guest-room ceiling at the Duca mansion, with its fussy plaster rose in the middle, and my mouth tasted of copper and stale wine.

William was sitting in the armchair by the window, sleeves rolled to the elbow, a glass of water balanced on his knee. He'd been there a while. The light behind him was thin, grey, early.

"You said you really liked me," he said.

I shut my eyes again. "I was drunk."

"You had two glasses of wine across four hours, Nicole. I counted."

"Then I was drunk on the wine *and* the altitude. Or the chandeliers. I don't know what I meant. I don't —" My voice snagged. "People say things. It doesn't have to mean anything."

William set the glass on the side table and crossed the room. He didn't sit on the bed. He crouched beside it, so his face was level with mine, and when he pressed the back of his hand to my forehead I flinched — not from fear. From the fact that nobody had touched me like that in years. Like I was something to be careful with.

"You're burning up," he said. "Thirty-nine, at least. You're going to argue with me about a sentence you said last night while your body's fighting an infection?"

"I'm not arguing. I'm clarifying."

"You're deflecting." He stood, went to the door, and spoke quietly to someone in the corridor — a name I didn't catch, a request for a thermometer and something with ginger in it. Then he came back and sat on the edge of the bed, and the mattress dipped, and I hated how much I noticed it.

"Why are you doing this?" I asked.

"Doing what?"

"Fetching me water. Sitting vigil. You're the Dawn of the Loco family. You have men for this."

"Marco's busy," he said, deadpan, and something in my chest loosened against my will.

I turned my face into the pillow. "You should go. You'll get ill."

"I've survived worse than a fever." A pause. "I survived six months of a woman telling me she was ugly and me telling her she wasn't, and her never once believing me."

The room went very still. The clock in the corridor ticked.

"Don't," I whispered.

"I'm not going to make you say it again." His voice was low, unhurried, the way he spoke when he was being careful — I'd learned that voice across a hundred nights of typing, of voice notes, of him reading to me in that flat grey murmur. "You told me who you were last night. That was enough. I'm not going to stand over you and demand a second confession."

I opened my eyes. "Then what are you going to do?"

"Get your fever down." He said it like it was obvious. Like it was the only thing in the world that mattered. "And then, when you're well enough to look me in the eye without your teeth chattering, we'll talk about the rest. The photos. The name. Why you blocked me. Why you walked into this house and let me search for a woman who was sleeping two corridors away."

"That's a long list."

"I've got time. You're the one who's ill."

The housekeeper arrived with a tray — a thermometer, a glass of ginger and honey, a plate of dry toast I had no intention of touching. William took the thermometer, shook it down, and held it out to me. I put it under my tongue and we sat there in the absurd domesticity of it, the two of us, while the mercury crept up.

Thirty-eight point nine.

"Right," he said, reading it over my shoulder. "Bed. Fluids. No arguments until you're under thirty-seven."

"You can't just order me to stop being ill."

"I can order you to stop pretending you're fine. That's different." He pushed the glass of ginger towards me and I drank, because my throat was sandpaper and because — God help me — it was easier than talking.

He watched me. Not the way men usually watched me, sizing me up, already deciding I came up short. He watched me the way you watch something you've been looking for.

"I don't understand it," I said, into the glass.

"Understand what?"

"How you can look at me like that. I lied to you. For months. I showed you a face that wasn't mine. When you picture Luna, you picture —"

"I picture a woman who stayed up until three in the morning talking me out of my own head," he said. "Who sent me a recording of herself playing Chopin badly and beautifully and told me it was random noise so no one would guess she cared. Who told me her favourite place in the world was a bench by a duck pond behind a library, and that she went there when she felt invisible, and that the ducks didn't care what she looked like." He paused. "When did I ever mention your face, Nicole? Not once. Not in six months. You were the one who brought it up. Every single time."

I couldn't speak. My eyes were stinging and I blamed the fever, and we both knew I was lying, and for once neither of us said so.

He reached out and — slowly, giving me every chance to move away — tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. His knuckles brushed my cheek. They were cool against the heat of my skin.

"You're allowed to be happy," he said quietly. "I don't know who taught you otherwise, but they were wrong."

"William—"

"Fever first." He stood, and the loss of his warmth was a physical thing. "Then the rest. I'm not going anywhere."

He walked to the door, then stopped with his hand on the frame.

"And Nicole? Next time you tell me you like me, I'd rather you were sober. I want to remember it properly."

Then he was gone, and I lay in that vast guest bed with the ginger burning my throat and my heart going like a bird against a window, thinking: *he knows. He's known since the gala. He waited.*

And underneath it, small and cold and stubborn: *he waited for Luna. What happens when he's had a week of the real thing?*

I pulled the duvet to my chin and let myself, for one whole minute, believe the answer might be *nothing*. That I might be enough. That a man could look at all of me and stay.

One minute. Then the fear came back, polite and punctual, and I lay there between the two of them — hope and terror — until the sun came up properly over the Duca gardens.