Page 234 of Carousel

“I’d have to.”

He’s disappointed.

He takes a step forwards. A crab scuttles away from him.

“I can feel other things, Ara,” he states, almost inaudibly. As if we’re not the only ones here. “I can feel how he lets you down.”

I reply instantly. “He doesn’t let me down.”

“He does. Quite regularly. He loses his temper. Says the wrong things. Acts irrationally – which endangers you. He can be rude and unkind to others, and to you. He lets you down.”

Any patience I had left is gone. I let my voice become a shriek. It sounds like how my soul feels.

“I’m not perfect either, Drake!”

I’m panting.

“I’m not perfect,” I repeat, “And neither is he. But he doesn’t let me down. You think you are telling me things I don’t already know about him? I know who he is. I love him anyway.”

He shakes his head again. As if my own mind is wrong, and only he knows it.

“You love that he suffered for you,” he says, disappearing like a trick of the light. Then he reappears right in front of me, dropping his head towards me. “But he has suffered for you no more than I have.” He holds out his arms to me, showing me the scars by his rolled-up sleeves.

“That’s not the same. You were made to suffer for me. No one made Cosmer⁠—”

He’s interrupting me again. “I was made to, then. What about now?” Slowly, he sinks his head into the crook of my neck. I stand, completely frozen, as he whispers into my skin, “No one is making me now.”

I go cold all over. Swallow nothing.

Hesitantly, my pulse in my ears, I lift his heavy head with my fingers.

I try to form thoughts through the haze in my brain he put there. “You’re saying you have feelings for me. Beyond just wanting my power.”

“I am saying,” he says carefully, “I want you to marry me.”

I separate myself from him fully. “I’m sorry,” I say, because I am. “I sympathise for you. But my answer is no. And,” I add, “I would appreciate it if you would stop coming here. Especially when there is another man in my bed⁠—”

“There isn’t.”

I almost laugh. “What do you mean, there isn’t?”

“He left your room. A while ago.”

The smile I’d half-made slips off my lips.

“What? No, he didn’t.”

He shrugs. “He did.”

I say, in a breath, “But where would he go?”

Drake flicks a crane fly off my shoulder, then dusts my sleeve with the palm of his hand. The movement is absent-minded, gentle. Almost a caress.

But his words wound me like violence.

“To that which he loves more than you.”

“There isn’t anything⁠—”