It just hurt too much. To love her and not have her. It’s always hurt so much.
I walked out to the lake after a while, after I couldn’t bear it any longer and started having disturbing fantasies of beating Pelleas to the ground and carrying Nimue out over my shoulder like some kind of Viking marauder. Just grabbing onto her and telling her you’re mine you’re mine only mine until she agreed in that singsong-y voice of hers and begged me to fuck the words into truth.
Needless to say I didn’t do that, but even the lake couldn’t slake the sudden, violent lust I felt, and when I heard her call after me, there was a striking moment when the violence and the lust turned inward and all I wanted was for her to claim me. To fuck me into being hers.
To possess me.
“Why did you leave?” she asked, but she knew why. It was written in the shakiness of her voice, in the hunch of her shoulders as she folded her arms across her chest.
“I’m not necessary,” I said, and I meant those words not just about her, not just about the party, but about so much else too. I may have been the hand that puppeteered the fates of so many, but it often felt as if my own puppet strings were slack. What was the point of all this suffering? Ash and Greer and Embry would suffer for a lasting peace, Mark and Isolde and Tristan would suffer for much the same, but me? Merlin the Enchanter who both made kings and brought them low?
I suffered for nothing. I suffered for suffering’s sake.
And I looked up at the lovely silhouette of this too-young girl, all limned in silvery moonlight, and I wished for one fierce, blazing moment that if I had to suffer, at least I could suffer for her, at least my suffering could bring me closer to her and bind me to her forever.
But then the moment faded and I saw the tears tracking down her face, and I knew. My suffering only wounded my little moon’s heart, and it only wedged us further and further apart. Maybe she would be happier with Pelleas.
I had, after all, believed that in the last lifetime too.
“I’m telling your mother tomorrow that I can no longer work on her campaign,” I said. “And I’m afraid I must go back east.”
“You’re afraid you must go?” she shot back in a mocking tone, swiping hastily at her tears. “Really, Merlin? You’re pulling that shit on me?”
Frustrated, I spun to face her fully. She was dazzling, angry and tearful with the moon like a halo around her dark head, and I wanted to take her in my arms and kiss her until she moaned for more, I wanted to drop to my knees and eat her cunt under her dress until she couldn’t stand.
I did none of those things. “If I stayed here, Nimue, what would happen next? Would you stop dating Jack for me? Would you live with me? Marry me?”
She furrowed her brow. “I’m eighteen, Merlin, I don’t fucking know who I’m going to marry yet.”
I do, I thought grimly.
“Fine. But what about Jack? Would you have us both? One for day and one for night, maybe?”
Even in the dark I could see her angry flush. “It’s not like that,” she muttered.
“Then what is it like? I confess to being jealous, Nimue, I confess to being so jealous that sometimes I can’t breathe for how angry I am. It makes me frantic and filthy with the things I want to do to you because of it.”
Her breath caught. “What kinds of things?”
I gave her a dark look. “I think you know.”
“And what if I want to do dark things to you?” she cried out suddenly, as if the words had been trapped inside her for longer than just the last few minutes. “What if I want to punish you for being so handsome? What if I want to torture you for being so mysterious? What if I want to tie you up so you can never leave me? I just want to break you open until you have no secrets from me ever again. I loathe how opaque you are, how hidden and closed off you are—yes even from me—” she interrupted, forestalling my objection “—and yet at the same time, I’m drawn to it. I’m obsessed with it, possessed by it. Your mystery—it’s like I was put on this earth to find a way inside it and live there forever.”
We were both breathless then, panting, her words spilling into the deepest cracks in myself and illuminating me. I was terrified and exhilarated and hard.
But.
“You didn’t answer about Jack,” I said.
She stared at me. And it was clear that she didn’t have an answer.
“Do you love him?”
“Yes,” she said quickly, then just as quickly shook her head. “I mean, no. Or maybe I used to. I thought I did. Until I met you, and then I realized what I felt for him was…something else.”
“Is that something else better than what I can give you?”
And Nimue—brave Nimue, merry, honest Nimue—answered, “I’m not ready for what you can give me.”
