Yrene✨’s Reviews > The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy > Status Update

Mordaunt, with a notable lack of interest in the weather, said, "I'm your Friend du jour; surely that warrants a dance. People would think it strange otherwise."
"As laudable as your commitment to the charade is" —Aurienne held up the shoes dangling from her fingertips-"I'm done for the night. Couldn't do another minute in these."
"Dance without them," said Mordaunt.
"Don't be ridiculous."
"No one can see your indecent ankles from down there. It's only me."
"Only you?"
"Only. My near-death experience has left me humble and lamblike."
Strains of music floated up to them as the first bars of the next song began. Mordaunt held out his hand to Aurienne. Aedan, looking every inch the lovelorn pup, chose that moment to look up, and spot her on the balcony.
If he saw her refuse Mordaunt's hand, it would send a signal to him, and Aurienne didn't wish to send signals to Aedan.
Well—unless the signal was that she had moved on with another. In which case—
Aurienne tossed her shoes to the side and took Mordaunt's hand.

"Very well. I will dance as nature intended."
"Barefoot, tipsy, and with flowers in your hair."
"You paint a lovely picture."
"You are a lovely picture."
"I thought I was an uptight little fusspot?"
Aurienne was rewarded by one of Mordaunt's brilliant smiles. "Do you know," he said, "sometimes I don't mind being wrong?"
🥰
They came together, hands guarded from touch by gloves of leather and silk. Aurienne had lost the added height of her heels; she stood at eye level with Mordaunt's mouth.
They danced slowly, because he couldn't go very fast, and because the song was a low, romantic ballad.
It meant nothing—it was a stupid little dance that was part of a stupid little charade— but her pulse was all aflutter. Aurienne took refuge in the clinical.
She quizzed Mordaunt on any lingering symptoms: dizziness, confusion, palpitations, tachypnoea, and, finally, oliguria-"And when's the last time you urinated?"
Mordaunt, who looked increasingly discontented as her evaluation progressed, said, "Really?"
"What?"
"We're dancing and you're interrogating me about urine?"
"It’s important," said Aurienne.
"You really can wring the romance out of anything," said Mordaunt.
"What romance?" asked Aurienne. "This is a sham."
"Well, I was enjoying the sham—and the garden, and the lights, and the music; it all pleases my sense of Aesthetics."

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Mordaunt had used her soap today; Aurienne could smell it on him. He was very near. Had they begun the dance this close together? And if they hadn't, which of them had closed the gap? It might have been her.
She hoped it had been him. She looked at the hollow at the base of his throat. It was the lighthouse all over again, the pull of the wanting to be near, the natural repulsion, the back-and-forth.
It began to rain.

There were gasps from the garden below and a faltering in the music as the quartet backed itself under a canopy. The music picked up again, as did the chatter, all dampened by the soft percussion of a gentle June-time shower. It scattered itself upon Aurienne and Mordaunt in glittering handfuls, lit by the green and gold lights below.

"It's raining," said Aurienne.
"I know," said Mordaunt.
"Shouldn't we go in?"
"Why must you be sensible?"
"One of us ought to be."
But they weren't sensible. They were tipsy. They danced in the rain.

Besides, they were indoors, sort of— as well as outside: a bit of both, all at once. Aurienne's bare feet danced from the balcony's cold stone to the bedroom's warm floorboards and back again. The wet splashed in-doors; the lamplight glowed outdoors; the rain washed the distinctions away. Water dripped against Mordaunt's neck, and Aurienne's bodice, and his temples, and her lips, and wrote things there in calligraphies long forgotten.

Their shadows also spoke things in their twine and untwine against balcony railing and white curtains, cast now by the lamps in the bed-room, and now by the light of the half-moon. The space between her and Mordaunt was a sparkling, rain-studded thing; they pulled it apart and tightened it with every spin, over and under, farther and nearer; they wove and unwove, and wove and unwove.

What was between them? An ebb and a flow, curiosity and guilt, today's fatal daydream and tomorrow's sears.

Delighted laughter echoed below as partygoers noticed Aurienne and Mordaunt's rain-drenched dance. There was applause—a celebration of a thing that was not, and could never be.

Aurienne sought Mordaunt's gaze to see how much longer he wished to keep up the pretence of the dance, but his eyes were on their joined hands. Their star-crossed täcn pressed against each other's. Their Orders were in their veins, as inescapable as their own blood.

He held his arm overhead; she spun out and spun back in; pale skirts clung to black trousers.

What was between them? Once it had been a theatre of war; now it was a no-man's-land.
They had grown entangled in each other through reciprocities.
Healing and killing, killing and healing.

The music swelled. Mordaunt radiated warmth; Aurienne could feel it through the front of her dress where it brushed his chest, through her glove where he clasped her hand. He was loose and relaxed; his head hung low, the scruff at his jaw brushed her cheek. The hand that had been decorously perched at her waist slid into the small of her back.
Through the fine fabric of her dress, she felt the press of his signet ring.
Their faces were near each other's. Mordaunt looked at her mouth like he thought of kissing it.
He was a very good actor.

To their audience below, a kiss would be utterly unremarkable— normal-expected, even. Aedan had found a recipient for his drink, but he was still looking at Aurienne.

"Let's put the poor bastard out of his misery," said Mordaunt, his voice more warmth than word against Aurienne's mouth.
A lie-that's what was between them now.

Their cheeks touched. Their noses brushed. His eyes flashed ardent, wanting.

"I don't kiss patients," said Aurienne against his lips.
"I thought I wasn't a patient," said Mordaunt.
"Right. You're just a Point of Leverage."
"You must make use of me."

And, because Aedan was watching—and only because Aedan was watching—Aurienne rose to her tiptoes and ran silk-clad fingers through Mordaunt's hair.
He didn't hesitate, didn't give her time to change her mind. He pulled her in close, put a hand around the back of her neck, tilted her head upwards.
Then came the tender apocalypse of his lips on hers.

She felt Mordaunt's scar against her mouth, felt the tightening of his hand at her neck, savoured Scotch and chocolate and lies from his lips. Her body didn't know what her brain knew; her heart beat wild in her chest; breathing became an act of discipline, irregular ins and outs and ins and outs between the press of rain-wet lips.
While it lasted, the kiss was eternal.

And it was too much and too little, and it was unhallowed, and it was sacrosanct.
There was warmth at the side of her neck. Mordaunt mapped the course of raindrops against her throat with his mouth. He released a long, shuddering breath against her skin. He held her against him rather possessively for a kiss that meant nothing.

The audience sighed about a thing that did not exist.

Aurienne stilled. The music carried on; the violins made a rapturous chorus with the dripping melody of the rain. She released her hold on Mordaunt's shoulder, but his lingered at her waist. He kept her hand clasped in his.
His nearness, the kiss, her rushing blood, all heightened her perception, and, as at the lighthouse, she saw warring in his eyes: vulnerability, yearning, desperate unhappiness.

He retreated into irony. Grey hardened into silver. He said, "Didn't think you would."
As for Aurienne, she regretted the kiss immediately-because it blurred already-blurred lines, because of what he was and what she was, because it felt good.

She blinked rain-misted eyes. She liked her precious categories. She liked things sharp and delineated. She liked contrasts. Clarity. Knowing where she stood.
She did not care about the secret calligraphies of rain.

She said, "I'd better go."
He said, "If you must."
Aurienne turned away. She dropped his hand and its profane tacn.

He released hers slowly. Leather slid against silk, palm slid against palm, fingertip slid against wet fingertip, and whatever had been woven between them stretched and tore and severed with a snap.

When Osric had asked Fairhrim to dance, she had, at first, done nothing but stare at him. A very dark time in his life had followed, taking on the proportions of approximately ten years of agony and sus-pense, until her shrugged "Very well."

That was where it should have ended. Osric had never intended to steal a kiss, and certainly never intended to linger along her neck. It was meant to be only a dance. But she had looked up at him, and he had discovered how her wet hair caught pentagrams of stars, and watched raindrops trickle down her throat and make a necklace of moon glitter there, and the kleptomaniac urge had risen, and he, weak-willed fool that he was, had yielded to it.

When he had asked her to put the poor bastard out of his misery, he hadn't been referring to Perfect Aedan. He had been talking abour himself.

He had played the smitten fool a little too well. Well enough to believe it.

Afterwards, Fairhrim had fled from him, and left him with an unfinished dance and a fear.

He wished he could unknow what she had tasted like. What it had felt like to hold her quivering stillness in his arms as he made his way down her neck.

Once again they had met upon a threshold, once again they had reached an Almost, and once again she had fled.
She would never cross over.
And he was burdened now, with the memory of a swiftly beating heart, exhilaration and pleasure, and the weight of regret.

He wished he could unkiss her.