Arlo handled his base emotions with care, like a man removing a snake from a box; otherwise, he could find himself poisoned and exhausted. But tonight he wasn’t deft enough. The fangs sank deep, and jealousy spread outward from his heart. Next came the doomed grief that he felt whenever he saw Angelika with the baby. But this time, the bad emotions were smothered by a new sensation. It took him a moment to identify it.
Smug, male, fist-tight possession. It might be time to take her back to bed.
“Don’t ask about Christopher anymore,” Arlo told Angelika with the new feeling in his tone. “It is not your concern when he comes and goes.”
“He finally said it,” Lizzie said with admiration and a laugh. “Jelly, I do believe Will has claimed you once and for all.” She turned her dancing eyes back to Arlo. “Correct?”
“He has,” Victor confirmed in the short silence that followed. “Remember? Stuck with her for good.” The man was prompting him again for a reply, and Angelika was running back through the last minute or two in her mind, searching for a confirmation he had not made.
His new memories were of himself as a young boy; would tomorrow bring him his teens and his early seminary life? By next week would he be repeating Scripture under his breath to delay himself as Angelika begged his body for faster, harder friction?
“We should talk,” Arlo said to the table at large, and received a kick on his shin under the table.
“We shan’t talk,” Angelika said, huffing herself up straighter in her seat. “Until you tell us all that you are going to love me until the day I die.”
Arlo pondered, “Why must everything be until death in this household?”
“Because that is how we Frankensteins love,” Angelika told him. “We love until death parts us, and then we die of sadness.”
“Terribly dramatic,” Lizzie said with a smile, but Arlo did not miss the chill of fear in her eyes as she looked at him. Victor, too, averted his gaze with tight lips. Only Angelika sat oblivious to the truth that was sitting across from her now: Arlo was a man running out of time. Fast.
“You’re about to find out if you can survive a second death, Will,” Victor said after an awkward cough, observing the fraught tension between the two new lovers. “Answer us now, or I will invite Christopher for dinner tomorrow. He’s starting to look at Clara’s rear end whenever she bends down for Edwin, but we can nip that in the bud.”
Angelika’s knuckles went white on the tablecloth, but she did not blink. “You are stuck with me.”
Arlo did not know the future, or most of his past, but there was only one honorable thing he should say in this exact moment. “Angelika, please marry me.”
She did not scream joyfully. With a solemn mouth she replied, “Why?”
“Why?” Arlo echoed in confusion. “Why ask you the one thing you’ve wished to hear from the moment we met?”
She said too quietly, “You’ve just been prodded by everyone to ask me.”
Infuriating. “You wish me to beg on my knees?”
“I know you are asking me because you are obligated to. You can’t see a way out of it.” She picked up her wine and swallowed the rest in a gulp. “No, I want something heartfelt. Not just something my brother forced you to say at the table, over our empty plates.” Her eyes glowed with temper as she gestured in front of her. “Don’t I deserve a little more than bones and scraps?”
Lizzie backed her friend. “It was rather lackluster, Will.” Her favor had always been with the commander. “Vic proposed to me on a cliff at sunset.”
“A romantic story to tell our children,” Angelika said with new resolution. “That’s what I want.”
“You want a lot of things,” Arlo countered. “And what you always forget is that I have nothing to give you. May I speak plainly? There may be no children. We all know it.”
He hurt his own feelings with this statement, because witnessing Angelika hold a baby made his bones ache with want. But still, he forced himself to add another horror: “And we wouldn’t even know who that baby looked like.”
“We’ll see, won’t we,” she replied, her complexion white. She stood abruptly, her expression tight and her eyes averted. “My courses are due in sixteen days. You may count each day as a prison sentence, if that is how you feel.”
She left the room, and Arlo remained motionless under the twin stares of Victor and Lizzie.