The world, meaning Walt.
“You really think it’s that powerful, darling?”
“Yes.” Edwin caught the yawn from his mother, and the aches of the previous day’s exertions settled back into his shoulders. “It’s nothing like Penhallick, Mother. It felt like if I stood there long enough, it would pull parts of me into the soil like roots.” He hadn’t meant to let that out, but the uneasy whimsy slid off his mother’s attention. “And I’m wrong for it. I think Mrs. Sutton grew half those gardens from magic, and God knows I haven’t enough to maintain them, or to have the slightest clue how she did it in the first place. It’s just going to be something else for me to disappoint. And after all that, I still haven’t managed to do anything about the curse on Robin.”
“I’m sure you will,” she said. “And I’m sorry about the Gatling boy. Sounds like such a nasty business, darling. Once you’ve sorted out Sir Robert’s problem, I hope you can keep yourself well clear of it.”
Edwin wanted to agree with her. He thought about Flora Sutton’s blue needling stare, and her hands branding his cheeks with her expectations. He thought about the sheer affronted anger that had sprung to life in his belly when he was shoved into the hedge maze. It was, he realised with a start, still there: an ember smouldering away beneath the ash of fear and futility.
He stood and kissed his mother’s cheek, and went to hide in the library again until dinnertime. Robin didn’t seek him out, this time. Edwin told himself he was glad.
He dressed slowly for dinner, listening for the sounds of Robin getting ready in the room across the hall. He couldn’t hear any: the doors were good wood. The walls were reasonably thick.
He was listening so hard that the knock on his door seemed abnormally loud.
“Cuff links,” said Robin when the door was opened. He was juggling them in one hand. “Do you mind?”
It was a transparent excuse. Edwin managed not to smile as he let Robin in, and managed not to smile as he fastened the cuff links for Robin, and managed not to smile as Robin sat on the edge of Edwin’s bed and looked in every corner for inspiration before finding, somewhere in the wainscoting, the idea of inquiring if Mrs. Courcey’s health had taken a turn for the better.
“Perhaps. She has ups and downs.”
“My mother would have loved a painful illness,” Robin said, bitter. “She could have raised hundreds of pounds in her own name, and had someone wheel her around the hospital wing with her name on it while she looked brave and interesting. God. That probably sounds—sorry.”
Edwin looked at Robin’s head, now buried in his hands. It had been, yet again, a long tense day, and they still had the evening to get through. He went over and touched the nape of Robin’s neck, two fingers tucked beneath the rise of the starched collar. Robin went still at the contact. Edwin moved his fingers, a light brushing back and forth, somewhere between comfort and invitation and apology.
And admission, even in his own head: I am nothing like you, and yet I feel more myself with you.
The word inked by a certain hand on Edwin’s heart was affinity. It was almost enough to make him bolt from the room.
But Robin’s skin was warm and Robin was looking up at him, now, with eyes like unshielded flame. Robin took hold of Edwin’s forearm, a thumbprint at the wrist, moving it until he could press an open-mouthed kiss to the dip of Edwin’s palm.
Edwin pulled his hand free. Robin let him.
There was a silence crowded with the sound of Edwin’s pulse, and the tightening of all his nerves, and the throb of blood in his cock.
“Come down here?” Robin said, a bit rough. “I want to kiss you.”
“It’s not long until dinner.” Edwin gestured to his clothes, though a small howling part of him despised the rest for a spoilsport and a coward. His knees were weak. He wanted to climb astride Robin’s lap and rip Robin’s buttons open and kiss him until both of their mouths were far too wrecked and obscene to be seen in public.
Robin stood and took Edwin’s face in his hands, raising his eyebrows. “My deepest apologies. If I promise not to crease so much as an inch of sir’s clothing, does sir think I might possibly—”
“Oh, stop being an ass,” said Edwin, feeling his lips twitch.
The kiss was careful enough to be a tease in itself. Like all of Robin’s teases, it made warmth spill down through Edwin. Edwin let himself feel the heat, let himself lean in only a very little. He could remain in control of this much.