Her body molded to his touch. He had her. The game now was to keep her. He wouldn't have tried to fully seduce her here, with a party downstairs and nothing but an unlocked door separating them from the whole of society. He knew the reluctance she had displayed a moment ago would follow her through until their next liaison. He'd lit the fire between them; now he had to stoke it and tend it until it was bright enough to burn all her hesitations away.

He sighed into their kiss and pulled her closer. It pleased him that her hands had found a place on his chest so readily — a good sign of desire, however conflicted she might still be feeling. He let the hand he had placed on her elbow drift to her waist and ran his fingers along her back.

"You taste like heaven," he said breathlessly when he broke the kiss. He barely paused before leaning in again to kiss her neck. "I want you. I've wanted you since the day we met. Those eyes—" he broke off to kiss her lower down, along her collarbone. "— your eyes, so bright and beautiful — and then so inexcusably lonely." He brought his forehead to hers, gazing into her eyes from only a few inches away. "You've been waiting for someone like me."

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Inexcusably lonely — the tears Elfrieda had blinked away were back. They overflowed and ran down her cheeks. Perhaps it was hearing someone acknowledge her misery that had opened the well they came from. She did not cry much since she had married. That was not a sign that things were well — she was a person of intense emotions. She lived on their waves, their high and middling peaks and sometimes gentle, sometimes dreadful lows; that was just who she was. The nothingness that clung to her recently, that was sickness. It was like the empty house she lived in was around her wherever she went. So she was glad to be able to cry and mortified at the same time. She tried to see Don Juan through her tears: "Don't think me silly, I am sorry. You are right. I was waiting. For you, not someone like you."
It could not have been just any other man, Elfrieda thought. She knew, if she did not feel so attached to his bright smiles and his eyes, that always said more than his words meant to, she would endure in her commitment to her suffering. She leaned into the sensation of his lips on her collarbone and held on to him, tighter. Yes, she was scared. But it did not feel wrong. "Promise you truly care for me.", she pleaded, suddenly terrified of her own daring. If she could believe him, she might not be lost.

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He ought to have been alarmed by her tears. This could be a very bad sign for him, a sign that her willingness to engage in this was about to melt into a puddle of guilt and regret. The words that followed soothed those concerns, though. Waiting for him. Her correction bolstered something in his chest. This was not the first time he'd been alone with someone in this way — not even the first time he'd seduced someone away from their husband (or wife, as the case may be) — but his prior liaisons were casual. They used phrases like have some fun; they talked about the way you make me feel or, as he had just done, of want. He'd tried serious sentiment once, when he was eighteen, and he'd been wrong and had been burned for it — but now, at twenty-four, with a beautiful woman crying in his arms and looking at him with such longing in her eyes and saying she had been waiting for him, he felt ready to try his hand at love again. And why wouldn't it be her? The way their bodies fit together now mirrored the twinning of their spirits over these last few weeks. She had been waiting for him.

"I do," he promised. He loosed his hands from her body so that he could use them to brush her tears back. "I do, I do. It breaks my heart to see you like this — unhappy like this. Elfrieda —" He drew his shoulders up as he inhaled and made a declaration that he truly believed, deep down in his center: "I can make you happy."

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   Elfrieda Yaxley

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