“Happiness is just a word,” she said. “It is like love in that way. There are many definitions, all of them accurate, but none of them all-encompassing. I am not sorry I married you.”
“And that,” he said, “is one definition of happiness, is it? That you are not sorry for something you have done?”
She raised her head and looked back at him—and laughed softly. It was a beguiling sight and sound.
“I am a married lady rather than a spinster,” she said. “My present and my future are respectable and secure. I have experienced the marriage bed. Perhaps soon, within the next few months, I will be with child. Perhaps there will be more children after the first. You promised that you would show me respect and courtesy, and you have kept the promise. You promised me a quiet home in the country, and you have given me just that, even though this is a far larger home than the one I expected. Why would I not be happy?”
He closed his eyes. Did she realize that she had not answered his question—are you happy? After listing a number of reasons why she should be happy, she had summed up with a question of her own: Why would I not be happy?
But she was right in saying there was no satisfactory definition of the word happiness. All definitions, or all attempts to give the word meaning, merely revolved endlessly about an empty center, a core of indefinable nothingness. As a boy he had known what happiness was without any need of words, and he had forged his way toward it with confident, unfaltering strides. Happiness in those days was doing what was right against all the odds and all the naysayers. It was accomplishing a noble goal through the efforts of his own body and mind and will so that he could see the world set to rights forever after. Happiness was about certainties.
Foolish, idealistic boy. He had accomplished the exact opposite of what he had intended, and he had destroyed life and happiness and certainty in the process. He had destroyed innocence.
The light from the fire, low in the hearth, was flickering off her face when he opened his eyes. She was looking steadily back at him.
“Have I said something wrong?” she asked him. “I do not expect you to give me happiness. It is something I will draw for myself out of the conditions of my life. Any happiness I achieve will be my own, with no obligation upon you to provide it or to pretend to share it. Is it not better that I be contented than that I be miserable? We did not promise each other misery.”
She made him sound like a coldhearted monster, though such was not her intent, he knew. She was not far wrong, though, was she? Could she possibly find any sort of happiness with him? And why could he not . . .
He got abruptly to his feet again. For a moment he stood gazing down into the dying fire, troubled by that familiar sense of yearning, the kind he could never explain to himself in words but only feel to the marrow of his bones.
She had risen too, he realized when he felt her hand light on his arm.
“I do not want to be miserable,” she said. “I do not want you to be miserable either. Surely we are allowed—”
His arm came about her waist and drew her to him, and his mouth descended upon hers all in one swift movement, cutting off the rest of what she was saying. The fingers of his free hand threaded through her short curls, holding her head still.
And he allowed himself the full luxury of desire. Except, he realized after a while, that it was more than just a physical thing he was allowing. His yearning for something unnamable had just been multiplied tenfold until he was afraid—yet again—that if he lifted his head away from hers he would be sobbing.
He gentled the kiss, explored her lips and the inside of her mouth more lazily with his tongue, wondered if he was offending her, guessed he was not. For her arms were about him too, and she was leaning into him, and her mouth was open to welcome the invasion of his tongue.
Perhaps . . .
He raised his head and gazed into her face. Her lips were moist and slightly swollen. Her cheeks looked flushed in the semidarkness. Her eyes were both bright and heavy lidded.
His insides lurched uncomfortably.
“Sex,” he said. “It is just sex, Chloe.”
“Just?” Her voice was a whisper of sound that he felt against his lips. “That word suggests that it is a slight thing. I think it must be more than that.”
He was amused despite himself. “It is,” he agreed, opening his eyes. “But it is still just sex. It is not love. Or happiness.”
“I understand that,” she said. “But it always feels good anyway. Is it not meant to?”
For a long time after his return from the Peninsula he had refused to allow himself to feel any pleasure at all, for there were men who were dead and would never feel anything ever again. There were families who would never quite recover from their grief. He had worked through that particular phase, which had included the compulsion to end his life, with the help of the physician at Penderris and with the sympathetic understanding of his fellow Survivors. There was nothing to be gained by punishing himself forever, he had come to understand and accept. It was a kind of selfishness. Those men were beyond pain. He lived on. Those families could not be comforted by his suffering. Perhaps there was a reason he had not been killed too. Who was he to deny the unexpected, unwanted gift of life and a future?
But he had never returned fully, or even nearly fully, to his old self. He had instinctively shied away from pleasure, laughter, anything bordering upon happiness, illogical as he knew it was.
He was not alone in this marriage, however—the very reason for his reluctance to marry. He did owe his wife something despite the chilling terms of their bargain, to which she had agreed—which, in fact, she had suggested. She wanted happiness, though she would not demand that he provide it. She enjoyed sex, it seemed, as a momentary means to pleasure. Or perhaps it was just kisses she enjoyed. Perhaps she equated them with sex. Or perhaps it was the night and morning brief ritual of their joining.