Page 56 of Thief of Roses
XXIII.
“Do you know what dayit is, Baró?”She inquired, bright and eager for the day although the sky boded ill.
Rivani could only see his back and though she had no way of knowing yet, he appeared tense.Maybe the muscles in his back or the way his head hung gave him away.It was often more difficult to tell on him than a man due to the spinal lump at the joining of his neck and back.The spinal formation altered his sleeping position and he held his head and shoulders differently because of it.Maybe he just ached.
“No.What day is it?”Baró did not turn around to look at her but shrugged a shoulder.
Rivani crossed the distance between them and began rubbing his shoulders.Under her touch, she was more convinced that they could use a good pounding and was half-inclined to tell him to lay down while she walked on his shoulders.Did they have a rolling pin?Even then, it might break.
He eased into her touch.
“I referred to my cycle.”She rubbed the back of his neck and kissed it amid her ministrations.“You have been with me through two ovulations and two subsequent blood times now.I have no fear that you will lose yourself in hormones.”
“But I have been lost in hormones.You have just been amenable to intimacy and have consented to let me hold you while we sleep.Indeed, the hormones have addled my mind.”
The forced humor in his voice made her skin prickle.He could pretend, and maybe if she were not so well attuned to him, she would believe his performance, but between the way his muscles twitched and the slight tell of his words, she did not believe in his light air.
“I brought some of my linens for you.I know you enjoy them.”
“Thank you.If you want to leave them...”
Leave them?Baró had not yet turned around to greet her or kiss her or anything.She panicked.“Baró, what’s wrong — were you visited again?”
The long silence, either to form words or to debate telling her at all, made her worry all the more.She wanted to go around him and look at him and make him look at her and tell her, but she just managed to keep it together to let him have the space and time to speak.
“More gifts, Rivani.I am changing again.”His head bent lower and he rubbed at his temple.
She sank onto the bench behind him, pressing her cheek against his back, at once relieved that it was nothing more serious and yet still concerned about the effects these changes had on him.She did not find them repellent, but she had, as a mental exercise before sleep, tried to envision Baró with every kind of physical alteration she could imagine — spines from his back, slitted eyes, drooping ears, tusks, scales instead of fur, tympanum like frogs, no snout or nose at all, bald from horn to hoof, wings instead of arms, anything more hindering or unsightly than his current form.And through this whole mental exercise, she had never once thought that any new feature he might bear would affect her feelings for him.Granted, she had not been tried, and she admitted that to herself, but even if she hesitated or doubted, he would have to become someone different for her to withdraw her affection.
“I’m sorry, Baró.I know it seems terrible to you, but I only care about how it affects you.”
“They come too quickly now,” he told her, a hint of well-controlled apprehension in his voice.
“We have not used the Magic.”
“The visitations abated but not the gifts.”
“What’s changed — your face?”Rivani stroked his back.
“Yes.”He growled.“I am being foolish.You have never shown me the slightest rejection.”
“Apart from vomiting in your courtyard, you mean,” she volunteered with a little regret and a great deal of mischief.When he laughed as she had hoped to make him even if it came at her expense, she kissed his shoulder.
“Apart from that, yes,” he agreed.“I attributed that more to your terror and less to your thought ‘this monster is so ugly, I must vomit on him.’”
