heorte | when i go towards you it is with my whole life.

She scoffs. But for all that it is a loud, skeptical sound and despite the distinct roll of her eyes as she shifts her attention from him back toward the dance floor, it's clear that he's said the right thing. That she's pleased. No matter that she says, "Really, Mister Ellis. You are quite ridiculous."

With a secondary prim sniff, she drinks further from her cup.

No rebuttal. Ellis smiles instead, letting the conversation lapse while his fingers graze once more up and down the back of her hand before he leaves off.

"Do you think the musicians can be bribed?" he asks instead. What he'd like to ask is if she'd care to go back to their rooms. Her room, his room. The specifics of it don't matter. It's only for the pleasure of being able to touch her without checking himself, and maybe kissing her, just once, before they sleep. But it's early, and Ellis knows without asking that Wysteria intends to dance more.

And so, the consideration of a bribe. Or at least, a heartfelt request from a man whose sweetheart would prefer not to dance another reel just yet.

"I believe all artists can be bribed, Mister Ellis. It is the mark of their trade," she says, settling close against the wall. The clatter of the drum and the stamping of feet across the dance floor is very loud. A woman out there is laughing in the arms of her partner, her dark hair loose and flowing prettily behind her as she's run round.

"The question is only how high their price is, and how many people before you had the idea and have beaten you to making requests."

Wysteria looks to him, holds his gaze for a moment, and then pointedly drops her attention to where she has tucked her spare hand between the small of her back and the wall. Her fingertips are just there, waggling invitingly. Well. If he should care to touch her hand, there are ways to be discreet—

And then her attention drifts back toward the dance floor, the assembly in the hall, and musicians and the dust drifting down from the rafters.

Yes, he does care to touch her hand. A slight smile warms his face as he takes the smallest step forward, reaches to lace their fingers together, neatly out of sight.

"I should have made my demands when we first arrived."

His thumb runs gently over her knuckles as he looks away from her to study the musicians. Which of them would be the better prospect? The fiddler's tunic is very fine, so perhaps he's the sort who needs the extra coin more than his partner.

"I'll know better next time," Ellis says, though he should point out, "It's easier, when it's Bastien we're asking."

More like: it's easier when they're dealing with people who know to be intimidated by Wysteria already.

The moment his hand is touching hers, Wysteria delicately shifts her arm to gently close her fingers about his wrist. It is an easy thing, then, to draw his hand safely behind her into that secret unseen place between herself at the wall.

"That is because Bastien is remarkably weak for all things that have even the veneer of romance. I wouldn't be surprised if he had a great collection of cheap novels on the subject. --Oh," she says, as if the following thought is only in this moment occurring to her. She laughs. "I hope that's what he used to print with his press. That would be very charming. And a little funny. Anyway, you can hardly be blamed for falling behind. Who could have guessed that Markham has such an aversion to anything slower than the pace of a sprint."

There, unseen, Ellis' fingers turn in hers to find her palm. His thumb sets against the soft center, presses there a moment as he listens to Wysteria relating her assessment of Bastien's interests.

"When you were last here, was it like this all night? A sprint?"

As he speaks, Ellis' fingers leave her hand to settle at the small of her back. His eyes never leave her face as his hand splays carefully outward, palm flattening across the fabric.

He'd dance more with her if she wanted, waltz or not. But he wishes again for a quieter place, even if he's warmed to the charm of this lively tavern.

"I truly don't remember. We spent most of the evening at one of the tables out of doors arguing over some mathematics. Dancing had very little to do with the conversation at all. We will have to ask Brown when we see him," she decides, attention fixed toward the center of the room and the spiraling patterns of the dance happening there like a counterweight to the quiet sprawl of Ellis's hand.

Her own hand has shifted too, settling lightly against his. The angle is not wholly natural, and so the absent scuff of her thumb along the joint of one of his forefingers is light but not unintentional.

"But if it is going to be like this all evening, I'm not sure I've really the energy for it. We were up at such an early hour."

The invitation in that statement is marked. Ellis' fingers flex against her back, beneath the light pressure of her hand on his own. It's a small thing, but his entire focus narrows to that little point of contact between them.

"Are you hungry?" is not quite the question Ellis wants to ask her. But it's close, within arm's reach of Would you like to leave now?

She finishes her drink before answering, turning her attention from the center of the room back on him—all wide eyed faux guilelessness.

"Are you?"

"There was a tavern I saw, several streets back. Before the window with the cat," he tells her, which is not an answer exactly but approaching one. His thumb runs up and down across her back, cup of water untouched in his opposite hand. "I thought we might have a later dinner."

And it had seemed quiet, the kind of establishment with a devoted clientele and little excitement beyond that. Maybe there would be a little music. They had to walk back that way regardless, and he wants—

Nothing resolves into one clear thing. He can feel the warmth of her through the fabric and it muddles his thought process.

Ellis tacks on "If you aren't too tired," a little absently, a concession the little game they're playing.

There is a multitude of small buttons down the back of her dress. Which is technically speaking an unimportant and highly irrelevant detail, save for the fact that she thinks of them in relation to the drift of his thumb and feels an immediate flicker of something like guilt behind her ribs. So she puts them promptly out of her mind and says instead, all airily and untroubled by anything at all in the entire world,

"Well, it sounds as if you've decided. I shall hardly argue with you, Mister Ellis. We've nearly a whole week of evenings to fill before us. I imagine there will be other opportunities for all sorts of dancing."

There is a restaurant more or less where Ellis recalled. The proprietor is gregarious and chatty and possibly Orlesian, promises a trio of musicians and a singer in two days time and gives them a bottle of wine on the house. Maybe they've been mistaken for newlyweds, though no one says those words exactly.

Ellis drinks none of the wine, and leaves a little extra coin on the table when they go.

Tony arranged two rooms for them in one of the better dormitories. He might have opted to demand two rooms on his own, but Ellis had asked. It had felt important to him, that Wysteria have space of her own to retreat into. Now, after having climbed the narrow stairs and come more or less to the end of the journey, Ellis thinks of all the things he should ask her, or perhaps should have asked her earlier in the evening or on their journey here.

Instead, he lifts one hand to touch her cheek first, looking her over.

"Your hair's coming loose," he observes, expression softening as his opposite hand lifts to brush the curling wisps back from her face. "Do you want me to serve my penance now, or over breakfast?"

Somewhere in the midst of dinner, her thoughts had begun to naturally pivot toward the great stack of notes waiting for her back in her little borrowed room. To the small mountain of annotations she would like to attend to, and the copying and rewriting she might like to do before the point of the day's lectures becomes smoothed over and nonspecific.

However the bottle of wine, of which she had drunk a significant portion, had successfully chased that thought well away. By the time they have wound their way back to the dormitories, she has chattered on at length about theories of perpetual motion and friction free machines and has forgotten entirely all question of alchemical science much less the notes strewn about the foot of her bed on the subject.

Her cheek is very warm in his palm, but her face is only a little flush and she has come all this way without stumbling or acting like a dredge off his arm. If she is drunk (and she personally wouldn't use the word), it's the pleasant kind had at the end of a long and unhurried evening.

"I'm not surprised. I've hardly touched it since morning. In fact, the whole thing will probably have to be refashioned and I'll have to dredge myself up an hour earlier to see it done. I cannot in good conscience recommend wearing your hair so long that it requires pins, Mister Ellis."

Her hand quests out behind her to find the handle of her door.

"I can't remember what I meant to ask you. Tomorrow over breakfast will have to do. So," she laughs. "You may kiss me goodnight and be about your business, if it is only your honor that is keeping you here."

"Wysteria," comes softly, Ellis' voice dipping tender over the syllables of her name.

His honor was a spotty, fallible thing. If he had so much honor, wouldn't he have let her be that night in her kitchen?

The impulse that had been tugging at him all of the evening unspools; the space between them closes as he leans into her, careful with his own body not to sway her backwards in the process. His hands so gentle at her face, at her neck when his hands shift to allow him to kiss the corner of her mouth and stay there a moment, forehead set against hers.

You're keeping me here, he wants to say, in which here is a bigger thing than her doorway. But the words catch. He says them with his hands and the bow of his body in towards her instead.

She is already turning her face up to him, cued by the shift of his hands and what has so rapidly become a kind of habit. It isn't so unlike leaving him notes in his kit, or teasing him about his gray hairs or the scratch of his beard, or minding to keep beyond the swing of his mace's arc in the field. These are all practiced things, aren't they? And she is, in her way, such a quick study.

The corner of her mouth quirks under his kiss. She wrinkles her nose at him, close enough that the pull of it must be a felt thing rather than a seen one.

"Nevermind. I have thought how I might embarrass you."

The answering smile curves against her cheek, his thumbs stroking gently along her jaw. She's flushed and smiling and beautiful. If it didn't feel near impossible, he'd like to lean back and look at her, commit to memory her right now.

"Aye?"

"Aye," she echoes him, all gruff and play stern. His whiskers bristle at her cheek when he smiles, and Wysteria makes some little noise of mock offense even as she turns slightly further toward his nearness.

"You must tell me what you're thinking," she says, checking her balance against the door handle; the hardware rattles a little and she half snorts a laugh against his cheek. "What it is you want without first qualifying it based on what you think I'm thinking or what you believe I prefer. That is what I would like to know right now. And it must be a real answer. No conceptual or metaphorical nonsense."

Is she tired? Is she hungry? What would she like to see and do while they are in Markham? Would she prefer beer or water or to dance a reel or waltz? They are perfectly fine questions, of course. It is kind these he asks them. But she knows all the answers to them already, so there's hardly anything to be pleasantly surprised by in them now is there?

His body bows further, hand falling to her hip as he turns his face in against her neck. The flicker of tension comes and goes, passing without gaining purchase. If they weren't touching at so many different points, it would have gone unnoticed.

"Right now?" he questions, muffled against the collar of her dress, grip flexing loosely at her waist.

He's reminded of Wysteria telling him, very seriously, that she was going easy on him. Ellis can't tell if this is her going easy on him or deviating away from that approach.

She laughs again and twists, just a little, from the rough tickle of his face against her neck. Her spare hand--the one not secured at the door handle--rises then, catching at the collar of his tunic. Touching the dark curls at the very base of his neck.

"Yes, right now."

Unsurprisingly, the answer is slow in coming.

"I was thinking about how beautiful you are," he says first. He thinks to straighten out of this position, but her hand feels good where it is, and Ellis doesn't want to dislodge it. His fingers trace the seam of her dress, follow a wrinkle of fabric around her hip to her back, leading back to the row of small buttons over her spine.

Beautiful is true, and it is contained; it's not a word that overwhelms, but it's only a part of what had crossed his mind. The rest doesn't fit neatly, and he's not ready to say any of it, so Ellis moves past it, pares down all his conflicting impulses into words.

"And about how I wanted to take the pins out of your hair," he tells her, pressing on despite the prickling rise of embarrassment, "And I wanted to help you undo all these buttons, and to kiss you, before we went to bed."

Then, clarifying—

"To sleep."

Which might be perceived as a thing tacked on for her benefit. In some ways it is, but Ellis doesn't know any other way than to draw that boundary and stick to it.

She is specifically aware of how the back of her neck goes warm, and that it is tangled up with beautiful and that little flicker of embarrassment she'd felt while standing at the fringe of that tavern with his hand settled against her for just wanting so much to touch the warm skin of his wrist just beyond the edge of his sleeve. Maybe he can feel the heat too since his cheek is right there. She imagines he must at least be aware of the sudden rabbit of her pulse, lodged high in her chest.

His dark curls are a little coarse under her fingers. She smooths her fingers through them and tells herself they can't stand in this passageway like this forever. It's late but not so late, and there are other people in the dormitories and it is only a matter of time before someone—

"Then—" She clears her throat and is more firm the second time. "Then let us do that. The buttons. They're perfectly miserable to undo myself. But I warn you that I will pinch you if you pull any one of my hairs."

Sometimes, when he is like this, he reminds her of a cup with a crack in it that she must hold with both hands to keep together.

(With a little jostling jerk and a shove, the door under her hand opens.)

As Ellis straightens, his grip tightening at her hip as he observes the flush of her face. How much is from the wine and how much might be from him? It feels like a presumption to hang too much on the latter, so he brushes a few last stray hairs back from her face before he lets go of her.

"I'll be very careful with your hair," he promises, invitation momentarily unremarked upon. He follows her inside, closes the door behind them, draws the bolt into place out of habit.

Once inside, he isn't so certain of where to begin. And it is a little distracting to be within her space like this, even a borrowed and temporary. He reaches back for her hand, reel her a few steps closer to him.

"Do you want to put your notes away?" he asks, teasing, as his eyes take in the papers abandoned at the edge of the bed.

It's a small room and between the lecture series and their evening jaunts and the hour at which they'd first arrived two nights ago, she has hardly been it in but for a handful of hours. And yet already the place is well colored in by her presence. There are the pages scattered at the foot of the bed, and the other dress she'd brought thrown over the back of the chair, and her knit wrap and hard sided traveling case, and her hair brush and combs and a series of ribbons and stacks of yesterday's papers.

"Oh. No. Well—" Flush still, she colors a little redder as he recalls her attention to the pages, and so to the rest of the room and the state she's left it in. "Actually yes. Just a moment."

She wrings her hand from his, and with a great flurry of skirts and shuffling of papers, she moves to hastily scrape together the scattered stack.

"And just—and you may move the chair away from the wall. I will sit there so you may see to my pins. Yes? Good."

It's a good room to be in, the much the same way it's good to be in her house, to visit her workspaces. The difference is in the details, the way the signs of her work mix in among the scattering of ribbons and the open case and the drape of her wrap. He's never been in her bedroom, for all he's wandered through her house dodging her ghostly roommate. He likes that she's invited him in, even to this borrowed space.

His smile pulls wider at her blush, but rather than distract her from her task he retrieves the chair in question. When he lifts her dress from it, he folds it briskly, with more care than the fabric might deserve. Wysteria's choices in wardrobe tend to hold up well, but Ellis is still careful with it when he relocates the partially folded item to drape over her traveling case.

For lack of anything else to do with himself, he crosses the small space to open the shutters and let cool night air into the room before he turns back to her.

"My room is in a similar state," he tells her, which is such a bald-faced lie, one that he doesn't expect to get away with. Ellis delivers it to her very seriously, apart from the twitch of humor at the edges of his expression.

The poisonous look she shoots in his direction while she dredges up her armful of papers and stuffs them blindly into her leather folio says he hasn't—gotten away with it. But the preoccupation of kicking her traveling boots under the bed and straightening the bed covers themselves keep her from anything more cutting than, "I doubt that very much."

The folio is flung onto the desk alongside her writing kit. The half folded dress he tended to so carefully is unceremoniously shoved the rest of the way into her case, the lid snapped shut after it. At least she'd had the foresight to put yesterday's stockings away, and he will not know the difference between hair ribbons and garter ribbons so it hardly matters that the latter are what's draped on the bedside table.

Probably.

When at last she moves to the chair, it is with brush and comb and a small, plain wooden box in her possession. She keeps all three in her lap.

"All right," she announces, very seriously indeed for her heart feels very high in her chest and she is thinking—. "I am ready. Do as you will, Mister Ellis. Tell me if you require instruction."

She is thinking of nothing at all, Wysteria decides, and instead opens the box in preparation to receive the assortment of pins that will be coming out of her hair.

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