CROWN OF THORNS
Chapter Three: The Winter Term
We had coffee four more times before December, and I stopped pretending to myself that counting wasn't a symptom.
Then coffee became dinner, once, at a restaurant near the university. Not student price, which he had chosen deliberately, and which I noted and said nothing about, because saying something would have required admitting how much I liked being chosen for.
The dinner ran two and a half hours. I told him about Glasgow, my father, a secondary school history teacher who taught me that arguments had structures and that understanding the structure mattered more than winning; my mother, who ran a community legal advice centre and taught me that the people with the best arguments were not always the people who deserved to win. He told me about London, his parents, both barristers, who had handed him the performance of legal intelligence before the substance and left him to build the substance himself.
"Your father performed in court," I said.
"Yes. Very well. He's very good."
"And the substance?"
"Also good," he said. "But the performance came first. He learned to look like a barrister before he learned to be one."
"And you?"
He looked at me, and something behind his eyes went unguarded for the length of a breath.
"I'm trying it the other way."
"Since November."
"Since November."
He walked me back to my hall after, a twenty minute walk through the December cold, the city lights catching the frost on the pavement, the particular quality of two people who have talked for two and a half hours and run clean through the conversational version of themselves into something underneath it. Our arms brushed twice. Neither of us moved away.
At the door of my hall:
"Mara."
"Yes."
"Do you know yet?"
I looked at him, at the question he'd asked properly for the first time without a hint of the stage smile anywhere near it.
"No. Not yet."
"All right."
"Cole."
"Yes."
"The performance," I said. "The charming and the strategic. Has it disappeared entirely? When you're with me?"
He thought about it, properly, the way he thought about arguments.
"Not entirely. But I know when I'm doing it. Which is new."
"What does it feel like?"
"Wrong," he said. "Like lying in a context that doesn't need it."
"And the non performing version?"
"Frightening," he said. "A bit."
I felt something in my chest loosen at that, an honesty I hadn't expected to want this badly.
"Good."
"Good?"
"Frightening means it's real," I said. "The things that aren't frightening are the things you've already mastered."
"Mara Flynn."
"Yes."
He leaned in and kissed me.
Not the performance. The other version, the one I'd watched accumulate over four coffees and a dinner, patiently, like something being built rather than deployed. His mouth was warm against the cold of the night, tentative where the performance would have been assured, which was exactly right, which undid something in me far more thoroughly than confidence would have.
I kissed him back, my hand finding the lapel of his coat, holding on rather than pushing closer, though closer was what every part of me beneath the collarbone wanted.
It was brief. He stepped back first, and I had the distinct sense it cost him something to do it.
"Cole."
"Yes."
"That was..."
"The honest version," he said.
"Yes."
"Good night, Mara."
He walked back into the December night, and I stood at the door of my hall for a long moment, my fingers at my own mouth, and thought: yes. That was the honest version.
And the honest version is what I've been waiting to see.
* * *
The term ended. Christmas. I went home to Glasgow. He went to London.
We texted in a way that was about nothing and everything at once, shared articles, a question about the Braithwaite-Pettit paper he'd apparently gone and found, a photograph of the Forth Bridge in the snow sent without commentary, which I saved without replying and looked at more often than I would have admitted.
He called once. Not texted. Called. The Tuesday before Christmas, his voice low and private in a way it never was in rooms full of other people.
"The Forth Bridge," he said.
"Yes."
"I looked it up. You're from Glasgow. The Forth Bridge is Edinburgh."
"It's the same country."
"Did you take the photograph?"
"Three years ago. I was visiting a friend."
"Why did you send it?"
"It was snowing here," I said. "The bridge seemed right."
"For snow."
"For... I don't know. It looked like something I wanted to send you."
He went quiet in a way that felt, even down a phone line, like being touched somewhere careful.
"I like that," he said.
"What?"
"I don't know. As a reason."
I looked at the Christmas tree in the corner of my parents' sitting room, thirty years of mismatched ornaments, entirely incoherent and entirely right, and felt the particular ache of wanting someone in a place they had never been.
"Cole."
"Yes."
"The January term."
"Yes."
"What do you want?" I said, and let the question mean more than it pretended to.
He was quiet a moment, long enough that I could hear him breathing.
"I want to see you. And talk to you. And not... I want the non performing version to be what we are."
"Is it possible? The non performing version, consistently. Given your life."
"The rooms," he said.
"The rooms," I said. "The networks. The strategic version of everything."
"With you?"
"Yes."
"With you it's... I don't want to perform. It would be insulting to perform to you. You'd see it immediately."
"Yes."
"So it's possible," he said. "Because the alternative is too obviously wrong."
"That's a strange basis for honesty."
"It's the honest basis for honesty," he said. "I'm not a naturally honest person. I'm a person who's honest with you because you leave no room for the alternative."
I thought about that for longer than the silence on the line should have allowed.
"Cole."
"Yes."
"January," I said. "Dinner again."
"Yes."
"And after dinner."
He went very still, I could hear it, the particular quality of a man holding his breath three hundred miles away.
"What about after dinner?" he said, and there was nothing charming in it now, only care.
"I know now," I said. "What I'm willing to have after coffee."
He said nothing for a long moment.
"Mara."
"Yes."
"January is two weeks away."
"I know."
"Are you..."
"I'm certain," I said. "If you're asking."
"I wasn't going to ask."
"I know. I'm telling you anyway."
Another silence, warmer this time.
"January," he said.
"January."
"Good," he said, low. "That's... good."
* * *
January. Dinner, the second time, lasted considerably less than two and a half hours, because somewhere between the main course and the idea of dessert we both stopped pretending the conversation was the point.
His rooms were warm against the cold outside, low lamplight, the particular hush of a building mostly emptied out for the evening. He closed the door and did not immediately cross the room to me, which I understood, afterward, as its own kind of question.
"Mara."
"Yes," I said, and crossed the distance myself, because I had never once in my life waited to be asked for something I already wanted.
He kissed me properly this time, no tentative version left in it, one hand coming up into my hair, the other settling at the small of my back like he'd been rehearsing exactly where to put it since December. I felt the kiss everywhere, a slow drop low in my stomach, my fingers curling into the front of his shirt to keep myself upright.
"Tell me if you want to stop," he said against my mouth, pulling back just far enough to find my eyes, and I understood, in that moment, precisely what he meant by the non performing version. This was it. No line he'd used before. Only the plain, careful truth of a man asking.
"I don't," I said. "I won't. Keep going."
He walked me back toward the bed with a slowness that felt deliberate, unhurried in a way that was its own kind of confession, and undressed me like he was reading something he intended to understand completely, his mouth following each new inch of skin he uncovered, unhurried over my collarbone, lower, until I had to grip the sheet beneath me and forget, for the length of several minutes, every argument I had ever constructed.
He's careful, I thought, somewhere in the part of my brain that still functioned analytically, even here. Especially here.
He asked, twice more, with his hand and with his mouth and with his eyes, whether this was still what I wanted, and twice more I told him yes, and the third time I stopped answering in words at all and answered instead with my hands in his hair, drawing him back up to me, and he understood that too.
When he finally settled over me, skin against skin, he held himself still for one long breath, his forehead against mine.
"Mara," he said, like my name was the only thing he trusted himself to say.
"Cole," I said. "I'm sure. Please."
He moved slowly at first, watching my face the entire time with an attention I recognised, because it was the same attention he had once turned on my arguments in a debate hall, total, unflinching, determined to miss nothing. I arched up to meet him, and the slowness broke into something more urgent, his mouth at my throat, my nails finding his shoulders, both of us breathing like the two and a half hour dinner had been a formality neither of us regretted skipping.
It built the way the best arguments built, each point compounding on the last, until there was no more room for observation at all, only the two of us, moving together in the low lamplight, until I came apart around him with his name on my mouth, and he followed shortly after, his face pressed into my neck, my name the last coherent word either of us managed.
Afterward, in the particular dark of a university room in winter, his arm heavy and warm across my waist:
"Mara," he said.
"Yes."
"The category error argument," he said. "In the debate."
"Yes?"
"You saw it in my opening."
"From your first line."
"And you let me continue."
"You were building the argument," I said. "I needed it fully constructed before I dismantled it."
He was quiet.
"You're ruthless."
"I'm precise."
"Both," he said. "You're both."
"Yes."
"And is this..." he said. "Are you being precise about this?"
I looked at the ceiling, his heartbeat slow and steady under my palm.
"I'm being careful," I said. "Which is different."
"What's the difference?"
"Precise is analytical," I said. "Careful means I'm aware of the stakes."
"The stakes."
"You're Cole Ashby," I said. "And I'm..."
"Mara Flynn," he said.
"Who beat you in a competition."
"Who I want to..." He stopped. "Who I think is extraordinary."
I looked at him in the dark.
"That's..."
"The non performing version," he said.
"Yes."
"And I mean it."
I looked at him, the January dark, the man who had taken perhaps and waited two weeks and kissed me with the honest version and called from London to say he wanted the thing underneath the performance.
"Cole."
"Yes."
"I don't think you're the person the reputation describes."
"No?"
"The reputation is the performance," I said. "I've been watching the person underneath it for two months."
"And?"
"And the person underneath it is someone I'm being careful about," I said. "Because the person underneath it is worth being careful about."
He went very still.
"Mara."
"Yes."
"That's the most careful compliment I've ever received."
"It's the precise one," I said.
He reached for me again in the dark.
"Good," he said.
"Good," I said.
The crown and the thorns, I thought, his mouth finding mine again, slower this time, unhurried, like we had the whole night and intended to use it. Not one without the other.
He's learning which is which.
So am I.
* * *