Late-night assignment

[Noémi Jourdain]

As though the champagne glass had been an anchor, its unburdening left him to drift in comfortable waters. Noémi’s gaze naturally drank in the lines of his body as he reclined. He looked beautiful like that, and it seemed more strikingly intimate than anything else she could have imagined of the evening. In fact, she felt strangely protective of him in that unguarded moment. The charm of his mood lulled her, and as formality stripped the weight off his own shoulders, it slipped further away from hers. She leaned into the cushions beside him, propped upon an elbow. The heels slipped delicately from her feet, which tucked up gracefully beneath her.

She was not sure if he offered a memory or a fantasy, but it seemed too fanciful to be a dismissal of her curiosity. It was certainly more answer than she had expected, and the reflective mystery of it beguiled her more than their expensive surroundings or even his nonchalant use of power. It was not just that she wanted to know him, but that each poignant moment of connection chimed something deep inside. Her imagination unfurled the detail like a tapestry, not as he might have been in his distant past – nor how she thought he might see it himself – but as she witnessed him now.

"I sometimes feel dreams and memories are indistinguishable," she mused after a moment. “They are a preservation that often speaks to us of absence. I do not mean that as a bad thing, of course. It is the same concept that first drew me to photography."

The world itself trembled beneath the Ascendancy's touch. Nothing was beyond the realm of his desire – in fact the very bones of the earth might reform themselves to his better liking, if he wished it. Yet Nikolai chose something utterly impossible, even for him. Perhaps it revealed the depths of his ambition – that she could well believe. That he determined impossibility, like shadow, to be only another tool to learn to bend to his whim. But she wondered too if it spoke of something softer. He had never been sentimental, and she did not think it was a longing. Yet it was something so human. Something so fallible. Who, these days, would dare criticize the Ascendancy of anything? A god’s due was power untold; reverence, respect, awe, adoration. But she wondered if it also begot a certain amount of loneliness.

That, at least, was something she could share with him.

When his fingers traced her cheek it felt like worship at an altar. He touched her like she was something sacred, yet Noémi was no goddess; she felt every human flush of blood beneath her skin at the intimacy. Her breathing deepened. Nikolai did not have a gaze well suited to tenderness, but its intensity enlivened her senses in those moments of his quiet contemplation, and she felt no desire to break away from the captivation. It quieted her heart like a promise of home, and she only wished he might trust her enough to share the thoughts shielded within. To finally let the itinerance of her soul truly rest back in those hallowed halls once more.

If the brush of his mouth was a genteel invitation or simply a decorous gesture of his interest she did not know, but she welcomed him with parted lips. Though it was years in the past, Noémi had once made a career weaving art and poetry into seduction. But she had always been its arbiter; she’d never fallen under the spell of it as she did now. She had never before wanted to.

Her palm smoothed against the line of his jaw, and as desire threaded her through it did not feel like exploration but affirmation. Like remembering. She already knew this man would be both salvation and ruin.

“Do you really see only what everyone else sees?” Beauty was an ephemera she had never cared for. It followed her all her life, and was not something she had earned. Yet compliments were not things she yearned to hear from his lips, like she was but a bloom among many to be plucked from the fields of Elysium. Her nose brushed his. He had not been contemplating her at all those last moments; she had seen vastness and complexity in his gaze, and it tugged at her more thoroughly than anything he could have said to draw her into his orbit. It was not a question needing of an answer, for she already knew. Because if she called him out, it was only because her soul was calling I know you. He would feel the hint of a smile against his lips; a rarity of its own. “I think it is not true.”

She did not melt like snows at first spring, but her kiss deepened into surety. Fingers snaked into his hair, parting like shadows. "You might likewise need to scold me, Nikolai, if I drink too quickly.”