An Education

V.

Author's Note: This chapter may provoke more questions than it will provide answers. However, I plan on publishing an extensive note on this story on my Tumblr (calenheniel.tumblr.com) for all those interested in the how's and why's behind this tale. (No obscure literary allusions, I promise.) Thanks for sticking it out with me to this point, and please enjoy the final part.

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V.

Days came and went; for him, it felt like weeks.

Hardly a moment passed when she didn't consume his thoughts, his visions, and his dreams, and he could still taste her whenever he absentmindedly licked his lips. His recollections of their last few evenings were tangled up together until he couldn't tell where they ended, or where they began.

You said you understood me. What did you mean?

She was incisive in her questioning, and he'd found himself increasingly at her mercy as their conversations lengthened, deepened, and tunneled into parts of himself that he'd kept hidden away for years. The misgivings he'd had about her motives and her true feelings hadn't gone away - he didn't think they ever would, entirely - but they had become more muted with time.

In turn, the defensive walls she'd barricaded herself with in their first few meetings had begun to crumble, and the outrage that belied all of her previous retorts to him had cooled as well.

It was lonely inside of the castle, for all those years. My parents tried to help me, but... they didn't understand who I was, or what I was. They could only look at me with pity, and pray that I could change.

But you couldn't.

No. But I trusted them, and I thought I could, too. I thought I could be different.

And you are.

Yes. Just not in the way they hoped I would be.

The pretense of "educating" her was falling away, leaving them in the uncomfortable space of honesty-and the even uneasier one of relating to one another. He had been surprised to see resentment in a woman who appeared, by all accounts, to be grace personified. In retrospect, her confident front at the start made all that much more sense to him.

But that's in the past.

It doesn't mean that things are easier now.

Even though Anna - and everyone else - knows?

She understands, but then she doesn't. None of them do. And it's hard for me to tell her these things about our parents, about... myself.

The revelations made him more careful in how he treated her, and in their intimacy. She likewise grew calmer when he touched her, and her own touch was gentler than before. His guidance, by turn, was more by suggestion than direct order; his words had become hushed and pleasant, and hers less cutting.

Then why are you telling me?

There were still things she would not allow him to do - to kiss her, to enter her - but she didn't protest when he whispered sweetly into her ear, or kissed the other parts of her face and form. Instead, she would sigh with contentment, curl into him, and bury her face in his chest and neck.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd let someone in this close.

Because there's no one else who would listen.

On the rare occasion, when her eyes met his, he saw genuine relief.

Isn't it the same for you?