The Ornaments of Love

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Three hours before dawn, Dídac lay gazing at the shadows cast by the faint light from the open windows. The silence of her breathing made his every movement laboriously slow, as he went out of his way not to disturb her sleep. He should've left hours ago, but she had asked him to stay, and so he had lain in her bed indefinitely, confident that their first time together was a technical marvel and an utter disaster for both their lives.

Misery: that's what this is, he thought. He felt as if he were betraying everyone by lying here in her bed.

Herbed!

He wished he was with the Marquesa at this very moment. Dídac had not anticipated that his feelings would be as strong as this. He had figured the Marquesa was correct in her summation: a lover is a lover, and a lover would satisfy him.

But Dídac felt that he had raped this girl. This was not the behavior of the love that he felt for her. It was but an amazing series of orgasms that had swiftly come to an end, leaving him with a dark and filthy tension in his shoulders. More than once, Dídac felt that he too had been raped when the girl had drawn him deeper and deeper into herself.

This was agony. He had misunderstood his whole life until this night.

Who have I become?he pondered. The question rolled over in his mind in waves like the pleasure of his orgasms, impossible to suppress or ignore. He had not understood that the physical ecstasy and the love he had clung to in the Marquesa's arms were two separate phenomena entirely.

He did not truly love Veronica. He knew this pain clearly now. There was no conflict in the matter. He had never loved her, despite all he had dreamt of in her, the woman who would be his wife, the woman he had shared so much with. But that was the crux, wasn't it? He had shared so much with her but had never truly given any of those letters to her out of love. He had given them merely to feel some small sense of communion, and the adoration from her eyes. She had adored him, the passages in her stories when she had feigned propriety and spoke directly to him, those words of adoration tainted with love.

Perhaps he had given them to feel the self-worth that his father had denied him.

But he had loved her only for the joy that he had felt, this simple result of her romanticized impressions. Beyond the adoration, all he had felt was uninspired possession, and now at the end, the fatigue of duty.

He could not remain in this room, not now. Moving with difficult silence, he slipped from the bed and began to feel around the room like a blind man for his clothing. The pungent smell of their sex was all over him and it rose up into his brain as he stood in the dark, using his feet as hands to search the dark until he had found his shirt.

Something there on the floor, he could feel it but couldn't figure out what it was exactly.

A loud clang echoed through the room as the desk chair crashed to the floor, forcing Dídac's shoulders to rise in a hardened state of fear.

Veronica sat up in spite of herself and uttered, "What was that?" in a clumsy mumble, hovering on the border of reality and her dreamscape.

"It's all right," he whispered to her immediately. "Everything's all right, just go back to sleep."

Any other night, she might have done just that, letting the flesh instruct the mind. However, the timbre of his voice was such that she immediately awakened into a lucid consciousness and rose from the bed to take account of what was happening.

For the first few seconds, she did not realize the voice commanding her was Dídac's, nor did she remember that she was naked. She could not even think to light a lamp in the dark shadows that she moved through.