Still, you have your small mercies. In place of selfish freedoms that would sully your family’s name and see you packed off to some dreary convent, you have found a kindred spirit. A confidant. Someone who dodges the unattractive prospect of shrinking to fit the title of wife by disappearing into books, trading jests which, spoken aloud, would be called cruel, and sharing cakes dusted with so much sugar your lips stick when you press them together.

Eloise.

She has the same kind of contained anger you do: held in behind the ribs, kept in check by manners that demand smiling compliance. When you are together, it stops circling and becomes a thing with purpose. You read to each other when nobody is watching; you try out speeches you will never be invited to deliver; you write pages meant for one pair of eyes and no other. A small club, and one women are not allowed. And secrets, precisely, are what can be had there. You are certain Eloise keeps hers. By the sheer act of never pressing, she makes room for you to keep yours.

As with anything that feels faintly revolutionary, your own secret is born in the places where people are permitted to be human. It happens because your lady’s maid has a simple yearning of the heart towards another, and no safe way to speak it. She has the feeling, and the fear, and a hand that will not steady enough to set it down. You see an opening where she sees a wall. You write the letter on her behalf, fold it, seal it, and slip it under the bedchamber door. After that, the requests begin to come—never plainly, always in small signals: a ribbon tied a particular way, a scrap of paper left where only you will find it, a glance held half a second too long. You discover, quietly, what power the pen has when the heart dictates and the mind merely makes it neat.

It is only fitting that your thirtieth letter should be written in the Bridgertons’ drawing room. Eloise is reading Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, neatly wrapped in an inconspicuous—and entirely out-of-character—copy of James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women, when Lady Bridgerton calls for her.

“It seems I must abandon the Sermons in order to pick lace,” she says, putting an extra measure of loathing on lace.

You smile. “Choose one that tears easily.”

Eloise nods, conspiratorial. “Do not go anywhere. I shall be back.”

The door opens and does not close. You sit with your back to it, and it would be difficult to tell who has entered intending to take Eloise’s place, were it not for the stench.

“I can smell all of last night’s endeavours on you, Benedict,” you mutter, nose still to the parchment. “You reek.”

Ah. A significant downside of spending your time at the Bridgertons’ establishment is Benedict.

Not because you have any real disdain for him—on the contrary. He has been lodged at the edge of your thoughts, in that periphery where notions are allowed to wander into forbidden country, ever since such thoughts first began to sprout in you. A fool with unrealistic dreams in the eyes of his mother, a buffoon to some, he somehow manages to make up for promiscuity and a contentious pursuit of all things hedonistic with something disarmingly plain: kindness.

He does not boast. He keeps most of his escapades confined to rumours he never troubles to exaggerate. He keeps his lovers’ names anonymous, as though their privacy is part of the pleasure, and not an inconvenience. There is an honesty in it that you cannot help but admire.

And admiration is a dangerous thing, when it turns its face towards wanting. Because what Benedict has, you want, too—the ease, the appetite, the liberty. With him, preferably.

Mind slipping into places you would rather it did not, you fail to notice that he does not dignify your remark with any answering sally. Benedict simply threads his way across the room and leans over your shoulder.

“That is quite a language you are using here,” he says, his mouth near enough to your ear that the words feel breathed rather than spoken.

Your head snaps to the side. “Oh, dear Lord,” you manage, the protest landing into Benedict’s cheek. “This is not—”

“Who is it for?” he asks, sliding the paper from beneath your fingers and beginning, quite shamelessly, to read. “I was certain that, much like Eloise, you were beyond earthly delights.”

You turn in the chair, swinging one arm over its back as though it might serve for a barricade. “If you mean slobbering, drunken men at balls as the full array of earthly delights I am permitted to choose from, then you are perfectly right,” you say, keeping your voice flat even as you reach for the page. “I am beyond them. Hand over the letter.”

Benedict does not look at you. There is a pause in which you could swear the tips of his ears go pink. “And yet you are writing quite… graphic filth,” he says at last. “About a man, I presume.”

“It is not about anyone I know,” you say, and at that you earn his glance. Heat crawls up your throat. “Oh—Lord help me. I, um—” You hide your face in your hands and speak through the spread of your fingers. “I may have found… a certain joy in setting down what others cannot say to their lovers.”

Your hands return to your lap. Your head dips; eyes fix themselves on the floor in hopes to find some mercy within it. “So I do it for them,” you add. “For a small price.”

Benedict mutters your name, his expression binding impishness and boyish bewilderment in unholy matrimony.

You stand abruptly, still reaching for the parchment, but Benedict simply lifts it higher—just beyond your grasp. “Please do not tell Eloise. Or anyone… for that matter.”

“Your secret is safe with me,” he says, and his smile shows that crooked canine you have, regrettably, thought about in scenarios that have nothing to do with food. “For a small price.”

“Extortion?” you huff. “Why am I not surprised?”

“Not extortion. I am no brute,” Benedict replies. “A favour.” A pause, intentful enough to be annoying. “Write one for me.”

You eye him, then fold your arms across your chest. Your foot nudges at nothing on the tiles, a small, useless rebellion, and then—against your better judgement—you relent. “Which of the ladies is so fortunate as to have you commissioning a letter for her?”

Benedict keeps smiling. Testing. “Not a lady,” he says. “A man.”

You bark a laugh, sharp and entirely unladylike. “A rather versatile rake, are you not?”

“You wound me.” His hand goes to his chest in something that aims for tragedy and lands, at best, in theatre. You roll your eyes. “Your judgement is inequitable. The only difference between you and me is that I perform the actions you only write of. The thoughts, however—” He steps closer. Offers the letter back, and when you reach for it, he keeps hold of it for one heartbeat longer, leaning in so his mouth finds your ear. “—we seem to share.”

Then he releases the paper.

“What would you like me to write?” you ask, quieter than you mean to, your face still near his.

“Do it as you would,” Benedict says, easy. “I shall tell you if I like it.”

The nerve of him pricks you, quick and clean. Anger, full stop. “I fear corrections are not included in my services,” you spit.

“I think a smart provider would reconsider, if the price is suitable,” he murmurs into your ear. It is not a threat. It is a challenge. “Like the silence of someone with many contacts.”

“Brute,” you say, because it is the only dignified response to being cornered by charm. “Fine. So be it. I shall remember this, Benedict.”

“I would hope so.” He looks pleased with himself, which only worsens the urge to bite. “I think it is the first time you and I are entangled in a scheme.”

“I have a feeling there will come a time when you will require my silence,” you say. “I hope you know it changes the way I shall provide it, and if—”

Something flickers across his face: interest, admiration, a quick, juvenile flash of joy at being met where he stands rather than indulged. “I like this,” he says, head tipping to the side. “Menacing agrees with you.”

“You are entirely insufferable.”

“You have three days,” Benedict tells you. He looks at you one last time before retreating towards the door and carries that image out with himself, alongside the words that he still cannot believe left your pen.

Excerpts, like: If you ever touched my mouth with your thumb, I think I would swallow it like communion. Nobody is as hungry as I am for you, compel Benedict to wish his memory were better than his imagination. A few lines on the page are enough to send his mind straight towards the images: open mouths with thumbs in them, then other parts of him.

Normally, he would stop himself, because normally, you are his sister’s friend. Today he is wrung out and defenceless. More and more moments happen when Benedict’s weak memory renders him forgetful even of that simple fact—when he stops seeing a girl and begins to see a woman, and not just any woman. Someone whose eyes reflect his own insatiability and lust for life. A kindred spirit, only far more miserable, because she is trapped in a body even more constricted than his own.

One line stays with him when he stumbles into bed with your face behind his eyelids: If there is a God for the wild parts of a person, He keeps no parlours. He lives in the hedge and the ditch and the mouth of the wood, where things do not apologise for wanting. Benedict thinks himself converted to do the bidding of that God. He falls asleep wondering whether that God grants people who want the same thing a bond that can outlast them.

As promised, three days later, an envelope arrives at his bachelor lodging. It bears a sigil of orchid pressed into white wax. Hands traitors, he takes it shakily from the valet and closes the door of his bedchambers. Impatient to see if indeed, you’ve written it as you would, if you were allowed to be yourself.

Lover of Mine,

There is a tendon at your neck that tightens when you swallow, when you laugh, when you lie. I think of it at the most improper hours. I think of my tongue laid there, greedy and patient, learning the pulse of you the way a creature learns a trail.

I think of your mouth, too; how easily it can be made to open, how it would look with my fingers at the corners, widening you as though I mean to see the whole of you at once. I would take the brine I draw from you and use it like holy water, as though it might keep me from sinning further, when it would only teach me the shape of my next offence.

Where your heart beats, I want my nails to leave their blunt testament, so that, later, when you dress and step back into the world, it knows you have been touched by something that lives on desiring you. I want you marked, not for shame, but for recognition. Between your legs lies the root I want to taste and take; I want to learn it until my mouth aches with it, until you have no choice but for your lungs to remember me. Let me cling to you like damp to stone, long after you have tried to be good.

Yours, to the last drop of my blood.

There’s a space underneath for him to sign. It looks particularly offensive without your name bled into parchment. You’ve written it oblique enough for any man to fit, and what Benedict should feel is that it is thoughtful and clever of you. What his hunger supplies is entirely different: he can insert himself into every paragraph and picture your fingers and tongue doing what your pen promises.

An ornate box with a trap that mauls prying limbs opens for him. The surface of its maw holds the pain of shouldn’t Benedict struggles to conquer his entire life. Once he trespasses deep enough, it dissolves into pleasure of pressure, familiar and new, where he tries his best to make himself believe his hands are not calloused from brushes, and are actually yours.

When he meets you again he’s weighted down by guilt of what he’s done with your image in his head and awful feeling of hollowed bones. Another rich family’s ball that cannot compete entertainment-wise to anything Benedict can have at Granville’s salon, yet he chooses this. To seek you out. To ask for more.

He finds you flanked by Eloise, seeping brandy and tucking your dance card into your cleavage having scouted a suitor approaching you.

“My favourite brother, in his least favourite place,” Eloise announces as Benedict comes up behind you, bright enough to earn a glance or two from nearby clusters.

He takes your hand anyway, because etiquette is a shield he knows how to wear. When his lips brush your knuckles, you murmur, low and sweet, “Violet’s tendrils reach even the fiercest fighters, I see.”

Benedict arranges his most innocent face. “Here I was, prepared to rescue you from that snotty gentleman who has had his eyes on you for the better part of an hour, and I find you far more interested in crushing me with my sister.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” you say, and when he starts to retreat you catch his sleeve, quick and sure. “Now you are my favourite brother as well.”

“That is what I thought.” He turns to Eloise. “Eloise, you are next on my list of damsels.”

Eloise gives him a look of someone who’s long accepted their fate. “I am quite alright.” She reaches for the drinks table, already moving away. “I shall drown the sorrow of this double betrayal in another glass and go and find Pen.”

Benedict offers you his hand again. You take it, and he leads you to the floor before your suitor can collect himself.

His palm settles at your back. Fingers find the line where cloth gives way, bare skin just above the seam, and the contact draws a traitorous breath from between your lips that Benedict both hears and feels. He is not proud of how quickly his own lungs answer. The music begins; the room loosens around the rhythm.

“I sense a secret intention beneath this act of chivalry,” you say, voice pitched for him alone. “Was the letter not to your lover’s liking?”

“Oh, it was to his liking,” Benedict says. On the next turn he brings his mouth near your ear, close enough that the heat of him lands there and holds. “So much so that I find myself in need of another.”

“Benedict,” you warn.

“I will pay you, if that is what you require,” he answers, unbothered. “With money. Or with a favour.”

“Interesting.” Your eyes narrow. You take a deeper breath, and it presses you a fraction closer in the hold. Benedict’s gaze strays once, then he drags it back to your face like a man correcting himself. “I shall ponder the favour I will require of you,” you say. A beat. Then, a shy, soft sweetness. “Have you read it?”

He nods, slow. Releases you for the turn and catches you again, your back briefly to his chest, his hand heavy on your waist. “Who did you write it for?”

“For your lover,” you say.

Another turn brings you face to face again, close enough that he can see the discomfort gathering before it shows. “And who did you think of?” he asks.

“What is this to you?” you return, honestly bewildered.

“I am curious,” Benedict says, and the steps pull you in again so he can put the words at your temple, private. “How a lady who keeps appearances so well writes about learning pulses and tasting roots.”

The distance returns with the next figure, and he meets your look full on. “I meant no offence,” he says, quieter. “It was magnificent. Inspiring.”

“What did it inspire?” you ask.

Benedict’s mouth curves, the same insolent little tilt he uses when he thinks he has the upper hand. “What is this to you?”

“Inspiration for further work,” you say, mid-turn. “Ouroboros of filth.”

“I will tell you,” he says, and when the pattern brings you back together your chests meet with the smallest, indecent jolt, “if you write me another.”

“That’s settled, then,” you answer, and the calm of it hits him harder than any raised voice.

The dance ends with both of you bowing. He steals one more glance at the place your features betray a fluster, and cherishes it. It helps him survive the evening. It helps him keep his forearms relaxed when other women touch them, and his smile steady when they offer their bland jokes.

He receives the next letter as before—days later, with the same wax and the same stamp. It speaks of bathing in waters that have nothing to do with rivers, lakes, or seas. Of the tempest that plagues people who cannot crawl inside their beloveds and live there. This time, your hand has got ahead of you: it is signed with a crooked B you have managed to conjure from the first letter of your name. Just as before, it is witty and melancholic in a way that leaves his loins aflame and his lungs feeling shallow.

To keep his part of the agreement, he uses an afternoon tea at Anthony’s, where the men are preoccupied with politics and the women entirely engrossed in children. He gives you a prolonged glance, then retreats to the library—unnoticed, and as clever as ever in the art of social disappearance.

Your excuse from the table earns you absent-minded nods and smiles, the sort granted to anyone who looks like they are doing something sensible. The library is a wild guess. Where else does one go, if one intends to speak of literature with any seriousness?

When you reach it, the door is ajar. Benedict is inside with his back to it, fingers skimming the spines as if he is searching for a particular title and cannot quite decide what it ought to be.

“You wanted to see me?” you ask, palms entwined behind your back.

“I dislike having debts,” he says, without turning. “And I believe I owe you a story.”

“And is it a story fit for an afternoon tea with approximately ten children running about the house?”

“Most of them are toddlers. I do not know much about children, but I do know toddlers do not run very fast.” He turns then, and props himself against the shelves with an ease that feels practiced. “It is also safest in the lion’s maw.”

“I think it an unfortunate figure of speech.”

“Always so clever.” His mouth twitches. “Come.”

He beckons you closer with two fingers, casual. The thrill hits you in a way you resent. Daylight. A respectable house. People within shouting distance. This is the sort of small trespass you are meant to outgrow, and yet it feels like learning. Acquiring, in bright hours, knowledge you suspect would still be denied you even if you did the proper thing and capitulated to a husband.

So you go. Benedict’s finger points closer still. You walk until you are beside him, nose near enough to the books that you can smell old paper and leather. Then he slides behind you. One hand comes up to the shelf beside your head, palm flat to the wood, boxing you in without touching.

“We should be quiet in the library,” he explains, voice lowered.

“A noble motive,” you murmur. “How clever of you.”

“What would you like to know?” he asks, and his breath stirs the hair arranged at your temple. “Keep looking at the books.”

“Everything,” you say. “Everything that sprouted from what I wrote in your name.”

He hums, as if considering where to begin, and then gives you a name as though it has always existed. “Call him Thomas,” Benedict says. “Thomas has a way of listening that makes a man forget himself. He read your letter and did not laugh once. He did not mock it, either. He took it seriously. He wrote back. He said he had never been spoken to with such… hunger. He said he could feel it on his skin.”

Benedict’s voice stays even as he lays it out, placing details like pieces on a board. A room, a door, a hand at a throat. A kiss stolen in a corridor. He speaks of a meeting that required caution, of risk, of wanting to be marked and kept. He makes it sound plausible enough to pass at a distance.

Up close, it gives him away.

He is too smooth. Too quick. The story moves as if he has already decided what each part should do, and now it is only a matter of saying it aloud. He does not stumble. He does not swallow. His breathing does not change. Nothing in him catches, as if focus were overriding the passion. If this were true, if these moments belonged to him, he ought to have some tell. A hitch, a heat, a crack in the polish.

The story of Thomas does not stir anything in you. Something else works though. What you feel with your whole being is his hand, a hairsbreadth from yours when you shift your fingers on a spine. His chest suspended at your back, not touching, and still crowding your breath. The warmth of him, the smell of him—spirits and soap, something stale that suggests too little sleep. The fact of his mouth near your neck, and the ease with which he could choose to use it. The fact of his palms, and where they could settle if he so wished. How simple it would be, in the space between one careful step and the next, to turn this from talk into something else entirely, to grabbing your waist, hoisting your skirts, to—

His voice carries on behind you, steady, persuasive in the way a man persuades himself.

You turn your head only a fraction, enough to let your words reach him without being heard by anyone else. “You lie to me,” you say. “Was your lover not satisfied?”

Now—the hitch in his breath arrives. He folds it into a scoff, then an incredulous little laugh, the kind meant to put you back in place by making you smaller. You turn in the tight space, face stern. Benedict sees the hurt in your eyes and still clings to hope.

“Which part of what I have told you sounded untrue?” he asks.

“Everything,” you tell him. “I am beginning to think either your lover was left entirely unimpressed, or that such a person as Thomas does not exist. Which is it?” Your chin lifts, defiant. “Am I bland, or is it simply impossible to entertain spectres?”

“You are not bland,” Benedict says under his breath. “But if I tell you the whole truth, you will hate me.”

You blink. Then smile, and your quiet laugh is your turn to test him. “Have you made someone miserable? Made a fool of me? Betrayed me?” you ask. “If not, I cannot hate you.”

He closes in. His jaw rasps against your cheek as he speaks, too close for sense. “I have been… touched… by your words, and by—” A swallow; you feel the motion like an echo in your own throat. “By myself. Wishing for you.”

You stay very still, nails biting into the wood behind you. “So there was no recipient,” you murmur.

“I was him. I am him.” His mouth finds your ear and sets the words into it. Warm lips, wet, licked over again and again. “Are you disgusted?”

You take a second, properly. Not disgusted. Never that. Not by Benedict, not by sincerity offered this plainly. The feeling is hotter, sharper, and it makes you careful. “If I said I was,” you mutter, low and wolfish, “would my silence be considered a favour?”

“Willful creature,” Benedict rasps, pushing his nose into the line of your hair. “What is it in that head of yours that you want?”

“The arrangement has changed.” You put your hand to his chest and shove, palm flat, feeling the quick flutter of his heart answer the beat in your wrist. “Show me,” you say, and by some miracle, your voice remains even, “how touched you were.”

“And if I say no?”

You pause. It would be unbecoming. And besides, it would be a blow aimed at yourself. Worse, it would betray the freedom you have been trying to reach.

“Then we will speak of this no more,” you tell him, solemn. “This is not the way I wish to be cruel.”

Benedict holds your eyes. “Do you wish to be cruel?”

“Sometimes,” you say. “But sweetly. Desirably.”

His hands find you like you’ve pictured it countless times. Your waist, fingers digging into meat, back pushed into wood. “Be cruel to me,” he says. “Tell me what you want.”

Your palms rest on his forearms. All willpower gets sent there, so they won’t tremble. Breath saws through your nose when you speak. “Touch yourself.”

Benedict’s eyes go deliciously wide. His fingers twitch where they hold you, then, by some mercy of the God of wild parts of a person, they drift to his shirt. He drags it free, untucks it, and palms himself through his slacks as if waiting to be told what to do next. Even now, impertinence clings to him.

“Properly,” you chide. “As you did during your reading sessions.”

“I need your wicked tongue for that,” he says, and works at the fastening.

You nearly miss it, too busy staring at the swell between his legs, at the dark scatter of hair at his navel, the straining root, when—your eyes meet briefly, and you keep your gaze there. Below his lashes where he’s under your spell and begging. “Talk to me,” Benedict says.

Your hands slip from his arms. One goes to his cheek, tender. “Do you seek praise?”

He nods, mouth agape.

“That is… oddly endearing.” A real, girlish laugh escapes you. “I thought of you too. Of your mouth. This mouth—” Your thumb swipes his lips, slips inside, and tests its weight on his tongue. “On different parts of me. Here—” Your other hand gestures to your neck, then lower, between your breasts. “And here.”

A sound leaves him. Breathy and wonderful, and yours, entirely. He draws himself out, bare in his hand, and his strokes are strained, fist unforgivingly tense. The head of him is darkened, weeping at the tip, teasing your own tongue to slip out and your knees to buck. “Is that how you did it?” you ask.

“Yes,” he breathes. His words keep trying to run ahead of him. “With your mouth in my head.” Firm hand clasps your shoulder, drawing you in until his forehead’s flat meets yours, breath all over your face. “On me. With your knees scruffed, ah—”

“I would,” you tell him. Hold him by the neck and keep the tension in his tendons until when you get to write about it. “I’d kneel for you. Learn you. Your shape inside me, when you’re rigid and after,” you say. “When you soften… and leak from me.”

“How are you real?” Benedict says, his mouth flattened against yours. His fist bumps your hip when it moves. Looking down, you see his slacks fallen to his knees and you take in every small gesture that brings him close: the thumb pressing the head, gathering the slick; the way he pulls himself away from his stomach; the twist of his wrist when it comes up, then the sharp descent that nearly has him punching his own abdomen. “Kiss me,” you feel him say into your lips.

“No,” you pout. “I need my mouth free, don’t I?”

“Beautifully cruel,” he says, shakes his head. “What else would you do? Where would you want me?”

“I want,” you bite your lip, “the shape of this tooth—” Your thumb hooks on his crooked canine and presses until his head cocks back a notch. “On my inner thigh. Only for me to see. Bruise me,” you say, spurring him on. “Take me. Show me what it’s like to be unafraid.”

Your calves burn from keeping you both upright. Between your legs there is a violent tug that spreads to your belly and pulses, wet and salacious, and it makes you say too much. “When you come back smelling of gin and bodies it makes my gut twist.”

“You say I reek,” Benedict mumbles, lost now, in the little space under your ear.

“Because I can’t stand the thought of you tangled with others when I am here, painfully untouched,” you tell him. You catch his cheeks and rub your face on his. “I want you to reek of me. I want to reek of you.”

“By God, darling,” he groans, “I am—” It breaks into a choked gasp. “Where do you want me?”

“Here.” You lift your skirt and guide him to the naked sliver of skin in the crease of your thigh, where you mean to keep him. Your other hand finds his mouth, too bold for his own good, and holds. Your fingers muzzle him, and you smile, wicked. “And quiet.”

The tip grazes where you want it. His breath comes in short, tormented bursts over your palm, like he is blowing up a broken balloon. He presses himself fully and thrusts against you, close to where you dream of having him, and then warmth floods, stains the material of your undergarments and sticks to skin, wanted, cherished, won. His whole body tenses, holds that precipice for stretched out seconds, and then everything goes at once. His jaw under your touch relaxes. His shoulders slacken, the entirety of him becoming smaller. Fit to hold. To cradle.

A man who softens immediately becomes your favourite kind.

“How beautiful you are now,” you say, astonished—the last words you manage before Benedict’s lips find yours in an off-centre, hound-like kiss. Grateful and generous and wanting all the same. He holds your face firmly, stretches the skin of your cheeks, and tilts you so his tongue can find the deepest parts of your mouth.

“You are—” he mutters. “A miracle from the God who lives in hedges.”

Your laugh is relieved. Satiated, for now. “Are you converted?”

“He can have me if I can have you,” Benedict says.

He can have you, you decide.

When everything hushes down, when he tucks himself back into his clothing and makes himself look as though you have indeed been merely browsing books, you feel something you thought impossible: deeper breathing, a focus unlike anything you ever mustered over piano or embroidery. An opened door, and on the other side a landscape howling, dangerous, endlessly exciting.

You’ve touched freedom. And it tastes of Benedict.