Paramour
At the time, she couldn't really have been much older than sixteen. By now though she'd been in the 'business' for many years. Her Madam, a women with daughters of her own, demanded that a girl dance for her money for the first few years out actualy working. It was good for discipline, (You really had to work for every Jade sliver.) It was also good for a growing girls psyche.
"There are plenty of years to come filled with bedrooms and back alleys. For now, you need to learn to control your own body before you can expect to control anothers." As the older women would often say.
Of actual 'work' she'd landed maybe a half a dozen jobs so far. A number she'd some day surpass by astronomical leaps and bounds. For now though, she suplemented her own life style with dancing. She was good. Very good. With her body she could paint pictures so vivid painters would pay her not to model for them, but to dance for them so they might paint the far off destinations her dance conjured. Some would laugh that she had to be older than sixteen... She seemed to have been dancing for much longer than that.
Every night she would come to the same small inn. A place many of her kind had done business in since the First Age it seemed. More than a hundred faces must have filled the dimly lit room that has a makeshift stage for her to preform on. More men passed through here in a month than a girl could possibly keep track of. And yet, yet somewhere in the crowd, like clock work, she would see him sitting there.
He wasn't particularly handsome. That he'd never come up to proposition her she assumed not particularly rich. Never the less he would be there out in the audience and he watched her. His eyes seeming to look at her and past her at the same time. As if, she mused, he might be imagining her somewhere far from the smoke filled chamber of this place. It was good for busines when men fantasized about you, and yet something in the man's eyes were diffrent. Much more intent, intense than her other 'fans.' Some time later, the gifts started. Any evening that she danced, one of the girls who waited tables would stop her on her way off stage to hand her something. Once, she asked why they couldn't give her the gifts after she'd changed, the girl looked flustered and told her the man was very very insistant it be given to her as she left the stage. Little pieces of the puzzle fell together in her mind. How ever that only teased at her curiousity, not quenched it. The gifts varied. Sometimes beautiful poetry in languages varied and exotic. Some times little trinkets or peices of inexpensive jewerly. Sometimes just single elegant flowers. Gifts, she noted to herself, a poor man can afford.
Finaly, one night her curiosity could take it no longer. She arranged with the bars owner to put her name on the list of preformers through she had no intention of dancing. (The owner had grown quite found of her and more than a little curious about this enigmatic customer of his. He made it a deal as long as she told him what ever she found out.) So, demurly dressed and well covered she sat by the door to watch for the stranger. And he arrived. She watched as he sat quietly through the first three girls and their dances. His eyes never lifted to the stage. Instead, he hurredly scribbled onto a sheet infront of him, having to squint in the dim light. When it was annouced that Adele would not be dancing that night, he looked up shocked, seemed to pale a little and rose to leave in a hurry. With a grin, she rose and followed him out. It was like a dance really, to keep to the shadows out side of his view. In all honesty she could have walked beside him, he seemed so lost to the world. Twisting and turning through the streets of the little city he never stopped untill reaching a small private fountain infront of a little villa. The thing looked in poor repair as water tricked, rather than poured, from the founts. She watched him slouch agenst the fountain wall, and in disgust, tossed what ever he'd been writing into the water. The ink, not yet dry, dissolved and faded away.
"Who did you think you were kidding?!" His sudden outcry in the otherwise silent evening air made her jump. "That she'd come away and marry me! She doesn't even know I'm alive!" His hands shot violently up into the air and then fell to cover his face as he fell again, slumped next to the fountain.
She laughed. She hadn't meant to but his words caught her so off guard she'd either have to be angery, or laugh. "Is that what you think? That I'm some poor lost girl who has no idea what I've gotten myself into? That I need to be lured from such a place and made into a quiet, complasent, well behaved wife-thing?" She hadn't meant to sound so disgusted, like she was making fun at his expense. "Then go ahead! By all means. Ask me now. Right here."
When he looked up, shocked by her presence, and moreso by her words, she could see even in the darkness, that he had been crying.
His eyes were impossibly dark. Like the sky at night would be if the stars suddenly didn't exist. Deeper and richer than the most expensive inks of the south. Almost endless as if his soul went on forever; and right now they glistened with further unshead tears. His lips just fell open, trembling. She realized then, with a growing sense of self-loathing, she'd just reached into this poor boys subconsious and pulled up his worst nightmare, then made it happen.
He stood then, and did what any self respecting man should, he started twords his house without a word to her.
"No wait. I, I misunderstood." She followed, dumbstruck by her own insensitivity. Her madam had often warned that in her line of work she'd brake hearts, the important part was not to be there when the peices fell.
"Yes." He stopped, shoulders squared faced away from her. "It seems very clearly that you did. As did I. Forgive me, and goodnight." If words could wound, these did just as well as hers seemed to.
"No no, wait. Let me try to explain. I think that you think I'm something I'm not. I'm sure your far too good a man then deserves to fall victim to the illusion a Cortisan paints."
"'Too good'?" He spat the words and turned to face her. "You mean too poor."
"That too.." With a growing horror, she realized she couldn't lie to him. "...What I mean is, what you see when I dance is just a fantasy. It's not a real person, you shouldn't become so infatuated that you lose sight of that. That it's just an illusion."
"And only a fool falls in love with smoke my dear lady. I'm all too aware of all of that. It wasn't your dance..." His sholders sunk from the defensive, arms crossed his body language still betrayed he felt wounded. "Any two jade whore can shake her tail and arose the masses. It wasn't that that made me come night after night. It was something.." His hand jerked up suddenly and brushed so faint as to be a whisper of a touch by her temple. "....In your eyes. Like you wern't really there being leered at in a soiled barroom. And where ever it is you went while you danced, Ms. Adele, your eyes brought me with them."
Not suprisingly, she was left speachless. "I, I didn't know. I didn't mean too..." Stumbling dumb over her words, he cut her off easily, lowering his hand from that brief physical contact.
"...And I didn't mean to fall in love with you." He turned those impossible eyes away from her and looked to the ground, clearly ashamed of himself. "You should return to your home, these streets are dangerous at night. I'd escort you home, however knowing I'd been so close to where you dream might kill me."
Again he left her speachless. Where speach fails though, action wins. So she kissed him. Hard and reckless perhaps to stop him from uttering another pained sylible. Or maybe because so early in her carrer she wasn't that sure of her tongue and none of her training had prepared her for a situation like this. 'Love everyman, or no man, the choice is yours girl.' As her madam would often say.
After a moment, he pushed her away, the akward action of a man confronted with a dream he pushed away purely so it might remain a dream. "What... What are you doing?"
Ah, so he was caught speachless this time. "What ever I want. If you really want to know me, good sir, you'll know that first. What I am always doing, is what ever I want to do." So she kissed him again.
For all her 'tricks of the trade' that night the stranger she came to know as Sabin taught her something. His lession a subtle one her madam had never quite got through to her. He taught her the diffrence between sex and lovemaking. Years later, when she'd become a master of her arts, she could fool any man anywhere into thinking, should he desire it, that they were making love. For her however, it would only ever be sex. Except, with Sabin.
After that night he never mentioned marriage again. He never asked how long she'd stay or where she went when she wasn't with him. He would only stir a little when she'd creep in in the middle of the night, smile at her, and wrap his arms around her till she slept. It became an unspoken rule, that no matter how long she was gone, no matter where she stayed or with who, the moment she returned to that little town outside of Nexus, she'd return to his little villa and spend a night or two. After a while it occured to her they both pretended the world only existed when they were together. She could only imagine the kind of suffering he went through while she was gone. After all, he was in love with a women who could never really be inlove with him....
...Right? She didn't think about it much, she was still young enough that she could live in that kind of denial. Of course, he gave her things the most powerful noble never could. He gave her a safe haven where, for a little while, she wasn't an illusion, but a real person with hopes and dreams and asperations outside of courtly affairs and wealth. Inside his home she wasn't a Cortisan, she was just a girl, and he was just a boy. If nothing else could be admited, she could admit, he made her happy.
He became her place to hide. It went on like that for almost five years. Some days she'd count the hours untill she was back in that little town in his poor little villa. The years weighed on him, that much was more and more clear to her everytime she came. He never said a word about it, of course, he was far to gracious for such unnessary discomfort. If she asked after the long-labored look in his endless eyes or the deeping grife in his sigh, he would tell her only he prized every moment she spent with him and he wouldn't taint a second of it if he could avoid it.
So when it happened it came as less of a shock than she would have thought. It had been storming that night, and in her walk to his home she's been soaked to the bone. Years ago, if he wasn't asleep when she arrived, she could have been assured to get a joke or two about drowned rats in his home. When she creeped in and found him still awake, at a table, faced away from the door, with an empty bottle of something in his hand, the chill from the rain left her entirely. That is, to make room for a diffrent kind of chill.
"So... You... went and drank all the bottle and left none for me?" She sounded a great deal more akward then she had intended. That she knew of, he rarely drank, and never alone.
"Ahh... But this brew is not for one so fair." His words slurred from one to the other, he was drunk and that made her discomfort more keenly felt.
"Sabin this isn't like you. Come now, lets go to bed, eh? You can sleep it off and we'll talk about it in the morning."
"As if you'd still be here come morning." If it was meant bitterly, it didn't come off that way. Rather, he sounded sorry. "Your like the raindrops outside Adele. If I tried to catch you in my hand, you would slip away. If I tried to make you solid, you'd only be frozen and hate me forever for changing you. I'll.... I'll never forgive myself for not knowing how to hold onto you." She froze in her tracks and just looked at him, every moment his words slurring more into each other. He stood then and took her face in his hands. A touch gentle as if she'd dissapear if he wasn't careful. "I meant it when I told you I loved you. I loved where I was in your eyes. And..." He said with a shaky nod of his head. "I've finally figured out a way that I shant ever have to leave that place again."
She realized then, it wasn't herself she was afraid for. "How much of that did you have to drink Sabin? What was it?"
Just something for the pain my love. Just something to help me sleep." His figure, so long so much bigger then hers seemed to melt. To sag and cascade downward, and in the motion she found she was also buckling to her knees. There she was, with his head now cradled in her lap. "You know, if you'd let me, I would have been the perfect husband to your."
"I know Sabin."
"I'll admit, I always thought you and I would have made beautiful children together."
The little chuckle was somewhat easier then the tears that threatened. "Yes, as long as they looked more like me."
"Your turn. You admit something to me." His fingers and twisted in the little curls by her ear, stroaking aimless at her lob.
"I..." She stopped for a while. Watching him, knowing, nothing came to mind at first. When the words came to her finally, they spilled out and tumbled down before she could stop them. "... Sometimes I wished that you would wake me in the middle of the night and tell me that I wasn't allowed to leave. Sometimes, especially on rainny nights like this, I wished you would grab me up at the door before I could leave and stop me."
He was quiet for a long time, considering. "I know Adele." A crash of thunder drew his eyes, if slughishly to the window. "The sky weeps for you on nights like tonight Adele. Especially tonight."
She didn't ask him what he meant, she already knew. "And it wouldn't matter if I grabbed you now and told you that you can't leave me... Will it?"
He shook his head slowly. "I love you." He whispered again and the hand still touching her face fell motionless to his side. She watched, silent as the glimmer left those impossible eyes till they rested dull and she finally closed them with a hand.
"I love you too Sabin." It made it easier some how. To love him, or at least to admit it, when she knew the words couldn't hurt either of them. He'd done the single most wonderful and more horrible thing for her he could have realized. He left her alone.
Not long after, when the storm that seemed to last for days, she bought the house from the Guild who seemed to want to forclose on it. When ever she wasn't traveling, she'd stay there, sleeping in their bed and some nights even pretending a pillow behind her was just his sleeping form. She'd invest, over time, a little extra here and there untill she restored the old place to what it should be. A beautiful, if tastefuly small mannor in a little city. In the years to come she came to comfortably love his memory. It protected her, helped her coat her heart and make her untouchable. She could dance then from bedroom to bedroom and no one ever came close, because she was, and would be, inlove with his ghost.
And she carried him with her, in her eyes.
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