The Confession That Cannot Reach

With a retch, water came surging back up from inside me, warmed by my body heat as it streamed down over my lips.

“Ria!”

Cough. Cough. I turned onto my side, still heaving up water, as Herman called out and lowered himself urgently down beside me. A large hand patted my curled-up back in a steady rhythm. It was meant, I knew, to help me bring the water up, and yet somehow it felt as though he were trying to set me at ease as well.

“Breathe slowly. Slowly now.”

Herman held himself close, not drawing even the slightest bit away, and watched me with a gaze in which anxiety and relief crossed and crossed again.

“Herman…”

I barely managed to call his name. The coughing had wrung every last drop of strength from my body; out of the water though I was, I was so spent I could scarcely draw a proper breath.

“Haah — honestly.”

At that, Herman muttered under his breath with a sigh, then gently drew me in and folded me into his arms.

“Thank God. That you’re safe.”

Against the cold, wet fabric and the faint warmth of his skin, the breath on the nape of my neck felt startlingly hot. Absurdly, a strange sense of relief washed over me. My tension unspooled, and I let myself lean into him and worked to steady my breathing.

“I’m sorry. It’s because I lost my footing.”

Once my breathing had settled a little, I apologized in a low voice. Careless as I’d been, I felt I had dragged Herman into danger along with me, and the guilt of it weighed on me.

But he only shook his head firmly at my words.

“No need to apologize. It’s enough that you’re alive.”

Herman held me close as though trying to press me into his chest for good, seemingly working to steady a heart still shaken by fright.

But more than that…

All at once I realized how very close our bodies were pressed together. His water-soaked shirt clung to his skin, and my dress was no different. Unable to hide my fluster, I squirmed a little there in his arms.

“You— you’re too close.”

Straining to draw myself back, I looked up at him.

“If you’d just let go of me…”

He watched me a while with unsteady eyes, then let his brow drop weakly to rest against mine.

“…”

The touch was exceedingly light. And though the meeting of our foreheads burned as if two worlds had collided, it remained, without question, the smallest of movements. Yet I could not breathe properly. Through clothes the water had robbed of all their function, Herman’s warmth came through more and more distinctly.

“I like you.”

His voice dropped low, low enough to set the whole forest ringing.

For a moment I wanted to believe the words were wholly mine; in the same breath I hoped my mind had failed me and I’d merely misheard.

“I said I like you.”

His dark eyes were fixed straight on me. His gaze didn’t waver, as if to prove the words weren’t just a slip of the moment.

“I realized it when you weren’t breathing.”

Herman said.

“That holding my feelings back under the pretext of waiting for you had been nothing but an excuse.”
“…”
“I was simply afraid. Afraid you’d refuse me to the very end. Afraid I’d be left all alone again.”

This was dangerous. Every instinct I had was telling me so.

“That’s what frightened me, and so I kept putting it off. I did.”

A sense of obligation welled up in me, as though I had to deny his feelings this very instant. I drew hastily back from his arms and wiped my wet cheek.

“Herman, you truly are a good man.”

My voice trembled far too much. His sincerity was endlessly sweet and, in the same breath, endlessly bitter.

“So even if someone other than me became your wife, you’d surely be able to cherish and love her just as dearly.”

I knew the words I was spitting out were terribly cruel. But I could not stop, for I believed this was the only way to protect us both, Herman and myself.

“What is that supposed to mean?”
“This feeling of yours, that you like me. I’m telling you it’s a delusion.”
“Are you saying that in earnest?”
“I’m not unaware of it, you know. That this marriage was one hastily arranged because you were going off to war, Herman. You needed a wife to safeguard your interests and your property — isn’t that right?”
“You…”
“And it’s no different now. In the end, all you need is a wife who’ll bear you an heir and build you a stable household — is that not so?”
“…”
“Anyone who could fulfill that duty — you’d have loved whoever it was.”

Herman said nothing for a long while. He only gazed quietly at me with trembling eyes.

“Yes. It’s no wonder you’d think that.”

After a time, in a voice sunk very low, he told me that he understood. He was not at all put out, contrary to what I had expected.

“I’ll admit it honestly. Before the war, I hadn’t much interest in marriage or a family. Blinded by my thirst for vengeance, I thought I only needed someone to safeguard the house, and that was all.”
“…”
“Going off to war without so much as stopping by the bedchamber on our wedding night — that was my fault, with no excuse to be made for it. Only, at the time, I thought it the last kindness I could offer you.”
“…”
“It’s terribly late, but — I’m sorry.”

I could make no response at all. This was not an apology I had any right to receive.

“I went through a great deal during the war, and I came to understand. How precious a thing it is to have a place to return to, and a family.”

And yet, however he had read my silence, Herman’s words began to come faster and faster.

“You’ll likely never know what it was to hear that the wife I’d assumed had long since remarried was, in fact, waiting for me.”
“I told you, didn’t I. That it may not have been you she was waiting for at all.”
“That I didn’t see with my own eyes, so it’s beyond my knowing. But the one thing I know for certain is that you are nothing at all like the rumors would have it.”
“No — that I’m nothing like the rumors…”

Atchoo. I broke off mid-word and sneezed. Early summer though it was, so long in soaked clothes had left me shivering, chilled to the bone.

“You’ll catch cold at this rate. Let’s head back now.”

At once, Herman swept me up into his arms.

“Wait— wait a moment. Put me down. I can walk on my own.”

Overcome with mounting embarrassment, I protested, working my feet up and down.

“Hold still. You’re heavy enough as it is.”

But Herman, like a train barreling straight ahead, showed no intention of stopping.

“That’s exactly why I’m telling you to put me down.”
“Ah — is it rude to call you heavy? I meant the dress, not you.”

The sheer nerve of him, truly. Seeing no sign that he meant to set me down, I gave up my pointless struggling. Better that than the two of us wearing ourselves out.

Far off, the carriage stood waiting at the edge of the forest. Herman carried me straight to it and set me down, then went back to gather up the belongings we had left behind. At some point, the jacket he had shrugged off had come to be draped over my shoulders.

“In the beginning it was guilt and duty, no question.”
“…”
“But not anymore.”

The carriage set off in haste. Just as its jolting had nearly carried us clear of the forest, Herman spoke.

“The wife I met again—”

He fell silent a moment, gazing out the window as if setting something in order. The tips of his ears, I saw, had flushed red.

“—was elegant, and wise, and considerate. And unlike how she seemed, she knew how to throw herself into things with real fire when the moment called for it.”
“…”
“Of course, every now and then she’d do the most absurd things. Honestly, sometimes I’d like to crack open that little head of yours and see just what’s going on inside it.”

A weighty stillness wrapped the inside of the carriage. The scenery slipping past the window flowed by like the time we had already lived through.

“But if there’s one thing I’m certain of—”

Herman turned his head to look at me. He reached out, crossed the two sleeves of the jacket over my shoulders, and knotted them together like a cloak.

“—it’s that you push me away with all your might, but that isn’t your true heart.”

The underhanded man had tied me up snug, so I couldn’t so much as flee, and then he whispered.

“Am I wrong?”

In that moment I understood. I had, in the end, carried the heart I ought to have left somewhere back in that forest all the way out of it after all. There was no other way to explain how Herman Ernst had seen straight through to the feelings I’d hidden so carefully away.

“What I’m saying is, I didn’t confess for the sort of reason you imagine.”

As I gazed blankly down at the knot, Herman’s low voice came dropping over my head.

“Simply because it’s you.”

How many people are there in this world who can lay their heart bare as forthrightly as this?

“It’s you I like, Gloria. Because you are you.”

And yet, for all of that, none of it changed the one thing that mattered: this was a confession that could never truly be mine. Its ending, as ever, sealed with ‘Gloria,’ never with ‘Marienne.’ Such a heart would take wing and vanish the very instant my true name came to light, and the two of us, I thought, would never be able to reach one another.

For some reason, the rims of my eyes prickled.