Because I Get Jealous

By the time I made my way back to Herman’s side, a fair crowd had gathered in the hall. Any moment now, I thought, the trumpets would sound to announce the opening of the ball.

“I’m back.”

For some reason, Gloria stood pressed close against Herman’s side. And, absurdly enough, Cedric was there as well.

“Ah, Ria.”

Herman looked at me as though I were nothing less than his savior. I had no idea what I was meant to do with that, and only blinked back at him, bewildered.

Gloria’s eyes went from him to me and back again, wide with astonishment.

“Why, does Your Excellency call Gloria ‘Ria’?”
“Is there some problem with that?”
“Not at all. ‘Ria.’ What a lovely little pet name.”

Hmph. A coy, simpering breath slipped out through her nose. Then she arranged her face into an expression of touching earnestness, folded her hands together, and spoke as though deeply moved.

“To hear you call her ‘Ria’ in such a tender voice — it’s so very good to listen to. If it warms even me to hear it, how much more must it warm our Gloria?”

I hooked one corner of my mouth up into a cold sneer.

A warning, maybe, that I was bound to the name Gloria for the rest of my life. Or a sneer at how powerless I was to change it.

At such sheer brazenness, everything clamoring inside me went cold, utterly and icily cold. Until that moment I had never known that rage could be so cold an emotion.

“Where have you been, though, Ria?”

She had read my expression, and now her face was the very picture of distress.

“We couldn’t even start the ball, waiting for you.”

The concern was feigned, and the tone beneath it turned it into a deft little reproach.

“That is why I told you to begin without—”

Herman was on the point of taking my side.

“It’s quite all right, Mari. We can simply begin now, can’t we? The night is far too short to be picking over such things one by one.”

Cedric cut in and sliced Herman’s words off clean.

“Let us begin at once. Come, Mari.”

As though it were nothing at all, he wrapped an arm about Gloria’s shoulders and steered her toward the center of the hall. And all the way there he kept glancing back at me, again and again.

What’s with him? Creepy.

Wherever his gaze touched me, gooseflesh prickled up. At the same moment Herman glanced behind us too, checking whether something was there.

“Why does that bastard keep looking back at us? It’s foul.”

There was too much irritation in his voice. I had never once heard Herman speak so rawly, though my surprise lasted only a moment: his estimate of Cedric Drake ran so exactly alongside my own that I had to swallow down a laugh.

“Don’t smile like that over talk of Drake.”
“I’m sorry?”

I had hidden it as best I could, but he must have caught the laugh anyway. I hadn’t been laughing at Herman; had he taken offense all the same? I was hurrying to clear up the misunderstanding when he spoke.

“Smile that prettily only when you’re looking at me. Because I get jealous.”

Heat rose in both my cheeks, as though a red rose, swept by the summer breeze, had shed its color straight onto my skin.

I turned my gaze hastily to the middle of the hall, where Cedric and Gloria’s waltz was only just beginning. I tried my utmost to fix my attention on their dancing.

And yet, though my eyes stayed on the center of the hall where the chandelier light came pouring down, my every nerve was pulled elsewhere entirely.

Whether the restlessness in my heart came from Gloria, spinning round and round in her dizzying circles, or from Cedric, who kept sending his gaze my way.

Or whether it came from Herman, glowering sullenly at Cedric with a face gone thoroughly out of temper. That, I could not say.

Around then the hosts’ dance came to an end, and the invited guests sent up their applause. One by one, the people ringing the floor took their partners’ hands and stepped out to the center.

“Shall we, then.”

I gazed blankly at the hand Herman held out to me.

To dance with Herman, in the middle of all this confusion.

I knew it was something that had to be done, and still my body would not readily move.

“Ah.”

Herman cleared his throat once or twice at that, as though he had committed some great breach of manners.

“Would you grant me the honor of this dance?”

The question was courteous. So courteous that I found myself taking his hand as though truly bewitched.

“…Gladly.”

I laid my hand over his and answered.

And so began a summer night’s ball with no end in sight.

One, two, three.

And again. One, two, three.

Shoes clicked crisply across the snow-white marble. Among people turning round and round with their hands clasped in one another’s, Herman and I traced an elegant circle of our own to the lively beat.

The waltz had come into fashion in Balter only lately, and it had once sat at the heart of a scandal, on the grounds that man and woman stood far too close together.

At first I thought the claim was nonsense.

Was it truly possible for feeling to bloom in a person from a brief meeting of eyes, a brief clasp of hands, a brief arm about the waist? A dance was only a dance. Hearts entangling, I had thought, must be a far more complicated business than that. The claim that mere touch could stir up emotion had struck me as somehow overblown, no more than the fretting of an older generation that could not keep pace with the times.

But now I had the feeling that I might have to withdraw that arrogant thought.

Was Herman always this big?

The hand far bigger than mine had closed firmly around my own, and the steady arm circling my waist made any unease seem a trivial thing.

It’s a little too much.

This was hardly my first time dancing with Herman. So why was I so uncommonly conscious of every part of him?

“You ought to be looking at me, Ria.”

His voice came low and settled, pressing me to meet his eyes. Taking the dance’s broad, sweeping movements for my excuse, I bowed my head quietly and slipped away from his gaze.

“What if I lose my footing while my eyes are wandering?”
“Is giving me your attention what you call letting your eyes wander?”

Herman saw straight through my clumsy excuse in an instant.

“Then wander a little. I’ll hold you fast so you never fall.”

He grumbled it out, petulant, as if there had been no point at all in accepting the Drake couple’s distasteful request for a waltz, if I only meant to go on like this.

Letting out a small breath, I carefully met his eyes. But the moment the next figure carried us on I could not endure the long look, and turned my eyes away again. In the same instant he drew my waist closer still.

“There you go again.”
“Doing what?”
“You keep avoiding me.”
“It’s a delusion.”
“No, I’m certain of it. Ever since the day I confessed to you at the lakeside, you’ve been avoiding me without pause.”

I drew a sharp, hurried breath at his words, and my ankle turned beneath me. But he was bracing my body so solidly that I did not stumble badly; I let my weight rest on his arm and carried naturally on into the next figure.

The figure after that drew me far away from his hands, and in the little distance between us I could at last find room to catch my breath. Though of course I had to return at once into his arms.

“That day, I truly felt that our hearts were the same.”

Herman said it as he gathered my back into his hold once more.

“That is why I confessed my feelings.”

“…”

“I had thought we’d grown quite that close.”

There was not a tremor in his eyes. If anything they were resolute, as though he knew perfectly well every last thing I was trying to avoid.

“Lately I find myself wondering whether what I felt that day was nothing but my own delusion.”

I pressed my lips tightly shut. I meant to look away awkwardly, as I always did, but his eyes were so intense they might have been binding me in place.

There’s no escaping.

Just as he said, I had gone on avoiding Herman ever since the day at the lake. And so now, pinning me in place under the pretext of a dance, he seemed to be pouring out everything he had been holding down inside him.

Should I tell him, even now, that everything he felt that day was a delusion of his own making?

But I did not wish to be false with him, not to the very last. From our first meeting until now.

There were far too many truths I had never been able to tell Herman, and for that reason I had thought silence better than a lie. Perversely, having kept that silence so long and so deliberately, I found it rather laughable that this one sincerity should be the single thing I could not deny.

That, I truly cannot do.

I could not deny it. For in a world so utterly false, the one thing of which I could be certain was that in that moment, I too must have felt what Herman felt.

“!”

In that instant my body took flight like a single swan. Startled half out of my skin, I caught at his shoulders on instinct. It was only one of the waltz’s figures, the passage in which the gentleman takes his partner by the waist and lifts her.

“No matter how I turn it over, I don’t think it was a delusion.”

Simple dance step though I knew it to be, the sensation of being given over wholly into his arms was disconcerting beyond words. And in that same moment I came face to face with the ash-gray eyes I had been at such pains to avoid.

“I know I must wait for you.”

“…”

“But the greater my feelings grow, the less well I manage it.”

He set me lightly down and whispered, soft as a strain of music. Only Herman Ernst would lay his heart bare as plainly as that. To a man who hid nothing of his sincerity and only ever came at me head-on, I had nothing at all to say, and the lively waltz sounded more mournful in my ears than any music in the world.

“Of late I keep having a strange dream, too. One where no matter how I call to you, you never turn to look at me.”

“…”

“As though you would leave me just so, without ever once turning back. In the small hours I’ve woken and gone to look in on you.”

“…”

“To speak honestly. Yes — I’m afraid.”

At his last words, before I knew it, I had seized his hand tight in mine. Here was a man who had looked as though there were nothing in this world he feared, confessing that he was afraid of something. Even with my own two eyes upon it, I could scarcely believe it.

“Your pushing me away — it’s not all right with me anymore.”

I wanted to say something. Anything at all, even only that I was sorry.

At that very moment, at some point I had not marked, the strain of the music changed. In this waltz, where the couples formed up two pairs at a time, the moment had come to pass on to the next partner. The figures carried on with a strong beat, and it was time to move to the side.

Gloria and Cedric had settled into place right beside us.

As the music changed, Cedric caught my hand in haste and drew me to him. I passed over to him in a perfectly natural motion, and still, in my heart, I could not let go of Herman.

Herman’s dark eyes lingered on my fingertips as they drew away. Long, and very deeply.

As though telling me to come back to him soon.