He woke more quickly the second time.

The breath came first, then the slow turn of his head. His eyes found me where I stood beside his chair, my hand still on the key. Something moved in them that I couldn’t read.

“You wound me again,” he said.

“You said it was going to be trouble.” My voice was steadier than I felt. “I wanted to hear what kind.”

Aurelian was silent for a long moment. The lamp hummed. The rain had softened to a whisper on the roof.

“Nell,” he said at last. “Sit down. Please. Not there—” as I reached for the chair at the card table. “Where I can see you.”

I dragged Gran’s footstool across the rug and sat on it, at his knee, looking up at him. Close enough to touch. I didn’t.

He looked down at me for a long time.

“I owe you honesty,” he said. “Your grandmother would have my head if I gave you anything less.” His long fingers flexed on the arm of the chair. “When you touched me just now, I felt it. Not the way I felt her kindness. I felt you. Your skin. Your warmth. The pulse in your wrist. I haven’t felt anything like it since before I was put in here, and I’m not certain I ever felt it even then.”

My throat had gone dry. “And?”

“And I want more of it.” The words came out low and rough. “I want it the way a starving man wants bread. I sat in this chair all evening playing cards with you, Nell, and losing badly, and all I could think about was whether you’d touch me again.”

Heat climbed my throat.

“That’s what you meant,” I said. “By trouble.”

“Yes.” His eyes held mine. “I won’t pretend I’m not something strange, or that I know what I am, or what wanting you might do to either of us. And I can’t take anything from you. I can only feel what you choose to give.” A pause. “So it’s yours to decide. All of it. Whether you give me anything at all.”

I looked at his hands.

They rested on the arms of the chair, long and pale and elegant, the porcelain glowing faintly in the lamplight. I remembered how they’d felt around mine. The warmth spreading through them. The faint, impossible softening.

I remembered being looked after.

I was thirty-two years old. I’d had three relationships that mattered and a handful that didn’t. I’d spent the last few years working too much and sleeping alone and telling myself that I liked it that way. I hadn’t been wanted like this — like bread, like warmth, like something precious — in a very long time.

Perhaps not ever.

“What would you feel?” I asked quietly. “If I gave you more?”

His breath caught. “Whatever you let me.”

I reached up and took his right hand from the arm of the chair.

I held it in both of mine. Cool and smooth and heavier than it looked. I meant him to feel it. I meant it with everything in me.

The warmth came faster this time. It bloomed under my palms and spread up through his wrist. I felt the porcelain give, faintly, like wax near a flame.

Aurelian made a low sound.

I turned his hand over and laid his palm against my cheek.

His fingers trembled. I felt them curve, slowly, to cradle my jaw. His thumb moved across my cheekbone, so lightly, as if I were something that might break. The touch was cool at first, then warm. Then very warm.

“Nell,” he breathed.

I turned my head and pressed my lips to the inside of his wrist.

He shuddered. The whole chair creaked with it. The lamp flared, then dimmed. In the dead grate, a sudden flame caught the kindling and roared up the chimney, and the parlour filled with gold, flickering light.

I looked up at him.

His eyes were dark and wide and burning. His painted mouth hadn’t moved, couldn’t move. But I could see in every line of him what he wanted.

“Show me,” I whispered. “Tell me what you want to feel.”

“Everything.” His voice was wrecked. “All of it. But slowly. Please. I don’t think I could bear it quickly.”

So I went slowly.

I stood up from the footstool. I untied the belt of Gran’s old dressing gown and let it slip from my shoulders and fall onto the rug. My nightdress was thin cotton, faded and soft. In the firelight, I knew he could see the shape of me through it.

His hand had fallen back to the arm of the chair. It was gripping the wood so hard I heard it creak.

I climbed into his lap.

He was solid beneath me, and so still. Cool porcelain through the fine wool of his trousers. I settled with my knees on either side of his hips and my hands on his shoulders, and I felt him tremble.

A thought crossed my mind then, wildly inappropriate and impossible to unthink. Whoever made him had dressed him in a tailcoat and a brocade waistcoat and a silk cravat. Had they bothered with what was underneath? Victorian doll-makers had clearly been thorough about eyelashes. I had no idea how thorough they’d been about anything else.

Beneath me, through the wool, there was only smooth, cool stillness. Which told me nothing at all.

“You’ve gone very quiet,” Aurelian said.

My face flamed. “It’s nothing.”

“Nell.” Dry as dust. “I can feel your pulse. It isn’t nothing.”

I shut my eyes. “I was wondering,” I said, “whether you’re… complete. Under all that.”

There was a long, long pause.

“Do you know,” he said at last, with tremendous dignity, “in two hundred years, it has never once come up.”

I laughed so hard I nearly fell off his lap. His hands caught my hips to steady me, and somewhere in the laughing, the last of my nerves went with it.

Then I took both his hands in mine, and I laid them on my waist.

“Here,” I said. “Feel this.”

His fingers spread against me through the thin cotton. Slowly, they warmed. I felt him feeling me — the curve of my waist, the shift of my ribs as I breathed, the heat of my skin through the fabric. He made a sound like a man drinking after a long thirst.

I guided his hands up.

Over my ribs. Along my sides. Until his palms cupped my breasts through the cotton, and his thumbs found my nipples, and I gasped.

He went utterly still.

“Is that—” he began.

“Yes,” I breathed. “Yes. Again.”

He moved his thumbs. Slowly, so slowly, circling. Learning. His hands were warm now, warm all the way through, and the smooth glaze of them against the cotton was like nothing I’d ever felt. My head fell back. I arched into his touch.

“I can feel your heart,” he said hoarsely. “Nell. I can feel your heart.”

I reached down and drew the nightdress up over my head.

The firelight was warm on my bare skin. His hands, when I placed them on me again, were warmer. He touched me as if I were the first warm thing he’d ever held. Wonderingly. Reverently. His long fingers traced my collarbones, my breasts, the soft curve of my belly. He didn’t take a single inch I didn’t give him. Each time, he waited for me to guide his hands. Each time, I did.

And each time, he grew warmer. More alive. The porcelain of his hands lost its glassy shine and took on a faint, soft lustre, like the inside of a shell. His fingers grew more supple. More sure.

When I guided his hand lower, between my thighs, he stopped.

“Nell,” he said. Just that.

I looked down at him. At his strange, beautiful, unmoving face, and the living eyes burning in it.

“I want you to feel this,” I said. “I’m giving it to you.”

His fingers moved.

He touched me with such care that it made my eyes sting. Slow and tentative at first, then surer, as I rocked against his hand and showed him what I wanted. His touch was smooth and warm and strange, unlike any hand I’d ever known. When he slid one long finger inside me, I cried out, and he made a sound that I felt all the way through my body.

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me how.”

I told him. In gasps and broken words. Slower. There. Like that. Yes. And he learned me the way he’d learned the rules of cribbage from Gran — carefully, attentively, and then very well indeed.

I rode his hand in the firelight, my fingers digging into the brocade of his shoulders. His other hand spread against the small of my back, holding me close. The fire roared. The lamp flickered. The whole parlour seemed to breathe with me. And through all of it, I could feel him feeling me. Every shiver, every clench, every desperate surge of heat, flowing out of me and into him through his hands.

When I came, I said his name.

I said it again and again, shaking in his lap. His hand stayed with me through every wave of it, slow and steady, until I slumped forward against his chest, gasping, and he wrapped both arms around me and held me there.

For a long time, neither of us moved.

His chest was warm under my cheek. Not cool porcelain anymore. Warm, like stone that’s been in the sun all day. And beneath it, faint and strange and slow, I heard something I hadn’t heard before.

A heartbeat.

“Aurelian,” I whispered. “Can you—”

“Yes.” His voice shook. “I felt it all. Every moment. I didn’t know— Nell, I didn’t know it could be like that. I didn’t know anything could be like that.”

His hand moved slowly up and down my bare back. I closed my eyes and listened to the fire crackle and the strange, slow beat beneath my ear.

Then I felt his hand still.

I lifted my head. He was looking past me, at his own hand where it rested on my shoulder. I followed his gaze.

Across the back of his wrist, where I’d kissed him, ran a single fine dark line. Thin as a hair. Delicate as a crack in the glaze of an old teacup.

I touched it with one fingertip. It was warm.

“Does it hurt?” I whispered.

“No,” he said. But his voice had changed. Gone quiet and careful again. “No. It doesn’t hurt at all.”

The key ran down a few minutes later. I felt the warmth leave him, slowly this time, and the heartbeat fade, and his arms go still around me.

But the crack was still there. A thin dark line across pale porcelain.

And as I sat there in the dying firelight, naked in his lap, I could have sworn it was longer than before.