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jomiddlemarch · 3 days

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and is there honey still

Kissing Mary Vance was nothing like kissing Faith.

This realization, occurring a moment after the kiss ended, Jem’s hand still at Mary’s slender waist, her normally pale cheeks as pink as a rare mayflower, was followed immediately by the understanding that he’d never be able to tell anyone. There was no confidant he could trust with such a secret, even if he could bring himself to so violate the rules of gentlemanly behavior. It just wasn’t done and that was before he considered speaking of kissing Mary Vance, who was accepted as Miss Cornelia’s adopted daughter, but whose personal history was never quite forgotten.

Susan, should she ever hear of it, would be scandalized beyond comprehension.

Jem would never eat another slice of her strawberry pie.

His friends and siblings would be confused, Faith put out, her pique covering any feelings of betrayal, for all that there was nothing binding between them.

Mother would be disappointed and Dad would shake his head.

The expression in Mary’s eyes, those queer eyes he now saw were the color of moonstones, told him she understood it all.

“It’s nothing to make a fuss about,” she said. Faith would have tossed her head making such a remark, her golden-brown curls shown to advantage, but Mary only looked at him steadily and let the hand that had been on his shoulder drop to her lap.

“You hold yourself too cheap, Mary,” Jem said.

“That ain’t—that isn’t possible,” she replied. “Anyway, what’s a kiss amount to?”

It was a good question, one Jem had thought he’d known the answer to, just as he thought he’d known the answer to the question she was laboring over at her desk in the empty classroom, a piece of paper scribbled over and crossed-out, grey smudges on the foolscap, on Mary’s white cuffs. She would’ve laundered them herself, being Miss Cornelia’s daughter not relieving her of her housekeeping duties, chores she’d call them though Jem knew none of his sisters had ever helped even pinning clean clothes to the line.

He supposed a kiss could be an ordinary thing, a peck on the cheek or the lips, a greeting, friendly and inconsequential as a wave, a forgettable gesture of a mild affection.

Kissing Mary Vance was nothing like that.

He could say, in all honesty, that he hadn’t planned it. He’d been pointing out something in her writing, a tricky bit she’d gotten tangled up in, and she’d been peering down at the page, trying to make it out. When she’d perceived her mistake, she’d looked up at him, her expression one he’d never seen before, victory and pride and delight all swirled together, altering her face from one he’d recognized without being aware of it into one he’d been startled to discover. Without a word, without a thought, he’d leaned in and kissed her parted lips before she crowed over her achievement or thanked him, the caress impetuous, a whim, irresistible.

She was irresistible. He’d grazed her lips with his own and in the space before the next heartbeat, he’d cupped her jaw with one hand and let the other drop to her waist to draw her close. He felt the most tremendous desire for her possess him, everything else dropped away. She tasted, quite impossibly, of honey, though that was perhaps because he had always liked honey best, and she was warm in his embrace, coming closer when his hand at her waist reached around her back, sighing a little when he stroked her cheek and angled her head to be able to kiss her more deeply. Every second, his desire for her ratcheted sharply upwards and she met him, her hand clutching his shoulder, her sharp tongue sweet in his mouth. She kissed the way a fast girl kissed but there was a terrible innocence to her response that made him know she’d never kissed anyone else, whatever she might have intimated to his sisters and her friends.

He couldn’t say why he’d broken away.

A sound in the hallway or her sudden stillness when his hand grazed her breast, the need to breathe, the pounding of his heart felt throughout his whole body.

“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” Mary went on when he was stayed silent.

“Are you sorry?” he blurted out, and hearing the words he became suddenly terrified that he’d transgressed, become that monster Reverend Meredith always warned of in his gentle way, a man consumed by his appetites, greed and lust. “Oh, God, Mary, have I made you do something you didn’t want—”

“As if you could!” she said, wry again, Mary Vance again as he’d ever known her. If she’d wanted to, she would have slapped him, he was sure of that. “There’s no person living who could make me do what I didn’t want and certainly not you, Jem Blythe.”

“That’s good, I suppose,” he said, chastened, still too close to her. Still tasting the honey-sweetness of her lips, feeling the sound of the quiet moan of hers he’d swallowed in his throat.

“We don’t have to talk about it anymore,” she offered. “Or ever again. It could be just something that happened once, like as if you’d knocked over my inkwell, and we can forget about it. If that’s what you’d like. To be easy about it.”

“We don’t have to talk about it anymore,” he repeated, agreeing. An inkwell knocked over would leave a stain, one endless scrubbing would never entirely remove. “But I won’t forget. I shan’t.”

“That’s good, I suppose,” she said, her old tone mixed in with a new softness. He’d mussed her hair and some of the loose strands caught the light, a far cry from the usual trig appearance Miss Cornelia insisted upon. He wasn’t sure he’d ever see this Mary again, but it might be enough, to have seen it this one time. It was more Walter’s way to say he’d carry it as a talisman, but Jem felt it without saying it, that to have this moment might serve him well in the future.

“Mind you turn that paper in,” he said.

“Mind yourself, then,” she said and turned away.

He wouldn’t see Mary alone for another ten years.

“Thought I’d find you here,” Mary said, sitting down beside him, facing the water. She tucked her skirt around her and made no effort to conceal her sturdy, scuffed boots. It was a cool evening, cooler by the shore, but she didn’t have a coat or even the old wool shawl she’d refused to give up before he’d left for France. He shrugged off his own coat and offered it to her. He’d be warm enough in his heavy jersey, one the fisherman down at the harbor wore when the wind picked up.

“Not Rainbow Valley?” he said.

“Why would you go there? You’re not a child anymore. Haven’t been for a long time, unless I miss my mark,” she said.

“No, you’re right,” he said. “Not for a long time.”

“You don’t have to talk to me about anything. Not about the War or Walter or being a prisoner,” she said. She said it without any particular tenderness, which was the most consoling part. He recalled, very dimly, that before she had come to Miss Cornelia, she’d lived through her own horrors, yet spoke of them rarely if at all.

“Don’t have to tell me about any French girls either,” she added and he laughed.

It was the first time he’d laughed since he came home. Since he came back to the Glen, anyway, and called it home without being able to fully mean it.

“Not much to tell there. I mostly saw nuns and the Red Cross nurses are awfully brisk, whatever their nationality,” he said.

“I’ve always thought Cornelia would make a good nun, for all that she’s married,” Mary said.

“Perhaps,” Jem replied. The waves kept breaking on the sand and it was dusk, romantic if you wanted it to be. Mary had his coat wrapped around her shoulders. Jem felt scoured, raw and empty.

“Why’d you come, if you don’t expect me to talk?” he asked after several minutes of silence.

“I guess because you need someone who doesn’t expect you to talk but who’s willing to sit nearby, without fussing over anything,” she said. “I’ve plenty of handwork and housework to deal with at home. I’m perfectly content to sit and be idle and there’s nothing you can say or not say that can hurt me. I’m not hurt the way you are, I can bear whatever you need—”

“They can’t at home,” he said. Mother, with grief in her grey eyes and grey in her auburn hair, and Rilla, grown into a mother before she was a wife, Dad with something more broken inside him than any of the rest. Susan and Dog Monday and the letters from Di and Nan, blotted and halting. Una, who might as well be one of the French nuns who tended him, all of them mourning Walter and trying to rejoice at his return. Jem, trying to keep them from hearing any of his nightmares, biting his tongue when they spoke at a meal of the future or the past.

“I know,” she said. “Faith Meredith’s married a Brit. Officer, Lord Something Hoity-Toity of Fancy Abbey-on-High.”

“I’m happy for her,” Jem said tiredly. “We were childhood sweethearts, that’s all.”

“I know. Just wanted it said so you’d know I know,” Mary replied.

“If she’d waited, I wouldn’t have wanted her. I wouldn’t want her to have me now, as I am,” he said. “Befouled, diminished—”

“Walter’s dead, Jem. You don’t have to speak in his voice,” Mary said.

“I wasn’t—”

“Yes, you were. If you don’t think I’d remember, after all those afternoons, those walks and rambles, listening to him, well then. You’d be wrong. I remember,” she said.

“I want Faith to stay as she is. Beautiful, golden, untouched, a lovely memory from my splendid childhood,” Jem said.

“Good Lord, she’d far better off than I thought, even without taking a castle into account,” Mary exclaimed. “Maybe her Lord Gawain-Excalibur-Avalon actually treats her like a women. A person.”

“I didn’t know you liked the Arthurian legends,” Jem replied, taken aback by Mary’s remark, choosing to deflect.

“I liked the sword. And the Lady of the Lake with her own place,” Mary said.

“I thought it would be like that, the War, knights going out,” he said. “I knew there’d be wounds and death, but I thought there’d be honor—"

“You always were a bit of a fool,” Mary said. “Stands to reason though, the way you were raised.”

“We had a—you’re right,” he said, realizing he did not have to defend his parents or Ingleside. “Mother was so careful for us to be well-loved. To live in a world where we might imagine ourselves heroes or able to speak with the fairies—you would have done better than I at the Front, Mary.”

“No one would do better,” she said. He braced himself for her to talk about his medals, his valiant efforts in the prison camp, how he tended those around him with what little he had. How many men had died in his hands, their blood the scent in his nose as terrifying as gas. “You lived.”

“It doesn’t seem like enough.”

“Come here, then,” she said, shifting to kneel facing him. The moon had risen and it suited her, her eyes gleaming like opals, her hair silver, the shadow soft around her bare throat. She reached a hand to touch his cheek, rough with the whiskers he hadn’t shaved for the past few days. “Come here, James,” she said and the sound of his name startled him enough to move closer. To let her draw his face to hers for a kiss.

For a moment, he was seventeen again and Walter was alive, the fields of France green, the chestnut trees in leaf. Then he heard a wave break and felt Mary’s hand move to the nape of his neck, her fingers callused, and he tasted salt mixed with honey. She beckoned him and he put his arms around her, holding her tightly, trying to lose himself in her embrace. Letting her find him.

They were alone with the moon and the sea. There was no hallway and Mary kissed him well enough there were no memories, not of France or Germany or Holland, not of the ship or the train or the graveyard with the stone too white, the wilting mayflowers at its base. There was nothing Mary would not do, no end to the comfort she would offer. His hands were at her waist and her breast, eased beneath her skirts, and she coaxed him on. When he brought both back to cup her face, she’d smiled under his lips. When he lay back against the sand and brought her to lie next to him, her head resting upon his chest, she’d come with him.

“I should have asked, Miller Douglas?”

“He married Ada Parker six months ago. I didn’t shed a tear, except that they should be happy,” she said. “To be honest, I didn’t fancy being a shopkeeper’s wife, but I would have made the best of it.”

“I’m alive, but I don’t know what I have to offer,” Jem said. Mary thumped him on the chest, hard enough to notice, soft enough to be nothing more than a scolding.

“You’ve yourself and I’m myself. You don’t have to offer me anything,” she said.

“That’s the first lie you’ve told,” he said.

“Then remember me. This. How it was, how it might be,” she said. “Grieve and suffer and if you want, I’ll be there for it. Or you can come round in a while, when you’re sorted out. I’m in no hurry. I’ve an idea of how to run a doctor’s house, no offense to your mother or Susan, and I’d like to try it out some time.”

“Will there be much pie?” Jem asked.

“There will be honey-cake, pots and pots of clover honey ready to drizzle. That’s your favorite.”

“Call me James again,” he said.

She propped herself up on his chest so he could see her face, the curve of her lips, her silvery hair hanging loose around her cheeks.

“I believe you meant to say, please, James. Mind yourself, then.”