Page 61 of Across Time

She frowns at the door as he walks through it. "You're sure you didn't fight?"

"Yes."

Is he out tonight because of what André said? Will he clear up any illusions about our relationship by sleeping with some slut from town? Or maybe he was just reminded of what he’s been missing out on. Either way I find that I am absolutely livid.

“How was reading to Madame Perot today?” Marie asks.

The urge to blame her is strong. She’s the one who agreed to have me read there. She’s the reason my ankle is still broken. And if none of this had happened, maybe Henri wouldn’t be off with someone tonight the way he is.

“I won’t go back to that house,” I reply, rising from the table. “I don’t care what you have to tell them.”

* * *

It's late when I hear him pull up outside. Marie has been asleep for hours and I should have been too, but I’m too busy stewing, wondering if he was going to stay out all night and stumble home in the morning with some sheepish grin on his face. I wrap the borrowed robe around me and walk into the kitchen just as he enters, bleary-eyed and unhappy.

"Did I wake you?" he asks. He isn't drunk but he's not quite sober either, and he can't seem to mask his discomfort in my presence, that he wishes he was alone right now.

My lips press tight. “You made enough noise to raise the dead,” I reply, though it’s not true. "I assume by your level of sobriety that you went out?"

"Can't get anything by you," he says with a smirk I'd like to wipe off his face. Now that I've hit someone with a crutch the desire to do it again is positively calling to me.

"I'd like a night out myself before I leave," I reply, feeling something mean and spiteful rise up inside me. I want to strike out like a cobra and I have no means to, but something keeps my mouth running. "I imagine there must be someone in the town nicer than you and André."

His smirk is gone, replaced by glittering eyes and a mean set to his mouth. "I’m sure there are. But just so you're clear, in my time, decent women don't give themselves away to the first rich man who makes them an offer."

"So I guess you were with one of the indecent ones tonight," I hiss. "That shouldn't surprise me."

His mouth turns up at one end. Another of his arrogant smiles. He runs a thumb over his lower lip. "Ah. So you're jealous. Is that what this is?"

I force myself to laugh. "In my world, you're a 72-year old man, remember? And I'm practically engaged."

He crosses the room until he’s a foot away, towering over me. He braces himself against the wall behind me, caging me in. "Except you're not in your world. You're in mine."

His gaze falls to my face, to my lips, and my heart feels as if it's dropped into my stomach. I'm shaking but it's not fear. It's as if my entire body is so primed, so reckless and raw, that it refuses to allow me to remain still.

His head dips. Just an inch. There's no longer a hint of a smile on his face. I know exactly what’s going to happen and I want it. I don’t care about our respective ages. I don’t care that I’m nearly engaged. I just want, as if there’s no room in my head for any other emotion. The pad of his thumb runs over my lower lip.

And then a door opens upstairs and we jump, separating from each other. Within seconds Marie-Therese stands at the top of the stairs. "Surely the two of you can contain your fighting to daylight hours?" she demands.

I swallow, guilty as a teenager caught in the back of a car with a boy. I can no longer meet Henri's gaze. "Sorry," I mumble, fleeing to my room.

I'm nearly to my door when I hear him. "Amelie?" he asks quietly. I stop and turn toward him. His eyes flicker over my face. "I wasn't with anyone tonight," he says. “I haven’t been with anyone since the day you arrived.”

He turns to walk up the stairs, leaving me standing there, relieved and with a bizarre desire to cry for the second time in one day.

* * *

The mystery of Henri's disappearance is solved fairly quickly. When Marie returns from the market she drops the bags inside the door and stares at us both.

"Someone put a cloth over André Beauvoir’s head last night and beat him within an inch of his life,” she says, her lips pressed tight. “I don’t suppose the two of you know anything about that?”

I turn to Henri in shock. That's where he was?

He avoids my gaze, lifting his eyes to his sister instead, looking bored. "He insulted our family," Henri replies. "I couldn't let him get away with it."

"He insulted our family?" she repeats incredulously. "Are we back in the Middle Ages? What could he possibly have said?”

His jaw grinds. “He implied there were some rumors about Amelie that…I won’t have anyone thinking of her that way.” I misinterpreted his disgust yesterday, and I’ve never been so relieved to be wrong.