Talk Sweetly to Me (Brothers Sinister 4.5)

—Not Mad.

Rose swallowed hard and read on.

Dear Not Mad,

Normally I approach my columns with a certain amount of jocularity. (Never tell this to my readers; they would never believe it.) But your situation has moved me to seriousness. You must work yourself up to your desires, bit by bit. Before you can dance on your uncle’s grave (I assume this to be on your list), you must first visit it and stand upon the grass. On the next visit, be sure to tap your toe and hum a ditty. Before you know it, you’ll be waltzing in the cemetery.

Should you need a dancing partner, consider yours truly.

Sincerely,

Stephen Shaughnessy

Actual Man

“You see?” Patricia said. “He’s flirting—publicly—with another woman. That’s the sort of man he is. Just keep that in mind the next time you encounter him.” She nodded as if she had proven a point.

Rose shook her head. It wasn’t flirting, no more than the time he’d done the Actual Man thing to Mrs. Barnstable had been flirting. It was…kind of him, in a sweet, outrageous sort of way. It hurt to read it, not because she thought him unfaithful, but because she could hear him in it, all of him.

I don’t have hidden shallows, he’d told her. Maybe he didn’t. She suspected that if she judged him by his column, she would see…

A man who offered to dance with a woman who had been badly wounded. A man who mocked other men when they made too much of their own importance. A man who wished to make others laugh, even when they suffered. She had never looked at him and seen a bad man, and the more she looked, the deeper she fell.

That, perhaps, made him the most dangerous specimen of all.

He liked people. He liked her. She suspected he’d told her the simple truth: He wasn’t trying to seduce her.

He was just succeeding at it.

“THIS WILL BE OUR LAST LESSON,” Rose said, when Mr. Shaughnessy had settled himself into her office two days later. “There is only so much you need to learn, and after tomorrow I shall be flooded with work. We’ll have data from the transit of Venus—and once we have that, there will be star charts to update, and I shall be up to my ears in calculations. I shan’t have time for you any longer.”

Mrs. Barnstable looked up at that, but she had a report to type for her husband, and the noise of the typewriter drowned out their conversation.

The truth was that Rose should never have made time for Mr. Shaughnessy. He was… Charming was the word she’d used, but charming sounded so sweet, so innocent. And by nature, Mr. Shaughnessy was never innocent.

He was not watching her innocently now.

That was the problem. She knew precisely what was happening to her. She could feel him coaxing her along the path to seduction. He made her forget herself every day she was with him, and one day, she would cross an uncrossable line. So long as he was around her, he would lead her astray.

His lips thinned, but he nodded ever so slightly as if he were accepting her edict.

“You’ll still tell me what you’re doing when we meet on the street,” he said. “And now I’ll understand it better.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think I should.”

No; that was too wishy-washy. The clattering of Mrs. Barnstable’s machine was beginning to annoy Rose.

“In fact, I know I mustn’t.”

“Aw, Rose.” He looked into her eyes. “You know I love it when you talk Sweetly to me.”

Her throat seemed to close at those words. She felt hoarse, almost ill. Her heart was pounding and her head seemed light. But this was no illness; she wanted more of it.

Therein lay her problem. He’d told her that her enthusiasm was contagious.

His lack of innocence, then, was a raging plague, and she was infected. The smallest glance in his direction sent her into an internal tizzy—the flash of his eyes, a glimpse of his wrist when one of his cuffs pulled up. The sight of him gave her ideas, and she didn’t need to be having ideas about him.

Once she had it in her head that he might do things to her, she could not help but imagine those things. Kisses, and not just on the lips or the hand, but on her neck, her inner wrist, up her elbow. He might give her caresses, too—slow, languid, full-body caresses. He didn’t have to seduce her; she was doing all the work of seduction on her own.

“Come, Mr. Shaughnessy,” she said briskly. “I’m sure you dream of more important things than listening to me ramble on. I don’t wish to be a way station on your way to bigger and better.” She looked down. “I have enjoyed—rather too much—spending this time with you. But I think I’ll be better off if our time together draws to a close.”

He took this in silence. His lips compressed into an almost angry line, and he looked away.

“Here,” she said. “I’ve set you some…some problems to work. Just a little parallax.” She actually choked as she spoke, as if she might cry over mathematics.

Better that. Better to cry over maths than a man, especially a rogue like this one. He’d scarcely even exerted himself and already she found herself watching his fingers, hoping he might crook one of them at her…and fearing that if he did, she’d come running.

He took the sheet from her and began to work.

“You know,” he said, “I realized last night that you were granting me a signal honor when you let me use your slide rule. Thank you.”

He didn’t sound as if he were making fun of her. She glanced suspiciously at him.

“I don’t dream of bigger and better,” he said, making his first notation on the page. “I told you: I’m appallingly simple. There is no grand design.”

“You’re a novelist. And a columnist. There’s nothing simple about you.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m exceedingly clever and exceedingly outrageous. But that doesn’t make me exceedingly devious.”

“But you must have had some plan in order to ascend the heights so swiftly.”

He smirked. “Here is the extent of my planning. When I was fifteen, I realized I was a poor Irish Catholic in England, a country with an excess of poor Irish Catholics. My only real skill was a talent for outraging others. Either I had to stomp out my only source of genius in order to have a go at making a living in the most menial fashion, or I had to indulge it to the fullest and hope for the best.” He shrugged. “Here I am. For the next few years, I shall be in demand enough to command a thousand pounds per book from my publisher. By the time that’s dried up—and the public’s capacity for any brand of outrage always dries up—I’ll have enough saved that I won’t have to care. See? There is no grand plan. No meteoric dreams. Just a dislike for manual labor and a talent for annoying others.”