It’s still magic even if you know how it’s done
“You’re thinking very hard, Diana,” Matthew said. His arm was loosely draped around her waist, the hand-pieced quilts drawn up over them. The house was quiet around them, content, and Diana supposed she ought to be as well.
“How can you tell?” she asked, feeling Matthew’s lips graze her shoulder, the nape of her neck, feeling his inhalation and the touch of his breath. “Does it change my scent?”
“No, but that’s a novel idea,” Matthew said, pressing closer to her. “I can just tell, you’re so still. Do you want to talk?”
“What’s the difference,” she began, then broke off. Once she asked, he’d answer and she’d know what he believed. There would be no turning away. “What’s the difference between desire and love?”
“Joy…and trust,” he replied without clarifying what she meant. That she was asking why he defined what there was between them as more than the most powerful lust, more than the most insatiable affinity. Beyond infatuation, beyond passion even.
“In fifteen hundred years, only you, Diana, only you have given me such happiness, such exquisite communion. Beyond any carnal delight, encompassing every carnal delight,” he said, his voice uttering the word carnalsurely a sin by itself.
“Not every carnal delight,” she retorted and he chuckled.
“I cannot imagine coming to you in that way will be any less transporting. I don’t crave you to consume you—I long for you, for how being with you makes me whole, at peace,” he said. His voice was so low, yet she heard every word.
“That’s the joy then. What about the trust? I’m the only one you trust to master you, is that it? A witch–not like the other women?” Diana said. She was not jealous of women long dead, but something in the way Matthew had spoken of them was a thorn.
“You’re the only one I trust myself with. Not to be mastered, to be known. To come to me, to be drawn to me but still always asking questions, challenging me to answer,” he said, pausing. “Waiting sometimes and then not waiting at all,” he added, pulling her towards him so that she could see his face, the delicacy of his throat.
“Dieu du ciel, your eyes are so blue,” he murmured. How could he sound so old and so achingly young in the same moment?
“How can you see? It’s so dark, there’s no moon,” she said.
“I don’t need the moonlight, mon coeur,” Matthew said.
“Because you’re a vampire?”
“Because you are my beloved.”
