The upper reaches of the castle are cold and dark; he is warm in fur and velvet and silk, waiting for Cinderella in this deserted hallway. Over and over he turns the box between his fingers, waiting for her. Surely, he reasoned, she had come. Surely, she was waiting.
They had met at a market in the shadow of the train station. He, escaping from his bodyguards and the press of responsibility, dressing down like a common tradesman and perusing the stinking press of humanity. She had been smeared with clay and dye, an apparition in common men's trousers, her black hair caught back from her face in a messy bow of viridian, shocking emerald against the tanned skin of her neck and arms. (It matched one of her eyes: mismatched green and brown in her heart-shaped face.)
Words had been unimportant; conversation had passed into drinks, and late into the evening, they had talked. Unselfconsciously, she had pulled him up into a narrow garret and undressed before pressing him down into her bed and rising astride him. Used to giggling serving wenches, and icy, sharp-hipped noblewoman, he had been agog at the site of her muscles and skin (she was, he discovered, tanned everywhere, and she tasted like apples fresh from the tree, then of salt-slicked flesh, then of nothing at all in the stars behind his eyelids). He had fallen asleep with the weight of her on top of him, all muscle and scars and imperfections.
"I have to see you again." he'd said as she dressed leisurely in the morning. She had glanced at him, not smiling, and nodded, once. Her eyes were heavy-eyed; she was quiet before her breakfast, not shy, but distant.
It had continued for days, weeks, months. She had discovered him sometime between then and now, the Duke's son, not just the man brash and tongue-tied at turns, the man with too much coin and a startling lack of sense about himself. He had given her a token, an invitation. A gown and a scarf of silk. Emerald, viridian, like her eyes. Streaked in clay, she had gazed at the box, and he pressed kisses to her mouth, her neck.
"This is not what you want." she said to him, then, and his breath had caught at the unfathomable distant look she wore, like the one in the mornings when she rose, bare-skinned to bathe in the basin. "This is not who I am."
"Please, love, come." He'd stroked her sides, wrapped his arms about her. "It would mean the world to me."
Her fingers had stroked the silk, and she had nodded, once, sharply.
"I can't live without you."
She had said nothing, the silk wrinkling beneath her hands as he kissed her neck. Had she grasped them in anger? In desire? He had taken her over the table, then, like a serving wench, heedless, glorying in her gasps of pleasure beneath him, in the rush of her salted, brown-stained skin.
The torches were out in the hallway when he found the scarf. It fluttered like a strange flame from the iron, bright in the window. Lipstick scrawled across the stone beneath it: "This is not who I am."