Breakfast was a quiet, amicable affair.  But I had been alone far too long to even consider spending an entire day in company, and immediately after we had finished eating, I excused myself.  Sorcha did not seem to mind, though what she would do all day, I had no idea.  I simply knew I needed to get away for a while.  I needed time to think.

            I fled to my rooms and seriously considered locking the door.  But I knew the bolt wouldn’t keep out what was most bothering me: my reaction to Sorcha.

            With the door closed, I flung myself, fully dressed, across the bed and stared up at the canopy, thinking hard.

            What had I learned about her further this morning?  That she was incredibly patient to put up with my teaching style, decent in the kitchen and had a very giving nature.  But what in these new pieces of her puzzle made me suddenly realize my love for her?  I wanted now more than anything just to be allowed to touch her, run my fingers through her hair, fell the softness of her cheek under my lips, hold her against my body.  But I knew from her reactions yesterday evening that she did not want to be touched.  For all her warmth of personality, contact was not an option, and it left me horribly frustrated.

            In the privacy of my own rooms, I growled.

            I stewed in my frustration for some time before I realized that I had not been thinking about how long, or short she would be here, or how we would spend the time, just about the desire to touch her.  Maybe I wasn’t feeling love again, perhaps it was just lust.  Lust, I can deal with.  I’ve had a lifetime’s experience ignoring lust.  That’s the easy part.  And deciding to ignore it, my frustration lessened, slightly.

            Exhausted from being up the entire night, and wrestling with my inner demons, I fell into a fitful sleep, where I dreamed not her body, but Sorcha’s smile, and woke thinking I had heard her laughter.

            I felt rather ridiculous sneaking up on my own living room, but I was curious as to what my unique houseguest had been up to in my absence.  I found her curled in a corner of my sofa, a huge tome open on the arm.  She had her long hair tucked back behind her ears and her lips moved occasionally as she recited to herself.  I stood in the hallway for some time, watching her smile and frown, and just once, fiercely wipe a tear off her cheek.  She looked so comfortable, tucked up alone in a corner of my space; I hadn’t the heart to interrupt her.  At the same time, I felt guilty for leaving her alone all day in my great dim house and resolved to make it up to her over dinner.

            Which I set off alone to cook, taking particular care over the preparations.  It seemed that nothing in the kitchen had been touched, and I wondered if the girl hadn’t eaten all day.

            All else was in readiness when I pulled another rose from the bouquet and touched the petals very lightly before laying it across her place.  Despite my earlier thoughts on the nature of love and lust in my bleak heart, it was almost a physical effort not to choose a red rose for her.  I selected a white one for her, instead, and enjoyed a dark chuckle at the irony of giving her a rose symbolizing purity.  My thoughts were anything but.

            It amused me to startle her, just a little bit when I threw open the door to the dining room and called out, “Aren’t you hungry yet?”

            She smiled at me when she stood up, and expression that was already becoming familiar to me.

            “Starved.  But, although I did invite myself into your home, I’m hardly so rude as to go raiding my host’s kitchen without permission!”

            The full effect of having her attention focused on me made it very difficult not to reach for her.  Although I craved touch, it was my heart that started aching again, not the regions somewhat lower than that. 

I had fooled myself for an entire afternoon.  There was, when facing Sorcha, no way to ignore the affection, tenderness, in short, love I felt for her.  In addition to the lust.  Erik, you are a twice-damned fool, you know better than this.  You ARE going to get yourself killed this time.  But my heart didn’t listen, and I resigned myself to a bittersweet life with her in it, fervently ignoring that it would come to an end and she would leave me alone, as before.

Remembering my oath that Sorcha must never know my feelings, I put on as jovial a demeanor as I could summon and said, quite heartfelt, “Consider this your home while you are here.  ‘Raid’ away.  But now, I have dinner ready.”

I seated her, and watched her ready smile at her rose, the color of which I now found even more ironic.

We had not had much time for idle conversation yet in our acquaintance, so the sort of question-parry conversation I imagine most people endure on first dates accompanied dinner.  Sorcha told me much of her recent history, and her travels really were quite amazing.  I also discovered in the course of her stories she had been orphaned quite young, that she had almost no extended family and that only a few people even knew where she was in her wanderings at any given time.  In short, she was a woman alone in the world.

I have to admit that I considered keeping her down with me forever.  No one would ever know.  However, the results of performing that experiment previously were still too painful to contemplate directly, and I quickly dismissed the thought.

She tried several times to inquire even the most basic information about myself.  I parried all of her questions back to inquiries about her, and issued bland, though not untruthful answers.  My history is not precisely polite dinner conversation.

When we had both finished, she leapt up to clear the table and wash up before I could protest that she was a guest and need do no such thing.  She bustled off with her arms full of dirty dishes leaving me unable to do anything but watch her walk into the other room.  She already moved about as if she believed me in my offer to make this her home.  I was still staring in her direction when she came back in, and to my surprise she halted right by my chair.

            “Erik,” she started shyly.  “I know you don’t have the faintest clue what to do with me.  I don’t know if you’d think it’s a good idea, but…” Actually I had several ideas what to do with her, none of which however were proper.

            “What?”

            “Well, you have a wonderful library out there.  We could read to each other a bit this evening…  I’d say lets play chess, but I’m awful; wouldn’t give you any sport.”

            “You can’t be that bad.”  She hadn’t been bad at anything yet that I could tell.  Why such a common thing as chess should stump her, I did not know.

            “You’d probably beat me in ten moves,” she declared.

            I decided to humor her, and actually I thought both ideas had merit.  Almightily knows I didn’t have any good ideas how to spend the evening, and I couldn’t bolt myself into my rooms constantly except for lessons.

“Well, in that case, I’d better set up the chess board and pick a book for us.  Mademoiselle, I await your pleasure in the lounge.”  I would have kissed her hand, but settled for a low bow in her direction.

I readied the board, selected a book of German folk tales, and poured two glasses of wine to accompany our evening’s entertainment.  I had only just settled into one of the armchairs when Sorcha emerged from the kitchen, with her rose.

She settled, cross-legged, on the couch and looked curiously at the board, which I had set up, sideways to us, for her to choose her color. 

            “So, am I black or white?”

When I didn’t answer her, she looked at me and laughed, turning the board so that the white pieces were in front of her. 

“Okay, I get it.  I can play any color I want, but you’ll be playing black,” she laughed.

            “As smart as she is beautiful,” I couldn’t keep myself from commenting.

“Yup, I did real good in school.  Teacher gave me all D’s for ‘Delightful!’  Pa was so proud.  He’d only gotten F’s for ‘Fine.’”

            I stifled a laugh and returned my attention to the board.  “Your move, Mademoiselle Delightful.”

            She moved a piece, seemingly at random, and I countered.  The game proved to be difficult, not because she was a good player, but because she didn’t seem to pay attention or have any strategy whatsoever.  I was sure that her playing style, or lack thereof, was a ploy, and she’d soon come with some clever plan and sideswipe me.  As a result, I played a conservative game, and tried to distract her with conversation.

            “I just can not believe you’re as bad as you claim at chess.  You know how all the pieces move, and it is just a matter of observation and forethought to figure the rest.”

            “Erik, my mind just doesn’t work like this game!”

            “I imagine someone told you that girls aren’t good at chess and you’ve never really tried because of that.”  She had just captured my Queenside bishop, and I was sure her plan was about to unfold, despite the fact that, as far as I could tell, the white Queen was unguarded.

            I was focusing so on the game, that her somewhat sharp reply startled me. 

“I do a great many things women aren’t supposed to be able to do, including science, reading maps, riding motorcycles and traveling Europe unaccompanied and with no money.  I would like to be good at chess.  I just can’t make my brain wrap around the game.”

“Nonsense, all you need is some more practice…” I countered, studying the board and noting, with surprise, that I had already won.  Well, maybe she is as bad as she says.  No, not quite…  “You lose.”

            “Yes, I know.”  She made the traditional ceremony of surrender with no fuss or apparent annoyance and the white king clinked against the stone tiles of the board.

            “No you lose your bet.  You said I’d beat you in ten moves.  That was eleven.”  And there was nothing she could say to that.  Or so I thought.

            “Well, as all of my possessions are currently in your care, I have nothing to forfeit for losing the bet.”  And then she looked at me strangely for a moment.  I felt that strange vulnerability again, as if she was looking right through my soul.  She held up the rose that had been her seat marker for dinner.

“Except this.  I know you gave it to me, but perhaps a kiss will increase its return value?”  She closed her eyes as she pressed her lips to the flower, and then laid it on the board.  I could scarcely take my eyes from hers for a long moment while my heart tried to decide if it should stop or beat wildly.

            “Yes, that should do,” I managed to choke out, and accepted the flower.  I raised it to my face under pretense of smelling its fragrance, but briefly laid my lips against the same place Sorcha had kissed.  I do not believe she noticed.

            The moment was too long and too uncomfortable, for me.  I handed her the book I had selected.  “You can also read first!”

            Her reading proved quite as entertaining as the stories of her travels had been over dinner.  Her selection was absurd, but the unique voices she gave the various characters gave it cohesion, if not precisely sense.

            When my turn came to read, I chose an equally improbable tale in retaliation and discovered the joy of making Sorcha laugh.  It was warm, and enveloping, and despite my feelings, my fears about the past, and the interminable secrets I ring my life with, I began, finally, to relax in her company.

            She was in the middle of a Rumplestiltskin type fable when tiredness caught up with my gypsy and she began to yawn.  I had hoped to keep her up later, so my nocturnal life and her dawn rising might begin to come a little closer together, but I hadn’t the heart.

I took the book from her hands.  “Your music teacher says to go to bed.  He won’t be as easy on you tomorrow morning as he was today.”

I think she actually snorted at me.  “Tell him I already think he’s a heartless dictator and can’t get any worse.” 

But, I could tell that she was joking, and she retreated, smothering another yawn, towards her rooms.  Just before she disappeared down the hallway, she turned around.  Her hand rested on the corner at the entrance to the hallway, and she looked over he shoulder at me with sleepy eyes.  My heart gave another lurch, and I knew I was well and truly in love with Sorcha, not the memories she evoked of Madeline.  Madeline had never stood so, never paused once she fled towards the sanctuary of her bolted room.

            “Erik, I had a good day.  I’m very glad I met you.  Goodnight.”

            All I could do was stare at her.  She gave me a small, self-conscious smile, was gone before I could form a coherent reply.

            I sat with the white rose across my lap, staring at nothing for a very long time before I sought my own bed.  Mercifully, my sleep was exhausted and dreamless, and I faced our lesson the next morning with a relatively sanguine mind.

            My new star pupil had forgotten much of yesterday’s lesson, but a few reminders seemed sufficient to bring her back to rights.  She seemed downright grateful to progress to scales, albeit very slow ones.  I forced her to form each note perfect and pure before being allowed to move onto the next.

            The rest of the day followed much the same form as the day before, and the days after would, as well.  The afternoons I spent apart from Sorcha, in my own rooms were an agony, but I couldn’t bear the thought of long, awkward pauses in our conversations, which I was sure would arise from my constant presence.  Sorcha would likely never return my love, never know of it, but I wanted her to be at least comfortable in all ways while she was in my care, and to perhaps someday think of me with fond memories.

            Our evenings continued pleasant, though whenever I pointed out her improvement at chess, “Twelve moves tonight.  A whole fourteen, this evening,” she shot me very dirty looks, which I think were only half in jest.

            One morning, several days into her stay, I went to prepare for the morning’s lesson while Sorcha was still sleeping.  I was quite excited, because today, she would get to sing her first simple song, opening a whole new world to teach her. My mind was filled with thoughts on phrasing, emotion.  When I picked up the sheets containing her exercises for the day, nothing of the stack was left on the organ.  Hastily, I took mental count of her days with me and realized to my horror that today was her last day, she would be leaving me this afternoon.  My Sorcha would be gone in less than twelve hours.

            It was an unbearable thought.  She would leave me alone like all the rest.  My mother, my Madeline, every other soul who had touched my life had abandoned me, and now Sorcha would do the same.  It was an unbearable agony, and I retreated into my usual defense.  Rage.

            I threw the papers with the day’s lesson across the room.  I couldn’t even begin her new phase of training in one day.  It would be of no use, and I was not in the mood to try.  Snarling, I threw a few candles after the paper, and it was lucky for me that they extinguished in mid air.  Then, I sat down at my organ and played out my fury and pain.

            I left no reserves in volume of temperament in my playing.  I filled the notes with my sorrow, my anger and my sense of abandonment and let the organ thunder out as loud as it could.  I played notes without thought, composing as I went, and delighting in the furious sound.

            I don’t know at what point Sorcha stepped, trembling into the room.  I was aware of her beside me for some time, and though her mouth was moving, I couldn’t hear her speaking over the sound of my own fury.  I thought I glimpsed an extra sparkle in her eyes that might be tears.  She’s probably here to try and leave a few hours earlier than agreed upon.  If my playing upsets her, she deserves it.  How dare she abandon me!

            When Sorcha discovered that shouting at me would not gain my attention, she did the most extraordinary thing.  Though she was shaking harder than I thought she could bear, she reached out a small, white hand and laid it on my shoulder.

            Not only was it the first time we had ever touched, the warmth and weight I was feeling on my shoulder, through my jacket, was the first human contact I’d had in over three years.  The shock of it, coupled with my overwrought emotions instantly stilled my playing.  All I could do was turn to stare at her, openmouthed, my fingers still resting on the keys.