Chapter Eight — What They Choose

Outside, the night had gone clear and cold and enormous.

They came down the hall's wide steps into it together, and the dinner closed behind them like a door underwater, all that candlelight and scrutiny and held breath suddenly muffled and far away, and Gwen stood on the bottom step in the freezing air and let herself, for one unguarded second, simply breathe.

"The car's down past the trees," she said, automatically, reaching for her keys.

Sam looked out across the dark — at the long path back through the heart of the old campus, the bell tower black against the stars, the lamps making their small gold pools all the way home. "Or," he said. "We could walk."

"It's freezing."

"It is." He didn't move toward the car. "But I don't think I want this to be a five-minute drive, Gwen. I think — " he hesitated, and something careful came into his voice — "I think there are things we have to say to each other, and I'd rather say them walking through the cold than sitting in a parked car staring at the dashboard. If that's all right."

She looked at him a long moment. At the stranger's face, the borrowed grey-green eyes, Sam underneath all of it, asking her — gently, deliberately — for a slow way home instead of a fast one. He seemed to understand, the way he always seemed to understand her, that some conversations need room and air and the dignity of a long walk.

"Okay," she said, and put the keys away, and left the car where it was. "Let's walk."

"You're freezing already," Sam said, and shrugged out of his tuxedo jacket before she could argue, settling it around her shoulders. It swallowed her, the sleeves hanging past her hands, and it smelled like him — like the cologne the rings had never touched, underneath everything else still exactly Sam.

"You'll freeze."

"I run hot. Ask anyone who's ever stood next to me in a kitchen." He didn't take it back.

It was a choice. She felt it be one as they made it — the two of them turning their backs on the easy quick thing and choosing, on purpose, the long cold honest way. The whole night had happened to them, change after change. This, the walking, was the first thing they decided.

For a while they just walked, their breath clouding, the gravel loud under their feet. Gwen's thumb found the ring without her quite meaning it to, turning it once, twice, around her finger — some buried, methodical part of her already working out how far they'd have to get from the hall, from the windows, from anyone who might still be watching, before it would be safe to slide both rings off and end this. Not yet. A few more minutes. But soon.

"I have to tell you something," Gwen said finally, "and it's going to come out badly, so just — let me get through it." A breath. "I have feelings for you. For Sam. I think I've had them for a long time, longer than I let myself know, and tonight, with the rings reading me, I couldn't keep not knowing it anymore. The ring kept reaching for you because — because some part of me has been reaching for you for two years." She stared at the path ahead so she wouldn't have to watch his face. "And it's the cruelest thing, because it's impossible. I'm gay, Sam. That's not — that's not a thing that changed tonight, it's the truest thing about me, I've known it my whole life. I want women. And so I can love who you are — I do, I love who you are, more than I've ever — and I could never, ever have been with the person you were. Both of those are true at once. I've spent two years loving my best friend and knowing, every single day, that loving him was the one shape of wanting that could never go anywhere, because of who he was and who I am. Do you understand what that's like? To love someone you know you can never have?"

Sam was quiet for three steps. Four.

"Yeah," he said. "I do, actually."

She looked at him.

"I've been in love with you since the stairwell," he said simply. "Since the coffee. Two years, Gwen. And I never said a word, because there were two walls between us and either one of them was the end of it. You're gay — I knew that, I've known that a long time, and it meant whatever I felt didn't matter, because I'm a man and you don't want men and that's not a thing anyone gets to argue with. And even if you weren't — " a short breath, almost a laugh — "I'm the kid who mops your family's library. I was never going to be received into anything, Gwen. There's no version of the world your grandmother lives in where Sam Doyle stands next to you in that book. Two walls. Either one alone was enough. So I did exactly what you did. I loved my best friend and I knew it could never go anywhere, and I made my peace with being the person who got to stand near you, and I called it enough, because the alternative was nothing." He shook his head. "We've been doing the same thing. Side by side. For two years."

The path blurred in front of her. "I didn't know."

"You weren't supposed to. I was good at it." He almost smiled. "Two years of practice reading you, remember."

They walked on in a silence that had changed shape entirely, the bell tower drawing slowly closer.

"There's a thing neither of us is saying," Sam said at last, "so I'm going to say it, and you can tell me I'm wrong."
Gwen's heart climbed into her throat.

"Both walls came down tonight," he said quietly. "Both of them. At the same time, by accident, because of a ring you didn't fully understand. The thing that made it impossible — me being a man — the ring's been undoing that all night. And the other wall, the family, the suitable thing — your grandmother just stood up in front of the whole Compact and put me in the book. Made me real. A Hallisay, received, written down. The exact two things that made you impossible to be with — gone. Both. In one night." He stopped walking. Turned to face her in the lamplight. "Tonight I'm the one person in the world you could love and also be allowed to have. And I don't think either of us has the first idea what to do with that."

"Sam." Her voice broke on it. Her hand found the ring, twisting it, and she looked down at it like it might answer for her instead. "I can't ask you that. I can't ask you to — to stay like this, to give up your whole self, your body, your life, your name, so that I get to — no. No. That's the most selfish thing I could ever do to the person I love most in the world. I'd rather lose you than do that to you." She was already tugging at the ring, urgent, tearful. "We're far enough now — nobody from the hall could possibly see — we should take them off, right now, before this goes any further and I can't undo it, we should just—"

Sam didn't say anything. He closed the space between them and took both her hands in his, stilling them, wrapping them up warm despite the cold, and looked at her with those grey-green eyes she'd given him out of her own old wanting, steady and certain in a way that stopped her breath and her hands both.

"Not forever," he said finally, quiet. "I'm not asking you for forever, Gwen. I don't think either of us knows how to promise that yet, and I don't want to lie to you tonight of all nights." A pause. "But right now — tonight — we have something neither of us is ever going to get handed again. Both walls, down, at the same time, by accident. You get to want someone you're actually allowed to want. I get to find out who I am when nobody's asking me to be anyone else. Each of us gets the one thing we thought was impossible." His thumbs moved once over the backs of her hands.

"Just tonight. Just this. Let's not waste it being careful."

"You're saying that for me," she whispered. "Because you love me. You'd say anything right now."

"No." He said it gently but with a flat certainty she'd never heard from him. "That's the whole point, and I need you to hear me, because you of all people will understand it. If I were doing this for you — giving myself up, becoming what you need — then your grandmother's right and it's the cruelest thing in the world and you should run from it. But that's not what's happening. I'm not telling you I'll endure it. I'm telling you I want to find out who she is. Me. For my own reasons, that I don't fully have words for yet, that have nothing to do with you." He swallowed. "And then, underneath that, separately — yes. I love you. And if the person I want to find out about is also the person who finally gets to be loved by you, tonight, just for tonight — then those two things aren't in conflict. They're the same direction."

"It can't be that simple," she said, still crying, still in the cold.

"It's not simple at all. It might be the least simple thing two people have ever done." He took a step closer. "But it might also be true. I keep waiting to feel the horror of it — the give me my body back, the part where I claw at the walls and beg you to make it stop. I kept waiting for it all night, every single time something changed. It never came, Gwen. I don't know what that means yet. I don't think I'm supposed to know tonight. I just know I don't want to stop finding out, not this second, not when we finally have the room to." His voice dropped. "You've been fighting it back all night, every change, because you thought you were stealing it from me. You weren't asking; you were taking, and you were right to fight it. I'm asking now. So stop fighting it. Let it finish — not because I'm giving in, because I'm choosing it, just for tonight. There's a difference, and I need you to trust me that I know which one this is."

She looked at him for a long, long moment in the lamplight — at her best friend, who had loved her across two walls for two silent years, who had just laid the truest things he had at her feet and asked her, of his own will, for the one thing she'd been certain she had no right to give.

And she understood that to keep fighting it now — to force him back into a self he'd just told her, plainly, he didn't want to return to — would be its own kind of violence. That she had spent the whole night terrified of overriding his will, and that this, now, refusing him, would be the override. He had chosen. The only thing left for her to decide was whether she trusted him enough to let his choice be real.

She didn't answer him in words. She let go instead — the way you let go of a breath you've been holding so long you forgot you were holding it — the same word he'd given her in the gallery, passed back now in silence instead of speech.

And she stopped fighting.

She felt it the instant she did — felt the ring, no longer met with her resistance, no longer sullen or straining, simply exhale, and Sam exhale with it, the two of them letting go of the same held rope at the same moment. The change came over him there under the bare trees, unhurried and complete and, for the first time all night, unopposed by anyone. She watched it the way she had watched nothing else all evening: not in panic, not stealing glances while she fought, but openly, fully, present to every moment of it, because he had asked her to witness it and she owed him that.

The last of the borrowed man eased away like a tide going out. The frame she'd dragged upright a dozen times settled, finally, where it wanted to be — narrower, lighter, lower, until Sam stood a clean few inches shorter than he'd been all night, shorter than her, for the first time since they were maybe fourteen years old. The hands she'd fought back to coarse and broad drew long and fine and stayed. Her hair — cropped short and pinned flat all evening under someone else's idea of a suitable young man — let go last of all, spilling loose around her face in the same dark waves Gwen had always secretly loved on her, as if it had only been waiting for permission. The jaw, the throat, the line of the shoulders, all of it resolving, degree by gentle degree, from the suitable young man the Compact had received into the person who had been surfacing under Gwen's wanting all night long, and who was, Gwen understood with her whole chest, also simply Sam — the same steadiness, the same kindness, the same eyes she'd loved across two years of stairwells, looking out now from a face that had finally stopped pretending to be anyone else's. She did not change out of the tux — she couldn't have, standing there in nothing but shirtsleeves and vest, the jacket itself still around Gwen's shoulders, no longer cut for the person it belonged to. That undid Gwen completely: the woman standing before her in the collapsing ruins of the family's lie, transformed inside it, having chosen every inch of the becoming.

"There," Sam said, when it was done — and stopped short, startled at the sound of her own voice, a small huff of surprise escaping her. "Oh.

That's — that's new." She tried it again, testing it, like a girl trying on a coat in a shop mirror. "Huh. Weird. Good weird." A small, wondering breath. "Oh. There." She looked down at herself, at her own hands, and then up — properly up, now, the new angle of it startling her all over again — and her face did something Gwen had no name for: not loss, nothing like loss, something closer to arrival.

"How do I look?" Sam asked, and underneath the joke of it, badly hidden, was real fear.

"Impossible," Gwen said, honest, wrecked. "In the best possible way."

"Good answer." A real laugh escaped her, short and startled, easing something in both of them. She swayed slightly, testing her balance in the new center of herself, one hand catching Gwen's arm. "You're taller than me now. That's — okay, that's going to take some getting used to."

"I have heels in my closet, if it's a problem," Gwen said, straight-faced. "I'm happy to close the gap."

"Absolutely not. I earned these three inches." But she was laughing again, for real this time, the sound of it entirely new and entirely hers — and under the laughing, "You know it doesn't feel as wrong as I thought it might," Gwen could see, she was still a little bit terrified, and it was the most human thing that had happened to either of them all night.

Gwen reached out, helpless, and took the new fine hands in both of hers — and then let one hand rise on its own, without asking permission from the rest of her, to cup Sam's cheek, new under her palm and achingly familiar at once.

"It doesn't feel wrong to me either," she said, and pulled her in.

It was the impossible kiss — the one she'd told herself, for two years, could never exist in any version of the world she was allowed to live in — and Sam kissed her back like she'd been waiting the whole night to be asked, both of them shaking, half from cold and half from something else entirely.

The clock tower began to chime.

"We should go somewhere warmer," Gwen said at last, breathless, pulling back only far enough to speak.

"It's late," Sam said before taking a step and nearly tumbling over.

"Oh—" Sam caught herself on Gwen's arm, looked down, baffled, and then started to laugh, a low helpless new-voiced laugh. "My shoes. Gwen, my shoes don't — look." She lifted one foot; the rented dress shoe hung half off it, suddenly a size and a half too large, the heel sliding loose on the path. "Everything's the wrong size. The whole — oh, this is going to be a problem, isn't it. The rings did the body. They didn't do one thread of the rest of it."

"Apparently not," Gwen said — and felt the strange enormous truth of the night narrow, for a moment, to something small and absurd and entirely manageable: a girl in a too-big tuxedo with shoes that wouldn't stay on her feet. It steadied her more than anything had all evening.

Sam stepped out of both shoes, there in the cold, and picked them up by the heels. "I am not breaking my neck on your behalf, Gwendolyn. Not after the night I've had." The grin was pure Sam, lighting up the unfamiliar face from somewhere entirely familiar. "I'll walk back in my socks like a civilized person."

So she did. The two of them went the last of the way across the dark quad slowly, Gwen in her gown and her grandmother's cold diamonds, Sam beside her in a black tuxedo three sizes too loose and stocking feet silent on the freezing path, a pair of abandoned dress shoes swinging from one hand. It should have been ridiculous. It was, a little. It was also the happiest Gwen had ever been walking anywhere.

They walked the rest of the way slowly, her hand finding Sam's the same way it had all night — two fingers, one small press, the old signal, except there was nothing left to signal, nothing to catch or shove back down, just the shape of the habit staying because it had become the shape of them holding on.

***
Her room was at the top of the old building above the quad, and it was empty. Tamsin had slipped out of the dinner early with her boyfriend, the two of them gone sometime after the Receiving the way they always disappeared once there was nothing left worth being seen at — which was the whole reason Gwen had been able to plan any of this in the first place: a room of her own tonight, no Whitmore-cousin roommate to explain a transformed date to. Gwen let them in and shut the door, and the world's whole watching apparatus — the Compact, the book, her grandmother, the two hundred pairs of eyes — was at last on the far side of it.

For a moment neither of them moved. The lamp threw the small room into low gold light, and in it Sam looked almost unbearably present — not a stranger anymore, not Samuel, just Sam, entirely new and entirely known, standing in the middle of Gwen's room in stocking feet and a jacket that had never once been hers.

"I don't — " Sam started, and stopped, and tried again. "I've never been on this side of myself before. I don't entirely know what I'm doing."

"Neither do I," Gwen said, which was the truest thing she'd said all night.

They stood there another moment, close enough to touch and not quite touching, both of them, Gwen thought, a little afraid of how much they wanted to. It was Sam who closed the last of the distance — reaching for the lapels of the jacket Gwen was still wearing, easing it back off her shoulders slowly, deliberately, her fingers not quite steady with it.

"You should get this back eventually," Gwen said, low, as Sam set it over the back of the desk chair with a care that had nothing to do with the jacket.

"Eventually," Sam agreed, and didn't move away.

Her fingers found the clasp of Gwen's grandmother's diamonds next, working it loose, and the necklace came away too, one more piece of the evening's armor gone. Gwen reached for her in turn — the buttons of the borrowed shirt, open at the collar all night — and felt Sam go very still as her fingers grazed the new skin beneath it.

"Sorry — " Gwen started.

"No — don't stop." Sam's breath caught, startled at herself. "That's — I didn't know it would feel like that. Everything's just... more, right now. I don't know how to explain it." A short, disbelieving laugh. "You'd think I'd have had some idea what I was walking into. I didn't. Not even close."

"Good different or bad different?"

"Good." She said it like the answer surprised her too. "Very, very good different."

They kissed again then — slower this time, nothing like the desperate thing under the trees — and it was the first thing in the whole impossible evening that was simply theirs: two people who had loved each other across two walls for two silent years, finally, with both walls down, on the same side of every secret at last. Gwen felt the held breath of a decade go out of her and something far better come in.

They moved toward the bed without quite deciding to, the way water finds the low ground, the last of what either of them was wearing coming away somewhere between standing and lying down, unhurried, both of them still learning the geography of it as they went.

"You can stop me," Gwen murmured, close to her ear, once they were down among the pillows. "Any second. Just say it."

"I know." Sam's voice caught. "I'm not going to."

What happened after, in the lamplight, in the narrow bed at the top of the sleeping building, was theirs and no one else's. Gwen marveled at how unhurried it was, where the whole night had been urgent — tender, where the whole night had been danger, slow discovery instead of desperate concealment. She learned the new sound of Sam's laugh against her throat and the old, unchanged steadiness of her hands underneath everything else that had changed. Sam learned the shape of her back, learned the sound Gwen made when she finally stopped being careful, and said her name once, low and wondering, into the dark — the first new thing she'd said all night that belonged to no one but herself.

Gwen looked into Sam's bright grey-green eyes and felt something break open in her chest that had nothing to do with the ring. She did not reach for the rings. She did not think about midnight, or the book, or the morning, or the price her grandmother had promised was always, always coming — and if Sam was thinking of any of it too, she gave no sign, and Gwen didn't ask.

There would be time enough for all of it. For one night there was only this: the two of them, chosen and choosing, learning the new and the familiar shape of each other in the dark. And when the last of her energy was spent, Gwen smiled the truest smile she could remember smiling, and let herself fall asleep in Sam's arms as the first grey light came up over the quad.

[End of Chapter Eight]

If you enjoy my story, there are more in the series that you can find on my website at: https://tinyurl.com/Blackwick