He pressed me firmly to him, and I could feel that he was more than ready to get on with the business at hand. With some surprise, I realized that I was ready too. In fact, whether it was the result of the late hour, the wine, his own attractiveness, or simple deprivation, I wanted him quite badly.
It starts out the same, but then, after a moment,” he said, speaking softly, “suddenly it’s as though I’ve a living flame in my arms.” His touch grew firmer, outlining my lips and caressing the line of my jaw. “And I want only to throw myself into it and be consumed.
It wasn’t the risk,” I said, flicking my toes at a big black-and-white splotched carp. “Or not entirely. It was – well, it was partly fear, but mostly it was that I – I couldn’t leave Jamie.” I shrugged helplessly. “I – simply couldn’t.
I think perhaps the greatest burden lies in caring for those we cannot help.” “Not in having no one for whom to care?” Fraser paused before answering; he might have been weighing the position of the pieces on the table. “That is emptiness,” he said at last, softly. “But no great burden.
Claire. The name knifed across his heart with a pain that was more racking than anything his body had ever been called on to withstand.
Do ye want me to be a horse, a bear, or a dog?” “A hedgehog.” “A hedgehog? And just how does a hedgehog make love?” he demanded. No, I thought. I won’t. I will not. But I did. “Very carefully,” I replied, giggling helplessly. So now we know just how old that one is, I thought.
For several days, I slept. Whether this was a necessary part of physical recovery, or a stubborn retreat from waking reality, I do not know, but I woke only reluctantly to take a little food, falling at once back into a stupor of oblivion, as though the small, warm weight of broth in my stomach were an anchor that pulled me after it, down through the murky fathoms of sleep.
I think it’s as though everyone has a small place inside themselves, maybe, a private bit that they keep to themselves. It’s like a little fortress, where the most private part of you lives – maybe it’s your soul, maybe just that bit makes you yourself and not anyone else. You don’t usually show that bit of yourself to anyone, usually, unless sometimes to someone that ye love greatly.
A Highlander in full regalia is an impressive sight – any Highlander, no matter how old, ill-favored, or crabbed in appearance. A tall, straight-bodied, and by no means ill-favored young Highlander at close range is breath-taking.
That only by forgiveness could she forget – and that forgiveness was not a single act, but a matter of constant practice.
Don’t cry, Sassenach,” he said, so softly I could barely hear him.
Oh. It’s Fraser. James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser.
Is it usual, what it is between us when I touch you?
If I were a horse, I’d let him ride me anywhere.
And what’s wrong wi’ the way ye smell?′ he said heatedly. ‘At least ye smelt like a woman, not a damn flower garden. What d’ye think I am, a man or a bumblebee? Would ye wash yourself, Sassenach, so I can get within less than ten feet of ye?
Not the historians. No, not them. Their greatest crime is that they presume to know what happened, how things come about, when they have only what the past chose to leave behind – for the most part, they think what they were meant to think, and it’s a rare one that sees what really happened, behind the smokescreen of artifacts and paper.
There were some chains you wore because you wanted to.
Does it ever stop, Claire? The wanting?
It was possible to leave things behind – places, people, memories – at least for a time. But places held tight to the things that had happened in them, and to come again to a place you had once lived was to be brought face-to-face with what you had done there and who you had been.
We look in the mirror and see the shades of other faces looking back through the years; we see the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway. By blood and by choice, we make our ghosts; we haunt ourselves.