Attempting Elizabeth (23 page)

“Till this moment, I never knew myself.”

We met back
at the little copse of trees I was starting to think of as "our spot." We were going to have to stop meeting here. Eventually we would get caught. There were just too many opportunities for discovery; too many risks. I suppose if we got caught, Darcy and Elizabeth would be forced to marry. I'd briefly considered what would happen if Mark and I just sped up the timeline by announcing Darcy’s and Lizzy's engagement and heading off to the altar. Would the book finally kick us out because we'd achieved happiness for literature's most beloved couple? I somehow doubted that. If there was one thing I'd discovered about
Pride and Prejudice
while I'd been here, it was that it wanted to be played like it was written.

I'd already done enough damage by bringing Mark here. He wasn't like me. He was stronger than me and being with him made me stronger. I was convinced that's why he was changing Darcy. And why I'd started changing Lizzy once I'd kissed him.

But I think the book still wanted to be played correctly.

"What's the new theory?" Mark asked me after a quick kiss hello.

"You're not going to like it," I warned.

"Try me."

"You remember how I said that if I played a scene wrong, I'd get bumped back until I did it right?"

"Yeah, but that's stopped happening."

"Yes, ever since I pulled you in. And we've changed the main characters. But I think the book isn't letting us out because we need to fix it. We need to proceed forward with the timeline of the novel and let it play itself out. When I've left before I was leaving the storyline undamaged, but we've broken it and we have to repair it."

Mark nodded. "I guess that makes sense in a way. But isn't there a lot of time left in the book?"

I glanced up at him through my lowered lashes, trying to gauge his reaction as I answered. "A little over eight months."

"Eight months?" Mark ran his hand through his unruly curls. "Seriously?"

"Well, it's the beginning of April now. Lizzy and Darcy won't see each other again until the start of August. Then they don't see each other again until September. Then they finally get engaged in October and married some time in December."

"So you want us to not see each other, at all, for four months?" He still looked shocked, and something else I couldn't quite put my finger on.

"No. I think it sucks. But I think it's best chance we have." I fought the tears I felt probing behind my eyes.

"Kels, babe, don't cry." Mark pulled me closer and wrapped his arms around my waist. I rested my head on his shoulder, my face buried in his neck. How was I going to go four whole months without even seeing him? And then even more months before we could be together? We were talking about staying almost two thirds of a year here, most of it apart.

"There's gotta be another way," he muttered as he stroked my hair. "What if we got married now? I mean isn't that the point of the book—Darcy and Elizabeth get married? We just take a shorter route to the end of the book."

"I don't think it will work," I said sadly into his neck. "Too many things have to happen to other characters that wouldn't happen if we did that. Bingley and Jane wouldn't get together, Lydia wouldn't end up with Wickham—that'd be an improvement actually, but I think it has to happen how Austen wrote it."

"And how she wrote it is?"

"You propose, and I reject you, and you go off and become a better person, and then I see your house and fall in love with you."

Mark laughed. I snuggled closer, trying to savor every second of his laughter. I was going to have a very long, lonely, road ahead of me. And so was he. And it was all my fault.

"I'm so sorry, Mark. I'm sure spending eight months in Regency England wasn’t really on your bucket list."

"Not really. But we'll survive it if we have to, right? If you think it's our best shot, we have to try it."

"Yeah. It's the best I can come up."

Mark continued to stroke my hair. I wished that we could just stay like that forever. "You're going to have to tell me everything I have to do."

"I wrote down everything I could think of. Where you're supposed to be and when. The good thing is once we get the timeline moving again I think it will just sort of sweep us along with it." I reluctantly stood back from him and handed him a sealed letter. "It's all in here."

Mark took it. "Is this my
Pride and Prejudice
instruction manual?"

I nodded. "The first thing is we have to get the first proposal out of the way. I put it in there for you to memorize. I…I say some pretty nasty stuff. So does Darcy."

"I think I can handle it."

"Okay." I stared at him. "The Collins's are supposed to dine at Rosings, then you come over and propose."

"I'll tell Lady Catherine I want to have you all over for dinner tonight then."

I swallowed. Tonight. God, that seemed soon. I knew it was best to get it over with, like pulling a Band Aid off. Then we could get on with the rest of the story. The sooner we parted the sooner we'd be together. That made sense to my head, but oh my god, it didn't make sense to my heart.

"Oh, I almost forgot. I brought you something," Mark smiled at me, his dimple winking. He pulled a few sheets of folded paper out of his jacket and handed them to me. "Read it later, though. It'd be weird if you read it in front of me."

"What is it?"

"My story, the second one. The one I didn't show you."

"Oh." I was suddenly dying to read it. But reading it meant leaving Mark and going back to the parsonage.

"So this is goodbye as Kels and Mark, huh?" He asked. "When I see you tonight it's just Darcy and Lizzy."

I nodded. "I'm so sorry."

"Stop." He pulled me back into his arms. "No more sorries. Let me say goodbye to you properly."

Mark's kiss was full of everything I wished I could somehow say to him. Full of longing, desire, and just a hint of desperation. His mouth moved over mine, sometimes soft and worshipful like a prayer, sometimes hard and rough like a there was a fire raging between us. The tears were streaming down my face, completely unheeded. His lips left mine just long enough to kiss the tears away and then returned with a passion that left me breathless. My arms wrapped around his neck, my fingers tangling in his hair, trying somehow to bring him even closer to me.

I wasn't going to be able to let him go.

He did it for me. Because he'd always made things easier for me, even when I didn't deserve it. He untangled my arms from his neck then leant forward, cupping my face in his hands, dropping a kiss on each of my closed eyelids.

"Goodbye, Kelsey." He whispered in my ear. I felt him move away. I couldn't open my eyes as I heard him start to walk back toward Rosings.

"Goodbye, Mark." I whispered.

I ran all the way back to the parsonage clutching the papers he’d given me to my chest. I didn't stop to say hello to anyone, just sprinted up the stairs to my room and slammed the door behind me. I sat down in the chair by the window and opened Mark's pages with shaky hands. It was pretty much the same as the story he'd written originally. Until the end.

Kelsey. She's the reason I'm here. I don't know how or why she pulled me into this novel, but I'm kind of glad she did. That might sound weird, but if she is here, I'd rather be here with her. She fascinates me. I know she thinks that the Lizzy character is prettier than her, but she's so wrong. I could watch Kelsey's face for hours, everything she thinks shows up in her expressions. She reminds me of the ocean. She's got undertow…in a good way. In a ‘pull you down and drown you in the love of a good woman’ way. In the ‘it will seep into you and sink into your pores and immerse you way.’ But also in the ‘it will challenge and push you and pull you apart and help put you back together better than you were before’ way.

I cried until the tears ran out.

~

That night Mark stood before me, wearing Darcy’s best jacket, his cravat tied in an intricate pattern that must have taken at least an hour. He didn’t let on that we were playing a scene at all—no smile or reassuring wink. He’d fully committed to the role, and those famous words were uttered with absolute perfection. Who knew Mark was such a good actor?

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”

He continued on, expressing Darcy’s opinions of the inferiority of Lizzy’s connections, of her family’s manners, of his own pride. Jane hadn’t given us an actual script here, so I’d written him a hybrid of the proposal scenes from the two most famous movies. He’d memorized it well.

I stared at him. Which was probably good because that was what Lizzy was supposed to do. There was an almost audible breaking sound coming from the vicinity of my heart. I wanted him to be saying those words for real. Or maybe not those words exactly, because Mark wasn’t Darcy and, thank God, could never really
be
Darcy. He wasn’t proud, self-conscious, or arrogant. He wasn’t any of the things that Darcy was up until this point—up until he came up hard against Lizzy’s vivacious, open, and honest spirit and found himself lacking.

I
was the Darcy. I was the one trying to hide my own insecurities behind stupid bravado. The one quick to jump to conclusions, the one who retreated inside a wall of silence and secretly coveted Mark's ease and openness. And Mark saw straight through it all.

He was waiting for me to reply, to play the scene like we’d decided—straight to Austen. I opened my mouth but the words wouldn’t come.

Elizabeth may have rejected Darcy, but I couldn’t bring myself to reject Mark, even if it was fake.

“I...I can’t,” I finally managed. He looked at me in surprise, one eyebrow raised, wondering why I’d just veered off track. "Mark, I don’t think I can do this.” I stood up, and took a tentative step toward him. “I’m sorry, it might be the only way, but I can’t just say no to you and not see you for months and months.”

Mark reached out his hand and I took it gratefully, closing the last few steps between us.

“Why, Kelsey?” he asked, looking into my eyes.

I had to say it. I couldn’t be a coward anymore.

“I can’t have you say those things—that you love and admire me—and not have them be
to
me. I can’t have you say someone else’s words like that, it breaks my heart. I won’t sit here and listen to it because—” I swallowed; my throat was painfully dry. “Because I love you. I love
you
. Mark Barnes, not Mr. Darcy or—”

I think I would have kept blabbering on for goodness knows how long except that Mark cut me off with a kiss that took my world apart. Took it apart and then rebuilt it, piece by piece, with his kiss at the center.

I kissed him back with everything that was in me. I didn’t care anymore about anything but me and Mark. I didn’t care if we destroyed
Pride and Prejudice
. I didn’t care if Lizzy ended up with Darcy. I didn’t care about anything but us. Our story.

I don’t know how long we stood there, Mark re-writing my life’s story with his lips, but when he finally lifted his head from mine it felt like it had been forever and somehow not long enough.

“Darcy did make a rather poor job out of it the first time,” he brushed a strand of hair off my neck with his thumb. At some point his hand had found its way up to the back of my neck, cradling the back of my head. “I’d rather not be stuck with his words. I love you, Kelsey Edmundson, the end. No qualifications, no struggling with anything at all.”

There wasn’t any way to respond to that other than to wrap my arms around his neck and pull his head closer to mine. You know, sometimes reality really is better than fiction.

As Mark's lips settled onto mine again I gasped against them, pulling away slightly.

“Kels?” He asked, concern etching his brow.

“Wait! Wait!” I jerked out of his arms and ran to the small writing table in the corner of the room, scrabbling around for a quill and ink. “Just a sec!” I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote frantically on it. I threw down the quill and waved the sheet of paper in the air, hoping the ink would dry quickly. I tested it delicately with my finger. It didn’t smudge so I folded it up and held it in the palm of my hand.

I ran back to Mark. “Sorry,” I said, a little out of breath. “I just had to do something.”

“No problem, not quite the reaction I was expecting after declaring undying love and all that—”

“Shut up and kiss me,” I instructed.

He laughed that deep, delicious laugh that always turned my insides out. He drew me close, his strong arms wrapped around my waist, “No more running away,” he whispered as he leaned forward.

“No more running,” I agreed as I brought my hand up resting my palm and that folded piece of paper against his strong, broad chest. He captured my mouth with his and I whispered against his lips “Let’s wake up, Mark.”

A rushing sound, like waves crashing inside my head, filled my ears. I could feel the familiar pull and push that I’d experienced so many times when popping back into a scene. I ignored it all, keeping my eyes tightly closed as I focused on the sensation of Mark’s arms around me, on the feel of his lips on mine.

I felt the bright, warm light on my face. I cracked an eyelid open and glanced up. I’d left the blinds open again and the brilliant Californian sun was streaming cheerfully through the window.

I was in my own bed, in my own apartment. The bright face of my bedside alarm clock had the right date on it. It was as if no time had passed and nothing had changed.

Except for the warm, strong, male body that was sprawled out under me, his large hands still gripping my waist.

I took a moment to study Mark’s face, he still had his eyes closed, his sandy colored lashes resting against his cheek. I thought for a moment my heart might actually burst with happiness. I reached up and ran a finger across his cheekbone as if to make sure he was really there.