Age Gap16 min read
He Came Back for Me (And I Took His Breath Away)
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"I'll break your rice pot if you burn tonight's soup again."
I slammed the wooden spoon down and the soup hissed like a small storm.
"Katharine, you're impossible," Bryson muttered, hovering too close. He always hovered when I cooked, as if my fire needed guarding.
"Then step back and let me cook," I said. I kept my voice steady. I had reasons to keep steady.
Bryson blinked, smiled with that soft, honest face, and helped by holding the lid. He thought he was helping. He did not know I was making dinner for someone much harder to please than him.
I had learned to be small for a long time. I had learned that the world loved beautiful things until it used them up. I had learned how to hide my hard places and show only what seemed safe. I had learned to be a blade wrapped in silk.
That night I served the soup to Gideon for the fourth time in as many days. He ate slowly, eyes on me like a quiet sea.
"You always try a bit of everything," I said, testing.
He set the spoon down and stared into the steam. "You try for me," he said simply. "You always try for me."
Later, when I stood under the cold moon and clutched at the thread of my pardon, I still could not say if that line had been praise or permission.
*
I came to the wind temple to find him.
"Come on, Katharine, you lead the tests. You always do," Bryson whispered as we walked among the pines.
"I do not seek the lead," I said.
"Then why fight so hard?"
I wanted to answer with all the truth of my life—the nights in the house of gilded shame, the hands that taught me the blade and then left—and call him back to account for leaving too. I wanted to wake him and shout that he had no right to vanish. Instead I tightened my fingers on the little willow blade at my hip and kept my mouth closed.
The trials were two-fold: a strength round at dawn and a spirit test at noon. I could make my sword sing and trash all but the best opponents. What I feared was what most feared when it came to me: the place between strength and being seen. Between being taken and being left.
"Katharine!" A bright laugh cut the air. Jayda Crowley spun onto the field like a flame. She wore red and a clear smile, and everyone loved her smile. She was loud, clever, and stupid in all the right ways that made men shout.
"I told you she would be trouble," Frances Ford muttered at my shoulder. Frances had thin lips and a sharp tone. She disliked me because I reminded her of things she could not buy.
Jayda took a bow that seemed to aim mostly at Gideon’s seat. "For the master, of course," she said in a syrupy voice, and every head turned.
"You always aim high," I said quietly.
Jayda flashed her teeth. "I aim where the light is."
I let her have the stage. I let her make a show of being bold and careless. We had all come to this temple to be chosen. But she had something else. She had a system she called the "edge"—some bright, secret thing that gave her power beyond her years. I had only my scars.
When we fought, Jayda's sudden move hit like a weight. She drew a burst I had no right to meet. My ribs burned with the force of it.
"System, fire the strike," she had whispered into her mind, and the world had tilted.
I pushed back with everything I owned. The blade cut the air and I felt something inside me stand and refuse. The crowd froze when my sword stopped a breath from her throat.
It was not meant to be poetic. It was math and grit. I walked off the stage with blood at my lip and a white dress stained at the cuff, and I kept my eyes on Gideon.
People whispered. They loved the story of the broken child who had become a weapon. They loved the one who moved like a breath and struck like a stone.
"She took it," a voice said.
Gideon had come down like a blade of his own. He moved with a calm that was both weather and law. When he looked at me, my chest turned small and honest. I wanted to ask why he had left me on the road once, but when I opened my mouth I only said, "Yes."
He smiled once, and it unknotted something in my rib.
"You will be in my house," he said when the choosing came. "You will stay."
I accepted, because I had wanted a place to stand and because he was the only man who had not treated me like a thing that could be exchanged for coin.
"But mind this," he said later as we walked in a quiet grove, "You will learn to hold yourself differently."
"Who are you to tell me?" I asked. My voice had the careful edge of the woman who had lived among buyers and thieves.
"Someone who knows what it's like to be alone," he said. "Come with me."
I wanted to test him. I wanted him to say sorry for the night he left. I wanted him to say he had been a coward. Instead he taught me how to stitch a seam in silence and how to wake a stove so its flame did not bite.
"You're soft-hearted," Bryson told me once when he came with a stupid grin and a tall basket of mushrooms. "You should be crueler."
"I'm not cruel," I said.
"But you let people hurt you." His hand brushed my sleeve, and his smile broke like a child's.
"You do not understand," I said. I did not tell him I had learned how not to break out of habit. I did not tell him I felt like a glass that might shatter in a stranger's hand.
Gideon watched us with an expression that was not quite jealous and not quite kind. He had centuries folded into a face that could be gentle and a voice that could cut. He told me that fire could not be loved into being less hot. "You must learn to take without being taken," he said once, quietly. I didn't know whether he meant me or he meant himself.
*
Jayda watched everything like a stake in the ground she wished to claim.
"You owe me position," she hissed one night when she thought I was alone. "You will not be the one he keeps in his heart. I will be."
I did not look up. "He is not yours to keep," I said.
"Everything can be had," she spat. "You are a story. I will write the end."
She had a system—a sharp, chattery thing that fed her lucky blows and told her what to do. I had a past and a sword. Eventually, she thought those would be equal.
She was wrong.
Months passed and the rhythm of the temple changed me. Gideon taught me water forms and how to change a breath into a wave. He helped me learn how to take pain and make it a stair. He smiled in private ways, as if my existence amused him, as if he kept me in a small pocket of the world to visit.
"You remember that story about the nine fruits?" he asked once as we sat by a small warm fire.
"The myth where a tree shields the sky?" I guessed. I was trying to show I remembered his stories.
"Yes." He touched the string I wore—an old bead one of his finds. "That is the reason I stayed once. I thought I could shield someone. I told myself I would walk away and not harm them."
"You left," I said.
"I left because I thought it would help you be stronger," he said simply. "I did not know you would feel betrayed."
"You are allowed no excuses," I told him, because I wanted him to look at the mark it had made.
He studied my face the way one studies a map. "I know. Here is only the path forward."
I wanted more than the path. I wanted the man who had gone and left the road behind me to answer for the night he disappeared.
He never offered a full apology. He handed me a bead and taught me how to boil water so it tasted like smoke and salt and home. In small ways he gave what I had wanted all my life: steady presence.
It was not the same as being named enough, but presence was a kind of name.
When Jayda started to flounder, she grew mean. She set whispers like traps and sent stories about me—old stories from the house I had fled—to paint me in colors I did not need. There are people who love fairy tales until they become truth.
"You have no shame," she crowed before the whole court one day. "You tricked our master into pity!"
"Stop," Gideon said, and his voice stripped the room bare.
"You will not make accusations about my child," he said.
People were stunned. Jayda lost her smile. She had thought her machinery could hum out anything. She had not planned for the moment when the man she wanted would protect the woman she mocked.
They forced a trial. "Let the stone test it," someone said, and they placed an old carved stone into my palm. It was a thing used to test binding love; the tale said it warmed for the true heart.
I closed my fingers around the stone. At first, nothing. Then I felt a cold like the inside of winter. The stone chilled and then the room shivered with surprise.
"Cold?" Jayda laughed nervously and snatched it. When she held it, the stone returned to normal color. Her hands turned white with fear.
"It is cold," Frances said. She pretended to be disdainful until she saw the cold and began to look at me with a new, strange respect. She had wanted what everyone wants: to be on the safe bench.
Gideon spoke without rising. "Enough. Jayda will be punished for lying and shame."
She fell apart. Not gracefully. She shrieked, she clawed at the air, she begged. It became a show of raw fear. I learned then what it was to watch a person unravel in front of a room. They filmed her with curious hands. Her smugness curdled into a raw spot of pleading.
"We will not be cruel," Gideon said. His voice was not soft.
Yet the crowd wanted blood. They wanted a lesson. Jayda's eyes were empty except for the system's faint glow. She had chosen her path.
"You will be isolated," Gideon declared. "You will be barred from gatherings. You will be stripped of office, cursed of coin. You will make public apology to all you slandered."
Jayda had no plan for public humiliation. She was good at small things—systems, sharp words—but she had never learned how to lose loudly.
On the first day of her punishment she was smeared with the ink of her own lies. Cards were read from public steps. Her story, all the ways she had cheated and lied, was recited with a dryness that made the crowd gasp. She crumpled. People spat.
She came to my little yard one rain-soaked night. Her hair was wild, her hands were scabbed where she had tried to hide. She held a box of pastries and smiled like a frail thing.
"Katharine," she said. "I came to apologize."
I took one step forward. "You don't get to choose how I feel," I said. "You hurt many people."
"I know. I will make it up." She said it like a prayer.
I pushed the door and the rain hit us both. She tripped and I reached out only to steady her. She fell and I pushed her away.
"Get out," I said, and for once I meant it.
She flopped like a damp rag outside, grasping the wrist that crawled with blood and shame. The next day a rumor spread that Jayda had tried to end things for herself in a storm. People cheered in a small way. The rumor became a lesson. I felt nothing. I had no wish to see a broken thing get worse. But the world had its taste for spectacle.
Gideon hated the world when it gaped. He hated it as he hated storms. He wrapped me in his cloak as if I were a relic and not a person. He moved in ways I could not read.
"You are mine," he told me once, and his voice was a soft press. "Not because you are property, but because I choose to stand with you."
A part of me wanted to accept that and fall down and be nothing but his. But I had a stubbornness that made me hold back. "You did not stay once," I said.
"I did not know how," he answered. "I thought distance would make you safe. It made you hate me. I know."
We learned to speak carefully. We learned the words that could not be used. We learned how to love without killing the other.
*
There were other dangers than gossip. The temple's cavern—the old hollow the elders called the Hollow of Open Ways—stirred. At the edge of the known world a gate shifted and announced itself like a cough.
"People are getting hurt," Anna Albert told me. She had been the one to tend me after a bad fall and looked at me with the eyes of a judge and a mother. "They are trapped inside the hollow."
"Then go," I said. "I will stay."
"No. Come," she ordered. She had a way with orders.
Gideon stood very still and dressed in robes that swallowed him. "I will go in," he said, "and I will find out why the hollow breathes out trouble."
"You are not to go alone," Anna said. For once she sounded afraid.
He smiled with the small, unreadable smile he used when he hid pieces of himself. "We will go together," he answered. "You and I."
So we went.
It was worse than the tales had said. A fog like children's tears crawled over the ground. Sounds came that were not animal and not human. I fought creatures shaped like old nightmares and saw men with their faces like masks thrown away.
"They push on the weak," I said out of breath. "They make people turn on each other."
Gideon moved like water through the battleground, and yet he never stopped to say my name in public. He forbade me to go too near and then let me stand at his elbow while he cut through the chaos.
At one point we got hemmed in by a swarm of winged things—small black beasts that hung and ate like flies. They bit and took and left a taste in my mouth like rust.
"Pull back!" someone shouted. I had been bloodied more times than I could say.
Gideon came through the smoke like a flash of iron. He pushed himself into the small pocket I had made, and I felt his presence like a wall. "Stay close," he said.
"I can't be kept like a child," I muttered, but my hand did not leave his sleeve.
When the battle ended—if any war ends—we limped back with the others and the elders declared some would leave and some would repair. Anna Albert's face was pale but full of grit. "You owe this child," she told Gideon.
He bowed his head. "I will watch over her," he promised.
"Watch," she said. "Don't possess."
"I will watch," he answered.
The cave had been a crucible of sorts. People who had mocked me came to me with red faces and asked for bandaging and bread. I treated their wounds without asking for apology. When men begged for pardon I let them speak and then turned away. I was not a saint; I was tired.
Later, when we rested under the moon, Gideon sat beside me and told me roughly how many lives had been saved. He looked older than he had any right to be. "You don't have to be small any longer," he said.
"I don't know how," I confessed.
"Then learn," he said simply. He took my hand and placed the bead he had given me in my palm. "Come sit with me." He was so plain in that request it made my head swim.
I went to him.
*
Days later, Bryson brought me a packet of small seeds from his family's shop. "Grow these," he said. "Grow something for me."
I planted them awkwardly and they grew into plain green leaves. They were nothing like jewels. Yet when I boiled them into a broth and Gideon tasted, he closed his eyes and smiled.
"You will make me food now and then," he said, his voice soft.
"I will because I want you to taste memory," I answered.
"Then that will be a part of us," he said.
We were like that for many quiet days: my blade, his book, our small rituals. When the world turned sharp we braced. When the world was kind we kept it. It was a life built on small things and an old man's joke.
And then Jayda did a thing so stupid and loud that it echoed.
She had been punished—only socially, for the elders were not monsters—and then she crawled back into the game. She found new tricks and began to whisper of old scars. She sold her old lies to new people with a talent that had once been charming and now was poison.
"You will ruin him," I hissed one night.
"I will never ruin him," she said, but her hands shook.
She found a way to set a trap. She stole some weak magic—clear, bright and small—then she sent people to the town square with her lies. They spread. The townspeople were animals when given the scent of scandal.
One morning the lock of my door began to make a sound like a breaking. "You think you can break into me and steal me?" I said aloud, but no one listened to that voice of fright. Instead, the village crowd got their entertainment. Men who had once bowed to me now laughed and pointed.
I was not dumb. I arranged, in public, a scene.
"Are you the bride?" Bryson cried out at the wedding feast of his house, where he had been forced to marry Carter Schmidt the daughter of a partnership. I had the note of his invite, the red card with the double knots pressed into my palm.
He had come to his duty. He had married to save his house. He had left a boy behind to be a man.
That night I attended the wedding like a small thunder. I walked in calm and bright and took my place on a quiet bench that was not for me. I had the look of someone who had ceased to want the world's small favors.
When Bryson saw me, he nearly lost his balance. "Katharine," he said—a little stunned.
"Congratulations," I said. The house rattled. The bride smiled with all the kindness of the comfortable.
"Come with me to the garden later," he said when the ceremony had drunk red wine to the roof.
I went, because there was a storm inside me and I wanted to burn it out.
"Why?" he asked suddenly, near the moonlit pond. "Why did you come?"
"Because the world is full of men who say a thing and vanish," I said. "I wanted to see if you would stay."
He looked like a child who had been told to carry a weight too heavy for him. "I stayed," he whispered. "I tried to do the right thing."
"And you agreed to be bought," I answered.
"I had to," he said. He did not look like a man who wanted to be remembered for sacrifice. He looked like a man who had had no choice.
"I wanted the whole thing," I said. "I wanted a man to choose me and stay. Not as penance. Not as duty."
He took my hand and trembled. "I did not choose to hurt you," he said. "I only made the choices I could."
I lifted my sword at him like a mock threat, then let it rest on my knee. "Then go," I said finally. "Live with what you have done."
He laughed, a small broken sound, and then left the yard.
I sat under the moon and watched until my fingers ached. The night gave me no satisfaction.
When I came back into the temple, there was a sound like wet cloth and a shadow slid through the arch.
It was Jayda. She tiptoed and claimed an apology. She promised to say the truth. She was dressed in new rat-slick silk, probably paid for with coin she had not yet earned.
"Leave," I said.
"Please," she begged. "I will tell them everything. Just let me in."
Rain fell hard enough to make the path gleam. She twisted and sobbed and finally, in front of the house, I reached out and cut one of her tendons. It was quick, precise. She screamed and fell. I cut it because at that time I was so tired of small crimes that I preferred to scare her to the marrow. I would not watch a person come back and slice me open gently.
She crawled away, bleeding into the gutter. I stood and watched as the storm took her.
They found her the next day, begging at the market. People laughed. The world was hungry for spectacle. I did not laugh. I had done what I had promised myself—the one promise that bound me more than any other: I would not be the soft thing for men to take and leave. I would not be broken for anyone's use.
Gideon watched me and when I did something monstrous he did not praise me. He did not smile. He looked at me like a man looking at a chosen relic.
"You must wear yourself," he told me finally. "Do not let the world wear you down."
"Then stay," I said more softly than I had ever said anything.
He took my hand, closed over it like a seal. "I am staying."
The world shifted then. I began to believe him. Not in his words alone. In the small things: a bandage folded, a meal at dawn, the way he tapped my shoulder when he wanted to be near. It was a slow war of tenderness and duty. He did not give me everything in one offering. He gave me pieces and kept a few back as if he were leftover wealth.
I would steal them, piece by piece.
Weeks passed and we grew. Jayda's disgrace turned into a quiet ruin. She lost friends; she lost favor. People who had hosted her laughed when she came and told it to be like water sliding off a leaf.
One day the elders called an audience. They would have a feast and test. They would bring out the old stone and the old lights. They would see if the bead on my string was a charm or a testament.
I walked forward with my hand in Gideon's sleeve, because he needed me to.
"Show us," Anna said. She had stacks of patience like iron. "Show us whatever piece you wish."
I put the stone in my palm and it warmed like an ember. Not the old tale of hands made ill, but warm like hand fire.
"You have done well," she said. "You are steady."
No one could take that from me.
That night, by quiet fire, I told myself what had changed. I had a friend who thought my kitchen terrifying and loved it anyway. I had a mentor who would not let the world eat me. I had my own cold justice when I needed it. I had Bryson who loved me in a gentle way and a husband who had married for duty and not because he wanted me. I had everything and nothing, and I was perhaps worse and better for it.
One night Gideon sat very close and the moon made his lashes into small dark bows. "Will you stay?" he asked.
"For as long as you will teach me to be strong," I answered.
"For as long as you will let me," he replied.
I took his hand and buried my face near his throat. The scent of him, the old books and water and rain, was a home I had not thought I wanted.
"Promise me one thing," I said.
"What?"
"Don't ever leave without saying."
"I will not," he said.
He kept his promise.
Months later, when the temple sent us to seal the hollow and Gideon ordered me to stay, I could not. I would not be told to hide away. I marched with him and he let me come, if only because he understood that I never knew when I would run if he told me to wait.
We landed in the thick of the fight. Things were ugly and bright and close. I took a hit to the thigh and it bled like a slow bell. I laughed and then vomited, and someone—Gideon—took me into his arms like a man who got back what he was owed.
"Don't be trying to be brave," he said.
"I don't try," I said, which was a true and small thing.
We found the heart of the hollow at last: an old stone the color of winter. It had been cold before and now it sang like a trapped animal. Gideon bent and spoke to it. His voice was thunder and kindness mixed in; the stone answered with a small glow and then was still.
When we returned the elders offered honors because the hollow would not close on our watch.
Anna looked at me and said, "Now you belong to no one but yourself."
I let myself enjoy the moment because there would be others—bigger storms, tenderer days. I finally understood that my life would not be a single revenge or a single triumph. It would be made of evenings like this, of small confident acts, and of eyes that watched me with steady hands.
On the last night of our long work, as we walked back through the pines and the world began to smell like possibility, Gideon took my hand in front of the temple and said simply, "Marry me."
He did not make the grand promise of a bed or a ring. He made the plain request that meant the most: he would make me the thing he wanted to call kin.
I hesitated because I had held a thousand things and none of them was forever. "What will you give me?" I asked.
"Presence," he said. "And a life."
"I will keep my own sword," I said.
He laughed a quiet laugh. "And I would be a fool to take it. I would be a poorer man for it."
So I said yes.
We married with simple vows and with only the people who had not been bought or sold in their hearts. Bryson was there and he smiled like the pure thing he was. Jayda was not. She was dusted from the world and I did not mourn her much.
On our night together in a small room, I held him and finally asked the question I had carried like a grain of glass.
"Why did you leave me that night?" I whispered.
He drew a slow breath. "I thought distance would give you strength," he said. "I thought I could not be both your shield and your teacher. I thought I would make you better by being gone."
"You were wrong," I said.
"I know," he said. He pulled me closer. "But come now. You are mine and I am yours. I will not leave without saying."
We slept like people who had learned finally how to hold one another without fear.
I am still Katharine Castle. I am still the blade wrapped in silk that can cut. I am still the woman who will not be used and left. But now I am learning how to ask for what I need and how to let a man offer it without thinking of it as a debt. That is the strange thing about love: sometimes it is not about taking or leaving, but about being taught how to hold the world and each other.
And when the rain came and Jayda crawled back one last time to the temple to humbly try to barter a place, the crowd spat and Gideon looked at her with the old, hard pity of a man who knows what happens to those who choose to prey on others.
"Get out," he said, and the way his voice fell broke her like glass. The crowd watched and then turned away. She had all the cruelty of a woman who had gambled and lost everything.
I walked past her and kept my head held high. I had been through worse. I had a husband who stayed. I had a life made of small kindnesses and a sword that sang when I called it.
"Stay," he whispered once in the night when I could not sleep.
"I will," I said, and meant it.
The End
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