For the second time during their encounter, Thomas was stunned into silence. Nicolette’s immediate and powerful response set his jaw, and his eyes widened. The falling of her chair as she stood made him flinch, as if he had received a slap of reality across his face. 

Blinking to recover his own composure, Thomas stepped back to slowly close the cabin door. He never turned away from the First Mate, afraid that if he were to present his back, this moment of electric insight into the mysterious woman would vanish as quickly as it had come. 

His eyes followed her as she turned from him. He noticed that she was shaking as she did so, her hands snaking up to clutch her arms. Thomas’ face contorted into an intense mixture of shame and empathy as the depth of the inner turmoil he had coaxed from Nicolette boiled to the surface of her very being. 

When she spoke apologies for being a disappointment to him, Thomas felt the gut wrenching urge to draw his own dagger across his throat. [i]What the hell have you done?[/i] he chided, [i]how selfish and short-sighted can one man be?[/i] 

He had unwittingly placed a burden, an expectation of monumental proportions, upon the shoulders of a woman who had not offered to carry his personal affliction of a past he could never hope to regain. As the First Mate told her tale of betrayal, of how she had been broken by a man who even Thomas himself seemed to embody in this very moment, his despair only grew in his chest. 

A hundred times over as she spoke, Thomas wanted to reach out and stop her, to say that she did not have to rip her own wounds open simply to satisfy his egoistic desires and curiosities. The pained expression upon his face only intensified as she glanced back to him over her shoulder, and in that instant Thomas Lightfoot knew that he had never felt so small and ashamed ever before.

Nicolette’s final words called for Thomas’ own outburst. “No! By the stars in heaven, no.” 

He stepped closer to the First Mate, his hand raising to reach for her shoulder, as if without his touch she would fly from the [i]Dusk Skate[/i] like a bird startled from its roost. Thomas’ hand hovered just above the black fabric of her coat, and several breaths passed his lips before at last he rested his fingers gently upon her right shoulder. 

“Nicolette, I am sorry. For everything.” His voice was quiet and strained with guilt. “I placed you upon a pedestal you did not even realize existed. I projected my past into your future, and I should not have done so.”

“Please stay,” Thomas said. “Please, stay with the [i]Skate[/i], and with me. Even if you can never grant me your trust, you deserve to have someone try to earn it every single day. If you will allow me, if you will stay, that is what I intend to do. You may not be able to grant me such graces, but I will strive in every instance to give you a reason to believe that you are no disappointment, and though you say you are broken, in truth what remains is not shattered, but merely tempered to a substance stronger than the original.”