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His job, especially. Since it certainly seemed like he traveled a lot. I had always wanted to travel more, but when you come from modest means, a holiday was a trip to London a couple hours from home, not globe-trotting. Would I maybe be able to travel with him? Would he be able to - in Aladdin-level cheesiness - actually show me the world?
It certainly seemed like we were heading somewhere serious.
I loved him.
I had told him I loved him.
Sure, I had done it and literally ran away, but I had said it.
If I didn't run, I was sure I would have a stroke waiting for his reaction.
It was easier to be a chicken sometimes.
And maybe it was good to have done it that way, to give him time to consider it, think through his own feelings.
I would rather he not say anything if he didn't love me yet, instead of feeling forced into saying it back.
It was okay, I told myself, if he wasn't as in love with me as I was with him. I understood if there wasn't as much about me that was so easily lovable as he was. He was just so fascinating, so mature, so worldly, yet so down-to-Earth, sweet, attentive. It was easy, effortless, even to fall in love with him.
He was perfection.
And perfection was always easy to fall for.
I was, well, not anything near perfection.
But, hopefully, over time, he would learn to love all the parts of me too.
I was patient.
I could wait.
"Oh, hey Uncle Armen," I said after washing off the mask, walking slowly with toes spread through the house, arms holding my first load of laundry. "I didn't know you were home."
"Mackenzie," he said, half-distracted with the stack of papers in his hand as I moved through the kitchen to the laundry before heading back to the kitchen, starting to make a pot of coffee, brushing Ani away when she tried to do it for me.
I never could get quite used to the staff, wasn't sure I would ever want one myself if I ever became wealthy. Ani was amazing. I adored her. But I felt weird having someone else try to do basic tasks for me that I was fully capable of doing for myself.
"Oh, I just wanted to tell you in case you were looking for it when you go into the office tomorrow. Mikhail Osman requested his file from your office. He said he really needed it for an important business deal," I told him, turning to face him as the pot started dripping.
"Who?" he asked, giving me some of his attention for a change, brows furrowed.
"Mikhail Osman," I told him, feeling my belly flutter a bit just at the sound of his name.
Hard.
I had fallen so hard.
"What file?" he asked, painstakingly folding his paper back together. I had found, over time, that my uncle was a bit obsessive compulsive in a lot of ways. From how he dressed to how he ate to how he folded his newspaper. Everything always had to be just so.
"Oh, just the Beeker one," I told him, shrugging, thinking nothing of it.
Until I saw his face fall.
Eyes huge, lips parted, I knew horror when I saw it even if it was something I hadn't seen often.
"What did you just say?"
Dread was a slimy, slithering thing. It coiled its way around your belly and chest, constricting little by little until there was no air left, until you felt light-headed from the lack of oxygen.
"Was I not supposed to do that?" I asked, hand pressing to the swirling sensation of my belly.
I had tried, as much as possible, to always do right. To live up to expectations, never to screw up too badly.
Save for leaving university, I had always managed to do so well.
And the idea of messing up, of disappointing someone, or making their life harder, filled me with dread.
I never saw someone move as quickly as my uncle moved then, overturning a stool in his haste around the corner of the island, barreling down on me.
I had never known violence at the hands of a man. My mother had been more of the disciplinarian at my house. My father had always been calm, soft-spoken, never prone to any extreme emotions at all. Let alone one that would provoke him to charge at another human being.
That said, one of my professors had once suggested that there was a primal recognition of the threat that came from masculine hands, even if you had never had need to fear it in your life before.
It was why women who had never been yelled at by a man shrank away from a strange man raising his voice in public.
It was why you flinched away from rising hands even if you have never been struck.
Instinctually, you knew they could - and historically, often had - used that strength against women.
