She studies me, like she’s trying to understand the weight of my partial lie.
“For him?” she asks, glancing at the training schedules spread across my desk.
The answer sits there between us, but I don’t reply. She studies me longer than necessary, like she’s waiting for the strategic angle to reveal itself. She expects ambition. Calculation. A longer game and using my influence and this project as my stepping stone into a federation role.
I let her look, because she’s not going to find the answer she’s expecting.
“You truly don’t want the presidency,” sheremarks, eventually. Cecilia’s eyes are fixed on mine, and it’s almost like I can see her train of thought.
“No.”
“But you could have it.”
“Sure,” I say as casually as possible. I even raise one shoulder to appear that way. “But I don’t want it.”
Her jaw shifts slightly. She believes me, and that unsettles her more than if I’d hedged.
“You’d be really good at it,” she says. “But my opinion doesn’t matter.”
We hold each other’s gaze. For a second, I forget the office. The fluorescent lights. The open tabs on my laptop and the fact that my parents were standing in this room not twenty minutes ago trying to rearrange my future like it was a seating chart at one of their many formal events.
What unsettles me isn’t her argument. It’s the way she said it.You’d be really good at it.
“You don’t get to say your opinion doesn’t matter,” I tell her quietly.
Her brow lifts. “I don’t?”
“No.”
I stand—not abruptly or to tower over her, but because sitting feels too defensive. Too contained. The space between us narrows without either of us moving. And it’s been recurring since the first day I saw her down the hallway in my rink.
“You’ve spent weeks assuming I had an angle,” I continue. “You don’t get to dismiss yourself now that you’re realizing you were wrong.”
The corner of her mouth lifts ever so slightly, like I’ve finally managed to amuse her.
“Oh,” she says softly, taking a step closer to where I’m standing to the side of the desk. “So now I’m wrong.”
“You were,” I reply.
Cecilia’s head tilts. “Careful.”
“Why?”
“Because I might enjoy you correcting me.”
That does something immediate and physical to my pulse, and I wonder if she can see it in my throat.
I don’t look away. “You do enjoy it.”
Her eyes sharpen, then brighten. There it is, that flash I saw at the welcome reception a few weeks ago when she realized I wasn’t going to bow to her distrust.
“You’re very sure of yourself,” she muses.
“I’m very sure of you.”
That makes her laugh—quiet, surprised. It spills out before she can stop it. And god, I didn’t realize how much I like the sound of her laughing at me.
“And what exactly are you sure of, Princess?”
