Celine was rushing inside before Charles could finish. The quicker she got this over with, the better. “Merci, Charles!” she tossed hastily over her shoulder. “Enjoy your cigarette.”
She found Jacques by the Medici Fountain. An obscene amount of petals littered the ground beneath his feet, the stems discarded into the fountain behind. He must have plucked atleast a dozen flowers and scattered them all around in his agitation.
Despite all that, he looked like the poster image of everything a girl could dream of. His striped suit gleamed pristinely under the sun-flecked shade of the magnolia foliage above, as did the gelled finger waves he had fixed along his forehead. Her eyes fell to the outline of a ring box on the left pocket of his jacket—so close to his heart.
Celine took a deep breath and approached him quietly. Her bones vibrated with tension. She was doing the right thing.A year too late, she thought with heavy regret, but better now than when they were both older and filled with hatred for each other. The long-term hurting would be inevitable unless she untangled her thorny self from his side now.
Jacques looked up from his botanic massacre, noting her presence with a start. His hazel eyes fell on her, darkening with confusion.
“You didn’t think you could hide from me today too, did you?” Celine asked, though not unkindly. Her resentment had waned since the last time they had seen each other. Celine understood him more than she liked to. The need to bend all sorts of ways to please others was, unfortunately, the only thing they had in common.
“Not really, no,” replied Jacques. “But I knew why you were calling. I just needed time to process everything.”
“I see that”—Celine nodded at the flowers around him—“you haven’t changed your mind.”
“How can I?”
“So you didn’t process any of the things I said?”
Jacques was pacing anew. “Do not start again, Celine.” He shook his head as though he could simply dispel the thought just by doing that. “We can forget about what happened on yourbirthday, okay? I will forget about it. I have already forgiven you for it, so let’s just go back to how things were.”
“The only thing we’d be going back to is pretending. Jacques…I can barely forgive myself that quickly, I certainly don’t expect you to.”
“You said it yourself—” He lifted a hand, as though to run it through his hair. Then his fingers contracted before he could make contact with the gelled waves, and his arm dropped down. “—all of this was planned. We can’t just go and make stuff up now. Our parents expect us to get engaged today. They want us to—”
“And what doyouwant, Jacques?”
The question took him aback. No one had asked him that before, just as no one had asked Celine before, not until Bastien.
“Do you think itmatterswhat I want? Do you honestly think that if I could have that option I wouldn’t have told Grandfather no when he asked me to give up Emilie?” His irritation melted from the smooth angles of his face, contorting them into an expression of pain. “I cannot be like Bastien and live just to please myself. Grandfather will not turn a blind eye for me.”
“So you are fine with pretending for the rest of our lives? With being miserable for the rest of our lives, just to fix something that we didn’t even break?” Gently, she cupped his face. They had both been wasting their lives away to please others, but if she was willing to break the cycle, she wanted Jacques to do it with her. “I am sorry your grandfather forced you to give up Emilie for me,” Celine said and tensed when Jacques shut his eyes tightly. “I know you were hoping I would love you so that all the hurt and the pain wouldn’t be for nothing, and believe me when I say that I did try. But I couldn’t.”
Jacques’s eyes flew open. “You couldn’t,” he repeated, more to himself than for her to hear as he struggled to make all ofit make sense. “You couldn’t love me.” He held her stare for a moment, brisk realisation settling in. “This is not just about the contest, is it?”
“No,” she admitted. “It is about Bastien, too.”
A muscle feathered along his jaw as Jacques carefully unclasped her hands from his face, and stepped back. “You said there was nothing going on.”
“There wasn’t,” she said faintly. “At first.”
A short, delirious laugh left his lips. “I can’t believe this.”
Celine reached out to touch his arm. “I know I should have told you earlier—”
“No.” He waved her hand away. “I cannot believeyou. How gullible you are.”
Celine staggered back a step, crushing the yellow petals under her heel. “Gullible?”
“You know,” he broke off, rubbing a hand over his face. “I realised what Bastien was doing when you told me about the contest. I just assumed he was desperate enough to get the money that he wouldn’t try anything. But I never thoughtyouwould be naive enough to fall for his games.”
“It wasn’t a game,” Celine insisted quickly. “He loves—”
“Oh, please! You don’t really think he loves you?” Jacques scoffed, splaying his arms as if to show some sort of invisible evidence in the very air between them that would convince her. “Bastien doesn’t even love himself, do you truly believe he is capable of loving another?”
It wasn’t true. She knew Jacques liked to believe what everyone else did. But last night had cut short all those rumours of Bastien being the cruel man who had no regard for the hearts he played with.
“You’re wrong,” Celine insisted.
