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“Axel.” She stilled me, with just my name. “Let’s not get into this again. I don’t have to ‘come to the table’, okay? I’ve done enough of that, I’ve met you more than halfway when I never wanted to engage at all, and now I’m just done. I don’t care what moves you think you have in reserve, if you want anything from me, you will actually have to force me.”
I knew I could make her come back to me if I wanted. There were all sorts of buttons I hadn’t pressed yet: factors like her stepmother and grandma and little brothers who could come into play. But it wasn’t a satisfying thought when I knew she wasn’t going to do anything to me in return.
Something completely out of left field escaped my mouth. “Come with me to our formal, Aileen. I’ll take you as my date. Put on a pretty dress and I’ll take you around on my arm so everyone gets to see how much you sparkle.”
> I had no idea why any of this was relevant until I saw the way Aileen inhaled and stepped back, as if—as if it meant something to her, that invitation. Was that what she wanted, the carrot I could dangle if I could shake myself out of offering the stick? Just to be a princess on my arm?
Her face had hardened again. “It’s too late for that too, Axel. I’m just going to go and have everyone thinking about how they might have seen me naked already. You’ve got to understand something: you can’t turn back time once something’s already spoiled. You can’t do as you like and think that you’ll have some way of fixing it no matter what. You just have to live with it.”
It seemed fucking dramatic, but I guess my whole patent deal had sounded dramatic to her at first. Maybe this formal was for her what securing this last possible loophole into someone ruining my future business had been for me. The thing was, there wasn’t a whole lot she could do now to change the way other people saw her.
“I’d like you to just leave me alone, please.” Again, Aileen was anticipating something I had yet to even say. “I don’t want you to try to fix or change things… just leave it. I’ve had enough.”
I opened my mouth and she quickly said, “Please,” in such a pitiful little voice I said, “Okay, yeah, fine,” and backed off, letting her scramble away back into the library. I was left alone to try to work out why I’d made that offer in the first place.
Well it didn’t take a genius to work through that question: I wanted to get to know her in a way that didn’t involve contract negotiations and trying to humiliate her in front of an audience. And this was a way that would make sure everyone knew they’d better not mess with her any more. A golden opportunity, perhaps the last before she was easily able to slip away from me forever.
But it was going to be harder to get her to go along with the plan than it had been to get my hands on her arse. Maybe too hard.
I shook my head at myself. What was I doing, losing my confidence all of a sudden? That would just leave her convinced I was exactly the man she’d settled on my being. That Axel who could win her, if only for a night… he wouldn’t let this kind of setback stand in his way.
Aileen was just another problem at the end of the day. A problem who might drive me mad if I didn’t address it, but all the same, following the basic rules of problems. I would just have to work on her.
I would need a more delicate approach than ever before, but surely I was up to that too.
Chapter Sixteen
I was scared for a few days, tense wherever I was because I expected Axel to loom and insist I come with him, accept the treatment he wanted to lay down. And it was different for me now. The intrigue was lost; I knew what to expect from him and the potential sick pleasure didn’t make up for it.
He actually left me alone as I’d requested, though. Sometimes even Axel Bennett had a surprise left in him, it seemed.
Things were still weird between me and most of the people I’d once counted as my friends, but I was so busy I didn’t actually get a chance to dwell on it. Tamara and I had formed a weird temporary group with Matt and his friends, and with exam season descending on us it was nice to fall into a group where everyone was motivated to study. We’d head to Matt’s place or one of the other guys’ places after school and spend a couple hours trying to overlap homework and study until we all ended up watching what was on TV as background noise or someone wanted to get into a game. Sometimes Tamara would call Steven to come over if they were playing something he was into; once it was that Wild Duty thing he was obsessed with, and she brought her little sister Jess as well. It was only the one time that happened though, as the whole point of those afternoons for Tamara seemed to be to get a bit of space from feeling like she was parenting a younger teen… and Jess had gotten really snappy when Matt’s friends were celebrating an apparently decisive victory and got into a fight with Danny, which I hadn’t even thought was possible.
I, too, had something to hide from back home. I didn’t want to see how badly Dad was fucking up the fake trust Axel had put in him, and I didn’t want to know if Axel was in my house. Dad, to his credit, had stopped telling me what was going on with his ‘job’ once he figured out things with Axel weren’t going so well. He didn’t even ask for the details of our bust-up.
Sometimes I thought about Callie when Tamara and I were curled up on beanbags at one of those big houses, surrounded by guys. She was probably at Lucas’s place when she wasn’t working, surrounded by… Lucas.
“Have we thought about inviting her to come along?” I asked Tamara once, and she shot me the most tortured look as if Callie hadn’t been one of the most important people in her life for years and years. I got it, though. She was stuck with her at this point… in the same way Matt was stuck with Axel.
“You know if we have her along, we’ll have Lucas along too, and then… probably Axel.”
“A fair point to consider,” I said.
I was a little nervous going into every one of my exams, the way anyone would be if they’d been disappeared from their academic life entirely once. There were no dramas… but as each exam was ticked off my list until the last one, my maths exam, I felt a growing worry. Anderson and Bennett: we were going to be seated next to one another according to school exam regulations to screw with the usual friendship groups and cheating rings, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity for Bennett to screw around with Anderson with an audience.
The only thing I could think of to defend myself from trouble was to get myself in and seated early, and try not to lift my head. But when he walked into the room, I turned right around anyway and saw his whole entrance.
It was a bit of a shock, to see him again after having avoided him so long. I followed every movement of his long striding legs and tried to work out how I’d even known he was coming… then my nostrils twitched and I understood. That fragrance—it had been cropping up in my home, in Dad’s workshop mostly but sometimes in the kitchen and lounge. I’d figured Sandy was using something new, or Dad was trying to cover for some really serious smoking. I’d never thought it was Axel, because he hadn’t smelled like much of anything on all the occasions I’d been close to him, but it seemed just like him to lay a trap for me in my own house.
I forced myself to stop smirking as his eyes fell on me. There was something soft in his expression that bothered me. I would have expected him to be smug, triumphant at the success of his plan. Perhaps it was just that it was only the start of his plan, and he had many other steps to go through before he was satisfied.
That had to be it: he would know me well enough by now to expect I would need more convincing to… I didn’t have any idea what his final goal was.
I knew I wasn’t going to be able to concentrate on the imminent exam until I got some resolution.
As Axel passed me and slid into the seat next to mine, I leaned over to him. “Trying a new signature fragrance?”
His eyes sparkled. “You noticed.”
