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“Oh no,” said Axel, “that’s going to have to come off now.”
“Nice try, smartarse. We’re not talking about coffee here.” I flapped the cloth of my dress until the heat left my skin enough to confirm I hadn’t burned myself. “It does make me think, am I really going to be as helpful to you as you think?”
I was only about twenty percent serious at most, but I knew I was in trouble when Axel made a serious face. “The thing is you fit more into the male partner role. You’re going to be great when it comes to all the schmoozing that comes with business… but the wives will turn up their noses at you.”
“That’s actually a hard thing to take,” I admitted.
Axel’s frown made me wish I’d ever been able to keep my thoughts hidden from him. That look on his face meant he was going to pursue this topic until he had the answers he wanted, though, so I’d better speak up. “I mean, I had this kind of idea about the school formal, to be honest. I wanted to be a—”
“Princess.” Axel nodded. “You wanted to be a princess, and I was trying to do that for you, but then you took it into your own, um, hands a bit.”
“Yeah, I think that was the moment I realised I had to let go of that idea. It wasn’t going to ever do anything for me. I’m not that girl who can fit into the spot a princess needs to go in. And you… you’re not the guy to treat someone like me like a princess, either.”
Axel put down his coffee. “Thanks.”
“I don’t mean you can’t be gentlemanly. I think if you were trying to charm one of those girls like what your dad wants for you, then you’d treat her like a princess.” I took a breath to steady the slight quiver in my lip. “But to feel like that princess I’d want more than just gestures, I want to really believe there’s nothing you wouldn’t sacrifice for me, and I know that’s not true. I don’t think it ever will be, that there are places you could not go just to be with me, and I have to accept that if things are going to keep going with us, I can’t expect you to meet a requirement like that.”
I thought he would understand, that I’d realised it was an unreasonable requirement, but he was out of his seat. “If I’ve made you think that you are lacking in value, unworthy of a man’s respect—”
Time to address his guilt, then. “You know you have, once upon a time, and neither of us can change that. I don’t mean to bring this up to humiliate you, it is just a truth we have to face to go anywhere from here.”
“I feel like forgetting it is the only way to go anywhere,” Axel muttered, staring at his shoes: these ridiculous things that slipped on like a baby’s shoes but were actually worth two hundred dollars, or something. I got a mark on one of them a few days before and he made the biggest fuss until he could sponge it off. I knew then, as if I didn’t already, that I was never going to fit well into a world where it was reasonable for men to act like babies over scuffs on their footwear. I couldn’t pretend I understood why he cared, or laugh tinklingly to my afternoon tea ladies about the situation.
But I understood what no tinkly-giggled sweetheart did, when it came to Axel: he didn’t fit so well below the surface, either. No man who was that defensive could say he was truly comfortable in the position he’d found himself. Perhaps that period of financial hardship had changed him too much.
Lost opportunities always took something from a person long into the future: I should know. I wanted to believe that ours could have given us something, too.
“I can’t forget,” I said. “I don’t want to forget—I don’t think I need to forget. Everyone has things they are ashamed of in their pasts, sometimes very bad things. Yes, what you did hurt me a lot. But I’d like to think I learned something from—”
He had started pacing; I shrank back into my seat when he whirled on me. “You are not going to be so ridiculous as to tell me you’re grateful.”
I smiled at him. “Didn’t I go through this earlier with your dad? I’m not going to thank you for something I never asked for. But at the same time…” I threw my hands wide. “Here I am, stronger than before even. That has to count for something. And I have seen too many people who loved one another fall apart because they couldn’t get past the ways in which they had damaged one another. There’s something about us that is so satisfying, Axel. I don’t want to be another part of that statistic.”
“You want to undo your parents’ failed marriage.”
“And the way my dad failed with Marcia, and the way he’s probably going to fail with Matt’s poor mother. But it’s not about Dad or Elizabeth or Marcia… it’s about me. I want to have learned something from that. I want to have learned something from growing up without quite enough of everything: how not to waste something really good that’s right in front of me.”
“Hm.” Axel turned quickly to the detail I’d been pretty sure he would pick up on. “Love, is that what’s going on here, then?”
“I think that’s where we’ll end up,” I said. I could tell from the way he looked down at me that it was one of those things I wasn’t supposed to say, that you were meant to be coy about where you thought a relationship was going. But I wasn’t going to give him any damn encouragement to play this like a business deal. “I’m not one to just let my emotions overwhelm me from the start, and I guess you know why… but, yeah, that’s where I see things potentially going. You can correct me if you disagree.”
Axel stared at me for a while, and then his expensively-dressed self came and knelt in front of me… postured like it was a proposal.
My breath became shaky. His pretty eyes sparkled at me, and he leaned forward to push a soft kiss on my lips that nearly took my ability to process air entirely. It was an evil tease, a threat of what he saw happening in the future, perhaps. And because I was pathetic, already lost, the threat of a proposal from him felt rather like an offer of the entire world from any other man in existence.
We did not speak of what had just happened except through our eyes. He laid his head across my knees like he was a pet. “I live in service of your dream.”
I was still struggling to keep my thoughts organised. “I thought we just got through agreeing you can’t treat me like a princess.”
“And I thought you knew better by now than to predict my behaviour.”
His head came up and his hands came up to push me back along the sofa so he could climb astride me. I knew exactly where this was going, and it didn’t feel like so much of a game this time, like something I was trading out of curiosity or strategy. I was ready to put it forward as an opportunity for us to come together.
His hands were still moving, seizing every bit of leverage I would give him, this bastard baby businessman.
Well, maybe I should see this as a series of opportunities too. I put my arms up and laced my fingers behind his neck. That new fragrance he was wearing that so beautifully complemented his regular man smell was doing things to me that made it hard to think of anything else.
“You know what, Mr. Bennett, I think you may be responsible for taking my self-respect and possibly my heart for the purposes of pawning, and I intend to conduct a citizen’s arrest to claim them back, if I can find them.” I struggled with the first button on his shirt, which was stiffer than I was going to need him to be for this business. Apparently money couldn’t buy you things like comfort.
