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“Would you like to have more kids?” she asks and I shake my head. Firmly.
“No.”
She nods, thoughtfully biting her lip.
“Your turn now. What about your childhood?” I ask and she looks a little embarrassed.
“It was fine. My grams meant a lot to me and she still does.” Moving to the second shelf with the duster she adds after making a long pause. “I was bullied though. In high school.”
Someone was mean to her? Mean to the teenage version of my little princess and anger and an urge to protect her flares in me.
“Tell me by whom,” I rasp. “And I’ll make sure to end their careers and their families and their future generations. I’ll make life so miserable to them...”
Shaking her head quickly she says, “It was mostly just this one girl. But...she was pretty cruel to me.”
My fists clench. “In what way?”
“Well...” Nell says carefully acting like she’s treading on glass for some reason, “she wouldn’t let me eat in the school cafeteria with the other kids so I would usually have my lunch in the girl’s bathroom.” She swallows. “And she would spread rumors about me.”
“What kind of rumors?”
Nell squirms. “They were all lies, lies about me being boy crazy. Lies about me having slept with every boy in my class.” She pauses. “Unfortunately a lot of people believed her.”
I shake my head, thinking that whoever that girl was she sounds like a real, little bitch.
“I bet she did all of that because you’re beautiful and I bet she’s not,” I say and Nell looks shocked. “She was probably just jealous.”
Turning towards me she asks, “You think I’m beautiful?”
It’s only now that I realize what I just said. I dropped a comment about her appearance. As her boss. But I’m not taking it back, especially since she looks like nobody has told her that before.
“You’re exquisite, Nell.” She’s more than just exquisite, she’s a rare, endangered creature that must be protected. “One day you’re going to make a man very lucky.”
Smiling a little, she does a half shrug, half nod, saying, “I hope so. My grandmother always tells me I should be dating more.”
My jaw clenches. I’m going to need to have a chat with that grandmother of hers.
“I think that would be very unwise,” I say and she raises her brows. Clearing my throat I say, “You’re too busy here to be paying attention to anybody else.” Anybody else but me.
In my mind, I’m already all over her. She wears my uniform, eats my food and sleeps in my bed and dotes on me under my roof. Primitively speaking, she’s surrounded by me.
She might not know it yet, but she will because I’m a very, very impatient man.
5
Nell
I can’t breathe whenever I’m around him, can’t stop shaking, my body acting up like it’s going on batteries and only Mr. Smith knows which buttons to push. It’s like he has the manual on how to work me, how to make me melt, make me feel like I’m a kept girl.
Every morning I find myself standing in front of my mirror and wondering how Mr. Smith would like to see me today. Should I put my hair up in milkmaid braids, a chignon or maybe just let it hang down my back?
Mr. Smith might not be the kind who says much but I still know little things about him that I doubt anybody else does. Stuff that only a maid could know, such as that his aftershave is from Penhaligon’s and smells of gingerbreads and rum, that he always eats fortified cereals for breakfast and that he never screws back the lid on his toothpaste.
Sometimes I take things I shouldn’t take. Things that are his. Like a t-shirt he worked out in and threw in the laundry bin but that I picked up and held to my nose and then I just couldn’t separate from it, so I kept it.
If anyone finds out that I did that I would die. Especially if Lucretia knew. If Lucretia found out what the target of her cruelty, feels about her father I’d be so embarrassed, I’d probably just dissolve.
“Aww that’s cute,” a sour voice says and I stiffen in front of the mirror, turning around only to see Lucretia sitting on my bed and fingering one of my sweaters. I didn’t even hear her coming in here. Reading the label, she purrs, “Made with love. How quaint.”
