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“Relax. I’m not going to murder or rape you.” He frowned, closing his eyes again.
Right, he’d heard that. “Uhh... I was just saying that because my mom is a bit—”
“Crazy?”
“Don’t call her that!” I snapped.
“Didn’t you?”
I frowned. “She’s my mom, so I can, but you’re—”
“Her future son-in-law?” he replied, a smile on his lips.
“As if! How can you even joke about that? Better yet, how can you just come here? Don’t you have prince stuff to do?”
He chuckled, the corner of his lips turning up, but he refused to open his eyes. “Marrying who you are told to marry is prince stuff.”
“What is this, 1808?” I frowned. “You can’t just force people to marry each other.”
“That is what I said. Then they reminded me I’m not a person—I’m a prince. I’m property of the crown, and the crown requires I marry a very rich woman. You are that woman. So, whether I like it or not, I was ordered to come to this...fabulous country where I can be talked down to at the border, dragged shopping by a mother for a costume I did not want to wear for a holiday I dislike, then told to shut up by her daughter before being forced to sleep on a couch,” he stated.
A small twinge of guilt rose inside me.
“Welcome to America. The land of equality...well, sort of,” I replied.
He opened his mouth to say something, but all of a sudden, his stomach growled, and then he shut his mouth again. I tried not to laugh.
“She really didn’t offer you food?”
“If the she you are referring to is your mother, then no, she didn’t. She said we needed to hurry for me to get this ridiculous costume.” He frowned again.
“I’m only getting something for you because you are a victim of this madness, too.” I shook my head.
Cinderella felt more realistic than my own life story right now.
What did princes eat anyway?
I am a cliché.
Despite all my best effort and reasonable thought, I became a cliché within seconds. I didn’t see it coming. It just swept me off my feet. How? Well, there was this moment in movies, books, plays—anything that told a story, really—where the hero meets his heroine, and he’s completely blinded by her beauty.
Romeo said, upon seeing Juliet, “Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.”
King Arthur said upon seeing Genevieve, “And this damsel is the most virtuous and fairest that I know living, or yet that ever I could find.”
In A Farewell to Arms, Frederic said about Catherine, “When I saw her, I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me.”
It was ridiculous.
Just prose by poets.
The world didn’t work like that, nor would it be possible to ever feel like that in real life. And yet, when I turned around... She stood on the stairs, staring down at me with her blue dress pooled around her, flowing over the steps like water—as if she had arisen from some magical sea. Her long, thick curls framed her sweet and innocent face, and her brown eyes were wide, mesmerizing, and only focused on me.
At that moment, in that brief second before she screamed bloody murder, all I could think was, the poets are right. No one will believe me, and many others will think I am insane. But I want the sun to rise with my name on her lips and my hand on her hips.
Yes, just because she was beautiful—even more so in person than in pictures—I was at a loss for what to do.
Was it love at first sight?
