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The doorknob jiggles.
A red wave of pure fury washes over me. Of course, I could let him in. He would find me in my pajamas, doing nothing untoward.
And yet the fact that I am not afforded even this tiny bit of dignity and alone time makes me fight back.
“I NEED PRIVACY!” Impulse makes me lose control. “I AM PREPARING MYSELF FOR MY HUSBAND!”
The jiggling stops. There is a long pause.
“Preparing?” That’s Jason’s voice now. Malcolm must have called him over. “Princess, what do you mean by preparing.”
“SEXUALLY!” I spit out, the word so raw on my lips. “I have less than two weeks to prepare and Malcom is being invasive and over the top. I made a sound! A simple sound that I hope signifies pleasure for my future husband. You do realize I need to be prepared in every way for him, do you not?”
Murmurs come from the other side of the door.
“Princess, this isn’t, uh, in The Manual,” Jason says in a sheepish voice. But his tone tells me something oh, so important.
I am winning. They are confused. Caught off guard, they do not know how to proceed.
This gives me power.
I walk to the door, fling it open, and straighten to my full height.
“Do you think any man is going to want a woman who just lays there and does nothing in the throes of intimacy?” I hiss at them, catching their gaze, forcing them to look at me as they face their just chiding. “What kind of wife would I be if I do not know the contours of my own body for him? I was given strict instructions from the masters,” I tell them.
This is not true. It is not technically a lie, however. I have been instructed in the ways of the marriage bed, but Jason is right.
There is no lesson in The Manual for me to pleasure myself as an act of learning before the wedding.
I gamble on social nicety. What man wants to report to his superiors that he enraged a future queen because he interrupted her in the middle of a word neither of them wants to have to type out on a report?
“Uh...” Jason is speechless, mouth open, eyes wide. His composure is lost for but a split second. Then he resumes his neutral face.
I see too many neutral faces in my life.
Cam’s face is anything but neutral.
“Tell me, Jason, would you choose to live the way I live?” I deign to look at Malcolm. “Or you?”
They give each other confused looks.
“See!” I throw my hands in the air as Jason frowns at me, then looks at a file on his phone. This means my ire is sent full force at Malcolm, who takes a half step back.
“What about you, Malcolm? Are you going to report that you heard me moaning in my room and forced me to interrupt my learning?”
His mouth bobs up and down, as if bubbles are pouring out, but no words.
“P-p-princess, I’m just doing my job.”
“It’s your job to interrupt orgasms?”
He begins coughing furiously at the last word.
Jason leans in toward him and says softly, “Her period tracker app says it’s not that time yet.”
“What does my – oh!” I gasp, my anger rising even more. “You think I’m behaving irrationally, don’t you? As if my desire to be left alone to fulfill my mission and help to save the entire world is rooted in some kind of hysteria. You sick, sick men.”
I can hear them both gulp.
