AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She walked across the sleek, modern room, to the window that provided a view of the lights in the Gaslamp Quarter. The city was glowing, still alive in spite of the late hour. And yet up in the top of the hotel, everything seemed so distant. Unreal.
It felt like an alternate reality up there. Both safer for its separation from the world and more dangerous for it.
She turned around to face Dante and her heart crumpled. He looked so perfect in his tux, his tie open, the top buttons on his shirt undone. He looked less than perfectly pressed for once. As if the day might have actually pierced that armor he valued so highly.
And she knew why now. She saw it clearly. What the press took as aloofness, a kind of unfeeling detachment, she knew had been a survival technique. To protect the little boy who had felt too much.
The boy whose world had broken before his eyes one horrible day, at the hands of the man who should have loved him. Should have loved his mother.
She also saw, clearly, that Dante’s parents loved him. That Don and Mary had deep, real affection for the boy they’d brought into their home as a teenager. And she saw that Dante didn’t realize it. That he kept himself from returning it, or at least showing that he did.
Still protecting himself. Still guarding himself against pain.
She recognized it clearly. It was a grand scale version of what she’d done for most of her life. Don’t care, don’t hurt. Don’t try, don’t fail.
“Champagne?” she asked, walking over to the full kitchen area in the suite, touching the top of the bottle that was sitting on ice, two crystal flutes set out for the newlyweds.
“Why not?” he asked. “It seems a traditional thing to do on one’s wedding night.”
“Yes,” she said. “And fitting, since you promised me the rest of the night would be traditional, too.”
He looked down, a lock of dark hair falling forward. “I did. And I must apologize for that. For the way I treated you before I left.”
“I’m over it, Dante.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “I behaved like an ass and I deserve for you to be annoyed with me.”
“I’m not, though. Since that first night with you I didn’t have any intention of going to bed alone on our wedding night, so your demand was well in line with my plans.”
He glowered at her, so serious and irritated she nearly laughed at him. “You’re impossible, Paige.”
“Yeah, I’ve been told that.” She took the champagne out of the bucket and worked the cork, wincing when it popped out. She poured two glasses and held one out to him. “I’ve been told I’m quite impossible, in fact, but I never seem to change. And there was once a man who told me that maybe the problem isn’t with me, but with other people.”
He took the glass from her hand and held it up in salute, and she did the same.
“To your impossibleness,” he said.
“I’ll drink to that.” She took a sip of the dry, bubbly liquid, her eyes never leaving his. “You know what’s funny?”
“What?” he asked, leaning against the counter.
“The other times I’ve been called impossible…it wasn’t because I was stubborn. Actually, I’ve spent my whole life being very, very not stubborn. I was impossible because I wouldn’t apply myself. Because I never listened when my mother told me I should try harder. Or, rather because I stopped listening at a certain point.”
“Explain.”
“You know I’m going to. At length.”
“Yes, I do know that about you.”
“Anyway, the thing is, it became clear very early on that school was hard for me. My brother and sister, they were brilliant. My sister in academics, my brother in academics and in sports. They were stars. From day one they were like hometown heroes. My sister would go to national spelling bees and science fairs. My brother brought the high school football team to the state championships and scored the winning touchdown. My sister was the valedictorian of her graduating class.”
She took another sip of her champagne and tried to stop the tears that were forming. It shouldn’t hurt. Not after all this time.
“So then there was me. And I struggled to pay attention in class. To pull average grades. And it wasn’t good enough. I was accused of not trying when I was. And I did try. I tried to do well. I tried to make friends and…and fit in. But it didn’t work. And so I just…stopped. Because if I didn’t care, then it didn’t hurt so much. You remember I told you about the braces incident? That was another one of those moments. If I laughed with everyone else and made it a big joke, it was funny that I cut the hell out of a guy’s tongue during my first kiss. If I could just laugh, when I got a flier handed to me in the halls that had a picture of me, covering my chest, with eggs on my face, well, then maybe I could be part of the joke instead of just being the butt of it. But I shut down inside. And I stopped trying.”
