I wasn’t sure if it was the old-fashioned manners, or the fact that he knew it threw me, but he did weirdly unexpected things.
Like reaching over and pulling me into his lap without saying a word.
“Are you planning to give them a show?” I asked, straddling him. A curious troll was peering at us around the wall separating our box from Olga’s, his glamourie sliding slightly off center in the process, because it was too small. Leaving him looking like he’d ripped the face off some earnest young man and was wearing it like a mask.
It was kind of horrifying.
“No.” The box had plush hangings, which Louis-Cesare reached over and untied one side of, swishing it closed in the troll’s face.
It was suddenly darker in here, and cozier, with only half the box still open toward the stage. I didn’t know if you were actually supposed to do that, to move the curtains around from their nicely arranged shapes. I’d always assumed that they were just there for show, because it never would have occurred to a peasant like me to try and find out.
Like it wouldn’t have occurred to me to bribe the valet instead of just arguing with him for half an hour. Or that golden baksheesh was expected at the consul’s court. Or probably a thousand other things, because we didn’t live in the same world—we didn’t even live in the same universe—so what the hell was I doing?
“Are you upset with me?” Louis-Cesare asked, steadying me so that the slippery jumpsuit didn’t dump me on the floor.
“No.” It came out flat, because it was the truth. I was trying, really hard, to work up a good head of indignation, to call on some of that anger that was probably my foremost character trait, to help me through this. But tonight, when I could have really used it, it wasn’t working.
Maybe because I knew him too well.
Despite the bank balance, Louis-Cesare wasn’t an overprivileged douchebag, a loser parking his Ferrari in a handicapped zone, because fuck you, that’s why. He was an old-fashioned aristocrat who could have coined the term “noblesse oblige,” the outdated concept that with wealth and power came a responsibility to help those without, and to fight for something besides just enriching yourself some more. In short, he was a goddamned Disney hero, including the hair, while I . . .
Was not.
And, frankly, his attitude didn’t even make sense. Because he hadn’t been born into privilege. In fact, his background weirdly paralleled Ray’s, with a randy father who cut out quick and a mother who didn’t die young, but who did abandon him at an early age.
Of course, in his case, the father was a duke and the mother a queen with a reputation to protect, and as far as I knew, he’d always gotten enough to eat. But his meals had been taken in a variety of prisons, where his half brother had locked him away so nobody would find out that their mother got around, and maybe start questioning his own royal parentage. And once Louis-Cesare had finally gotten out, it hadn’t been followed by a trip back to the palace where he’d never lived anyway.
Yet you couldn’t tell it. He acted like the prince he’d never been, with a casual arrogance that frequently made me want to strangle him, and an overconfidence that made me afraid for him, and an innate goodness that made me want to sit down and have a serious talk with him, because life wasn’t a Disney flick. In real life, Prince Charming took a knife in the eye, because he fought fair when nobody else did, and the bad guys won.
That was my reality. Hell, that was everyone’s reality, because that was actual fucking reality, and yet here he was, acting like none of that was true, none of that could touch him. But it was, and it could; I could. Not only wasn’t I a
Disney hero, part of me wouldn’t even have been cast as the villain because she’d scare the crap out of the kiddies.
“You are upset,” said Mr. Insightful.
“Getting there.” And—finally—I was. And it felt good.
Anger was comfortable, familiar, unlike everything else these days. My life had started to feel like a fight against an outsized opponent, where every time you got back to your feet, he hit you again. And back down you went, onto your ass, with the little birdies flapping around your head while you wondered where you were.
And how you got into this.
I sure as hell didn’t know how I’d gotten into this. It was like I’d stumbled into some kind of crazy dream, one where I had all these people around me, and a respected job, and a gorgeous boyfriend, and . . . and that wasn’t real, that didn’t happen. Which is why it felt less like a dream, and more like the setup for a nightmare, because I didn’t know how this all ended yet, did I?
I felt my hands clench on the thick muscles of Louis-Cesare’s shoulders, and wanted . . . what exactly? Reassurance? Life didn’t give reassurance. You paid your money and you took your chances, and most of the time, you lost. Like I was going to do, because I didn’t deserve—
“I’m frightened, too,” Louis-Cesare said suddenly.
I blinked, torn out of my mental battle by whatever the hell that was. “What?”
“I, too, am afraid,” he repeated.
I just stared at him. His eyes met mine, hedged by lashes that couldn’t decide what color they wanted to be, like his hair. At the moment, both were reddish gold, gilded by a stray beam from outside making it into our little cave. And the eyes themselves were open and honest and vividly blue, because the damned man didn’t know you weren’t supposed to say things like that.
And then I realized the implication. “I’m not afraid!”
“I think you are.”
“Of what?”