16. Delilah
CHAPTER 16
Delilah
I was packing up more things in my room, regretfully taking my books down from the shelves. Alexander had had them specially built when we first got married, because he said what was the point of being rich if he couldn’t make me a Beauty and the Beast style library, complete with a rolling ladder.
It had been so much fun riding it all around the room. And Alexander had fucked me up against it, too, many times, his strong hands lifting my ass up so he could thrust deeply inside me, his mouth on mine, making me feel dizzy with love and lust and need.
But he never made you come, did he? I reminded myself savagely. Because he’s a selfish bastard . I yanked angrily at the packing tape, feeling furious when there were only two inches left.
Fuck! Why was everything so hard right now?
There was a knock on the door, and Libby entered. There was a strange expression in her green eyes.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Have you looked outside recently?” she said.
Oh god, what now?
Without another word, I rushed to the windows and threw them open.
And there was my stupid husband in front of the palace, in an extremely old-fashioned looking colonial-style wooden stock, his head and hands stuck there.
“What the fuck has gotten into him?” I yelped.
Libby cleared her throat. “I believe,” she said, “that he took what we said about punishments yesterday very literally.”
“Why isn’t he letting this go?” I cried. “I never thought he’d hang on this tightly. What we had wasn’t even real! It was just a silly, foolish crush on my part.”
Libby didn’t say anything, and I glanced over at her. She was worrying her lip with her teeth.
She never had anything good to say about Alexander, and the fact that she wasn’t even making fun of him made me nervous.
“It doesn’t mean anything!” I cried. “Just that he’s a melodramatic jackass!”
I turned and headed downstairs.
“I never said it meant anything,” Libby protested.
“You better not be softening,” I warned her.
“I’m not,” she replied. “It’s just not every King who orders his subjects to throw rotten potatoes and cabbages at him in the middle of the day.”
My teeth ground together as I rushed through the palace and onto the front lawn. Quite a large group had gathered, although the cabbage and potato-throwing were decidedly on the tentative side. Alexander himself was urging his subjects to keep throwing harder.
As I came up beside him, I saw that he had drawn CHEATER in what looked like sharpie marker across one of his expensive, snowy-white cambric shirts.
“Stop this!” I hissed as soon as I got even with him. “You’re frightening all the normal people. Other countries are going to start invading us.”
Alexander was secured so thoroughly in the stocks that he couldn’t crane his neck very far, but I could see him trying to.
“Hit me,” he said. “I pissed you off. I hurt you. Hurt me. Punch me. Throw some cabbages at me.”
“Oh my god, Alexander,” I cried, tapping my toe impatiently, irritably aware that the whole incident was being live-streamed. “I’m not going to do that!”
“You have to!” he urged. “Hurt me like I hurt you.”
Suddenly, I didn’t feel cold and disgusted. I felt white-hot anger at him. The arrogance of him thinking that a couple of moldy potatoes were going to change anything.
It wasn’t going to change anything, but I did suddenly feel like hitting him with rotten vegetables. I selected the most openly repulsive-looking cabbage head and threw it as hard as I could at him. I usually had the shittiest aim, but it hit him in the forehead, splattering rotten cabbage guts all over his face.
“You humiliated me,” I seethed at him, trying to keep my voice down so all the interested tourists couldn’t hear me. “You made me feel stupid for agreeing to marry you. I don’t believe you ever loved me.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, his throat swallowing convulsively and his voice cracking. “I deserved that, Delilah. I would deserve it if you left when the month is over. I don’t deserve anything more. But I want something more. I love you, and I know we can be good together if I can show you I’m not that man anymore.”
There was silence except for the wind blowing across the pond, and the gently clicking sounds of the townspeople, palace employees, and tourists all recording this.
I felt an embarrassed, prickly heat break out over my body but I realized one thing.
He did not give a shit about how embarrassing this was . Alexander did not care how many people would be gleefully viewing his humiliation on their phones later. He was just watching me, his shallow, rapid breathing thrumming through my chest.
My chest, my throat, felt constricted.
“Welp, time for the ducking stool,” Roger said cheerfully, thankfully breaking in, because I had no idea what to say.
Was it even possible for us to be good together?
We had never been good together.
I had been besotted, wildly, madly, foolishly in love.
Roger unlocked the stocks and directed Alexander to the huge wooden dunking stool, which was a wooden chair attached to a huge lever that Roger would use to dunk my husband under the water.
“Where did you even find that?” I asked in annoyance.
“I had it specially-made,” Alexander said, sitting still as Roger tied him in with the straps. Now he was trapped. He couldn’t get out even if he wanted to.
“Dunk me until I tell you to stop,” the King said. “Hold me under for at least a minute.”
“This changes nothing,” I warned, and Roger dunked him in the lake.
There were scattered gasps of horror.
Alexander was down there for what seemed like an excessive amount of time, and finally Roger raised him up, water streaming off his body.
“Again!” the King said, his eyes on me.
Oh my GOD.
“Are you sure?” Roger asked uncertainly, glancing between Alexander and me.
“No!” I cried.
“Yes, if you want to keep your job!” Alexander shot back at him.
Sighing, Roger dunked him in the lake again. And then again. And again.
Then longer each time, as my husband demanded it.
I began to feel the panic rising in my body.
This unhinged moron was going to get himself killed .
Finally, I could bear it no longer, each second that he was under seeming like it clawed on my nerves until I was afraid they would snap and I’d go stark raving mad.
“ Stop !” I ordered.
“King Alexander said I’d get fired if I stopped,” Roger protested, looking slightly flustered.
“I am your Queen,” I said, raising my voice. “And I order you to stop. You will not be fired.”
Roger pulled my aggravating husband up and out, the King coughing and choking on the lake water.
I strode up and my fingers began to fumble at the knots and straps tying him to the ducking stool.
“This show is over!” I yelled, waving at the assembled group on the lawn. They were certainly getting their money’s worth out of a hereditary aristocracy today, but I was over it. Roger I ordered to go chase them out, and he hurried over, the big, gentle man much more comfortable politely escorting guests off of the grounds than participating in the King’s unhinged behavior.
“Why are you doing this?” I hissed impatiently, yanking the ropes off to free him.
Alexander rubbed a hand over his face, pulling the slimy duckweeds from the pond off and shaking them onto the ground. His blonde hair was slicked back and malodorous.
“There’s a duck dropping in your suit pocket,” I added.
“I’m doing it to show you I’m sorry. I want what we had again,” he said. “I’ll do anything for that. I’ll get in the ducking stool every morning if that’s what it takes.”
I gritted my teeth, thinking about being forced to watch Roger dunk Alexander every single day until I left.
“What we had wasn’t real , Alexander.”
My estranged husband looked like he’d been punched in the face.
“It wasn’t real. I was straightening my hair to impress you, dressing like I don’t normally. When I got married I was shy and insecure, and I sure as fuck didn’t enjoy blowing you with a mouth full of ice cubes.”
“First of all, you definitely don’t have to do that,” Alexander said, and I saw the ghost of a smile cross his face, one of the first since I’d told him we were done.
“It was real,” he insisted. “I wasn’t planning on marrying anybody that weekend. I let the palace send out invitations to the most eligible ladies in the region, but I wasn’t planning on getting married. Until I saw you , Delilah Levesque. You made me want to marry you. I don’t care what your hair looks like, what clothes you wear. You pulled me to you then and you pull me to you now.”
“That’s not the real me,” I insisted.
“Well, then, show me the real you,” he begged, his voice low and urgent. “I want to know everything about you. I refuse to believe none of it was real. When we were laying in bed, your head in the crook of my neck, my arm around you as your whole body shook with your adorable little giggle at our favorite show, that was real. You can’t tell me that wasn’t real, Delilah.”
“It wasn’t real,” I whispered, but I felt the lie all over my body.
It was real. It had been real. But he didn’t need to know that.
Flickers of pain flashed in his eyes. He smelled like sour pond water and stagnant reeds and probably duck droppings and he scrubbed one hand over his face. For a moment, Alexander’s eyes fell and I noticed his arm was shaking a bit. That pond must be colder than I thought.
“it was real to me, then,” he said in a low tone, raising his eyes again to mine. “Even if it wasn’t real to you.”
“If it was so real, why did you feel the need to fuck other women?” I shot at him, crossing my arms tightly over my chest.
He flinched but held my gaze. “Because you were right about me. I was spoiled and selfish and used to getting my way with everything. The fact that my dad did the same thing to my mother is no excuse either. It was wrong and I knew it was wrong. Because I would never have been ok with you doing it. So it was never ok that I did it. One more chance, Delilah. That’s all I ask for. One more chance.”
I said nothing, staring up into his face.
I didn’t know what to believe.