Chapter 30 #2
“I know,” Finlay says, a softness to his voice he’s not quite familiar with. “I know you have. But we agreed to a truce tonight long before sitting here, did we not?”
The clipped laugh she ejects from her nostrils tells him she concedes that yes, that much is true.
“Tell me what’s going on,” he pushes, as gentle as he can manage. “I know I’m not Draven or Kiran—I know I’m unpleasant—but… I swear to you I’ll do my best to listen.”
Rhea glances at him sidelong. “Unpleasant is an understatement.”
“Be that as it may.”
Silence stretches between them for a long time. In fact, it sits heavy for so long, Finlay nearly gets up, already internally scolding himself for trying. But just as he presses his palms against his thighs to lift himself off the ground, Rhea sighs.
He can’t tell if the sound is resignation or defeat.
“I have this…problem…sometimes. With my body. It started a few years ago, but after many intensive sessions with a holistic healer, I was able to overcome the issue. Yet formal events like this…” She pauses, biting into the inside of her cheek. “Let’s just say it stirs up remnants of it.”
“Have you seen a healer with magic? Can’t they fix whatever the ailment is?”
She shakes her head, turning her chin over her shoulder to stare at the opposite wall. “No. The healers…they can’t fix this with magic.”
“I see…” he says slowly, his mind already racing to solve a problem he doesn’t even yet understand. “What is wrong with you then? Why can’t magic help?”
She sighs again, the sound long and deep and filled with a heaviness Finlay knows typically accompanies exhaustion. “The healer Tynan had me see after he found me retching after dinner one night called it ‘an affliction of the mind.’”
“But I thought you said the problem was with your body?”
She turns back to glance at him, and he had been right—there is such exhaustion in her eyes. A detached pain that he knows is dangerous.
Why is seeing her like this hurting him so much? His feelings of scorn for her have not changed, and yet…
And yet he finds himself wanting to reach out to her and comfort her. To help mend the wound making her bleed out on the floor right in front of him.
“The problem is my mind’s relationship to my body.
At least, that’s what the next healer I had to see said—the holistic one.
” Her face twists like she’s tasted something sour.
“Tynan said he couldn’t have broken resources, and so, he sought out different healers to inspect me.
People who could be discreet. Really just meaning someone who was in the pockets of House Dalmar, but…
luckily for me, I ended up with someone who was actually good at what she did. Who truly managed to help me.”
Finlay tries so hard to understand. Tries so hard to emulate Kiran’s comforting ease or Draven’s ability to understand emotions.
Yet Finlay has none of that. He lost his mother too young to be shaped into a good man like Draven was by his mother.
Never trekked the paths Draven walked to get to where he is emotionally.
Finlay doesn’t have a supportive household like Kiran does or a sibling who would ravage the world to protect him.
He has never in his life been shown how to comfort or care or love. All he knows is his training. Are the ideals his father instilled in him. His virtues and sense of righteousness.
But what good are those things right now? What do they offer him in the face of something human?
He releases a breath, determined to—in spite of all his many shortcomings—be there for Rhea anyway. “What happened to make this appear?”
She scoffs, the sound deeply bitter. “What happened was that I was subjected to scrutiny in House Dalmar at every turn, and no matter what I did, what I looked like, it was never enough. I was never enough. So my fucked up mind began to believe I could never be enough, while simultaneously still wanting Tynan’s approval like some masochistic fool.
I despise that man with every ounce of my being, and yet somehow, over all these years, I’ve been conditioned to depend on his favor and respect.
I hate him, but I can’t stand it when I feel like he hates me. ”
“And so that caused you to view yourself poorly?”
“Not just that,” she replies, voice rough like gravel.
“I started to hate how I was made. Hated eating. Hated undressing, because any exposure of my body was too much. In turn, I began to love the ache of a hunger pang more than I loved myself. I figured an empty stomach was better than a bloated one.” She exposes her palms, staring into them like a lifeline.
“But that other healer? The holistic one?
She helped me work through all those things.
“It was really, really fucking hard—hence why I am so pissed off at feeling so much as a glimmer of it right now—but slowly, she helped me retrain my thoughts. To speak to and view and treat myself differently.” Rhea pauses.
“At first, she told me I had to learn to love myself more than I loved the other things, and that didn’t make sense to me because I thought the problem was so obvious: I didn’t love myself—that was the issue.
And her telling me that in order to get better I had to love myself more made me so fucking angry.
“Yet over time, the healer helped me understand that loving myself starts with choosing myself. Spending time with myself. Getting to know my own person. And those things? Those things made sense to me. Were like training tasks I was used to performing. So, like the dutiful trainee Tynan made me to be, I did everything she told me to—was intentional with how I went about it—and in the moments between, like it always seems to happen, love started to appear.” Rhea toys with her fingers, dropping her voice.
“I owe her my life, truthfully. I probably would have done irreparable damage had it not been for her sessions. Especially if I kept on going how I was.”
Finlay drags fingers through his hair, a multitude of feelings clamping down in his chest. “I am so sorry, Rhea. I never knew. I mean—you never came across like you were struggling with something like that. How…” He bites down on his lip, reaching for words that do not answer him easily while also trying really hard not to say the wrong thing. “Does Draven know?”
“No,” she whispers, drawing her knees into her chest and folding her arms atop of them.
The weight of that rings through Finlay. “How did Tynan manage to do it? To extinguish your fire? Make you question yourself to the extent where…” He studies her through softened eyes. “Well, where you hurt like this.” He almost reaches out to take her hand, feeling like it’s the right thing to do.
Almost.
“Would you really like to know how, Frosty?” There’s still a bitterness coating her words, but for once, he can tell it’s not a blade meant for him.
“It’s because at every moment, at every turn, my body is deemed an object, put on display like some painting in a king’s hall, subject to unsolicited scrutiny by anyone who decides they want to look.
Too large. Too small. Too flat. Too wide.
Too pale. Not pale enough. Too seductive.
Not womanly enough. As a woman, I am the only thing that can be at once everything they asked for while being nothing close to that of their measure.
And I am fool enough to know this, but still be haunted by all the fucking voices that have told me my body isn’t good enough the way it is.
That have critiqued me. Told me to lose weight, and then told me I looked too thin once I had. ”
Tears well in her eyes, but there is nothing sad about them. There is only rage living within the small pool forming along her lower lashes.
“And I am so pathetic—such a hopeless, fucking fool—that here I am, sitting on the floor telling Finlay fucking Frosty Fjolla all of this. Evidently I’m so broken, I can’t even function properly for one evening.”
“You’re not broken,” Finlay murmurs. “A little cracked, maybe. But never broken.”
There is a long stretch of silence.
“Why?” Rhea asks, the sound nothing more than a hollow echo of her usual vigor.
Her chin quivers, and she rolls her head back onto the stones once more.
Her eyes gaze emptily at the ceiling while her chest falls in on itself from her sighs of defeat.
“Why can’t I just accept that I am enough as I am? ”
Throughout the entirety of the conversation, Finlay has felt something akin to drowning, barely able to tread the surface of the admissions Rhea is offering him.
He hasn’t known what to say. Hasn’t known what to do.
Nobody comes to him when they’re hurting—they go to people like Kiran.
Yet now, for the first time, he feels like he knows what to say. Because that question?
He does know the answer to that question.
Before he can talk himself out of it, he wraps one arm around Rhea’s shoulders and tucks her into the crook of his side.
To his surprise, she lets him without protest, dropping her head to rest against his shoulder.
He leans his cheek against the top of her head, and he traces soothing lines down her arm.
“You feel that way because my actions forced you to live in a world where we are taught we must earn our place—our ability to live, to love, and be accepted—instead of simply being told we already belong. That we are enough as we already are.”
A quiet, bitter laugh falls from her lips. “Because of Tynan, it feels like the only love I have ever known is conditional.”
The statement strikes a chord in Finlay. “Me too. With my own father, I mean.” A pause. “It’s hard to feel like you’re enough when the only proof of love you’ve ever had is reliant on what you can or cannot give.”
“Yes,” she agrees, “it is.” She stretches her legs out once more, a soft sigh spilling out of her. “There was a time I saw what unconditional love looked like, but I barely remember it anymore.”
Knots tangle and wind deep in Finlay’s chest, painfully gripping all the spaces he wishes they would not touch. “Rhea?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t think I have ever told you I am sorry for the role I played in your father’s and sister’s death.
” He swallows against the dryness crippling his throat.
“I apologized to Draven, but I never have apologized to you. Not directly, anyways. In a manner which truly counts.” His fingers still against her skin.
“I am sorry I told Tynan where to find your family. I am sorry I told him about Príth. About your father’s bookshop.
I just…I had barely turned fourteen, and I…
” he trails off, sighing. “Well, let’s just suffice it to say I am sorry. ”
She doesn’t respond right away, instead staying silent for long enough to make Finlay want to squirm.
“Your apology changes nothing,” she says finally, her voice far softer than Finlay is expecting.
“And neither does what I’ve shared with you this evening.
I still hate you. I will always hate you.
Nothing will ever change that.” Her words are a blunted blade, no longer sharp enough to slice bone.
For some sick, twisted reason, it forces a small smile to Finlay’s lips. “I hate you too.”
“Good.”
“Good,” he confirms.
His fingers resume gliding absently across her skin in reassuring strokes.
She continues letting her head rest against him.
Together, they continue sitting there on the floor dressed in dazzling formal wear, their legs splayed out in front of them, a tangled mess of jaded hearts and sharp personalities that have softened solely for this moment.
“Finlay?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you. For everything you’ve done and said tonight. For listening. For being here with me.”
The words warm him far more than he cares to admit it. “You’re welcome, Rhea.”
“But you can never tell anyone about this. Not Draven. Not Kiran. No one. When we leave this corridor, things go back to normal, agreed?”
There is a small part of him that wonders if that is even possible. Rhea has been humanized to him now. Has been stripped of her mask, allowing him to see the working components of the heart she keeps so carefully guarded.
Yet he is a Fjolla, and so he has to. Because as much as he can admit that something has stirred inside him by being this close to Rhea and holding her against him, that small stir can never grow into what Finlay suspects it could become.
They are not so fortunate to live in a world of fairytales, where the pauper can marry the prince, and the tortured prince can always find his princess.
And so, as he always does, Finlay will do as he must.
“Agreed.”