Chapter Eight #2
“Yes. In the way that it completely compromises any integrity that I might’ve had.” She let her head fall back against the elevator. “You know, it was you I was talking about. Whenever I texted you, and I was talking about difficulties at work.”
She looked at his expression, to try and see if that affected him in any way.
“I imagine I would find that funny if…” He trailed off.
She frowned. “You would find it funny if what?”
“I don’t know. If I found things funny.”
“Why are you such a godawful prick?”
She was angry. And she was getting really tired of his nonsense. He was just… He expected people to just accept him as he was. Because he was Christos Onassis and he was a villain and blah-blah-blah allusions to his inner darkness.
But she didn’t have to accept it.
“Does there have to be a why for everything?” he asked.
“I tend to assume that there is,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because. Because I am desperately insecure. Because my mother is a polished socialite who thinks nothing tastes as good as being skinny feels, and who constantly victimizes me with her cutting statements about both my appearance and my value system. And that is why I didn’t want to meet you in person.
Then there’s my father, who was the only parent really involved in raising me, and he was wonderful.
He loved me. And he loved this place. And I can’t separate those things out.
If I want to continue to be worthy of his love, of the legacy he left me, I have to say that, don’t I?
And if I can’t, I’m everything my mother thought I was, and nothing that my father hoped I would be.
So yes. I think we all come from somewhere. ”
“How neat.” He tugged on the cuffs of his perfectly tailored shirt.
“A little narrative to explain each and every difficulty in your life. I don’t know that I think the story of my life is at all relevant.
Because the truth is, I watched everyone around me go through the same things that I did, and they emerged differently.
Or didn’t. But I can’t say definitively that a specific instance shaped me into what I am. ”
She thought he had to be lying.
“Or rather,” he continued, “I cannot say that it did so without my permission.”
“Oh. Well. Of course. Even your issues didn’t appear without your express written consent.”
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “your mother is incorrect about your appearance. You are extremely attractive.”
She blinked. “I am… What?”
“You’re beautiful,” he said.
With as much emotion in his voice as she had ever heard. Meaning none.
“I’m not sure what to say to that.”
“Many people would say thank you .”
“Many people would probably not say it to you, since there is undoubtedly some…lurking danger beneath the compliment.”
“When have I ever been a lurking danger? I am quite in the open with it, I would think.”
Well. That wasn’t wrong. She resented him for that.
“I just have a hard time believing it. Given that you and I had many, many interactions over the years, and there was never an indication that you—”
“Fantasized about bending you over your desk and smacking your ass while I rode you?”
She actually lost her footing, in the elevator. Her knees sagged and gave out, and it was only because she was leaning against the wall that she didn’t plummet entirely to the floor.
“Excuse me?”
“Do you really need me to restate that? Because I thought it was quite clear.”
“You cannot have thought that.”
He still looked so unbothered.
“I did. I couldn’t decide whether I found it titillating or perplexing. Because you were involved in a business dealing, and it is not usual for me to have sexual feelings in context with business matters.”
She gritted her teeth. “Oh, that’s weird. I’m constantly getting aroused over staplers.”
“When did I say that I saw you as a stapler?”
The weirdest thing was a small bubble of jealousy welled up in her chest. “Did you really fantasize about…that while you were carrying on conversations in our texts?”
“So were you,” he said.
“But you didn’t know that.”
“No. I didn’t.”
He said nothing else to follow up.
It was weird that she was jealous of herself. Astonishingly so. Especially since everything that had happened between them before now felt fake.
How could it be real? Because everything she knew about him led her to believe that the texting had been a game.
Yes. That would make sense. That it had been a video game to him.
Something he had found amusing, as he had texted words of support, filthy sentences and the kinds of sensitive reassurances that she was fairly certain had never crossed his mind before.
Too soon, the elevator reached its destination, and they were moving quickly out of the office. His car was there, waiting up against the curb.
She was having difficulty processing things.
They got into the car, and it began to drive away from the building.
“I have asked the doctor to meet us at my penthouse.”
“We didn’t really decide—”
“It is decided.”
She swallowed hard.
She wished she didn’t feel so alone. She wished that she still felt like she could text him. And in a fit of minor panic, she reached into her purse and took her phone out. Pulled up the tech stream she now knew was him.
It still said Baby . She kept it that way.
Kid: I’m dealing with this guy, and he’s a real dick.
His phone buzzed. He took it out of his pocket and opened it, looked at the text.
“Really?”
“Really I think you’re a dick? Or really I texted you?”
“I know I’m a dick.”
She laughed. “Well, why shouldn’t I text you? I’m used to communicating with you that way.”
He looked down at his phone and began to type as she watched her screen.
Baby: Are you going to make this difficult?
She looked up at him. And she smiled. “Yes. I think I will, Christos. Because I have made far too many things in this world easy for people.”
She wanted to call her mother and ask for advice.
But her mother wouldn’t give good advice.
She wanted to do a séance and get in touch with her father’s ghost. She wanted the man who had once been a source of great comfort to her to actually be real and not some specter of Christos. A variant who wasn’t real.
It was like the two of them in those texts had been people existing in another timeline. In another life. She just wished that… She really did wish that she could somehow pop herself into that timeline. Where maybe that version of them was real.
Instead, she was stuck with this one.
She looked at him, at his rigid, unsmiling profile.
All too soon they were at his penthouse.
The building was like a fortress. He had a private entrance at the side, a private elevator that only worked with his fingerprint.
“What if other people need to come up without you?”
“They can use the front. And there are certain people approved to enter.”
“I see. But only you get to use this fancy private door.”
“Yes.”
“And what about me? What about when I’m supposed to live here? Do I get to use the fancy private door?”
“I’ll program your fingerprint into it.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Thank you.”
She didn’t really mean it.
When the doors to the elevator opened, his pristine penthouse was revealed. She had never thought about where he lived. She looked around the space and took in the clean lines, all black and stainless steel everything.
“I always thought that you lived in a cave. I guess this is close enough.”
“Did you think that?”
“Yes. That’s where one imagines the dragon returns home to at the end of the day, isn’t it?”
“A dragon?”
He nearly looked amused by that. And she did her best not to feel something in response to creating that amusement for him.
He was such a difficult man.
“Yes. That was what I thought about you the first time I met you. When I was a teenager.”
He lifted his dark brows. “I don’t remember meeting you then.”
She blinked. “Of course you don’t. Why would you? I was invisible.”
“If you were a child, I can guarantee you I had no reason to notice. I’m not interested in children.”
“I was sixteen.”
“A child to me in many ways. I find you to be a child now.”
“Excuse me?”
“I only mean that you have lived nothing of the kind of life I have.”
“Maybe you want to share what you’ve been through?”
“I don’t. But that is interesting that you thought me something quite so dangerous as a dragon, even then. I suppose that was your self-preservation instincts. Which failed you later on.”
“The man I was texting with wasn’t a dragon.”
He looked up at her, his dark eyes blank. “But he was, silly. All along.”
That made her stomach twist tight. Made her heart feel like it was being squeezed.
She felt like she was gasping for air.
Just then a different set of doors to the penthouse opened, and a medical team entered. A whole team . There was equipment, being rolled in on great wheels, and she was stunned by the sight.
“We’re going to do a sonogram,” Christos said.
“In your house.”
“Of course. Why would I have my fiancée trek all the way down to a medical facility?”
“You’re picking a strange thing to be chivalrous about. Considering you’re literally strong-arming me into a marriage and are in general not at all courtly in any manner.”
“Do not question it when I decide to show chivalry.”