Chapter 21
negotiations, dammit
LEXI
“Because—okay—” Sucking in a deep breath did not fortify my courage nearly as much as I’d hoped. My hands trembled, so I grabbed them together and shoved them into my lap. “I don’t want to wait any longer for my life to start. I don’t want to wait a whole ’nother year for—you know.”
Nicolai’s level gaze felt like an accusation. “I’m paying for your time.”
“I don’t want to sign a contract saying I have to remain a virgin. That I can’t have a relationship with someone else if I want to, a real relationship.”
With someone who wanted me.
Who loved me.
Even though finding someone who loved me felt impossible.
“A real relationship,” Nicolai repeated, watching me. His dark eyebrows still pinched a crease between his eyes.
“If I sign that contract, it would mean that my body doesn’t belong to me. My body would belong to you, at least for the year.”
He lifted one knee and rested his arm on it. “That’s not what I meant.”
“But it’s what the contract would do. That’s the effect it would have. I couldn’t be with you or anyone else. You would control what I do with my body. You’d be able to dictate to me what I do and what I put in it.”
And who I put in it, but I didn’t say that part out loud.
He shook his head. “The point of you remaining a virgin is so the non-consummation can be verified by a doctor.”
I rolled my eyes. Did they not teach guys this stuff? “That’s not how it works. I don’t have a hymen-ribbon stamped ‘Sealed for Your Protection’ over my vagina.”
Nicolai pressed his eyes closed as if he were in pain. “Of course not. But I thought there was a way that a doctor could discern.” His quick glance held the slightest confusion. “There were always doctors’ examinations before royal weddings, proclaiming the princess was a virgin.”
“Yeah, whatever. They also thought leeches could cure the dropsy. I wouldn’t bet much money on a medieval doctor’s understanding of a woman’s anatomy.
It’s not even something you can see most of the time.
A hymen is like a balloon arch that gets roughed up during your first time, rather than a seal the guy has to punch his way through. ”
Nicolai’s gaze wandered to the ceiling. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”
“So, look. I get it if you feel like you need to earn your annulment. Those are some pretty deep sleeper codes you’ve got in your head, there.
Some of the other girls in my young women’s youth group at church were crazy-stringent about wanting to earn their white weddings.
I mean, like, they kissed their husbands for the first time at their weddings. ”
He startled and turned toward me. “Wait, you’d kissed someone before our wedding, though, right? That wasn’t—” Horror dawned in his eyes. “That wasn’t your first kiss I can’t even remember?”
“No. No, I kissed Jimmy. I mean, sometimes I kissed him.”
Nicolai’s hand tightened into a fist on the bed’s comforter. “You did. Interesting.”
“I didn’t like it very much. I thought everything would be okay once I married him.”
This time, Nicolai tilted his head. “To be clear, if we didn’t need evidence for a defect in the marriage to get an annulment, any previous lovers in your life would be none of my business. I didn’t ask before I married you because it wouldn’t have mattered, I think.”
Huh. Interesting qualifier, there at the end. “You think?”
Just one of his eyebrows tilted downward. “Sometimes I hold an idealized vision of how civilized I am. I think I wouldn’t have cared that they existed, only whether they continued to exist.” His voice had lowered to a growl.
Continued to—I wasn’t going there. “Nicolai, the thing is, I’m twenty-one years old.”
“All of twenty-one,” he mused, primly smiling at me like I was a damned child because he was twenty-eight whole years old, he’d said.
“I don’t want to wait another year before I start living my life.”
“I’ll make it worth your while. Besides the money at the end, we’ll travel this year. I’ll show you Europe. We’ll go to Bali, Paris, the Seychelles, anywhere you want. We’ll swim in every ocean.”
I’d never even seen an ocean.
Nebraska is really far from every ocean.
And yet, oceans weren’t the problem.
“As what, buddies? Roommates?” I demanded.
“Until we sort this out. You’re worth waiting for.”
Jimmy’s other woman had been standing in the crowd at my wedding. They’d been living together. They’d obviously been sexually involved. “Evidently, I’m not.”
“You were waiting to indulge until you were married.”
“We are married.”
“Don’t you want to wait for your real husband, the one you’ll spend your life with, not give yourself away to an inebriated bum you scraped off the sidewalk?”
Nicolai was watching me very closely this whole time, his eyes moving as his attention darted to every twitch of my eyebrows and mouth.
“How old were you, your first time?” I asked him.
His face blanked any sort of emotional expression, like he’d slapped a mask on. “I don’t see how that has any bearing on this conversation.”
“How old?”
He grimaced. “Fourteen.”
“You were—Jesus, Nico! Did someone hurt you?” I was riled up and ready to pummel someone. “Did a teacher or a coach take advantage of you when you were a kid?”
His dismissive shoulder twitch mollified me. “It wasn’t a teacher. Mores are different at boarding school. She was my age. Well, she was sixteen, but barely, and I was almost fifteen. It was mutual. I didn’t date freshmen, even when I was one.”
He got an older woman. Figured. “Well, my point is that you didn’t wait.”
“Of course not. I’m a—” Nicolai trailed off and pressed his lips closed.
I almost laughed at his sudden switch from natural arrogance to mortification at what he’d nearly said, but I went with outrage. “Go ahead. Say it. I dare you.”
He shook his head. “Absolutely not.”
“Fine, but I’m done waiting. I mean it. I don’t want to live half a life.”
He squeezed his eyes like this whole conversation pained him. “Having sex isn’t everything. Not having it is not living half a life.”
“Says the dude who’s had a lot of it.”
“Come on, now. My point is that you can do better than me.”
“Heh. That’s not what the girls at the Omnia said.”
He rolled his eyes a tiny bit, the smallest possible expression of disdain. “I have a standing agreement with a few of the women I went to school with. I pay them a thousand dollars every time they tell someone I’m a good fuck.”
I paused. “Really?”
Nicolai sighed. “No, it was supposed to be a joke. I should have said ten grand to make it believable. They wouldn’t even say something for a mere thousand dollars.”
“Yeah, they didn’t look like they were lying or flattering you behind your back. I swear to God that Ottalie was almost crying when Clementine told her you really were married, saying she was going to miss your . . . sparkling conversation.”
The corners of his eyes contracted, a wince. “No one has accused me of seducing women with my sparkling conversation.”
Yeah, they were more interested in his magic D.
“Look, the point is that I want to make my own decisions about my life and my body. I wasn’t saving me.
Jimmy sure as heckers wasn’t celibate. He didn’t wait for me.
He had someone else. Jimmy had been saving my virginity for his wedding night like he was hiding a bottle of wine in a cellar to celebrate his own triumph, so he could drink it alone. ”
I saw the moment Nicolai understood, his slow blink and the lowering of his head. “Oh.”
“Yeah. And I was so caught up in everything Jimmy wanted, everything his family wanted, everything his church wanted me to be, but it didn’t matter. He fell in love with someone else, in a heartbeat. No matter what I tried to do, it didn’t matter.”
“Oh, Lexi.” Nicolai wrapped an arm around me and pulled me against his warm shoulder. His voice was quiet, soft, when he asked, “Did you love him?”
I laid out the evidence like a cop. “I changed my whole life for him. When I was in high school, I wanted to be an actor. Stage, not screen, though I would have done anything I was cast in. But when Jimmy and I started dating during sophomore year, when I met his family, they didn’t like that I wanted to be an actress.
I wanted him, I wanted them, so I dropped my drama class halfway through senior year when things got serious.
I converted to their church. I took business and accounting courses so I could work in their HR department because that’s where they had an opening.
Didn’t I do all that because I loved him? Isn’t that love?”
Nicolai didn’t look at me, just held me in his arms. “Changing yourself so entirely? Giving up a future you wanted? I’m not sure.”
“It must have been love, right?” My eyes burned. “I thought I was going to die when he walked out of our wedding. He didn’t even look back at me. My chest hurt like my heart had been shredded, like there was no way I could go on being alive without him. That’s love, right?”
Nicolai’s arms tightened around me. “Don’t be upset over that fool. He didn’t realize what a prize he had, and therefore, he isn’t worthy of your love. He even has a stupid name, Jimmy. No adult man calls himself Jimmy.”
A pathetic, stupid sound clogged my throat when I tried to laugh.
“Do you want me to destroy his life?” Nicolai asked, his tone offhanded, but then his voice lowered, just slightly. “Because I will. Say the fucking word.”
I stopped, startled. “What?”