Chapter Nine
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Maple
My eyes narrow on the man sitting across from me at a small, round table in Nivora’s main lobby.
The stars didn’t help, and I had to paint over more than half of the newly added golden dots.
I’m now forced to consider that, perhaps, the problem lies somewhere else.
Maybe the couple? I don’t believe for a second that the square of red is the issue, but possibly the slant of the man’s nose, or the dimple in his chin…
For his part, Ivy takes my severe observation with remarkable patience.
He hasn’t spoken—or moved—since his initial greeting when I arrived downstairs.
His jade green gaze rests contentedly on my face as I review the contours of his in a structured scan.
I catalog features I’ve memorized thousands of times, looking for discrepancies in my memory.
Finding none, I frown. He’s exactly as I remembered.
Ivy takes my frown as the sign that it is and breaks his silence. “You know I’ll sit for you any time you want, rosy. Even while you’re here. Just say the word and I’ll come.”
I just bet he will. “I don’t want you to sit for me right now,” I lie.
I’d very much like for him to sit for me, preferably directly beside my painting until I can determine what, precisely, I’ve done wrong.
That would require letting him into my suite, though, which I would not survive through unscathed.
I barely made it through the half-groveling, half-begging phone call with him this morning when he contacted me to set this meeting, his voice gruff and pleading.
Having that voice with his face taking up space in my studio would do more harm than good to the scraps of willpower helping me resist his charms—the same charms that got me married to him in the first place.
Good looks, a scrumptious voice, and a willingness to leverage them to get you trapped in his web—The Iverson Special.
“You have your ‘war plan?’” I ask. My fingers itch to create the air quotes my tone implies, and I shove them under my thighs. Pettiness during a war summit is not a good look.
“I have a proposal,” Ivy says.
I roll my eyes. “A bit late for that. Proposals are meant to happen before the wedding.”
He waves a hand through the air, narrowly avoiding his open laptop with the flippant swipe. “Not a wedding proposal. A courtship proposal.”
“A courtship proposal,” I repeat. “Like in the 1800s?”
“I do hope that we can modernize the idea a bit,” he replies with nary an amused tilt of his lip.
He’s serious.
Dead serious.
Flabbergasted, I ask, “You want to court me?”
“Yes.” Clear. Decisive.
He wants to court me. Genuinely and truly, my husband wishes to start a courtship with me, his wife.
At a loss, I look behind Ivy to where Etta and Mary unabashedly eavesdrop from the lobby counter.
I’m hoping they’ll offer me… I don’t know.
Help, maybe? Though I’m unsure what they could actually do for me right now.
It’s not like they have any power over Iverson’s mental health, which clearly needs an overhaul.
I make eye contact with Etta, who raises an eyebrow. Mary bites her lip and shrugs.
Right.
I’m in this mess alone.
I refocus on Ivy. He doesn’t rush me. He sits, watching me with a calmness that unnerves me, broken only by a casual swipe of his finger across the mousepad every time his laptop brightness dims to indicate it might fall asleep soon.
I eye the machine warily. Whatever’s on his screen is important to him—to this conversation.
I do not think I want to find out what it is. However, the last time I gleefully skipped about in ignorance of his plans, he took me to my surprise wedding. So I’m not sure I can afford to not want to find out what it is.
Which is worse, I ponder, the knowing or the not?
In the end, it isn’t really a question.
“I’m listening,” I say. Under duress, and unwillingness, and other synonyms that express how very much I wish I did not have to listen for the sake of avoiding the what ifs that Iverson could hold within his secrets.
The sneaky, schemey man straightens, and the snake on his neck jumps with his pulse.
“The problem,” he starts quickly, before I can change my mind, “is that I do not believe our current situation would be amenable to a regular sort of courtship. Hence the modernizing. I believe that in order for you to have the autonomy you desire, you would have to court me.”
A pit opens in my stomach. “I have to what?”
“Court me,” he repeats. “I’ve thought about it a lot, and it would never work with me leading.
You wouldn’t have as much control. You’d be in a defensive position, protecting yourself against any advances I might try to make, and you’d be constantly unsure of what might come next.
With you in charge, these issues erase themselves.
Plus, it gives me the opportunity to put myself in your hands, just like when I pose for you.
I could bare myself to you, to your whims and desires.
I want to bare myself to you. I want to prove to you that I can.
I want to prove to you that a life of love with me doesn’t mean giving up yourself or your rights to make your own choices, despite what our wedding might imply. ”
I stare, wide-eyed, at my husband.
All of those words were… remarkably intelligent. Particularly in the specific order he put them in. Goodness. Remarkably intelligent. A perfect solution. If we just ignore how absolutely I do not want to do it.
How am I supposed to “court” a man that I barely want to interact with at all right now? Not to mention! I agreed to let him woo me. I didn’t agree to me wooing him.
An excellent point, actually, and I relay it to him with haste.
He dismisses my excellent point. “I’ll still be doing plenty of wooing. Don’t worry about that. You’ll just be deciding the situations in which my wooing will take place. Think of it like the theater. You set the stage, and I make the love story come to life within it.”
“I set the stage,” I repeat weakly. I’ve done stage setting before. I’ve built the sets. I’ve painted the landscapes. I’ve worked hours and hours to make a beautiful backdrop for a beautiful love story. You know what I learned from it?
I learned that the people who set the stage get rewarded with little recognition and a lot of back pain.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he declares, green eyes shining with something akin to amusement.
“And it won’t be like that at all. Part of the joy of this is that yes, you set the stage, but you also get to decide how much or how little is on that stage, and you have full rights to pass the job to me at any moment, or snatch it back afterward. This plan is for you, not against you.”
I find it supremely annoying that not only did he know what I was thinking, but he had a pretty good rebuttal for it. “Stop being logical and agreeable when I’m upset with you,” I order.
Mirth flickers at the crease of his mouth. “As you wish,” he agrees with a logical and agreeable tilt of his head. His hair falls over his face to frame a mischievous twinkle just there, at the edge of his pupil.
My nose wrinkles at how endearingly cute he makes his impishness. How dare he be not only logical and agreeable, but attractive, too? Does he have to use every weapon in his arsenal right out of the gate?
“Is there anything else about my proposal that you’d like to discuss before accepting it?”
My lips purse, and, mind blank in the face of his face, I glance behind his deadly weapon to see if our peanut gallery has any qualms I could bring up.
Etta and Mary blink at me, about as helpful as they were the last time I looked to them for a sprinkle of support.
Ugh.
“I guess not,” I grumble, unable to come up with any real issues.
Or, I should say, unable to come up with any issues not steeped in a stubbornness that would lead to the complete dissolution of our friendship.
I’m upset with him, but I don’t want to lose him, and I’m not so far gone to my emotions that I don’t realize the careful tread I need to find.
I don’t want my nos to lead to a permanent loss we can’t come back from.
He’s still my Ivy, after all, even if his vines are currently pressing in on me a little too tight.
His current constriction doesn’t erase the many years they’ve held me together, though.
They just need a little pruning right now, that’s all, not a full-fledged eradication.
To his credit, Iverson Swallow doesn’t gloat at his win. I only know he feels the victory at all because he can’t quite hide the spark of satisfaction in his eyes. From someone else, maybe he could have, but not from me.
A sense of relief hits me, sharp and unexpected.
I’d convinced myself after walking into the ball—the wedding—that I didn’t know him, not truly.
How could I? How could I believe that I knew him better than anyone in the world when he was able to deceive me like that?
He spent months lying to me as he planned what most people would consider to be the happiest day of their lives.
He looked me in the eyes while he did it, and I didn’t suspect a thing.
He requested I wear white, and I still didn’t think anything was amiss, even though he’d never tried to dictate what I wore before then.
Looking back, I can see all the signs of his deceit—his nervous ticks and increasing affections. But at the time I didn’t see it.
Then we walked into a dream, and it all became so clear.
I’ve been thinking I lost the ability to read him.
No, worse, I’ve been thinking I never knew him well enough to be able to read him in the first place.
That our lifetime of friendship has been nothing more than a lie, and my knowledge of Iverson nothing but wishful thinking and delusion.
In a fit of reality-based drama, I’ve been despairing over memories I’ve been looking at without my rose-tinted glasses.
The spark in his eye, though, tells a different story.
I saw it. It was real. There and gone so quickly that someone who had studied him less would have missed it.
But I didn’t. Somewhere between us still lies a familiarity I’d come to expect as due course, and with it, a chance at a future where we settle into a relationship not quite like what we had before, but not so dissimilar that we’ll have lost the strings of love that tie us together.
I rest my glasses back on my face, and allow the wonder of a rosy tint to once more color my life.
As relief cuts a knife through my heart, poking at my lungs and making it hard to breathe, Ivy reaches for his laptop. Unaware of the emotions roiling in me, he spins his screen to present a blank spreadsheet. Of Love and War, it’s titled, A Courtship Plan.
I gulp.
“So,” he says, “how would you like to start?”