20. Baron #2
I resisted the urge to say something like, Now see what you did. I didn’t want to fan the flames any more than I already had. If I gave Laurel time, her anger would cool off, as would mine. If we kept talking, both of us would say things we’d later regret.
I crossed to my desk and began rifling through the sheaves of parchment stacked there. The hourglass dripped slowly as I painstakingly reviewed report after report, but I absorbed almost nothing. All the while, I felt Laurel’s heated gaze fixed on me, burning into the side of my head.
“Pretty normal for you to have women in your room, isn’t it?” she asked snippily after a long silence. “They didn’t seem too surprised by your story. After the dance that night, did you bring your date back here and brag to everyone about it after?”
I closed my eyes briefly. Of course I hadn’t brought anyone else here. She should know that. She did know that, I was sure. But Laurel wanted a fight, and every answer I gave would become another weapon. Someone between us had to remain rational, or at least try to.
“You’re going to be angry with me no matter what I say, so I’m not answering that,” I said carefully.
Every quarter hour, I got up and pulled back the sliding panel to check whether the hall was clear.
Still, the men remained. I cursed them under my breath and returned to the desk each time, more trapped than before.
My reports sat beneath my hands, useless and blurry, while the one person I most wanted to reach sat only a few paces away and felt farther from me than she ever had.
After one such trip to the door, Laurel spoke up. “I can go out. I’m not afraid of them.”
I refrained from rolling my eyes. “Even if you aren’t afraid, they could blow your cover. I won’t let you go out.”
She stood so quickly the bed creaked, her face nearly as red as her hair. “Excuse me? You won’t let me? You, Baron Blackwellson, don’t own me. I’m not property. You don’t control what I can or can’t do.”
I exhaled hard. “I know that.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” My voice came out sharper than I intended. “What I mean is that you need to think.”
“Oh, you are saying I don’t think? You’re saying I’m stupid, aren’t you?” With every few words, Laurel stepped closer until she was right in front of me, chin lifted and eyes blazing.
It felt as if she was purposely misinterpreting every word I said, twisting everything until I couldn’t find a safe sentence to stand on. I inhaled slowly. “You know I don’t think you’re stupid. But you are impulsive. You act without thinking of the consequences.”
Laurel grabbed the water skin from my bedside table and splashed the water over my head. “Oh look, there’s me being impulsive. I just can’t control myself.”
For a second, cold water dripped down my face and onto the front of my shirt, and all I could do was stare at her. Then I wiped it away slowly, forcing my hands to remain calm. “Was that really necessary?”
Laurel backed toward the door again. “Ooh, look, here is me being impulsive, walking to the door. Maybe I’ll get caught and blow the entire mission. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
“Laurel,” I hissed. “Stop it. Just calm down and think, would you?”
She crossed the room in a few swift strides and poked me hard in the chest. “That’s the problem with you, Baron. You’re always thinking and never doing. You analyze everything to death, and it’s really annoying.”
“Anything would annoy you right now. You have a temper,” I said.
The moment the words left my mouth, I knew they were a mistake.
Her cheeks flushed angrily. “Oh, but you don’t? How about that little temper tantrum you threw when we first came up with this whole undercover idea? Then it was you acting like a two-year-old and yelling at everyone.”
I was determined not to take the bait and I wasn’t going to apologize for caring whether she lived. “I had to show everyone how serious of a situation they were getting themselves into. None of you were thinking ahead. Someone could get hurt or die, and no one seemed to care.”
“No one cared about what? Your personal safety?” Her mouth twisted. “Poor baby. You were worried your own comfort mattered more than the future of the country?”
“I joined your little band, didn’t I?” I shot back. The anger slipped free before I could stop it. “Didn’t I agree to run around in the woods wearing tights for the rest of my life, only for you all to send me away right after? It’s like you don’t even want me around.”
Laurel stared at me for a long time.
I refused to break eye contact. I was not going to be someone’s punching bag. Not even hers. Not when I was already standing in the wreckage of every shameful thing I had ever done, trying to prove I was not that man anymore.
“Why do you even want to join?” she finally asked.
The question caught me off guard. “What do you mean?”
“Are you joining us because you actually believe in what we are doing, or because you thought I wouldn’t want to be with you if you didn’t join?”
I hesitated.
The truth was ugly, or at least it had been at the beginning.
I never would have left my father’s camp if Laurel hadn’t asked me to come with her.
I certainly would never have sought out Robin Hood and asked to follow in his footsteps.
And if I had refused to consider joining the Merry Men, Laurel would have left me. I’d known that from the start.
But that wasn’t the whole truth anymore.
I had lived among them. I had seen what they fought for.
I had sat by their fires, listened to their arguments, and watched them hand food to people who had nothing.
I had met men who genuinely believed loyalty was something chosen rather than forced.
I believed in their cause now. I wanted to stay. I wanted to be worthy of staying.
But the words tangled together in my throat. I didn’t know how to explain something that had begun selfishly and later become real.
“That’s irrelevant,” I said. “I’m here now, and I’m working on the same mission you are. I thought we were a team.”
The fury slowly faded from Laurel’s eyes, but what replaced it was worse. It was sorrow, and a terrible kind of certainty.
“I thought we were too,” she said quietly. “But I was wrong. We’re too different. This isn’t going to work out between us.”
It suddenly felt like there was no air in my lungs. There was no air in the entire room. I was falling, falling into nothingness. She couldn’t mean…
I stared at her, certain I had misunderstood. She couldn’t mean it.
“Wait,” I said, and the word came out too rough. I took one step toward her, then stopped when she stiffened. “Wait. Let’s sit down and think about this.”
“No.” Laurel’s anger flared again, but now I could hear the hurt beneath it. “I’m done thinking about it. I thought we could figure this out, us being together, but we clearly can’t. Didn’t you want me to think ahead? Well, congratulations, now I am. Are you happy?”
I opened my mouth, but no words came out.
A thin, awful panic began inside me and spread until I could hardly hear anything else.
She was leaving me. I was going to be alone.
The thought was so sharp and sudden that it stripped away my anger at once.
I wanted to beg. I wanted to tell her I was sorry for every cruel word I had thrown at her because I had been too ashamed to say the truth.
I wanted to promise that I would be better, that I had already changed, that whatever monstrous thing she had learned about me was not all I was. But the words wouldn’t come.
“No,” I croaked.
Laurel’s face tightened as though that hurt her too, but she didn’t move toward me.
I knew I shouldn’t have to apologize for every part of my past forever. I knew one argument shouldn’t end everything. I knew she had come here already half convinced I was a monster and that nothing I said could have been enough while she was this angry.
But none of that mattered. I was willing to apologize for anything if it meant I could keep her.
“Goodbye, Baron,” she said.
She kissed me briefly on the cheek then she moved toward the door.
“They’ll see you.” My voice sharpened with panic.
I had to stop her. I had to explain. One fight was not the end of the world.
It was just one argument. If she stayed, we would make up.
I would apologize. I would tell her everything.
I could still fix it. She had to stay long enough for me to fix everything. “Laurel, please.”
“But I’m impulsive, remember?” she snapped.
She pulled her cloak hood down over her head, flung the door open, and screamed, “What’s that?”
Every head in the hall swiveled toward the direction she pointed. By the time the soldiers looked back, she had darted down a side corridor and vanished.
I stood in the doorway, unable to move.
Someone in the hall laughed and made a crude remark about the sheriff’s lady friend fleeing before dawn. Another soldier asked if I needed them to chase her down. I turned my head slowly, and whatever they saw on my face made the laughter die at once.
“Leave her,” I said.
My voice was quiet, but every man there obeyed. I stepped back into my room and shut the door. The latch clicked into place with a tiny sound that felt horribly final.
For several moments, I stood where she had left me. Water still dampened the front of my shirt, the reports waited on the desk, and the hourglass kept dropping sand. Somewhere down the hall, the soldiers returned to their dice, their muttering, and their ordinary lives.
Mine had just split apart.
I looked at the bed where she had been sitting only moments earlier, at the water skin lying crooked on the table, at the door she had walked through without looking back.
The room seemed emptier than it had before she’d been there, though nothing had changed except that now I knew exactly what I had lost.
She was gone.
And she had taken many of my hopes and dreams with her.