Chapter Ten
I spend days without a single thought in my head. It’s strange, uncomfortable, and at the same time, it’s like having a vacation from myself and the burdens that I’ve carried my entire life.
I’m not thinking about the future. I’m not thinking about what’s right or wrong or good for me. What might be bad for me. I’m just in a state of surrender.
To his pleasure. To him.
I’ve spent my life learning. But I’ve never learned another human being. I’m learning Lucian. His moods, his expressions. The shift of every muscle, the particular way he sounds when he feels pleasure. At the same time, I’m learning something about myself.
I’ve surrendered to the experience. To what it means to feel. Only.
That night, our wedding night, when I fell asleep in his bed, I didn’t make the conscious decision to put away my concerns and suspicions.
I didn’t decide to set it all aside and surrender.
I just did. I woke up in his arms the next morning, and he claimed me, again and again. I spent that whole day in his bed.
Since then, we’ve done other things. He has a country to manage, and true to his word, he set me up with some online classes—they haven’t started yet, thus my reprieve on thought—and I’ve also been presented with some charities that I might throw my weight behind.
But mostly, this has been a honeymoon, even if it is inside a castle.
I’m almost embarrassed how eager I am to see him every day.
But really marinating in that embarrassment would require thought, and I’m not doing that.
Instead, I’m lying naked on the foot of my bed in a sunbeam.
I’m reading a science book. I don’t consider that thought, because it isn’t planning or anything to do with myself.
It’s just being in the moment. But I’m waiting for him.
So when I hear footsteps outside my door, I’m already setting the book aside when he opens it.
He sees me, and his eyes glow. The way that he wants me fills me with a kind of delight that I’ve never experienced before.
I feel important in a way that I never have.
It’s such a strange thing. To feel like sexuality is powerful, like my body matters, when honestly I’ve always felt like a brain floating in a skull jar.
Not anymore. I’m very much connected to every part of myself now.
He’s stripping his own clothes off before I can greet him, and he’s taken me to ecstasy before we exchanged two words.
And yet, as he finds his own pleasure, pours himself inside of me, I feel like the look in his eyes speaks to feelings and truths that words wouldn’t be sufficient for.
I feel like I’m perilously close to understanding something I thought I didn’t need to. The way that my sister falls so passionately into these kinds of relationships doesn’t seem like a mystery to me anymore. She and my mother no longer feel like alien creatures that I can’t understand.
Because before Lucian touched me, I didn’t understand, and that version of myself would look at this version of myself and find her to be sad and woefully misguided. While I look back at the version of myself who didn’t know this and I feel…she didn’t know.
There was so much she didn’t know.
It frightens more now than it did before, but I also understand why people decide to embrace it, terrifying and powerful though it is.
Which is part of why it compounds my fear.
“What do you have to do today?” I ask, my fingers tracing patterns on his chest.
“I’m finished for the day with everything but this,” he says.
He takes hold of my hand and lifts it, kissing my palm.
Then he picks me up from the bed, along with a bundle of blankets, and moves us down to a sunny patch on the floor that’s big enough for the two of us.
It’s right in front of the bookshelves, and it’s a cozy nook, but funny, because we could just stay on the bed.
But I enjoy the strange things that he does.
The ways in which he’s oddly romantic. I wouldn’t have ever said that I was a romantic person.
Maybe that’s why I like his version of it. It’s not hearts and flowers. It’s midnight feasts and nests of blankets. It’s endless orgasms and the way that he studies me like I’m a fascination.
“Have you read any of the novels that I’ve given you?”
“No,” I say.
The look he gives me is stern and it does something to me. Makes my insides feel like they’re melting. Makes my stomach drop. I curl into him, and he puts his arm around me. “Shall I read to you?”
“You want to…to read to me?”
“If it’s the only way I’m going to get you to discover the merits of fiction…”
That is how we spend the afternoon. Lying on the floor in blankets as he reads The Secret Garden. It’s a children’s book. But it makes me cry. I watch his face as he reads, and I wonder what speaks to this man about that book. I wonder how it reaches him.
What it meant to him when he was a boy, and what it means to him now.
He looks up from the book, eyes connecting with mine. “What?”
“Which one are you?”
A crease appears between his brows as he considers this, and I can’t help but marvel at the hard-cut lines of his face. I see his scars differently now. They shocked me at first, and while they never detracted from his beauty they added to his beastliness.
Now I see them as part of him.
“Are you the girl who came to live there, the one who discovered the secret garden, or are you the boy?” I press.
He considers this for a moment, his large hands cradling the book, an expression on his face that’s almost…soft. Almost.
“Both,” he says. “I spent my childhood in a certain amount of isolation. My imagination was an important part of my survival. But then, I’ve also been shut in. Lying in bed, trying to heal.”
“But you didn’t have a friend to come and draw you back out?”
He shakes his head. “No. And my parents were dead, so that meant that I was king.”
“How old were you?”
I’m hungry for his story.
I know that it’s printed in history books and the like. I know the dates, but somehow, looking at him, really taking in the reality of it, I need to personalize it more.
I need to hear it from him. His feelings on what happened, the facts beyond what the press printed.
“I was thirteen when I officially became king. There were advisors who handled things for the six months prior to that, the press, official statements. I was too injured to do much of anything.”
“Lucian…”
“It’s all right. It was a long time ago.”
“But it hasn’t faded.” I lift my hand and touch his scars.
“It has,” he says, taking hold of my hand and lowering it. “What you see, that is nothing in comparison to how it was.”
“What were your parents like? I don’t mean as king and queen. I mean as parents.”
He makes a low noise in the back of his throat and looks up at the ceiling.
“Busy. I loved them very much. My mother was exquisitely beautiful. My father tall and strong. I wanted to be like him. They had grand parties. And I remember watching them from the balcony in the ballroom. Gazing down at all of the opulence. Then the wars started and they closed the palace. My mother grew fearful. She stopped dressing up. My father became short-tempered. I understand, of course. The toll that it took on him. And truthfully, their anxieties were not misplaced. I was taken from the palace. By someone that they trusted. Held captive, tortured. I’m the reason my parents are dead, you see.
Because they did try to rescue me. And when they did, it left them vulnerable to attack.
It was demanded that they both appear to come and claim me. ”
“But they let you go?”
He laughs. “No. My father was not a fool. When he went that day, he had men lying in wait. Unfortunately, they could not save my parents. But they did save me.”
Imagining him as a boy, one who had been hurt like that, then lost his parents, wounds me. But I know he doesn’t want me to weep over him. He’s telling me this with grave matter-of-factness. And I know that he won’t welcome me being overly soft about it. So I just try to listen.
“That was actually what ended the war. The death of the king and queen. Other nations intervened at that point. They squashed the rebellion.”
He takes a breath. “The very sad thing is I understand what the rebellion wanted. I’ve tried to give some of those things to the people.
More freedom. More resources, though based on what you have said I still fall short.
However, I cannot feel entirely sympathetic to their cause. As you must understand.”
I nod. “I understand.”
“Books were my only friends,” he says. “And something of a guilty pleasure. Particularly after I became king. They didn’t want me reading stories. They wanted me reading up on world events. On diplomacy. But I was still a boy. In many ways. Surrounded by adults. Responsibility.”
The picture he paints is so poignant, almost especially so because of how evenly he tells it all. Like this is another story he’s reading to me, not painful memories from his past.
“How did…how did your myth start?”
He lifts a brow. “My myth?”
“Yes, you know. Everything people say about you. That you’re the Sea Serpent of the Mediterranean. The dragon of the castle on the rock, half monster, half man, all mad.”
“Hmm.” The sound is somewhere between a hum and a growl. “When I wouldn’t make appearances, it started. They were right too. It was because I was disfigured. Because I had fits and rages and mercurial moods. If I’m honest, I was half mad after my parents died. After my torture.”
“Why did you let it continue?” I ask, my chest aching. “Why did you…cultivate it?”