Chapter Eleven #2
It’s such a strange admission, because there is no current danger, but he’s projected his anxiety onto me.
Knowing that he cares in some capacity about me personally.
But of course he does. Because I know him well enough to know he isn’t controlling for the sake of it.
He’s not a cruel man. Nothing that he’s done would ever lead me to believe he was.
“I know you might find this difficult to believe, but I lived in the world for all of these years without you.”
“But you weren’t tied to me.” His voice is rough. “I don’t have the best outcomes with people who join themselves to me.”
Yet again, I want to ask about his other wives. But I find that something is stopping me. That there are some things I don’t really want to know. Even though part of me is curious.
“But you’re letting me out of my cage,” I say. It feels like something. Maybe like progress.
“I am bringing your cage with me,” he says.
I don’t know if he’s being serious, if he’s teasing me, or if he’s reminding me of exactly who he is. That no matter he might make concessions, I belong to him.
He’s right. I surrendered to this. For him. Now all I can do is be grateful that he’s doing this at all.
I’ve never been on a plane. It’s…terrifying, actually.
Even though I know this is luxury travel, we are hurtling through the air at an alarming rate of speed.
I am aware the speed is a feature and not a bug.
But even so, I find it unnerving. The flight to France isn’t a long one but I’m restless all the same.
“I assumed you’d traveled,” he says.
“You make it very difficult.”
“I don’t intentionally make it difficult to travel,” he says. “I just try to keep the airspace on the island clear.”
“Which means that your citizens first have to take a boat somewhere else if they want to fly. We’ve never had that kind of money. And I’ve been…saving. You already know that.”
“Yes,” he says. “I do. But I confess that I assumed you had been to some of these universities that you were dreaming about going to.”
“No,” I say. “I just looked at them online.”
He appears discomfited by this, and I can’t figure out why. I can’t figure out why he cares, since part of our relationship is him limiting my access to things. But he also likes giving me things. Maybe he feels the push and pull the same way that I do.
He is bringing me on this trip. And I might feel pleased about that once the plane actually lands.
I’m right. When the plane descends in Paris, and I see the overhead view of this city that I’ve seen depicted so many times on TV, in movies and books, I forget everything. If the plane were to go down right now, I might not even be that sad.
We are ushered from the aircraft and into a luxury car, and my face is glued to the window as we drive through the city streets. As I take in the glory of the architecture.
“You are so strange,” he says.
I rip my gaze away from the view and stare at him. “I’m strange?”
“Yes. You, who claim to have no dreams. Who claim you have no interest in fiction. This little scientist. You’re the most sensual woman I’ve ever known.
You love beautiful things. You love to be touched.
” We have a driver, and no partition up between us, and I shift uncomfortably as he describes me—accurately—with an audience.
“You love food, even though you decline to tell me your favorite. You yearn for adventure, but are afraid of air travel.”
“I just hadn’t done it before,” I say, sniffing.
“You are not practical, Queen Lilith. You are greedy. Insatiable. You don’t just want one thing, you want it all. I am uncertain why you can’t admit it.”
“Because I can’t have it all,” I say. “I already told you. Watching my mother and sister made me afraid to dream. And anyway, I’m not wrong. I’m the queen now. I still can’t have everything.”
He considers this. “No. None of us can.”
“I never wanted to live with that unbearable ache.”
“To live, I suspect, is to have an unbearable ache. The world is vast, and there are so many experiences. None of us can have all of them.” He’s now looking out the window.
“I suspect there is some beauty in that. Knowing that the world contains so much glory, and we cannot experience all of it. It is compensation for all the sadness the world contains.”
“It’s another sadness,” I say. “If you want too much.”
“I suppose that’s one way of viewing it,” he says.
I wonder if the reason he sees it this way is because of how much more time he’s lived. It makes me feel like there’s a cavern standing between us. I don’t know why I care about that at all.
The car pulls up to a luxury estate with wrought iron gates, glorious and vast. “This is the chancellor’s lodgings. We will be starting here, and stay for a couple of days. We can do some sightseeing, and then we will move on to England.”
“Oh,” I say. Because I can’t help myself. I’ve always wanted to go there. I want to see Oxford. I’ve always wanted that. It’s where I wanted to go. Me and so many other people. But it makes me feel like if I could do it I would be…
That I would matter.
Maybe walking through the halls would be enough.
“What?”
“I’ve always wanted to go there. I mean, not just to visit, it’s where I wanted to go. I… I had a tentative acceptance. Because of the focus of my research.”
“And what is that?”
“Cancer cells,” I say. “The way that they grow.”
“I see. Why medical research?”
“Because it matters,” I say.
“And you want to matter.”
I look at him. “How? The idea that I could do something significant for the world, even being a person who is often so insignificant in every way. I suppose that’s why my mother and sister look for love. Romantic love, I mean. That’s where they get that feeling from. That they matter.”
“But you don’t.”
I shake my head. “That’s depending on another person a bit too much for me.”
Ironic. Especially considering the image that he left me with before we arrived here. That he’s carrying my cage.
But at least he’s carried it somewhere nice.
We’re sharing a room in the estate, and practically we often do, but we have our own separate quarters that we can go to otherwise, so this is interesting.
A shared space for several days. He has diplomacy during the day, and I am allowed to see the city with security detail.
I go to the Louvre, and I find peace in art in a way that I never thought I would.
It makes me think about what he said about me. About how I am a dreamer. How I want everything.
But I don’t have everything. He’s not even here with me in the museum and I find that sad.
But that night we dress up and go to a dinner with the diplomat, his wife and a few other key political people.
The person I’m most interested in is Dr. Isabel Swift, who I’m starstruck to meet, honestly.
She’s a pioneer in the field of infectious disease research and even though that isn’t my focus, I’ve read a lot of her work.
“I just finished reviewing the Stanford Study,” I tell her as I take a sip of the finest wine I’ve ever had in my life. For a moment I feel like I do have everything.
She looks surprised. “You read medical studies for fun? I didn’t expect to meet anyone here who knew what I did at all.”
“Oh, I’m… Well, I was studying to go to school to do medical research but obviously I…can’t do that now. I can still have an education just not the way I wanted.”
“Why can’t you?” she asks.
“I married a king,” I say. “Which as far as furthering career goals goes is a bad move.”
“What did you want to do?”
I download all of my aspirations onto her, but I’m careful about what I say in regards to my marriage because even if it’s strange, I feel protective of Lucian, and what we have.
“Do you want a university tour? Because I can arrange for you to have one—not that your husband can’t, given that he’s a king, but I have contacts in the research department—”
“Yes!” The very idea of getting a tour at Oxford has me so excited I don’t even try to play it cool.
I’m so excited about my conversation with Dr. Swift that my enthusiasm carries over to dinner, and I fear I’m much more talkative than I would normally be.
I’m not suffering from the comparison terror, or any of the awkwardness I felt back at the wedding.
I’m not really sure why. But there’s something about sitting next to Lucian, who looks at me with approval, that adds to my confidence.
“Your wife is a gem,” says the diplomat. It is a sincerely given compliment, and though he’s speaking to my husband and not to me, I receive it. “You should do everything you can to hang onto this one.”
I’m reminded that if Lucian has been here before, then these men have met his previous wives. They’ve seen a side of him not even his own country ever sees. They’re all even older than he is, and they would have known…
That dims some of my light. After dessert, we’re mingling about in the study, and Isabel comes to sit beside me. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say.
“What did he mean by that? ‘Hang onto this one.’”
“I’m rather famously Lucian’s third wife,” I say. I look down at my hands. “It seems foolish, doesn’t it? His third wife, in her twenties, with the others long gone. We must actually look quite like a joke.”
Isabel frowns. “No. You don’t at all. He seems like he cares about you very much.”
On his own terms, I suppose he does. Maybe.
But what is care to Lucian? I think back on his childhood.
On how desolate it was. Has he really ever had any kind of care?
And if so, does he really know how to give it?
He tries. But I’m like a pet to him, really.
I get some nice little things, and he gets everything he wants.
I’ve been letting my feelings get too intense. In the palace it’s easy to do. It’s only us. Out here, I feel so much more tender. I feel young, I don’t feel like his equal. I feel like a silly girl for believing he might feel deeply for me.