12 | Taylor
Taylor
Thomas: I didn’t say anything to her. We didn’t even talk for that long.
Thomas: nail polish is a chick magnet btw. Who knew?
I don’t understand Melina. I apologize. I beg. I offer to pay triple her rate. I cook dinner for her twice. Now, after Tom merely talks to Melina, she’s suddenly back on the project. This isn’t the ending I wanted. I was supposed to convince her, not my moronic brother. That wasn’t the plan.
Julien texted me the great news right as I got off the jet. The only reason I’d gone home first was to grab her stupid apartment keys. I didn’t bother using my driver. Instead, I took my own damn car and drove to her place myself.
Maybe it’s not the best idea to pay her a visit in this state of mind. It’s how we started fighting in the first place, but I don’t care. I’m here now, and I’m done sucking up.
When I exit my car, a young couple passes me on the sidewalk. I hear the girl whisper, “That dude looks exactly like Prince Taylor,” as they walk by.
Idiots.
Now that her lock is fixed (grace à moi yelling to the dry-cleaner-slash-landlord about how unsafe it is,) Melina’s apartment is pretty nice for what I’m assuming she can afford, especially for living in the more well-to-do part of the city.
The place is full of art, strange-looking plants, and tourist trap fridge magnets.
The woman has a lot of fridge magnets. I don’t even know the real color of her fridge because the thing is covered with them.
I imagine that she gets one for every place she travels.
The art that’s on the wall is all signed with a tiny Melina in the corner.
She must be a painter. Yeah, I might’ve rooted around the place while she wasn’t there.
Nothing creepy, just enough to know she likes mechanical keyboards and reads a lot of true crime novels.
Her kitchen is small but not the most annoying to cook in.
I might miss making food for someone else instead of myself, or Tom, or the house staff and gardeners when I blackout and make too much.
I knock on Melina’s door three times. I may have forgotten to text her that I was coming, and it’s a little late. I’m just here to give her the spare keys back and leave. I could have asked somebody else to do this, but who knows? I might be in the mood to tell her off.
Melina opens the door and furrows her brow at me.
She’s dressed like she’s about to go somewhere, heels and everything.
I try not to give her the up-and-down, but I do anyway.
I haven’t seen her in a skirt before, and definitely not one this short.
The contrast between the waist-hugging black leather and the loose baby blue blouse makes her very enticing.
Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it.
“Hot date?”
Curse my mouth.
Melina crosses her arms, hiding her chest. I’m not sure what she has to be shy about. “Didn’t Julien tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
Sometimes, it’s more fun to start off conversations with a lie. I’m suddenly in the mood to draw out Melina’s torture for a very unnecessary amount of time, the consequences of her magic skirt.
She squints. “Why are you here?”
“To negotiate,” I say like it’s obvious.
Melina looks behind me. “I don’t see a grocery guy.”
“I had dinner planned at my place.”
I’m not sure where I’m going with this yet.
“At your castle?”
“Manor.”
She leans against the door frame. “Well, I can’t. I have plans. Why didn’t you text me this time?”
I’ll try to steer her away from that question and deflect with my own.
“What’s his name?” I sing like a gossipy teenager.
“I didn’t say I was on a date.”
I look her up and down once more, this time making it obvious.
“Okay, his name is Cody. What’s it to you?”
“Cody?” I ask, my voice dropping back to normal. “You curled your hair for someone with the name of a ten-year-old boy?”
She tucks some strands of said hair behind her ear.
She seems to get bashful when I notice things about her.
I’m not sure why, but something about Melina putting in effort for Cody makes me feel a strange, unpleasant emotion.
I think there’s a word for it, actually.
Maybe it starts with a...J? No. Never mind. The feeling is gone.
“He’s from Tinder,” she says. “They can’t all be perfect.”
“Can I see this Tinderman?”
After staring at me for a couple of seconds, she pulls out her phone, scrolls through it, and hands it to me.
Cody from Tinder is blond, twenty-eight, and likes the beach.
He’s okay, I guess, but way too sickly sweet-looking.
The man has fucking freckles, for Christ’s sake.
This is what she’s into? The J feeling begins to creep through my veins again.
Melina closes her eyes. “Just be straight with me.”
I cough. “Excuse me?”
“Say whatever snarky thing you have brewing to make me feel bad about my date.”
Oh.
I hand her back the phone. “He looks like a maggot.”
“There it is,” she mumbles while scrolling through Cody’s profile. “Well, he has a dog. He should be very nice.” Melina displays a picture of Cody holding a surfboard next to a golden retriever.
“I have a dog, and I’m not nice.”
“You have a dog?”
“Yes.”
No.
Vinnie is more of my brother’s dog. Much like Melina, he only likes me when I have food.
“Listen, I don’t have time to deal with you and your stubbornness this week. This is the only night I don’t have something going on.”
Sadly, that part is true. I like dealing with her and her stubbornness.
Melina doesn’t move.
“What the hell does boardshorts have that I don’t?”
She shrugs. “Rent, probably? You know, one could say that you’re being jealous .”
I roll my eyes at the very notion. What a silly idea. Me? Jealous? I’ve never been jealous of anyone in my life. Certainly not over Cody.
“Please, Melina, I’m on my knees.”
She scoffs. “No, you’re not.”
I have to do it now, don’t I? I find it so easy to swallow my dignity in front of her. I place one knee on the ground, then the other, and come face to face with her fantastic legs. Legs I bar Cody from ever seeing. She’s lucky. I’m not supposed to do this for anyone except the sovereign and God.
Melina’s eyes go wide like I’ve awoken something primal in her. “Get up,” she rasps.
“Meli—”
“Get up, get up, get up.”
I do what she says.
“Fine. I’ll blow off Cody.”
“Ugh. Can I at least watch?”
Her hand slaps against her forehead. “The ice you’re on is so thin, it’s nearing two-dimensional.”
Melina types something into her phone, looks at me, then types some more. She tugs at her bottom lip as if she’s really concentrating on how to send a simple text message.
“Let me help,” I say, stealing her phone.
She yells my name. I don’t care.
I erase her hey, I’m really sorry about this but, and take five seconds to craft my message before giving it back to her.
“ Sorry about ditching you, something came up. Have a nice rest of your life,” she reads monotonously. “Taylor! What if I wanted to see him again!”
I only shrug because I’m not sorry. In fact, she should be thanking me. I’m doing her a favor. Melina is not spending her night with some six-at-best named Cody. She’ll be spending it with me, Taylor, who is dark-haired, thirty, and hates the beach.
I reach inside and take her peacoat off the hook on the wall.
I splay it out for her, and she puts her arms in.
I do each individual button like she’s a fragile package.
If she was really invested in this date, she would’ve told me she was back on the project.
Finally, she’s starting to enjoy my company.
I follow her downstairs, then outside. She freezes when I open the passenger side of my car.
“You drive?”
I put my hand on her shoulder. “Were you expecting a horse?”
She purses her lips instead of retorting. Maybe it’d be nice if we stopped fighting for two seconds. Before I resume the torture, of course.
She hops in the passenger side as I come around the front.
“This is a nice ride,” she says as I start it. “Audi R8.” Her gaze affixes to the roof. “But it’s the Coupe, not the Spyder?”
I have no idea what that question means. Dad gave this to me for one of my birthdays. I forget which. It’s got an engine. It has wheels. It does the job.
Melina must sense I know fuck-all about cars because she asks, “Does the top come off?” in a way that’s condescending.
“No,” I answer as I pull out of her street.
It’s not a long drive from the city to where I live, but hopefully, it’s long enough so I can think about what the hell I’m going to make this woman for dinner.
After a minute of driving, she pipes up. “I didn’t think you’d have a license. I know you have a driver.”
“I might’ve had one at some point, but it’s probably expired. I’m pretty confident I can talk myself out of a ticket.”
“What would it say on your license? Like, does it say Prince Taylor, or do you have a last name? Did you have to queue like the rest of us to get your license?”
I side-eye her.
“Sorry, I bet people ask you a lot of stupid questions.”
“No one’s ever asked me if I’ve had to queue to get my license before. That’s just you.”
I actually like the more interesting questions rather than my ‘What’s the Queen like’, ‘How much money do you have’, and ‘What happened to your mother’s missing necklace’ staples I usually get. Stoic, a lot , and I don’t know are my usual answers.
“Well, have you?” she asks.
I’m not sure why she’s so interested in bureaucracy.
“Not in this country, but when I was living in America.”
“Must’ve been a humbling experience.”
“It was awful.”
Melina giggles, but it really wasn’t. I’m only exaggerating to make her laugh.
The DMV was the least of my humbling experiences from when I moved out.
But I’d like to believe most humbling experiences are ultimately good, the main reason why I wanted to attend college abroad.
That and the whole ‘find myself’ bullshit.
“I like knowing that you were once a real boy,” she says.
“Like Pinocchio?”
“You do lie a lot.”
My grip tightens on the steering wheel. “What have I lied about?”
“Your whole TV Prince Taylor character. You’re kind of boring in interviews.” She sounds like my publicist. “I could find some very colorful words to describe you, but none of them would be ‘boring’.”
Boring is better than my alternative. I’ve been told St. Claire thinks I’m ‘bitchy’ based on rumors started by people who’ve worked with me before. The rumors are true, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to believe it.
“It’s not a character,” I say, switching lanes. “That makes it sound like acting.”
I just try to be the most generic version of myself for the public. They don’t deserve any more of me than that. And I’m not an actor. I hate actors. I’m more of a charlatan or your run-of-the-mill-fraud.
“Then what are you doing if not that?”
“How can I be acting if Prince Taylor is me? I’m just cutting out all the parts of my personality that aren’t very stately and adding some qualities that are.”
“That sounds exactly like acting. You’re very method.”
She’s thinking too much into this. It’s not that deep, right?
“Guilbert?” Melina shouts with butchered phonetics.
She’s on her phone, and unfortunately, I know what she’s looking at.
“Your government name is Taylor Guilbert Alexander de la Favresse-Rengault II? That is disastrous. I thought Melina Ramirez-Chadwick was long. Your license must be the size of printer paper.”
Taylor was my father’s youngest brother, who died in infancy.
He had the middle name of Guilbert, so I’m stuck with it as well.
My full Catholic name is Taylor Guilbert Alexander Erasmus de la Favresse-Rengault II.
Yes, Erasmus. The priest told me that my confirmation name should be the saint whose patronage inspires me, and absolutely under no circumstances should I pick a name because it ‘sounds cool’ or ‘is the patron saint of something ridiculous’.
Of course, I did both of those things. St. Erasmus is the patron saint of abdominal pain.
I guess thirteen-year-old me thought that was funny.
“It’s unfair,” I mutter.
“What’s unfair?”
“You can look up all my secrets, but I can’t with any of yours.” I’ve tried, but she’s not on social media.
She turns off her phone. “A name isn’t a secret. Your Wikipedia page is a dull read, anyways.”
Good. I’ve lived life carefully to have the dullest and least scandalous Wikipedia page possible.
“What do you want to know?” she asks. “I’m an open book.”
We pass a streetlamp. Everyone once in a while, we pass one that lights her face, and I sneak a glance. There are lots of things I want to know, but I can’t seem to formulate a single question.
“What’s, uh, your middle name?”
Why did I go with that? It sounds like you want to steal her banking information. What’s next? Mother’s maiden name? Name of your first pet?
“We don’t have middle names. My parents forgot. I’ve always been a little jealous of everyone else, even if they have something really embarrassing like Guilbert.” I’m not going to correct her pronunciation. “What else ya got?”
Another street lamp.
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Me and my twin brother Mateo. He’s a tattoo artist. And regular artist. I think my mom passed down her steady hand to him.”
“And your father? What does he do?”
After a few seconds of her not answering, I realize how much of an asshole I am. Nice going, Taylor. Really outdid yourself with that one.
“I’m sorr—”
“He’s not dead.”
I wait for her to go on, but she doesn’t. I won’t press.
“What do you want for dinner?” I ask.
“I thought you had it planned.”
Did I say that? I don’t remember.
“Plans can be changed. What’s your favorite? I’ll make whatever.”
“My favorite food isn’t dinner food.”
“Says who? Anything can be dinner if you eat it at night.” Learned that in university.
The green from the stoplight illuminates her awkward smile. “Pancakes?” she squeaks.
“I can do pancakes. It’s easier than what I was planning.”
Which was absolutely nothing.