Chapter 17
Penelope
While walking through Xander’s beach house, I was distracted and carrying too much.
Distracted from the call I just ended with my mother. My hands full with a banana muffin and an iced coffee in one hand, my
laptop in the other hand with my water bottle dangling precariously from my pinkie.
I called my mother to tell her the news and was met with very little in the way of conversation. She congratulated me, told
me marriage was silly, and that was about it. She didn’t question any of it, she never did, and it was a relief.
As I crossed that item off the mental checklist, the sound of my refillable water swinging off my pinkie and crashing down
on a large ceramic globe that sat in the living area yanked me right out of my head.
“Oh God.” I placed all my things on the table behind the couch and assessed the damage. The pieces were large, maybe I could
fix it. Although mending ceramic usually left noticeable seams—not something you’d really like on a globe.
The sunlight streaking through the windows highlighted every jagged edge.
“Are you—” Xander came rushing down the hall and stopped abruptly when he saw me knelt over, looking nervously at the mess. His eyes drifted down to the large broken pieces, his shoulders relaxed. “Oh.”
“I’m so sorry.” My heart raced with anxiety.
My head began to run through all the ways I ruined something in his home. Was it important? Did it mean something? I prayed
it was some throwaway piece that a designer stuck in the corner.
He ran a hand through his hair, the bottom of his crew neck T-shirt lifted a few inches from the waistband of the gray joggers.
The quick flash of his abs distracted my busy mind for a delightful second.
But only for that one second.
He shrugged and walked over to me. “Things break.”
“Was it important?”
“Not really.” Xander knelt down beside me and began helping me pick up the large pieces carefully. “It was actually stolen.
I’m no lawyer, but I think that makes you an accessory to destroying evidence.”
I paused and stared at him for a moment. He was joking to make me feel better. He had to be.
“You’re not serious.”
“I am. The original owner was a French photographer. He broke CeCe’s heart, so Sloan stole this from his studio,” Xander told
me as he stacked the three largest shards together. “Then Rohan broke his nose.”
“And now it’s here?”
“It used to be in Manhattan, but it must have been moved here with some of my things when I bought the place.” He smiled as he ran a thumb over the smooth glazed piece he picked up. It was the shattered remains of Brazil. “Occasionally, the group of us used it to decide where we wanted to go next. Spin the globe, pick a spot, get on the plane.”
I envied him. Xander, in his thirty-four years of life, was never bored. Always a new adventure whether here or abroad. He
was a man with a story for everything. It was like when one adventure ended a new one began. No respite.
“What if you land in an ocean?” I wondered.
“Spin again.”
“What if it’s a place you can’t travel to?” I took the smaller pieces and left the tiny ones to sweep up.
“Spin again.”
“What if—”
“It’s a pretty simple game.” He stood with the broken pieces neatly stacked in one hand. “Just spin again.”
Even when I didn’t want to be happy, like when I wanted to stew in shame, he had a way to pull a smile out of me.
I carefully held the pieces and got up, looking around the floor for anything else I might have missed. “Traveling around
the world, stealing with your merry band of cohorts. You’ve lived quite the life, Xander Sutton.”
Caught in the magnetic pull, I felt myself draw closer.
His eyes locked on mine.
He smiled, took a step toward me until something passed over him and he pulled away.
Looking down at the floor as he cleared his throat.
The static dissolved into the air and I felt silly for acknowledging—to myself—that the static was there in the first place.
“I’ll throw these out,” he said as he turned and walked to the kitchen in the direction of the trash can.
“No!” I ignored the rapid thumping in my chest and followed him. I took the pieces and laid the broken ceramic on the cool marble countertop. The words began to feel jumbled in my mind and the seductive ease I felt a few seconds ago was replaced with a thorny apprehension. “I can find someone who might be able to put it back together. If not that, then—”
“Hey. It’s okay.” He put a steady hand on my shoulder. “Things break.”
That was something I’d come to expect with him. No matter the circumstances, he always reset to where he was before as if
nothing happened. Like at the masquerade. I couldn’t tell if he was pretending or if it was real, but it was like a switch.
“Okay.” I turned the ring around on my finger. “Are you sure you’re not upset?”
I tried to move about the world quietly, without incident, but I was always breaking things. Or blamed for breaking them.
My stepmother, Eleanor, complained that my social graces were wobbly—it made me the target of her ire.
Overthinking every step—because my life felt like a field of land mines—made me clumsy.
“Who needs a globe, anyway? The Internet exists.” His contagious good humor made it difficult to be hard on myself.
I smiled. “How are you like this?”
“Like what?”
There wasn’t much that disrupted his calm tide. Even when something managed to make a ripple in the still waters, it didn’t
last long. Was it an act? Or was he this pathologically easygoing?
“Why doesn’t anything bother you?”
“Things bother me,” he countered softly.
“Like what?”
He paused, opened his mouth, then closed it. Something warred in his eyes. I could tell he wanted to say something, but he
didn’t.
“Maddox bothers me,” he answered quietly. His brows lifted, like he was surprised he said it.
“Maddox?” Butterflies in my stomach spun up a whirlwind.
“I didn’t like how he talked to you,” he noted casually, leaning against the countertop.
“Me neither,” I murmured. “And I know he can seem difficult, but he’s been a friend to me.”
I knew I’d rationalized a lot of Maddox’s behaviors to myself, but he wasn’t a bad person. He’d been honest with me about
what he wanted out of marriage, and what our future would look like together. His primary draw had been that I could have
it all. My family would be happy, and I would finally be accepted rather than rejected. It was never love, but I told myself
it could be enough.
Xander’s eyes moved around the kitchen as he turned his wedding band a few times.
“You’re sure that’s all?” he asked quietly.
For a man who never forgot anything, he had a habit of asking that question in one way or another. He didn’t move, but there
was a subtle change in his demeanor.
Trusting others felt impossible when I hadn’t even perfected trusting myself, but Maddox was the only person I had growing
up—aside from my sister and cousin, Olivia—that seemed to care, at least a little, about my quality of life.
“Yes,” I repeated. “I want my chance to find happiness.”
“Something you haven’t found yet?” His voice lowered; it sounded like he was talking to himself. He took a step away from
the countertop.
The air shifted. “Yes, I guess.”
He nodded again, taking another step back.
“Then, why wait so long to walk away?” Seriousness hardened his tone to something that sounded stern. “Why put m—” He faltered.
“Why put yourself through all of this?”
The tempting warmth that the encounter originally started with evaporated.
“You have a supportive family,” I reminded him with the same irritation I had at the masquerade. He and the rest of them came out to tell me what I could and couldn’t do out of some well-meaning protectiveness. But they didn’t understand what I was up against. They’d never felt completely rejected by the people who were supposed to care for them. “You wouldn’t understand.”
I felt the brunt of the blame for everything no matter what I did. I moved to New York to pursue my own goals and I was selfish.
But when I was in Singapore, in my father and stepmother’s home, I was treated like a burden. Yet, I was expected to be grateful
because I was still raised in the upper echelons of society thanks to the Chen fortune.
“What does that mean?” His brows scrunched together.
“It’s not easy to decide you want to go it alone,” I snapped. An angry flame burst alive in my stomach. He had no idea what
it was like to tiptoe through life. He could live as raucously as he liked without fear of recourse. “You don’t know how paralyzing
it can be.”
A familiar feeling began to swell. It always started the same way. A quiet whisper in my mind. A subtle shiver deep in my
bones before it would blossom into an all-consuming whirlwind. Weeks of repressed anxiety began to claw its way out.
“Every decision. All the time. Worrying who you might affect. Who you might hurt. Who you have already hurt,” I rattled off,
feeling my chest tighten. “Questioning everything , constantly.”
What was to come now that I’d ruined my family’s plans? Would I ever find a place there with them?
A maelstrom of implications whirled like leaves in a storm, a mess of fears and doubts that I could neither fully understand
nor silence. Each concern speeding past my vision, too quick to grasp, blurring it entirely.
“All while hoping whatever you’re blamed for isn’t irreparable. Knowing some of it probably is.” I drew in a deep uneasy breath trying to prevent the inevitable. “You’ve never had to weigh a life you wanted against losing your family.”
My vison distorted into a hazy abyss behind tears I tried not to shed, while the air thickened, choking my lungs.
“Penelope...”
I could vaguely hear him, but everything blended together like waves in the ocean.
Tears pricked along the side of my cheek.
And then, everything began to settle. I hadn’t realized he’d moved until his arms were wrapped around me, my head buried in
his chest, his fingers gently stroking my head.
I didn’t say anything. I listened to his heartbeat and found some balance in its metronome.
The time passed and I ran my final words through my head again as the fog lifted.
“You’ve never had to weigh a life you wanted against losing your family.”
He didn’t have to make that choice, but he’d already lost enough of the loved ones in his life and in my own frenzy I didn’t
see how this conversation might hurt him.
“I didn’t mean it like... I’m sorry,” I murmured into his chest.
“Don’t be.”
He continued to gently run a few fingers through my hair, and I let him. After weeks of trying to have everything together,
I was no closer to actually having a plan for my future. But I felt better.
Calm.
“Just so you know,” he whispered softly, his fingers continuing their gentle caress. Once again, his warmth took over despite
how I may have rattled it. “You have a family here, and it’s not going anywhere.”
The truth of it resonated through my chest. He was right.
They were always there, and I kept them at a distance. It felt safer. When the people in my life who were supposed to care about my happiness—my family—didn’t see me as anything more than a pawn, it was survival to keep others at a distance. Fearing their judgment or maybe rejection if you happened to show any part of yourself that they didn’t agree with.
But as each day passed with Xander, I was reminded of how safe I was.
That I could simply be myself without recourse.
It was freeing and somehow even more terrifying.