Chapter 15
Perdita felt bad about leaving Bilal to fend off the wolves by himself, but she knew he’d be fine.
Perdita hated media interviews and, as a general rule, avoided them at all costs.
They were all the same anyway, consisting of the same rotation of questions: What are you working on next?
How does it feel to have already painted Ovid’s Muse, your magnum opus, at such a startingly young age?
How long do we have to wait until the unveiling of your next great piece?
She’d already been interrogated tonight by a few well-meaning guests, and also by one not-so-well-meaning European museum curator who was very adamant that she reveal to him the “secrets of her process.” Perdita hated having to answer every single iteration of these questions. Especially the last two.
How did it feel to have painted her grand masterpiece at fifteen years old—and now, at seventeen, to not have been able to paint anything else since?
Well, it felt like she’d peaked young and would never be great again—something everyone would not stop reminding her of.
How long until her next big, impressive thing?
Possibly never, she’d always thought, but kept this to herself.
Perdita had painted her supposed masterpiece, Ovid’s Muse, over two years ago.
It was her take on the Greek myth about the star-crossed lovers Pyramus and Thisbe, who were forbidden to be together because of their parents’ ancient rivalry.
The painting depicted a young girl, Thisbe, crying over the dead body of her lover, Pyramus, whose blood formed a puddle around them both, flowing in rivulets of bright red crushed mulberries.
The piece was currently hanging in the Louvre in Paris, making her part of an exclusive group of young artists across history to be showcased there.
It was something Perdita should’ve been happy about, having achieved all of these big accomplishments.
But it only made her more anxious, made the imposter demon inside of her more scared to create, in case nothing else she ever did would be praised the same.
She hated how much she thrived off of the external validation.
But without someone handing out gold stickers and praise, she wasn’t sure her achievements mattered.
The sad thing about all of it was, Perdita was not even a fan of the painting herself.
For one, the piece was never meant to be taken seriously.
She’d painted it on a random afternoon in her art studio at the Manor while bored and searching for real inspiration.
It never would have seen the light of day if it hadn’t been for her father.
He’d somehow seen the painting, and before she knew it, buyers were flying in from all over the world to see it too, offering mind-boggling sums of money to host the piece in their museums. It wasn’t like she could say no either; her father was the one that steered the ship, selling her unfinished, uninspired work to the highest bidder.
The rest of the world seemed to love the painting too, which made Perdita worry that maybe she had no idea what good art even was anyway, and whether that even mattered in the end.
What seemed to matter was that other people thought it was good. Not how she felt about it.
Now this first draft of a half-formed idea was forever immortalized as her greatest accomplishment. She was embarrassed by it, honestly, and for this reason, among many others, she wasn’t sure she could stomach another interview about it today.
Bilal was so much better at media interviews, anyway. They were a part of his job. Not that her being bad at interviews was the reason she’d fled that specific scene though. The reason she had rushed away was because of who had been approaching.
Jesse Philips.
She’d recognized him immediately in the way she’d always recognized him. It was his eyes. The blue-gray swirling tempest of light and dark. Like father, like son. She’d always thought their eyes looked remarkably similar; a family heirloom of sorts.
If Jesse was here, she wondered if that meant—
She didn’t get to finish her train of thought, because just then her phone began buzzing in her hands.
“Speak of the devil …,” Perdita muttered as his name flashed up on the screen in bright bold letters: THORIN.
She scanned the area around her for any sign of her father or of Thorin’s father, and then she picked up, holding the phone to her ear cautiously, surprised she was still getting any sort of signal on this boat.
“Rin?” she said in a quiet tone.
“Hi, Dee,” he said, his voice a little muffled.
“Hi … Is everything okay?” she replied.
There was a pause, the sound of shuffling, and then his muffled response. “No, not really.”
Perdita’s heart jolted in her chest as she held the phone tighter. “What happened? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine … mostly fine. It’s just—”
She cut him off, her mind racing. “What is it? Are you hurt?”
“It’s just, I’m staring at the most gorgeous girl on this yacht right now and she hasn’t even noticed me. I’m starting to think I shouldn’t have worn this bow tie,” he finished, his voice no longer muffled or coming from the tiny speaker in her phone.
She turned around and there he was. Standing right in front of her, or, well, kind of, anyway.
He was standing in front of the ice sculpture of the Greek god Poseidon that Perdita had been hiding behind.
He stepped to the side, and grinned at her with his usual dimpled smile and watchful eyes the same as his father’s, a dark blue-gray color that was as fathomless as the depths of the ocean.
“You are the worst, Thorin Philips,” Perdita said, hitting him lightly on the arm.
“It’s the bow tie, isn’t it?” Thorin asked, pointing to his Van Gogh–inspired Starry Night bow tie.
“Nope, it’s just your personality,” Perdita said.
Thorin gave a relieved sigh. “Thank God it’s not the bow tie, it took me ages to pick this one out. I was hoping you’d like it,” he said, smiling even wider now in a way that made it impossible for Perdita not to give in and smile too.
“I do like it. You look very …,” she began, half pretending to size him up, half actually sizing him up.
Even though they spoke on the phone every day, she hadn’t seen Thorin physically in a few weeks, having been away in Europe.
He looked like his regular strange but adorable self—or as she often liked to say, a younger, slightly nerdier Adam Brody.
“I look very …,” he prompted.
“Snazzy,” Perdita concluded.
He looked thoughtful for a moment, and then finally nodded. “Snazzy means stylish and attractive, so I’ll take that.”
There were a few seconds of a silent staring contest between them, before Perdita started speaking again.
“What are you doing here? You didn’t tell me you were coming,” she said, her arms folded as she gave her boyfriend her best attempt at a very stern glare, which only made him smile more.
“It was a last-minute thing. For some reason, my dad got invited by your dad … or your dad’s team or whatever, and he wanted me to help him with interviews.
I tried to get out of it, but the divorce has been pretty hard on him, so he gets super emo if he feels like I prefer hanging out with my mom over him.
Plus, the old man is very persuasive.” Thorin leaned in close and whispered, “That being said, I didn’t need too much persuading, knowing you’d be here and all. ”
A shiver ran across Perdita’s arms as she tried not to react to his words too obviously.
Her father could be watching, after all.
She stepped back a little, away from Thorin, and peered over his shoulder to ensure that this wasn’t the case.
When she could confirm that they were not actively being watched, she glanced up at him again.
“Could have still given me a heads-up,” she said quietly.
Perdita knew she was being somewhat unreasonable, but, in a way, she had to be.
Her father had caught her texting Thorin once, and that had been enough for him to confiscate her phone for an entire month, and they weren’t even together at that point.
There was another time when Thorin’s father had suspected something and had spent an entire dinner telling his son how screwed up the Button kids were, urging him to keep his distance, and then when it seemed that Thorin wasn’t heeding his warning, Jesse Philips resorted to contacting her father about her attempts at trying to “lure” and “seduce” his son.
Her father was obviously livid, and retaliated by once again restricting her access to her phone for three more months.
She learned then that there were penalties that came with being caught, and Thorin wasn’t afraid enough for her liking.
The two kept things extremely low-key after that point.
He placed a hand on her arm tenderly and moved a little closer to her, counteracting her strategic steps back. “I know, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. It won’t happen again.”
“Good,” she said, still glancing around nervously, feeling the jitters from the anxiety that had been building in her for weeks coursing through her body.
“I’m glad I’m seeing you tonight though; I need to tell you something.
I was going to tell you tomorrow night, but I think you’ll want to know before then,” Thorin said, looking serious all of a sudden.
He was staring intensely down at her, his skin as pale as the moon that hung in the sky above them.
“That’s not ominous at all,” Perdita said, her eyes narrowing as she tried to read between the lines in his expression. “Is this about—”
He nodded. “Yeah. There’s been a development … a pretty significant one.” He looked even more nervous than she did now. “Can we speak in private somewhere?” he asked.
She did another quick sweep of the deck, finally spotting her dad on the other side near where the string quartet was performing, talking to a tall red-haired woman who Perdita was pretty sure was one of the donors he’d invited from NASA.
Her dad would be much too distracted to notice that his daughter was missing from the first-floor deck.
Not that he paid much attention to her or her siblings otherwise.
It sometimes felt like they were just there to be dolls he could dress up and show off to important people.
Perdita returned her focus to Thorin and whispered, “The lower deck is out of bounds for guests. We could go there?”
“What about the security?” Thorin whispered back, his jaw tense, his eyes trained on one of the men in dark suits at their post a few feet away.
“I’m a Button, Rin. I know how to get around them,” Perdita replied.
Thorin looked nervous, but nodded. “Okay, then, Miss Button. Lead the way.”