9. Chapter Nine
Chapter Nine
Maddie
The Rolls-Royce is the most comfortable car I have ever sat in.
I hate it. Scratch that. I hate that I don't actually hate it.
I hate how the seat seems to have been specifically engineered around the curve of my butt. I know it hasn't. But it sure feels like it.
I hate the temperature, which is perfect without being asked.
I hate the way the road just disappears under us, the Rolls apparently deciding that potholes are for other people's cars, lesser cars, cars that haven't achieved whatever this car has achieved.
I hate that there's a little panel built into my door that I haven't figured out yet and that I keep accidentally touching and that plays a warm chime every single time, like the car is delighted by my incompetence.
And I hate the driver. Specifically, I hate how good he looks driving it.
There really should be a law against a man this size wearing a suit this well. The charcoal jacket stretches across those wide shoulders in the way only something tailored to one's specific measurements can. Sexy, manly, and devastatingly unaware of how freaking... muncheable he looks.
Yeah. I said it. Demetrius Thornwood looks muncheable. Like a juicy and delicious piece of minotaur beef-cake.
Ugh. I'm going straight to Hell.
It's just that he has no right to look like that.
His hands on the wheel are steady and big and his horns catch the light from the passenger window as we come around one of the tight curves on the road down into town.
My brain, the absolute traitor, files all of it into a folder labeled Do Not Open and then immediately opens it again.
Two days.
Two days since the rose garden and the kiss I started, and I've been performing a masterclass in strategic avoidance. I found things to do on Agatha's floor when I heard him on the stairs. I took my meals at different times. Very demure, very cowardly.
Agatha, for her part, has said absolutely nothing, but I suspect she knows something happened between us. The old minotaur has as much intuition as a witch.
In the backseat, she has been narrating the landscape to herself in murmured observations about the state of the hedgerows.
I have been spending the last twenty minutes replaying the kiss with a dedication that would impress a film editor.
His hand at my jaw. His mouth moving to the hollow of my throat.
The way he said I missed you, three words with no armor on them at all, and then the way my hands pushed him back while the rest of me was ready to commit a significant number of crimes against good judgment.
I was the one who started it. I was also the one who stopped it.
Both of these facts are extremely inconvenient.
The Rolls takes the last bend into town like it's gliding. Demetrius adjusts his grip on the wheel and glances at the passenger seat where I sit silent while my brain plays naughty scenarios about those hands and that car.
Well, the backseat of that car.
"You have something to say about the car."
It's not a question, it's a preemptive accusation, and my mouth is already open to deny it before I register that he's almost smiling.
"I was going to say nothing."
"You were going to say something," he says with that self-confidence I hate more than anything about him. "You've been making a face at the dashboard for the last ten minutes."
"That's just my face."
The corner of his mouth moves. "It's not."
"Fine." I shift in my impossibly comfortable seat.
"It's ridiculous. It's an obscenely big, obscenely expensive, obscenely comfortable car, and it plays a little song every time I touch the wrong button on my door, and I don't know what half these panels do, and I love it, and I hate that I love it, and there you go. "
From the backseat, Agatha makes a satisfied sound.
Demetrius says nothing. He holds the almost-smile for a beat, then looks back at the road. I'll be damned if he's not smiling just a little.
"But I get it. It fits you and Agatha the way normal cars probably don't," I add, before he can say anything else. "That's all."
"Of course," he says, in the voice of a man who knows he's won something and is being decent enough not to say it out loud. "I'm all about practical considerations when I choose a vehicle."
I look out the window at the Saltford Bay oaks and pointedly say nothing more.
The waterfront is already filling up by the time we turn into the lot nearest the piers. Demetrius finds a spot right away, and I refuse to be annoyed by it, though it's a near thing.
I get down from the car while Demetrius brings Agatha's chair around, and then we have the argument we have every single time she needs the wheelchair over the past week.
Granted, her progress has been nothing short of spectacular, but she's still in recovery and walking for a long distance is out of the question.
Our argument follows a very predictable format.
Agatha declines it. I explain that it is medically necessary.
She informs me that she would appreciate not being treated like an antique.
I tell her I agree that she is not an antique, and that nevertheless her hip is only four weeks post-operative, and that she will be miserable tonight and difficult tomorrow, and then I tell her it's one hundred percent her choice.
She considers it, although most of it is for show. She concedes, in the manner of a head of state agreeing to a minor treaty modification.
Demetrius holds the chair. His face is entirely composed throughout this exchange. He knows better than to get involved.
She's right to concede, for what it's worth. The piers are two blocks from the lot and the waterfront is cobblestone, and the crowd has already gathered three rows deep around the speaker's platform.
We move through it. Demetrius pushes the chair and people turn to look. There are whispers. Some people point and others snap some quick pictures with their phones.
My stomach does an unpleasant thing at the whispers that has nothing to do with attraction and everything to do with self-preservation. I've never liked being the center of attention and it feels surreal to have all those eyes turned in my direction. Even if no one is really interested in me.
The mayor's platform is set up just past the ribbon line, and the commemorative plaque is still covered, a square of dark fabric draped over whatever's underneath.
There are folding chairs arranged in a loose arc for the front row.
A refreshment setup from the Knitters Club is visible just past the pier entrance, and I can see the corner of what has to be one of Mrs. Primrose's brownie trays from here, and for a split second I want nothing more than to just go stand over there and eat brownies and wait for this to be over.
Then Agatha turns and beckons me forward with two fingers.
I try to hang back. There's no good reason for me to be at the front.
"Maddie." Her voice is pleasant and final in equal measure. "Come stand with me."
Demetrius, from behind her chair, catches my gaze. His expression doesn't say much. But he moves to make room on Agatha's left side, and that's its own kind of answer.
I come forward, ever the considerate nurse, but my cheeks catch fire and my entire face is firetruck red.
Up at the podium, the mayor is shuffling notes. He is a minotaur, broad-shouldered and enthusiastic, the kind of community figure who sweats through big public moments but means every word he says. He taps the microphone twice, then smiles wide at the assembled crowd.
"Good morning, Saltford Bay."
The crowd cheers, because this town cheers for everything.
I scan the crowd while the mayor talks through the history of the waterfront, the decades of deferred maintenance, the north extension that got shelved in the nineties.
He covers what the piers mean to the working families of this town, to the fishing operations, to the seasonal business, to the soul of a community that has always understood itself by its relationship with the water.
And then my gaze finds them. Dad in his good jacket, standing just back from the third row on the left side, with his arm around Mom's shoulders and that particular look on his face he gets at the high school graduation ceremonies, like he's working very hard at holding himself together and is not quite succeeding.
Mom's head is tucked into his shoulder and she's smiling at me.
It's the real one, the one that reaches her amber eyes and makes her tusks catch the light.
The mayor announces that the revitalized project will be built by a local company employing Saltford Bay workers, and Dad raises one hand to the crowd in acknowledgment when the mayor says the name of his company.
He's grinning like a fool and I love him for it, so much I have to look at the covered plaque for a second because otherwise I'm going to be ridiculous in public.
I concentrate on the mayor as he moves next to the covered plaque and turns to the crowd with a dramatic flourish of his hand.
"All this is made possible by a generous donation from a private donor whose contributions to this town are too numerous to list here." He turns to Demetrius and Agatha and his smile is wide and bright. "Would you like to do the honors, Mrs. Thornwood?"
Demetrius moves around to the front of the chair and crouches beside it, which puts him more or less at Agatha's eye level, and says something quiet to her.
She listens, then shakes her head once. He says something else.
She puts her hand on the armrest of the chair and gives him a look that would send lesser beings running.
He straightens and steps back, defeated. Agatha grips the armrests, and then she's on her feet.
I take one small step in her direction, but then she cuts me a glance that stops me where I am. Since I have survival instincts, I stay put and watch, doing math in my head about how fast I could actually get to her if this goes sideways.
She walks the three steps to the ribbon on her own, which takes about four times longer than it should and is also the most dignified thing I have seen in my life.
Someone in the crowd applauds, and then all of them do, because Saltford Bay knows how to recognize stubbornness when it sees it and loves it unreservedly.
Agatha takes the scissors from the mayor. She looks at the covered plaque, and there's something in her face in that moment that's not for the crowd and not for the cameras; it's for herself and for the particular weight of a very old love.
She cuts the ribbon.
Two volunteers lift the fabric from the plaque and the morning light catches the letters cut into the stone.
Cornelius Thornwood.
I look at Demetrius.
He's watching his grandmother at the ribbon, and his face is still and serious and he has no idea I'm looking at him.
The crowd is applauding. Dad has both arms around Mom now and his chin is tucked over the top of her head and his eyes are closed. I know what this means for him. It's his salvation and his dignity, right in one neat little package.
He will care for his family through his hard work once more, like he always did.
And all thanks to Demetrius Thornwood. My ribcage does something complicated. I look at Agatha, who is looking at the letters carved into the stone with her chin lifted and her eyes bright with unshed tears.
All this. All these people. Made happy by the man I believed a heartless jerk for decades.
Then the mayor is at the microphone again, announcing refreshments courtesy of the Knitters Club, and the crowd starts to move, and the moment dissolves into noise and motion.
I stay where I am.
Agatha lowers herself back into the wheelchair with the assistance of a Knitters Club member who appears to have materialized specifically for the purpose.
Agatha says something to her that makes the woman laugh, and then the elderly minotaur is being wheeled off toward the mayor, who looks at her like an overeager puppy.
Footsteps stop beside me on the cobblestones.
"The mayor looks like he's about to ask her for advice," I say without looking back at him. Or more like cranking my neck until it snaps to look up at him.
"He has no idea what he's invited into his life."
"No," Demetrius says. "He doesn't, but give him about four minutes and he's going to beg for mercy."
He says it with the flat certainty of long experience, and the laugh comes out of me small and involuntary.
"Jeez, I can't even wrap my head around how much a project like that costs," I say, and I tip my head to look at him. He's looking back at me with an expression I can't name. "And you just gave that money away?"
"I did."
Two words, delivered with nothing extra attached to them. No bow on it. No expectation of credit.
"When you made the donation, did you know the contract was going to my dad's company?"
He doesn't answer, but the corners of his mouth curve up in a faint, almost sad smile. My throat does something inconvenient that I deal with by breathing in slowly through my nose and looking back at the plaque.
"Thank you," I say with the tiniest voice. Barely a voice at all.
"It was the right thing to do," he says.
Which is such a Demetrius Thornwood answer that I don't even try to argue with it.
From the direction of the mayor and the plaque, Agatha's tone is sharp enough to draw blood, and the mayor responds in a voice that is definitely not the voice of a man in charge.
"He's going to cry soon," I say.
"Yes." Demetrius looks over at the scene with the expression of a man watching a natural disaster from a safe distance and feeling a little grateful it's not him. "Better him than me."
And there it is, a small laugh slips out and his mouth ticks up, and for a second we are just two people standing on cobblestones in the May morning light.
"Mrs. Primrose's brownies are out," he says. "We should get there before they're gone."
I chuckle and he offers me his arm. It takes me about a quarter of a second to accept it, then we're walking together to the Knitters Club table in search of an insane amount of sugar.
I try to just enjoy the moment.
I try not to think about the fact that Demetrius is not the boy he was when we last walked hand in hand on those piers.
He's the same. He's broader, larger. He has more money and more power, but underneath all of it is the same person who was once my entire world.
And as he hands me a still-warm brownie, I'm not sure if I'm the biggest fool of them all. Or just a woman about to lose her heart all over again.