Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
GIA
Oh no.
The full-body, heart-in-throat, everything-has-gone-wrong kind face.
He is still looking at my mouth.
Stop looking at my mouth. Look at literally anything else. Look at the ceiling. Look at the wall. Look at the chair where you put my slipper, which by the way you caught without even looking and I haven't forgiven you for it.
"Three feet," I say. It comes out smaller than I intend. "Please."
Something in his expression changes. Something that moves through his eyes quickly, and then his gaze drops, just for a second, to where his hand is wrapped around both my wrists, and back up to my face.
And I know he sees it.
I know because I can feel it on my own face, the thing I cannot keep off it in this specific moment.
The fear sitting underneath the attraction sitting underneath the fury, all three running at once and none of them winning.
My heart is beating too fast. My breathing has gone shallow.
I am pressed against a headboard in a room I don't know with a man I married a handful of hours ago and my body cannot decide whether it wants to lean in or get out.
He sees all of it.
His hand opens.
Just like that. No pause, no hesitation, no making me ask twice. He releases my wrists and straightens up and takes one full step back from the bed, and the sudden distance hits me like cold air through an open window.
I breathe.
He looks at me with something level and steady that I don't have a name for yet.
"I'm not going to force you," he says. Flat. Factual. "I don't do that."
I look at him.
"Ever," he says. "Understand?"
There’s a whole video called 'believing men when they tell you who they are' and I've watched it four times and I don't know if I believe him right now, but I want to, which is somehow worse.
"Okay," I say.
He moves to his side of the bed. Sits on the edge. Looks over at me, at the cardigan and the socks and the entire polar expedition I've constructed on top of his mattress, and something shifts in his expression.
"You’re trying so hard to hide," he muses, his voice dropping an octave.
"But the body doesn't know how to lie the way the tongue does.
I could check you right now. I could slide my hand between your legs and find you soaking through those leggings, begging for the very thing you're pretending to run from. "
He holds my gaze until I’m the one forced to look away. "Don't play the martyr with me, Gia. We both know."
The heat that hits my face makes me want to crawl under the earth.
"Absolutely not," I say.
"No?"
"I will find another slipper."
Rafael throws his head back and actually laughs. He's laughing, quiet and genuine, and it does something to his face that I am categorically not going to think about.
Stop it. Stop laughing. You were terrifying thirty seconds ago and I had a whole strategy built around you being terrifying and you are dismantling it.
I get underneath the covers with all my layers intact. I lie down. I face the wall.
Behind me I hear him settle above the covers on his side. Not underneath. Above, maintaining the distance without being asked, and I note this and file it away although I don't know what to do with it.
The light goes off.
The room goes dark and quiet and I lie there next to a man I don't know who just told me he wouldn't force me and then laughed and I stare at the wall and I do not sleep for a very long time.
I wake up to sunlight and the immediate knowledge that I am in the wrong life.
Married. Still happening.
I sit up.
His side of the bed is empty. The covers undisturbed because he slept above them, and I can see the exact distance he kept all night. I refuse to think it meaningful.
I find him downstairs.
He's in what I can only call a breakfast room that is nicer than any restaurant I've ever eaten in, sitting at the end of a long table with coffee and a newspaper and the quality of stillness that means he has been awake for hours and accomplished several things I don't know about.
Dark shirt, no jacket, irritatingly well-rested for a man who slept in his trousers on top of the covers.
He doesn't look up when I come in.
Good morning to you too. Jerk.
I pour myself coffee and sit down somewhere in the middle of the table.
He turns a page.
I drink my coffee.
"We need to talk about how this works," he says, still looking at his newspaper.
"Good morning to you too," I say.
He looks up. Looks at me. Looks back at his newspaper. "Good morning. We need to talk about how this works."
Charming. Genuinely, breathtakingly charming. This man laughed in the dark a few hours ago and now he cannot manage a complete human greeting. Fantastic. Great marriage so far.
"I'm listening," I say.
He folds the newspaper and sets it aside, which I'm learning means whatever comes next has his full attention and I should pay the same.
"Public appearances," he says. "Functions, dinners, events. You'll be beside me. You'll be convincing." He pauses. "Composed. Present. Respectful of the alliance in public." He looks at me. "Not throwing slippers."
"The slipper was a private matter."
He ignores my words completely. "Functions are twice a month usually, sometimes more. Carla will brief you on the schedule."
"What else."
"This marriage is political," he says, and he says it the way he says everything, like it is a fact of the universe that was always true.
"That's what it is and that's how it operates.
You appear beside me when it's required.
We present what needs to be presented to the world.
In private we are two people sharing a house.
" He holds my gaze. "No performance required when there's no audience. "
I sit with that for a moment.
Two people sharing a house. No performance in private.
My father told me to convince him and consume this marriage and Rafael is sitting here telling me it's a political arrangement and nothing more. I don't know if that's a relief or a problem or both simultaneously.
"The household," I say. "My autonomy within it. What does that look like."
"We'll discuss that later," he says.
I blink. "That's not an answer."
"It's the answer you're getting right now." He picks up his coffee. "There are things that need to be established before we have that conversation."
Established. Things need to be established. So, I am sitting here in a marriage I didn't choose, in a house I've never been in and the man across the table is telling me my own autonomy is a topic for a later date that he will decide when to schedule.
I want to push. Every part of me wants to push.
I look at his face. The absolute, unmovable calm of it. The green eyes that are watching me with that steady patience that means he has already decided how this conversation is going to go and is simply waiting for me to arrive at the same conclusion.
I let it go.
For now.
"Fine," I say. I pick up my coffee, I drink it and I look out the window at the grounds of an estate that is enormous and manicured.
The silence between us settles.
He picks up his newspaper, turns a page and he does not look at me again.
Controlled and cold and I don't know which parts are real.
I think about the burner phone sitting in my jewelry box upstairs.
I think about my father's voice.
Be convincing.
I look at the side of his face over the rim of my coffee cup.
I am in so much trouble.