35 | Taylor #2
After some polite conversation, wine, and a delightful childhood story concerning a microwave Melina exploded by forgetting to put water in a mac and cheese bowl, Mateo sets some plates down in front of us.
The white fish is topped with colorful spices, herbs, and cuts of lemon.
The dish is very colorful. There are people in this world who avoid ordering bonier fish because they’re harder to eat, but those people are lazy and don’t know what they’re missing.
I wait until everyone sits, and Melina takes a bite.
Jesus fucking Christ.
It’s like my tongue has burst into flames.
I enjoy spicier food, but this is on another level.
There has to be something wrong with it, right?
I look around the table to see everyone eating and conversing normally.
The second bite is just as painful, so I take a sip of wine.
I stare into the cloudy eye of the dead fish. How am I going to finish you?
Melina nudges my elbow. “It’s not too hot, right?” she chides. “Mateo always made the food extra spicy for whichever boy I brought over.”
Ah. I’ve been poisoned. So both the Ramirez twins are insane. Mateo tenses when I make eye contact.
“No, it’s delicious. You guys are great chefs.”
His brow furrows like he’s surprised I didn’t snitch. Yeah, I can handle your little games, Mateo. Baptism by fire, bring it on.
“How come I never get compliments like that from you, Melina?” Sonia asks. They playfully bicker as I tackle the fish. Hopefully, no one will notice my slow and painful death as I answer her increasingly personal questions.
“Do people have to bow to you?”
“No.”
“Did you always know you were going to be king?”
“Yes.”
“Is your brother still dating Seoyeon from LadyBee?”
“I have no idea who that is.”
For some hellish reason, water makes it worse, so I stick to small sips of wine in hopes that I’m not completely plastered by the end of this. Thankfully, the rice and other vegetable-based dishes are wonderful. I spend a lot of my time with those.
“You’re sweating.”
I turn to Melina, squinting at me.
“No, I’m not,” I lie.
I only have a few bites left. It can’t end like this when I’m so close to winning.
I repel from her hand when she tries to swipe it against my forehead.
“You totally are swea—” Her eyes go big. She quickly fists a fork and tries to stab some of the tainted flesh.
“What are you doing?” I ask as I nudge the plate from her. “You haven’t finished yours.”
Except she’s too fast and takes a bite anyway. Instantly, she spits it out and looks to her mom.
“Mateo!” they both shout.
He flinches at the insults being hurled by both mother and sister. The Spanish races out of their mouths so fast there’s no chance for me to keep up.
“I should’ve eaten you in the womb!” Melina yells in English.
Sonia points Mateo out of the dining area.
“Sorry,” I mouth to him. Truly, I didn’t want to rat him out. I could’ve finished, but my plate has already been taken away. This is much more disappointing.
“An idiot, that boy,” Sonia tells me.
As Mateo leaves, he says something in Spanish to Melina, which makes her laugh in that way where she knows she shouldn’t.
“What did he say?” I ask.
“He said I deserve someone who’ll eat fire for me.”
Mateo shouts from somewhere, “And with the table manners of a prince!”
––––––––
Melina’s old bedroom has a twin bed, a closet, and a colorful lamp that reminds me of an octopus. The space has a couple of shelves filled with books, tchotchkes, homemade crafts i.e., more stuff I can look through.
“I should thank you by the way,” I say as I open a small plastic box with Pokémon cards inside. “The monarchy’s approval rating has gone up half a percent. I’m chalking it up to you and Tom’s sleuthing.”
We kept the necklace’s rediscovery quiet until we could no longer.
Although there have been some international articles, to our surprise, they have brought only gentle ribbing from Twitter and late-night talk show hosts.
Our statement to the press was brief; we said that the necklace was misplaced by archivists .
I don’t think anyone believes us, but it sounds better than anything mentioning interfamilial thievery.
“Glad I could be of service,” she says, holding a neon green fuzzy pillow.
I pick up a cracked CD featuring Justin Timberlake’s face. “This looks well-loved.”
“Oh, it was.” She sets the pillow aside. “It’s bizarre you’re in here. Like, all this stuff was so important to a little girl you don’t even know. I wonder if I told my younger self you’d be standing in my bedroom one day, she would believe me.”
I look around the bright teal walls and assume that little girl I don’t know picked out the color herself. “This place is a time capsule. It feels like I should be wearing my retainer.”
“I guess we never got around to, uh—” She picks up a rainbow rubber bracelet from her nightstand. “Cleaning it out.”
I sit on the bed next to her. “I’m having a small dinner for the Charlotte Foundation next week. It’ll be our launch party.”
She takes my hand. “That’s great, Taylor. I know how hard you guys have been working on that.”
She’s goddamn right we have. Julien and I, along with the two other people we permanently hired, have done everything ourselves.
Our setup has been frugal, so most of my mother’s inheritance will go into non-bureaucratic affairs.
The thing that bothers me the most about the Crown’s charities is that so much of the money is donated to pencil-pushing nonsense.
Efficiency has been the keyword for the Charlotte Foundation, and I’ve never been this confident in a project before.
Even Alex wasn’t there to supervise. Do you need help?
he asked just enough times to make me feel condescension.
No, Alex, I didn’t need your help. Go and cry about it to your wife, husband, or whoever your other significant other is.
“Who’s coming to the party?” Melina asks.
“You, I was thinking. But my dad will be attending, and maybe an ex-prime minister, if you’re okay with that. Julien and Rachel will be there too.”
“Which ex-prime minister?” she asks suspiciously.
“Jean-Paul Rainier.” One of the more tolerable ones.
“I’d love to come. It just makes things kind of official.”
It does.
She looks at the picture on her nightstand. It’s of her, Mateo, and their father at the beach. “Have you done background checks on my family as well?”
I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out.
“Don’t act like you didn’t do one on me,” she says. “If you were smart, which you are sometimes, Mr. Dartmouth, you’d probably do some research on your date before you parade her out in public to make sure she doesn’t have a controversial past life full of sex, drugs, and political activism.”
“They make a file for everyone who gets within five meters of me. Sorry if that’s an invasion of privacy. I guess it’s protocol.”
“Find any juicy details?”
“Alex only tells me their results if he finds something notable.”
Melina raises her brow because she knows I’m being intentionally vague.
“I know your father is in prison,” I admit. “If that’s what you’re getting at. Alex went more in-depth after I kissed you and felt the need to tell me ahead of our trip to America. I stopped him before he went into any details.”
“You aren’t curious?”
Yes.
“No. It’s none of my business.”
“What if he’s an axe murderer?”
I lean back. “Is he...an axe murderer?”
She laughs. “No, it’s nothing violent. His charges were white-collar stuff. Money laundering. He used to work in auto body repair and was running, or helped run, a chop shop out the back of the garage. Which one, depends on the lawyer you talk to.”
“He was stealing cars.”
“Not steal, exactly, but incentivizing it. My dad’s a nice person and disastrously likable, but he got caught up in something he shouldn’t have.
Made acquaintances he should’ve made.” She picks at her nails.
“I still don’t know why he didn’t tell me he was running out of cash.
Mateo and I would’ve given him some, but he’s just so stubborn.
God, I felt so stupid when he was arrested last year.
All the signs were there, his shady friends, him acting weird when I stopped by his work unannounced. ”
“Do you see him?”
“We get one hour once a week.”
“That’s not a lot of time.”
She swallows. “No, it’s not.” When her eyes become glassy, I put my arm around her shoulders.
And then I sit there, holding her, for as long as she wants me to.
“Sometimes when I can’t fall asleep, I think about him in there and I just—” She lets out a deep sigh.
“I assume the reason the press didn’t find him is because Mateo and I always drop off our dad’s last name.
They always called us the Ramirez twins in school.
‘Melina Ramirez-Chadwick’ is just on government documents. ”
I had the preconception that she didn’t want to be involved with her incarcerated father and didn’t use his surname out of resentment. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
She sits up. “What’s going to happen when everyone finds out?
If you start inviting me to things, people are going to talk about us again.
Am I just supposed to wait around for the inevitable ‘Prince Dates Daughter of Criminal’ headline?
Is your family going to try to rip us apart like Romeo and Juliet?
They both die at the end of that play, you know. ”
“They’re not going to rip us apart,” I assure her. “This isn’t the sixteenth century. Or England. It wouldn’t be in their best interest anyway.”
I won’t remind her of this, but if Alex knows her father is in prison, then my family knows too. They know everything. If they had a problem with Melina, I would’ve heard something by now. They’re not shy about making their opinions known to me.
“Visions of grandbabies probably dance in my grandmother’s head whenever she hears a story about me and another woman. My family trusts me to make the right decisions. They have to.”
And if Melina isn’t the right decision, I don’t know what is.
“We’ll figure things out, right?” she asks.
“I promise.”