Chapter 21 Hopped Up
Hopped Up
MARC
“It’ll be fine,” I tell Ella, shrugging my suit jacket over my shoulders. I keep wanting to touch her—to say goodnight the right way—but we haven’t worked out whether or not our deal includes affection, touches softer than passion but somehow more intimate.
So, I keep my hands busy smoothing my collar and straightening my tie, moving closer to the door as I attempt to reclaim some measure of control. “As long as we don’t make it more than it is, both of us will benefit.”
She leans over the arm of the sofa, resting her head on crossed hands, and chews on her lower lip. “Remind me what those benefits are?”
We went over this, but then we kissed each other like zoo animals released into a new enclosure—hopped up on curiosity, wild with it, running in circles. No wonder she forgot.
I return in five long strides and crouch, leaning against the arm of the sofa until we’re face to face.
“I get to focus on being the CEO of Han Heyden and the master of Lindenholm without the considerable stress of wondering if I’m going to drag you into the bushes at one of your mother’s garden parties.” I’m going to start again if I don’t leave now.
She nods, but her short fingernails rake against the texture of my tie and I feel the vibrations in the center of my brain. Does she understand the power she holds? “And I get—”
“Clear-headedness.”
She quirks a brow. “You think this is giving me clear-headedness?”
I reclaim my tie. “You get to focus on the succession crisis without spending emotional energy trying to keep your hands off me.”
She snorts. “I was doing just fine.”
I’m fighting for my life and she’s only having fun. I can’t forget that.
“We’ll be in a better headspace if we stop thinking so hard.
Let’s just show up for each other like we always do and let this happen in microdoses.
” I sound like a motivational speaker sent to boost company productivity by 3%, but I pray she buys it.
This is the only way I see out of this mess. “We’re in this together.”
“You make us sound like Samwise and Frodo. Does our fellowship come with a motto?” Her hand sketches out an arc. “The real treasure is the friend we made out with along the way.”
I laugh when I leave her, but by the time I drive through the palace gates, I have regained enough sense to congratulate myself on this plan. Putting my attraction to Ella on a schedule is going to remove my major obstacle to moving through the world as a normal person.
It doesn’t work out that way.
We start texting again—cat memes, wake-up calls, touching base—which manages to fill me with both restlessness and contentment, and I think about her more than before.
This doesn’t mean my plan is garbage. Once we’re past the novelty of being allowed to touch each other, we’ll go back to some baseline level of reasonable attraction.
The problem is that I’m not finding the baseline.
I last two days before inviting her over to my sleek, sterile flat for dinner. “Nothing fancy,” I text. It’s not a date. We’re very clear about that, but I put house slippers in her size by the front door and stock up on Vestfyn and extra throw pillows.
Ella arrives wearing a pair of joggers and my old Two Strike t-shirt I haven’t seen in years under a zip-up hoodie. She passes my threshold and toes her shoes off while I grip the door handle, staring hard at the empty hallway with one thought in my head. It does not fit her like it used to fit me.
“Your hostess gift,” she says, handing me a bag. I pull out a new Two Strike shirt.
“Did you steal mine or did I leave it at the palace sometime?”
She won’t look me in the eye. “Steal is such a harsh word. What are we eating?”
I follow her into the kitchen with a laugh.
I show her the instructions left by the private chef, and we move comfortably around each other.
I salt the pasta water according to the written notes that read, “like an angry toddler throwing fistfulls of sand,” and wonder how I’m supposed to make this feel normal.
Ella and I are not in a romantic relationship.
We kiss and don’t kiss. On. Off. The deal says nothing about nuzzling her neck while she stirs the bolognese or sliding my hands around her waist.
The problem of what this deal will allow works away in the background of my mind until I’m like an overheated laptop.
Ella cracks open a Vestfyn and syncs her phone with my sound system, cueing up a playlist of American jazz standards performed by a member of one of the larger Seongan boy bands. “Is he as pretty as he looks on my lock screen?” she asks, when I offer to introduce them.
I scowl. “If you like that kind of thing.”
“Like an otherworldly creature with star-kissed abs?” Her eyes sparkle with laughter and she turns the burner down, dipping a clean spoon into the pot. She purses her lips to cool the hot liquid, tastes, and blows some more. “His skin is—”
She lifts the spoon for me.
My heart is beating hard and I push her wrist back, leaning in to taste her lips.
Gentle and warm, with the faintest trace of bolognese.
She giggles against my mouth. That’s fine.
She’s welcome to find this hilarious. I drop the spoon in the pot, and banding her waist with my hands, I lift her onto the countertop where she’s easier to reach.
Her fingers rake through my hair and I shiver. She’s never the one to kiss me first. She’s happy to follow my lead, but I feel a feather of discontentment. When I lift my head to catch my breath, she swings a foot and a slipper falls to the floor.
“I’m going to kiss you next time when I open the door,” I tell her, voice roughened. “And maybe again when you put down your bag. I’m going to kiss you when you can’t reach the upper cabinets and when you’re looking for the lids.”
She arches a brow. “How about when I’m asking about Park Hyeon Yu’s skincare regimen?”
“Especially then.”
Her lips twitch. “I wonder what kind of toner—”
She never finishes the thought.
We do eat eventually, after letting half the water boil out of the pot and replenishing it.
Over pasta, she tells me about her last family meeting and how her mother threatened to cut off her wi-fi if she was late again.
She swipes the warm olives off my plate, placed there in anticipation of theft.
This becomes our habit. When our schedule allows it—and even when it doesn’t—we make dinner and talk about our day, then move to the lounge where there is an entire wall of glass and a view of the city lights.
I scroll through a tablet with one hand, going over the accounts for Lindenholm or emails from the office, while the other arm anchors her to my side.
She tells me about the intense logistics of Queen’s Week and chats on her Friction server.
She often works on the source code of the app she created for her family to track notable dignitaries ahead of royal events.
I limit myself to careless, lazy kisses on the top of her head, promising myself more only when I’ve shifted a mountain of work.
As a result, I work like a man possessed.
It takes two weeks before she acknowledges that this was a brilliant idea.
“It’s like a personal chef,” she tells me, placing a kiss on the underside of my jaw that has me gripping the leather sofa.
This easy affection I decided I could not do without is murder.
“There’s an entire category of my life I no longer have to think about.
” She places another kiss, and I turn my head, stopping her mouth.
I absorb her approval with satisfaction.
I’m brilliant. The first person in recorded history to have their cake and eat it, too.
But I can’t help feeling like we’re fighting fire with drums of gasoline and tracts of dry, brittle forest. Ella and I are forever, but not like this.
So I try to keep it light, and she tries too.
There’s laughter in the air every time we get serious, setting aside everything we’ve made ourselves busy with to do what we’ve been wanting to do all night.
We don’t tell anyone, but some people begin to notice.
Ella chats with my doorman Felix when she comes over, discovers his kid has a cough, and drops a small box of interlocking bricks off at the front desk to take home.
The guards manning the palace security checkpoint have taken to opening the gates when they see my plates, and the night footmen stationed in the Great Hall probably have a betting pool about when I’m going to make Ella an honest woman.
It is sheer luck that Alix hasn’t figured it out.
When she video chats from a backyard cookout in Pennsylvania or a dressmaker’s studio in Lebanon, Ella dives into my front hall, using the large blank wall as her backdrop.
While she talks, I hold her free hand, lace our fingers together, and kiss them until she bats me away.
Caroline Tiele has seen me parking in the Summer Palace employee lot at all hours, and offers me a brisk nod when she does. She never asks where I’m off to, who I’m with, or how we’re spending our time. I know she knows.
Tonight, I’m in Ella’s suite, watching an episode of Moonflower. I drag her feet across my lap and answer questions about the complexity of historical Seongan wedding rites.
“But when are they actually married?” she asks. “When the bell rings? When they drink the nuptial wine? Or when they bow?”
I roll my thumb over the gold chain around her ankle and slide my hand along the curve of her calf.
“It’s a process,” I answer, frustrated by these self-imposed boundaries.
I have no one to blame. I drove the stakes into the ground and strung the fence myself.
“In a way, they’ve been married since he sent the bride his first gift. ”
“That wouldn’t make her married,” she protests, crunching on a peppermint. “Not even in ye olden times.”
“She kept his gift. That’s the thing.”