The Queen's New Year Secret(12)

“Because I trusted you. Clearly, my own fault.”

“No, I think I was the one who was foolish to trust you.”

“We could go back and forth for days. But it doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t erase the fact that I think we’re better off apart. We should never have been a couple, Kairos, and you know it. As you said, I’m little more than a piece of white trash from a tiny town. You’re the king of an entire nation. You wanted to marry someone else.”

“You might be right. But it’s too late for regrets. We are married to each other. And more than that, you’re carrying my child.”

“Plenty of people work out custody arrangements.”

He stood, knocking his chair backward and not caring when it hit the ground with a very loud thump. “And do those people still want each other? Do they exist constantly on the verge of tearing each other’s clothes off and having each other on the nearest surface?”

The pink in her cheeks intensified. “You can only speak for yourself on that score.”

“Really? I don’t think that’s true.” He was suddenly gripped by lust, lust that mingled with the ever-present anger in his chest. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to yell at her, or press her against the wall and claim her body again. Both. He wanted both. Even though neither made sense. “You want me.”

“Go to hell.” They were the harshest words he’d ever heard on her lips. So much sweeter than the sophisticated chill had ever been.

“There. There at least, some honesty. Perhaps you should try it more often.”

“I gave you honesty.”

“Your version of honesty was a list of complaints that you could have, and should have voiced years ago. Ideally, before you accepted my proposal. What changed? What changed that you can no longer stand what you agreed would be enough to make a marriage?”

* * *

His words hit her with the force of the slap. And she just stood there, reeling. Tears prickled her eyes, her tongue was frozen. He was making too much sense. Making too good a case for how aggrieved he was by her request for divorce. He was right. She had not spoken an honest word to him. She hadn’t asked him for what she wanted. Hadn’t told him she was unhappy.

But she didn’t know how to do it without opening herself up, and reviewing bits and pieces of pain that were best left hidden. Didn’t know how to do it without confronting her fears. And anyway, she hadn’t imagined that he would care.

She hadn’t trusted herself enough to voice them. To deal with them.

She wasn’t sure she trusted herself now.

“It isn’t what I wanted,” she said, her voice hollow.

“You just said what you wanted changed.”

“Yes. No. It isn’t that simple,” she said, panic gripping her neck, making it impossible for her to breathe.

“It seems fairly straightforward to me, agape, but then, I do not know much about the inner workings of the female mind. Throughout my life I have seen women act in ways that are inexplicable to me. My mother walking away from her position at the palace, Francesca compromising our union   for a bit of stolen pleasure. You divorcing me. So, it comes as no surprise to me that I do not understand what you’re trying to tell me now.”

“You don’t know everything about my past,” she said.

It was for the best that he didn’t. Best that he never did. She looked back on the Tabitha she’d been, before university, before she’d put distance between herself and her family, and saw a stranger.

But he didn’t seem to know the Tabitha she was now. And she didn’t know how to make him. Didn’t know how to make him understand who she was. Why she was.

She didn’t even know if it would change anything.

If nothing else, it would show him. Why he should let her go. Why she wasn’t suitable. And it would remind her too.

“Do I not know you?”

“No. I know you did some cursory searching, as far as I was concerned. My name. But you don’t know everything. In part because I don’t have the same last name as my mother, nor is her name the same as the one listed on my birth certificate, not anymore. I don’t share a name with my stepfather either. Not having those names excludes quite a lot from a cursory search. Of course, you found nothing objectionable about me. Nothing but good marks in school, no criminal record, no scandal.”

“Because that’s all that mattered,” he said, something odd glittering in his black eyes.

“Yes. It is all that mattered. You were only looking for what might cause problems with my reputation, for you, as far as the public eye was concerned. You weren’t actually looking for anything real or meaningful about me.”

“Come off your high horse, Tabitha. Obviously you didn’t care whether or not I found anything meaningful out about you, because you deliberately concealed it from me.”

She lifted her shoulder, her stomach sinking. “I can’t argue with that. I can’t argue with a great many of the accusations leveled at me today. I wasn’t honest with you. I didn’t tell you. I preferred to run away, rather than telling you what I wanted. But a lot of it is because... I don’t actually know what I want. I started feeling dissatisfied with our relationship, and wanting more. And that confused me.”

“Well, hell, if you’re confused, what chance do I have?”

“I can’t answer that question,” she said, sounding defeated. Feeling defeated. “I don’t know the answer. All I know is that I never thought I would marry. Then I met you, and I can’t deny that I felt...attraction. It confused me. I had spent years getting through college, school of every kind, really, with a single-minded focus. I wanted to be better than my birth. I knew that education was the only way to accomplish that. I set about to get good grades, high test scores, so that I could earn scholarships. And I did that. I knew that if I split my focus, I wouldn’t be able to. Then the internship at the palace came up, and I knew I had to seize it. I didn’t have connections, I didn’t have a pedigree. I knew that I needed a leg up in order to get the kind of job that I wanted.”

“I imagine, ultimately, the chance to become queen of the nation was too great a temptation to pass up?”

She laughed, hardly able to process the surreal quality of it all even now. “I guess so. It was a lot of things. A chance to have you, physically, which I wanted. A chance to achieve a status that I’d never even imagined in my wildest dreams. I’m from nothing. Nothing and nowhere, and I wanted something more. And that... How could I refuse? Especially because your criteria suited mine so well. You see, Kairos, I didn’t want love either. I didn’t want passion.”

“You said you were attracted to me.”

“I was. I am. I suppose that’s something I can’t deny now. But I thought perhaps I could just touch the flames without being consumed by them. Then I realized that holding your fingertips over a blaze for five years is nothing more than a maddening exercise in torture. You’re better off plunging yourself in or disengaging.”

“And you chose to disengage?”

“Yes. I know that I can’t afford to throw myself in.”

“Why is that?”

“Reasons I haven’t told you. Things you don’t know.”

“I’m not playing twenty questions with you, Tabitha, either tell me your secrets, or put them away. Pretend they don’t matter as you did all those years. Jump into the fire, or back away.”

Her throat tightened, her palms sweating. She hadn’t thought about that day in years. She had turned it into a lesson, an object, a cautionary tale. But the images of the day, the way that it had smelled, the weather. The sounds her stepfather had made as he bled out on the floor, the screams of her mother when she realized what had been done... Those things she had blocked out. The entire incident had been carefully formed into a morality tale. Something that served to teach, but something she couldn’t feel.

Not anymore.

Use what you need, discard the rest.

“I never wanted passion. Or love. Because...I shouldn’t. I’m afraid of what I might be. What I might become. I think I’ve proven I have the capacity to act recklessly when I’m overtaken by strong emotion,” she said, realizing that to him, the admission must seem ridiculous. For years all he had ever seen was the carefully cultivated cool reserve she had spent the better part of her teenage years crafting from blood and other people’s consequences.

“Tell me,” he said.

She was going to. Her heart was thundering in her ears, a sickening beat that echoed through her body, made her feel weak.

But maybe if she said it, he would understand. Maybe if she said it he would get why what he’d offered had seemed amazing. Why it had felt insufficient. Why she’d chosen to end it instead of asking for more.

“I was walking home from school. I was seventeen at the time. It was a beautiful day. And when I approached the trailer I could already hear them fighting. Not unusual. They fought all the time. My mother was screaming, which she always did. My stepfather was ignoring her. He was drunk, which he very often was.”

She didn’t let herself go back to that house. Not even in her mind. It was gritty and dirty and full of mold. But more than that. The air was heavy. The ghost of faded love lingering and oppressive, a malevolent spirit that choked the life out of everything it touched.