“Oh, you mean the day that you watched a video of the woman you had chosen to marry having dirtier sex with your brother than I imagine you ever had with her? The day that you—drunkenly—told me you thought I would be a better choice to be your queen? I find it difficult to put much stock into anything you said that day.”
“Then that’s your mistake. Because I was sincere. I told you that we could build a stronger foundation than Francesca and I ever could. I told you that I had been having doubts about her even before her betrayal.”
“Yes, that’s right, you did. And why were you having doubts, exactly?”
“The way you behaved...it was such a stark contrast to Francesca, even on her best of days. I found myself wishing that it was you. When we traveled together, when I went to you to discuss affairs of the state...I found myself wishing that you were the one I was going to marry. I respected your opinion. And I felt like I could ask you questions, when with everyone else I had to simply know the answers.”
He felt stripped bare saying these things now, without the buffer of alcohol, five years older and a lot more jaded than he had been then. But she needed to hear them. She needed to hear them again, clearly.
“And while it is a very nice sentiment, it isn’t exactly the proposal every girl dreams of,” she said, her tone brittle.
“It seems very much that you are angry with yourself for accepting a proposal you now deem beneath you. How high you have risen. That the proposal of a king is no longer good enough for you.”
“Maybe I am the one who changed. But people do change.”
“Only because they forget. You forget that you are going to have to leave my palace, leave Petras, search for a job. Struggle financially. Perhaps even face the life that you were so eager to leave behind. Marriage to me offered you instant elevation. The kind of status that you craved.”
“Don’t,” she said, “you make me sound like I was nothing more than a gold digger.”
“Oh, you would have done all right finding gold on your own. But validation? Status? For a piece of white trash from Nowhere, USA, that is a great deal more difficult to come by.”
She stood, shoving her plate toward the center of the table. “I don’t have to listen to you insulting me.”
“You want me to call you something honest. Though, I hasten to remind you that I learned these words from you. This is what you think of yourself. You told me.”
“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.