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“I’m not easily manipulated. So if this is an effort to do that—”
“It isn’t,” he said. “You’re right. I am… Sorry.” The word felt unfamiliar in his mouth.
“Oh. That sounded like it was difficult.”
“Nothing is difficult for me.”
“Of course not,” she said. “Nothing.”
“I am trying to get to know you. Why can’t you take it as a gesture of goodwill?”
“I don’t know, something about you makes me think that you’re prone to weaponizing your knowledge.”
“That’s unflattering.”
“I don’t know that I trust you.”
“Why not?”
“Why… Why didn’t you tell me? Who you were. Why didn’t you tell me who you were when we were up there together? You let me believe that it was somebody else’s wedding. And you didn’t tell me who you were at all. Why?”
“Because,” he said. And he could feel the truth of it rising up in the back of his throat, making the back of his jaw ache. He didn’t want to say it. And yet, he had already begun. He was trying to give her something, so he might as well give her the truth. He wasn’t…ashamed of it necessarily, but he had also never spoken it aloud to anyone before. “Because there were unintended consequences for the way that I chose to handle my mother. She wasn’t the only one who witnessed my behavior and formed an opinion. No. The whole world did. And with you, this woman who had no idea who I was, and what I thought might be the last days of my life, I wanted to be the person that I was there. No baggage, no presuppositions, no titles.”
He didn’t know whether or not he was shocked or gratified to see her expression soften. Perhaps both.
“I understand. My name doesn’t carry any… Any weight at all. So it didn’t cost me anything to tell you who I was. But you didn’t know everything about me. You didn’t know that I have never slept with anybody. You had never seen me in my little house. You didn’t… You let me be me. In a way that I hadn’t been for a very long time, so I guess… That’s another way we’re more alike than different. We keep finding strange ways.”
“Yes,” he said, the word coming out rougher than he intended them to.
“I don’t know what kind of present to ask for. You’re a prince and the kinds of things that you might be offering me are beyond my scope.”
“What do you like?”
“I like…so many things. I like to knit. I like to garden. I like books.”
“Books,” he said. “I can give you books. There’s a library in the palace. And it is always stocked with new books.”
“Really? Not just…musty classics? Which don’t get me wrong, I like, but I like a little bit of popular fiction.”
“Yes. We have a book buyer for the palace.”
“That’s…amazing.”
“Yes. And you can go use the library. Anytime you wish. You could sit in there all day. Until you have official duties, there’s nothing else for you to do. You could be a lady of leisure.”
“I don’t even know how I would begin being one of those,” she said.
“By being leisurely.”
“It sounds nice…”
He extended his hand. “Come with me.”
She looked at him for a moment, her expression skeptical. But then, she took his hand. And he led her from the room and down the great hall.
They went up a curved flight of stairs that opened into a massive room. There were bookshelves from floor to ceiling, ladders all around that slid on rails so that you could reach the heights.
And he watched her expression transform to one of wonder.