Page 36 of The Prince of Hidden Shadows (Runaway Prince Hotel #5)

Rose

“I don’t think that I want you to be the mother of my children.”

Wait, what?

Children? Mother? Since when?

“I don’t think that I want us to keep seeing each other.”

Wait, what?

He thought? He didn’t want? Since when?

“I don’t think that I want to continue wasting my time with you.”

Wait, what?

Wasting his time? With me? Since when?

No warning signs. No logical explanations. Nothing.

How lame of him to pull this stunt in such a snide way.

I doubted he was in any way interested in what I had to say on the subject.

I had just turned twenty-one and there was no purpose in fast-forwarding our relationship.

We were fine until a second ago. Why the sudden need to change things between us?

Once these three sentences were blurted out in a matter-of-fact tone, Guillaume parked in front of my mom’s Parisian apartment building, near Bastille, and sat quietly to let them sink in.

Meanwhile, from the corner of my eye, I noticed that his knuckles were getting whiter and whiter from his tight grip on the wheel.

He didn’t budge, his deep blue eyes wandering anywhere inside his car but at me.

I readied myself to open the passenger door to escape and hopefully get a good night’s sleep.

Instead, I froze and stared ahead. No matter how hard I tried to will myself to move, I simply couldn’t force myself to look at the man seated in the driver seat.

A chill began to course through my body, and I swallowed down an irrepressible need to throw up.

I waited while listening to some depressing English pop song that barely registered as a muffled sound. I heard only him .

My thoughts started to ramble at full speed. My way of avoiding the situation and confronting him. He, who sat like a crash test dummy, gripping the fucking wheel even harder as I clutched my purse with the same strength.

I could tell by his sudden cowardice that he would never take any of the words back. Not that he had any intention of doing so. Clearly, he wasn’t interested in how his words sounded, or how they would be received, but rather whether they’d hit their target.

Bull’s eye.

I had no way of turning back time to undo the pain that was beginning to tighten around my aching heart.

We had a future together, or so I thought.

A future that may or may not include children in it, and I had leaned toward may rather than may not .

Still, it was too soon to be discussed, in my humble opinion.

We were too young. We hadn’t been dating long enough.

We didn’t have steady jobs… So many reasons for his outburst to leave me speechless.

And most of all, we had never broached the subject, so where did this come from?

Since when had children become an issue between us?

I couldn’t make myself ask, nor did I want any information about a new love interest that he might have found.

Have you been cheating on me, or are you contemplating the thought?

That poisonous thought hit me out of nowhere and stole my breath for a split second. Enough time to make me uncomfortable. Enough time to make me wonder. Enough time to make me nauseous.

The song that was playing rubbed salt into the wound. Girl Afraid . And just like the girl in the song, I wondered where did his intentions lay? Only, it was a totally different situation because I was supposed to know the boy that was sitting to my left.

I hadn’t seen it coming because everything had always been so easy with him.

A mutual friend introduced us at a party; back then I was enrolled in my second and final year of a math prep school generally required to enter France’s elite schools.

He was a first-year student in a prestigious architecture school, ESA.

Although we hit it off right from the start, we took it slow. I chose to put aside my attraction to this good-looking guy with golden blond hair and a strange sense of humor.

Shortly after we realized that the attraction was mutual, we nonetheless decided that it was best to remain friends.

I was too driven by my studies and exams, having no spare time to date since my school required loads of work, and after the mandatory two years, I was left exhausted and drained.

It had been too demanding, and I felt lost and unable to see my future.

I needed a break before prep school ended, so I traveled to Bali.

That was where Guillaume and I hooked up on spring break.

Shortly after we came back to France, he earned his bachelor’s degree from ESA. I followed his lead and joined the same school. Despite what I had told Guillaume, my dream of becoming an architect hadn’t been dictated by him, but rather by my late dad, Sean, who had also been an architect.

Shortly after we started dating, I became friends with Guillaume’s best friend, Vincente, a tall and slender guy whose mother was from Italy and his father from Vietnam.

Despite the closely-shaven hair on either side of his skull, he kept the rest of it long enough to wear in a short ponytail, giving him a unique look that caused everybody to refer to him as Samurai.

My favorite Samurai. Outspoken and caring, he was easy to talk to and also the king of lame jokes.

Lame jokes that I had heard over and over again at his party that night.

Yet, right this second, none of them came to mind to lighten the mood.

And the buzz that I felt from the alcohol swirling through my system didn’t do shit to lessen the punch in the guts that Guillaume delivered.

We were on the way back from the party that Vincente threw to celebrate my graduation.

A fun party. A bunch of great friends. A happy couple. ..or not.

His words were pronounced in a loud and clear voice, completely devoid of emotion.

I loved his voice. In truth, I was a sucker for deep male voices, and although his didn’t quite match these requirements, I loved it nonetheless.

Well, at that very moment, I found his voice despicable because of his words.

Such simple phrases. Such poisonous phrases. Such nonsensical phrases.

Slowly but surely, my heart splintered into tiny pieces that were like shrapnel, ready to burst inside of me.

Yet I remained silent, at a loss for words that would form an adequate response that could somehow make this okay.

I couldn’t wait to go upstairs and cry out the hurt.

I prayed that my mom and Chris, my fifteen-year-old brother, would be asleep considering the time.

I needed some alone time to process the news that I was incapable of wrapping my head around.

I did a piss-poor job at swallowing the lump that was lodged in my throat, and forced myself not to shed a tear. I wished for the running engine to explode into a wild fireball so that we would die. It didn’t.

Emptiness filled me as I continued to listen to him when all I wanted was to open the car door and exit the confined space.

“Trust me, it’s better to break up now.” His sugary tone worsened his case: what was the use in trying to lessen the impact of how he expressed his callous sentiments? The asshole hadn’t looked at me once, too busy searching for the right song to fit his current mood.

The Smiths again, really? Fucking perfect. Last Night I Dreamt … Well, so did I, and it didn’t involve my boyfriend of two-and-a-half years and first true love dumping me like… like what? I couldn’t find it in me to categorize it.

Why did Guillaume bring up trust when he had just betrayed the trust that I had placed in him?

Unfortunately, he just wouldn’t shut up. “Look, Rose, if we keep this up, we’re just going to end up hurting each other.”

Don’t Rose me, asshole, can’t you understand that you’ve already hurt me?

My entire body shivered violently as if I was taking a freezing cold shower.

He continued talking. I continued shuddering uncontrollably. We continued to ignore one another.

“I don’t think that I’ve ever loved you, you know.”

The last blow for the kill. Holy hell.

How could I have imagined falling in love with someone as hard as I had and then falling out of it just as quickly?

Actually, that wasn’t true. I still loved the conniving bastard with all of my heart and soul.

Both parts of myself that, after being smashed, shattered, and broken would never be successfully glued back together.

Neither would ever be able to be fixed properly because irreparable damage had been done.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t remain in the same space as him. I couldn’t…

Still, he robbed my last thought before I rushed out of the car. As I turned to slam the door shut, I heard him say, “Deal with it…”

Yeah, I couldn’t and wouldn’t deal with it.

At that, the words of Sean Bateman rang inside my head. I loved Patrick Bateman’s brother in American Psycho and instantly thought of his favorite expression. “Rock’ n’ roll,” I whispered to myself as my feet hit the sidewalk, and I walked away.

He was gone by the time that I tugged open the building door.

Later, after I let my muted sobs and ugly tears be absorbed by my pillow, the events replayed endlessly before my eyes. Nothing made sense.

Should I be appeased that he was only partially a jerk? At least he didn’t use excuses and the easy way out like, “It’s not you, it’s me. You’re a wonderful person, but I’m a mess right now so it’s best if we break it off… Let’s stay friends, okay?”

For weeks, Guillaume’s words haunted me. I couldn’t get over the fact that deep inside, I knew that something prompted them but I simply couldn’t put my finger on it.

“I don’t think that I want you to be the mother of my children.”

Words that were said in French but remained engrained in English, my second language. My deceased father’s mother tongue. As if playing them over and over in English would lessen the pain.