gave all your time, all your money, all your heart. But you did something, you tried. You might have failed, fallen, tripped and bloodied your nose, but you were in control, you and your silly heart. I would play the fool any day.
What I could not stand, what I could not brush off my shoulder, what I could not handle was being used.
To me this was the worst someone could make me feel. To reduce me to a rusted penny to slip into a coin slot. To dehumanise me, to treat me like an object with a function, to throw me away when that function was performed.
Because to be used was to be made helpless, actionless, powerless. A penny can do nothing when held between two fingers. It can do nothing when dropped on the sidewalk. It can do nothing but wait and hope to maybe one day be picked up again.
I hated Ronan in that moment, in that very instant of overhearing him in that hallway. I hated him and I didn’t see a way of not hating him. Because he confirmed my worst fears: that I was nothing to him. That there was nothing I could do to ever change that. I was worth a euro and what was a goddamn euro to a billionaire?
I heard the conversation over and over again in my head as I ran away. I no longer cared about pretending to be a proper lady, a woman of high class, a distinguished, demurred, detained girl. I let the tears fall freely like I would at any Walmart in any bumble-fuck, middle of nowhere town. I sobbed messily like I would have over a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, the kind with the most chunks stuffed in there. I wiped at my eyes like I was that girl at the local honky-tonk, the one who cries after a Mike’s Hard Lemonade (strawberry flavoured, of fucking course). I pushed and shoved like I was on a roller derby rink, scowled like I was on a city bus and didn’t want some creepy old man offering me a lollipop, and cursed under my breath like I was reading the degenerate’s dictionary.
I didn’t care what these rich assholes thought of me anymore. Ronan had proved that I had been right all along: they were all heartless vampires only caring about the next neck to suck dry. It didn’t make matters any better that my parents were proved right, too: I was never going to make my place amongst these people. My place was below, and it always would be.
I snorted at the dark irony of the universe when I found myself stumbling onto a balcony previously described by Anna. How long ago that moment felt, when it was Ronan and me against that Versace vulture, him and me against the Le Ball, him and me against the world.
I thought I was alone to cry by myself (not that it mattered, really, I would have sobbed miserably in front of the fucking queen of England), but a quick, curt, meant-to-be-heard throat clearing drew my attention to a tendril of cigarette smoke in the stone-etched corner of the balcony. Blowing the smoke away, Alexander Ryan stepped from the shadows into the dazzling light of the Eiffel Tower, standing golden in the thick-aired summer night. He looked sheepishly at me. He was expecting me to gather myself together, having been caught being emotional, one of the seven deadly sins of class.
I stared at him as tears (and perhaps snot) streamed down my cheeks.
“So you do have a vice after all, Mr Ryan,” I croaked, my vocal chords apparently breaking along with my heart.
Alexander, still looking uncomfortable at my womanly distress, glanced down at the ash eating along the length of his cheap brand of American cigarettes.
“I find these events stressful,” he said and then hesitantly extended the cigarette toward me. “Perhaps you do, too?”
I laughed bitterly as I took the cigarette from him. “I find them perfectly wonder-fucking-ful,” I said, sucking in a deep drag before adding, “You’re not getting this back, you know.”
Alexander laughed and reached into his jacket for another. I watched as the flame from his lighter illuminated his face: tender lips, long lashes, the chiselled, high cheeks of chivalry, perfect chivalry.
“I thought I wanted to be a part of this,” I said, waving my hand vaguely toward the chatter from the Palais de Chaillot, all those people pretending at having something real to say.