to happen? We’d have found ourselves alone after some party, me the Princess, married to your brother, and... Would we have touched? What about if I had been with him, and what transpired between us didn’t make me feel half so much as what looking into your eyes did?”
“Tinley, it doesn’t matter. He’s dead.” Those words came out raw. “You were never with him. And you will be with me.”
“I think it matters. Because I want to understand. I want to understand desire. And why it doesn’t seem to make sense. Why sometimes it makes it seem like the world is turned inside out. Is it why I make you so furious? Is that why you had to marry me? Because you are afraid if I was wandering around out there married to another man, and you married to another woman that we might... That we might violate who we want to be in order to be with each other?”
“I turned temptation into duty. All in all, I feel it was the best decision I could’ve made.”
“So you were afraid of that. You were afraid of me. Were you always? Is that why you opposed me so very much when I was engaged to Dionysus?”
“None of this matters.”
“It matters to me.”
“I told you. I made the decision to be a king, and not a man.”
“You outran temptation rather than being potentially subject to it. You would bind yourself to me forever so that you don’t ever have to feel weak again.”
“If it is a weakness that you’re looking for, Tinley, then look no further than this moment here. Does that make you happy? You are correct. What you’re reaching around for, searching for... It’s true. I made the decision to marry you so that I would not be fallible. Now your body is my duty. Your children will be mine. And there will be no vows to violate.”
Her heart pounded in her ears.
“Why does it make you so angry?”
Because that was one thing she couldn’t understand. Hadn’t he won in some respects, gaining her as a wife? If the temptation of her had vexed him all this time.
“Because nothing should test me in this way.”
“Why is that? Does it bother you so much because of the temptation in general? Or because... Because it’s me. Because I’m so unsuitable.”
He closed the distance between them, cupping her chin, forcing her to look into his eyes. “It is that the strength of my desire for you makes me unsuitable.”
And this was it. A window into the man. The man that she was going to marry, for whatever he said, it was not simply the King she would bond herself to for her entire life. For it was not a king looking at her now. He needed to believe it, and she understood that. She understood that the blame that he carried around was heavy on his shoulders. That he believed he couldn’t want things for himself. That he couldn’t want fun. That he couldn’t want pleasure. And he had moved her into the category of duty to sidestep that, and he recognized it was a side step. He had also tried to make it as a grave decision. One that seemed a better choice than simply pining and taking chances.
She wanted to believe it meant there was more, and she couldn’t even quite say why, for she was only just beginning to wrap her mind around the fact that she had wanted Alex for quite some time. That Alex was something uniquely special to her. It occurred to her then that maybe there was a difference between the disapproval that her mother had shown her, and the actual feeling Alex had given her when she was near him. Perhaps it wasn’t disapproval at all. Perhaps the real issue was that Alex made her feel like she needed to be different, and the idea of having to try like that terrified her. Yes, it was rooted in what her mother had made her feel, because she had gone into her awkward phase, her teenage years, already feeling at a deficit. Already feeling like there was no possible way for her to triumph over the awkwardness she had been born into.
But there was a difference between that, that shallow disapproval of her mother, and limiting herself because she was afraid to be disapproved of. Because she was afraid of trying her absolute hardest and failing.
What an easy thing it was to fail at having straight