kids could only dream about. But I was trapped inside a cage nevertheless, just a golden one. It all came to a head shortly after high school.”
She disappears into the past, her eyes glazing as she stirs the pasta on the stove.
“What happened, Carly?” Her name tastes bittersweet on my lips. I don’t like it, but I don’t not like it either. Or more specifically, I don’t like the fact that I want to say it more, to growl it as those hips of hers do things that have my cock stirring in my pants.
I sit back, crossing my arms over my chest, needing to fortify the wall between us, praying for a little more control.
Her shrug is heavy, and her voice drops a noticeable amount. “Robert Gunze the Second happened.” She draws out the suffix and says it like the name should mean something to me, but it doesn’t, so I wait her out. “His dad and my dad worked out . . . a deal, I guess you’d call it, to connect our families. All of a sudden, I was engaged to Robert and planning for a wedding with a guy I didn’t even know.”
“Like an arranged marriage?” I ask, my brows lifting. “Your parents do know this is the twenty-first century, right?”
She smiles, but it’s sad. “For some of us, and not for others. But it was all I knew, all I’d grown up with, and it didn’t occur to me to say no. So there I was, planning a wedding, and we’re dating. It was all very nice.”
“I’m guessing there’s a ‘but’ in the story,” I prompt, curiosity growing. I don’t like the idea of her being married to someone—not someone else because that would imply that I want to marry her. And I’m definitely not interested in her that way. Not at all.
Definitely not interested in matrimony, my traitorous cock says, but other things could be considered.
Still, it calms down enough to let me listen to what Carly has to say, like it’s somehow important to me.
“But then it wasn’t. Robert was a bit of a douchebag. Monied, entitled, a brat type who’d never had to work for anything. I was too, to some degree, but I wasn’t like him. I had morals, dreams, and plans for life after I got away from my parents. I thought it was going to be better. But Robert had a cage too, although his is like a soulless black hole. And he wanted to force me into it, make me fit the mold of who he wanted me to be. It was ugly and painful. I knew if I married him, I’d be locked away into that life forever.”
Her words are soft, and I don’t think she realizes that she touched her cheek carefully when she talked about how painful it’d been. She might not have said it, but I can tell a bit of what she went through. It makes me respect the bright, open star she is now even more because I know how hard she worked for it and how easy it would’ve been to let the assholes in her past snuff her out.
“I’m sorry.” The words are useless and I know it, having had them said to me dozens of times. But I repeat them for the same reason, simply not knowing what else to say.
She waves her hands, like she’s clearing the air of the moroseness of her past, and I see her will a smile to appear on her Cupid’s bow mouth. “Past is past, and if it hadn’t been that bad, I wouldn’t be here.”
Here. In my apartment. Cooking me dinner.
A wave of warning rushes through me, but I try to swallow the panic down.
Just dinner. Not a date. She’s not Anna.
She plates the pasta, sliding a piece of the promised bread smeared with olive oil onto each of them before setting them down. “Voila!”
As she turns around to grab the bottle of wine and the plastic cups that are all I have, I grimace. Plastic cups, like my plastic life. Nothing real, nothing substantial, nothing pretty. Not anymore.
It’s like a dark cloud over the whole evening.
She sits down, unaware of my change in mood. “Dig in.”
I robotically take a bite, chewing though I don’t taste a thing. “It’s good,” I say, more out of habit than manners. Honestly, it could be cardboard and ketchup, the way my mood’s suddenly darkened.
“Now you. Your turn,” she says, forking an obscenely large mouthful