beyond my understanding how he could not.
“I know you are not, Princess,” he said. “Do you think we’d allow Yoseph into the family without looking very deeply into his background–and his parents’ even?” Oh! “Beyond that, I actually told you enough to keep you safe, but only that. You don’t know of the paths to my father’s wing, you don’t know how to enter the palace from the outside. The system is very complicated, you can only get in with the code you got out with, and if you weren’t in this wing and used its doors, then you can’t get in from outside. The codes always change as well, depending on the number of doors you used to go out and which ones.”
Holy Mother of Christ!
“That’s…” I couldn’t find the word.
“Complicated,” he smiled.
“Understandable,” I said, my mind in a fog just trying to process everything he’d said. And...I failed miserably.
A quiet silence and calm tranquility fell upon us. Time passed while I stayed in his arms, liking his touch, loving his tender kisses on my forehead and adoring the sound of his heartbeat under my ear. I kept my eyes closed and I almost fell asleep, but the prince said he had to get up to pray. I almost asked him not to, but I knew I couldn’t say that; so I got up, and then he did as well. Before leaving the living room, he placed yet another kiss on my forehead, renewing the argument I had inside me to ask him to stay. But still, I fought it and let him go without saying anything, knowing he’d be back in a few minutes anyway.
We talked a lot that night. As a matter of fact, we barely stopped talking at all. I learned a lot about him, and he learned a lot about me.
He still had two years of specializing to do, but wasn’t so sure if he could do it. He told me he’d had to go through a lot to convince his mother to agree to let him leave the country to study abroad. She disliked the idea of him being so far from the kingdom and leaving most of his responsibilities towards his country for his brother to do. She disliked the fact that he was studying something that wouldn’t serve in his position as the future king anyhow, but he said that helping people was something he had always wanted to do–not just ruling and guiding, even if that was what he had been raised to do all of his life.
I told him that he should consider psychiatry: he always knew the right thing to say, always knew how to comfort and solve problems. It was just the right thing for him, in my opinion. Heck, he was able to spread calmness over my heart faster and even better than what my therapist had for all those years. It made him beam, then he spaced out, as if he was really considering it, or at least thinking of the possibilities, because it seemed like his duty towards his kingdom was preventing him from doing anything further than that, just like he’d told me.
I told him about the company, about my parents, about my life in New York. It was kind of embarrassing how very boring my life was; it was only work and more work. And before I had to take care of the company, it was studying and more studying. I had no time for friends, and my family was only my grandmother and my parents, but after the loss of my parents...I didn’t even have a grandmother anymore. Well, not that much.
Still, the prince seemed really fascinated by everything I was saying. He hung on my every word, told me how impressed he was by my accomplishments and all I’d done for the past year. He liked that we were still able to complete the project of having a branch in the kingdom that my parents had started, and that we still kept the branches in London and Paris working as well as before and even better, making me feeling less pathetic about my non-existent social life.
He was that nice, and like always, he knew the right thing to say.
Our talk was easy, sweet, and I liked it a lot. But it also made me feel sorry for the past several days I’d spent feeling too much fear to actually enjoy them. But...I don’t think I could’ve ever helped it. Everything was