Royal Disaster by Parker Swift (8)

We didn’t get home that night until nearly two. I was asleep before we got home and had no memory of being brought to bed or undressed.

The next morning, whenever I’d start to stir, I’d happily roll back under my covers and into Dylan’s warm body, prolonging sleep as effectively as I could. When I woke up for good, it was because Dylan was drawing circles with his fingertips on my bare chest, making ever-wider shapes, tracing invisible pathways and leaving a cool alertness in his wake. I smiled before I opened my eyes.

“There’s my girl,” he said, and I squinted into the bright room, taking him in. He was lying on his side, his head perched on his hand, supported by his elbow. In the mornings Dylan looked just a little less precise, a little more rugged, like his cool, polished exterior had been marched through an outdoor sports magazine. His scruff was at its longest, his hair was at its most unruly, and his smell—that refined warm earthiness that was unmistakably him—was at its most pronounced. It was possible that I loved him more first thing in the morning than I did at any other time of day.

His whole hand was across my chest, a couple of fingers lying just atop the lower curve of my breast, others wrapping around my side, tapping my soft skin there. It was a subtle drumbeat, not overtly sexual, but summoning my blood all the same.

“Morning,” I said, stretching my arms up above my head, running into the headboard, and incidentally pushing my chest farther into his hand.

“Good morning,” he said.

Oh.

It was subtle, but I could hear the calm control in his voice. It was that tone. His hand gripped a little tighter, moved a tad higher, so his thumb was right by my nipple, not quite touching it.

I reached my arms over his head, moving to wrap them around his neck, but he gently gripped my wrists in his hand and firmly placed them back above my head. He just shook his head, indicating that no, I couldn’t, shouldn’t move my arms again.

“How did you sleep, damsel?” he asked smoothly, again that control right at the surface.

“Well.” I gulped a little, feeling the anticipation, my arousal shifting, awakening. I cleared my throat. “I slept well.”

“Good.” His hand steadily drifted down my torso and resumed drawing those tantalizing circles around my hip, swiftly brushing over my landing strip, then lower, but never close enough. Lazy, as though he had no intentions, as if this were totally innocent, naïve. As if.

“Not too hungover?” he asked.

I mentally ran a check over my body, and by some miracle I was foggy but not in the misery I probably deserved. I shook my head.

My hips shifted involuntarily, tilting, hoping to coax him into accidentally speeding up his process. But he lifted his hand altogether and made a quiet tsk-ing sound.

When his hand returned, it was to grasp my upper thigh under the light sheet and pull it firmly towards him, so my knee ran into his rock-hard stomach. I lay on my back, my arms arched above my body, my breasts exposed, nipples taut, my legs spread wantonly, and goose bumps rising to the surface of my skin. My breaths were shallow, and I shut my eyes, trying to revel in the purity of this feeling, this readiness.

Dylan ran the cool back of his hand up one thigh and down the other, again and again, making a circuit but only ever just touching or just missing my damp core. God, it felt good. He wanted me soaking wet, and I would be.

“I know you feel like I’m not telling you everything.”

My eyes shot to his. Now? Was he going to open up to me now?

“I—” I started in a husky whisper.

“Shh, baby. I know.” He moved entirely on top of me, my face framed by his forearms, his body tenting mine. I was practically shivering from physical anticipation underneath him, and now I was also out of my mind with anticipation for what he was going to say.

He was holding my wrists in his hands, stroking my palms, and he had kneed my legs apart and settled between them, hovering above me. Unbearably, our bodies were not touching anywhere except our hands and where he held my legs apart with his knees.

“Damsel. I don’t talk about my business or my family. I never have—I’ve told you more than I’ve ever told anyone.”

“Dylan—”

“And I know I’ve not been around as much as you deserve.” He let his body drop a fraction, the air between us getting warmer. “But be patient. Let me take care of you. Trust me.” He kissed my lips hard, firm, conveying the seriousness of his request. “Trust me to protect you.”

“No,” I said firmly, surprising even myself and feeling the warmth dissipate.

He tried to silence me with a kiss, but I turned my face, only to find him confused, annoyed even. But fuck it. He wasn’t going to get away with only pretending to open up to me. I wanted him to keep doing what he’d been doing—Christ, he was so freaking good at seducing me that stopping him required a willpower I hadn’t known I possessed—but in my gut I knew that I couldn’t just keep waiting for him to open up to me.

“Lydia?”

“Nope. You’re talking to me,” I said, inching up into a seated position and bringing the sheet with me to cover my breasts.

“About what?” He reached for the sheet, but I slapped his hands away.

“No, sir, not until we talk. About all of it. About your crazy need to protect me. About what’s going on at work, with your father. Anything. Everything. I know you’re seeing a lot of your dad, and it’s upsetting to you, but I don’t know why, not really. I know you’re working for him—or I do now, thanks to Will—but again, I don’t know why. And I know there are things you’re not telling me about whoever is emailing me. There’s all of that, but it’s more. There is just ambient tension around you. You were in another place entirely last night.”

“But last night was lovely—”

“Yes, eventually, after I roped you back in. After I distracted you by putting your hand between my legs. Dylan, I want you to talk to me.”

Silence.

A sigh.

“Lydia,” he started, but he didn’t continue.

“Dylan,” I replied, trying my best to convey that I was serious.

Dylan looked at me as though he were lost, as though no one had ever asked this of him in his life. Like I was asking him to jump into a volcano or swim with sharks. And I realized in that moment no one probably ever had asked him. Not only that, but it was highly likely that no one had ever really communicated with him. Maybe if I wanted him to open up to me I needed to do more of it myself. Maybe I wasn’t communicating with him either.

I let the silence remain between us for another moment, giving him a chance to start speaking, and when he didn’t, I took a deep breath and decided to try leading by example.

“I’ll go first,” I said. “I’m scared.” I felt my chest tighten a little as I thought about what I was saying—this was hard.

He looked at me again, longer, harder, almost as though me saying something so bold, so vulnerable, was tilting his world into a different axis.

“I think about my dad every day,” I continued, taking a deep breath, tightening the sheet around me, and inching closer to him. “I think about how wrong it feels that I am in love with you, and my father didn’t even get to know you. I think about how I am living in a new city, a city he once lived in with my mother, the city where I was born, and I don’t get to tell him I am finally seeing it, that I get it, that I see what is so beautiful about this place. I think about how you shut down after seeing your father, and it must be something so intense that is happening between you two—something so painful or stressful or scary or maybe even good sometimes—but how you won’t share it with me, not really. And how that, even more than not being able to talk to my father, that makes me feel alone. That very fact scares me.”

I glanced up and Dylan’s eyes were glassy, his hand smooth on my back.

“So please,” I pleaded. “Talk to me.”

“Lydia,” he said again. “I…”

I waited, my hand on his chest, unflinching, as though if I moved I risked reminding him that he was someone who never shared anything with me.

“What you want from me…I can’t….” He sounded sad as he said this. “I don’t…” He sighed again, and I could feel the sadness in his chest, his shoulders. “I just need you to trust that I tell you everything I can, trust that I love you. You know more about me than anyone.”

I waited a moment longer, waited for a conversation that might still happen.

“I do,” I said, because I didn’t doubt that.

“Your father sounds like a good man,” he said after a few moments.

“He was,” I said, and as I said it, he pulled me down to lie next to him and stroked my side, as though he knew the tears were forming in my eyes.

“My father isn’t a good man,” he said, and the way he said it I knew that it was more of a confession than it even sounded.

His grip on me grew tighter. He kissed the top of my head and then pulled me up as he slid down, bringing us face-to-face. He looked at me for a long moment.

“I’m sorry, baby. I know you want more from me. I’ll try,” he whispered, and he kissed my cheek, each of my eyelids, my lips. Then my neck more firmly as his hand reached for my breasts. “I’ll give you everything. I will.”

With each kiss he tried to tell me that even if I didn’t understand all he was going through, even if he couldn’t fully open up to me, that it was all there for me, waiting. It felt like a promise. And it was so close to enough.

“Move in with me,” he said, as he did at least once a week, and his kisses became more forceful, deeper, begging.

“No,” I replied, half-smiling at his predictable plea but half-sad as he kissed my collarbone. I couldn’t give him more until he gave more to me.

He grunted in frustration, and even with the disappointment of not knowing more, of still feeling in the dark, and even though I knew I might be fooling myself, I let him promise me that there was more to come.

Later that morning we sauntered down the high street—or more accurately, I sauntered and Dylan took march-like strides, pausing to impatiently wait for me every once in a while. It was as though as soon as we were out of the house, out of our bed, his stress, his Dylan-esque need for efficiency took hold. During the week I was all for the urban power walk through city streets, but on a weekend I just wanted to relax with him, not check things off some invisible list.

Dylan got a phone call and gave me the one-minute sign with his finger as I window-shopped while I sipped my coffee. The store I stood in front of was just opening, and I ducked inside. The sign read LOCK & CO. It was a proper hat shop, and I wanted to touch those hats, try them on. Milliners were definitely not something we had in such abundance back in New York.

I browsed the men’s hats, arranged and labeled by type: trilby, homburg, fedora, panama. And I had the realization that these esoteric names, these specialty hats, were oddities in my world, costumes or something a hipster Brooklyn guy would wear and talk about to sound cool. But Dylan probably knew just the occasion for a Vienna fedora versus a Town Coke; in fact, he probably owned versions of these somewhere and maybe even wore them for their intended uses. On one hand, it was so cool—my boyfriend was of this deep, traditional, storied past, and I thought it was beautiful and unique and odd, all at once. On the other hand, even a simple hat seemed to symbolize the gulf between our worlds.

I picked one up from the ladies’ section, a purple disk purporting to be a hat, with a thick fan of felt feathers radiating from its side, and I stood in front of the mirror. I was holding the hat perched on my brow, experimenting, when my phone buzzed in my pocket. I looked out the shop window and Dylan was pacing in front of the store, still on his phone. I looked down at my own and saw it was a text message from Fiona.

Oh fuck.

I hastily put the hat down, skewed and out of place on the table, and walked out of the shop. Whatever was in the Daily Mirror was obviously bad. And there was no way the deep, aching pit in my stomach was going to go away before I knew exactly what it was.

I walked past Dylan, who immediately started to follow while chattering away about mahogany from Brazil, oblivious to my anxiety, and I approached the first newsagent I saw.

I didn’t even have to go inside.

There. Outside the shop, on the tented sandwich board, was pinned an enlarged copy of the newspaper’s front page. A huge picture of me in that gorgeous green dress at the Serpentine. Standing next to Dylan, who was charmingly engaged in conversation with his ex-fiancée. But I was looking off to the side, away from him, with an unmistakable look of displeasure on my face. The headline, bold, in white capital letters:

Those fucking shoes.

Or more accurately, my fucking inability to ignore the pain I felt because of those shoes. I hated this. I felt dirty. I felt guilty, like somehow my expression had been about Dylan, which of course it hadn’t. But it was like the newspaper somehow made it true. Or that he would think it had been about him. Or his parents would. Or Caroline. Or Hannah. That anyone would believe this made me cringe. I hated this, and I hated myself in that moment. How could I have been so careless? How could I have let my guard down?

The thing in HELLO! magazine had been both of our faults, but this fell on me. Then again, this wasn’t my fault. How was I supposed to know that I couldn’t even flinch or a photographer would catch it? This whole thing felt like a glaring sign that I wasn’t good at this, that I didn’t know what I was doing.

I felt Dylan’s quiet presence behind me as I stood there, staring at the sandwich board, willing its contents to change. I knew what my best friend, Daphne, would say if she were here and not back in New York: This would pass. That it felt bad now but in a few days no one would be thinking about it. That these things simply happen, and they are not the end of the world. Intellectually, I knew that was all true. But it was the sudden lack of control over how I was perceived in the world and the fact this affected more than just me that had me spinning, wishing I could turn back time. The panic was making my chest tight, making it hard to breathe. He wrapped his arms around me, holding me against his body.

“It’s all right,” he said quietly.

I just shook my head, horrified, and threw his arms off of me. I was both paralyzed and agitated. I wanted to be comforted and to crawl out of my own skin. I was furious, with no one but myself. How couldn’t he be too? “It’s not all right! What if people think it’s true? Look what I’ve done!” I said, dejected, pointing to the sign.

“What they’ve done—” Dylan started, trying to interrupt me.

“No. I shouldn’t have been so careless. I made such a rookie mistake, letting something as silly as discomfort show on my face, when I knew full well that photographers were there.” A woman passing turned her head, and I immediately pulled myself together, tried to put on a blank expression, and started walking back towards my house. Game face: on.

But Dylan grabbed me by both arms, halting me, and pulled me back into his chest. We were off to the side, under the awning of a coffee shop. I felt a single tear escape from my eyes, as though simply being held firmly by him had allowed me to release some of the panic.

“Listen to me, damsel.” Dylan spoke quietly and calmly into my ear from behind. “The photographers at that party had been vetted. Someone’s head will roll for selling this photo—I promise you that. This isn’t your fault. This takes practice. You were stunning that night, lovely, and this asshole got one off moment.” He turned me around towards him, and wrapping his large hand around the base of my head and arching my lips to his, he kissed me. He kissed me with possession and fervor. He kissed me to reassure me that he knew what the paper said was crap, that there wasn’t an ounce of trouble in DyLy land. He kissed me to calm me down and bring me back to us, to our safe bubble.

But the problem was that with every day that bubble felt smaller and smaller, and the aggressive world outside seemed to be pushing against its walls. And I didn’t know how to make it stop.