Page 97 of The Dandelion Princess
I break free and take a deep, shuddering breath. It’s time to move along. I see my future unfolding before me. It belongs to Entirely Reasonable Spreadsheet Guy who doesn’t expect a grand passion—or, if that’s too heartbreaking, I could lean into being the cool aunt forever.
Why can’t it be Marc?
Freja and I aren’t anything alike. She is tall and I am short. She is self-contained and I am a trash panda. She likes fashion and I like gaming. But it seems that we both love deeply and irrevocably. She got her happy ending with Oskar, but I love Marc van Heyden and he considers us to be—first and foremost—friends. Everything else can be traded away.
“I have to go,” he says, planting his feet firmly on the ground. “We’ll talk about it later.”
I reach for the tail of his shirt, worked free from his waistband, and move to tuck it in. He jerks back, finishing the job. I stare at my hand, suspended in midair, then let it fall. See? I can’t do this halfway. I need all of him or nothing.
“There’s one good thing about finally knowing what’s going to happen with Freja,” I say.
“What’s that?” he asks, straightening his tie.
“We don’t need this arrangement anymore.”
30
She Cheats
MARC
My hand freezes on the knot of my tie. “Excuse me?”
Though the tip of her nose is still red, Ella smiles. “We met our goals,” she says, sounding like aflamenquarterly report. “You said that the aim was to provide ourselves with a much-needed outlet for,” she waves her hand dismissively, “rampaging hormones while we handled various dramas. But Alix’s wedding is less than three weeks away. Most of the organization for the BLUSH concert is done. Now that Freja dropped the hammer on the succession crisis, I don’t need to worry about what might happen anymore. It’s happened and—”
“The fallout is going to be significant,” I counter.
Ella walks around the room, fluffing pillows, straightening the coffee table, and erasing any signs that I was here. “I told you my plan for that.”
“The spreadsheet.” Theflamenspreadsheet. The cursed spreadsheet.
She nods. “It’s only fair to give it a look. Maybe,” she kicks a stuffed raccoon out from under the bed, “I can find an undiscovered treasure. Someone who checks all of Mama’s boxes and all of mine, doesn’t have any pending paternity suits, and still has his original hairline.”
I run my hand through thick lustrous hair, one of my best features, but Ella isn’t hinting that I’m one of her options. I don’t even occur to her. “You’d really marry someone you were matched with?”
She scoops her ponytail over her shoulder. I kissed her there. “No one ever guessed Freja would run off with a commoner or that Alma would choose an American.” Her eyes dance. “Surprises abound.”
“Why stop now?” I ask. I am not cool. I don’t carefully calculate my choices. I sound desperate. “We’re getting along pretty well with the current arrangement.” A lie. Every day I have to hold myself back. Every day it gets worse. I’ve been like a wolf in a trap, chewing at my leg. “I’m getting mountains of work done.” That much is true.
Her nose wrinkles in thought. “You’re easy to kiss,” she says, doling out the compliment like the Order of the Dragonslayer, pinning it to my chest. Impersonal. Rigid. “But what this…incident on the couch taught me is that you’re too important to play around with. Who else would I have cried all over? No one. We are such good friends, and I had a lot of fun,” she assures me, not meeting my desperate gaze, “but we both know that doing damage to our friendship is a real possibility. I can’t take that risk anymore.”
Her words whistle through the air and sink into my heart like arrows. Thunk, thunk, thunk. In another moment I’ll drop to my knees and bleed out.
She stows a pile of things in a cabinet. “It was nice—”
Nice? I sniff like a wild bull elk. This wasnice?
“—but things have changed. The way you are with Lindenholm—” She lifts a shoulder. “You never run away from responsibility. And I—it was good for me to see what that means, up close. Is that the lesson you were trying to teach me all this time?” she asks.
She thinks I had control? That I was doing anything more than holding on to her because I had to? With every word, she turns me to stone.
“When everything was happening today, I had to think about what sacrifices I was willing to make to protect what I love. The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became that I have to choose my sisters, Noah, my dumb parents, every great aunt that visits for Christmas—even the scandalous cousins. Allyoudo is protect what you love. You involve yourself. You fight for it. I don’t know if I would have seen my duty without you showing it to me.”
Well, I am an idiot.
“I know I’m going to be frustrated,” she concedes. “I’m going to complain like there’s a shortage of whiners and I’m filling the deficit. But my place is here, and since I’m going to stay, I have to start building my life around things that matter.”
She knows how to deliver a punch.
