by May, Linnea
She looks at me, her eyes widening with disbelief. “What?”
“I can’t go through with it,” I say. “I thought I could. I thought I had to. But I can’t.”
She furls her eyebrows, wiping away another tear before she sniffs again, trying to regain composure. It hurts to see her like this, I just want to make it stop. I’ve never felt like this when I was confronted with a crying woman. Usually, they’d just annoy the hell out of me and I’d try everything to get away from them.
Elodie just proves once again that she’s different. She didn’t use her tears to get her way, but instead tried to hide them from me and everybody else, suffering in hiding, too proud and too scared to let anyone see how much this is hurting her.
How much I’m hurting her.
“But…but your family,” she whispers. “You… can’t.”
“I’m a grown man, Elodie,” I say. “I’ll find a way. It’ll work out, it has to, because I can’t marry Gloria. It’s not worth this.”
“Bu –”
She’s interrupted by the sound of fast clicking high heels coming from down the hallway and stops speaking as I look around the pillar to see Gloria approaching us in wide and angry steps.
“What the hell, Kingston!” she yells, pointing at me. “You and your little slut –“
“Hey!” I interrupt her, my voice so pervasive that both she and Elodie wince in shock. “Watch your tongue for once, Gloria!”
Gloria comes to a halt right next to us and I instinctively move myself in front of Elodie to protect her from that witch’s fury. But Elodie wouldn’t be herself if she let that happen. She touches my arm as she steps forward to stand her ground.
Gloria glares at her just for a second before she turns back to me.
“What the hell were you thinking,” she hisses at me. “How could you not let me in on this!”
Both, Elodie and I gasp in surprise, exchanging a quick look before I address Gloria.
“What?” I ask, frowning at her. “Let you in on what?”
“This!” she says, pointing back and forth between Elodie and me. “If you’re that serious with your little ch –”
I raise my eyebrow as a warning and Gloria pauses, clearing her throat before she continues to speak.
“Why didn’t you tell me that you’d be staging this little play?” she asks. “And that you were planning to call the wedding off?”
“We didn’t stage anything,” I tell her. “And I didn’t plan to call anything off.”
I pause and look at Elodie. “Until now.”
Gloria huffs. “You should’ve told me, Kingston. After all we’ve been through together, this is just not fair.”
“Told you what?” I bark at her.
“That you’re serious with her,” Gloria says, waving at Elodie.
“The last time we talked you threatened to fire Elodie if I don’t stop this!” I remind her.
“What?” Elodie interjects, looking back and forth between Gloria and me.
“Oh, whatever,” Gloria says, rolling her eyes. “I just didn’t want you have to have… this.”
Gloria pauses with an unusual expression of insecurity on her face.
“I didn’t like the idea of you having something that I can’t have,” she finally admits. “When I threatened you… that was before –”
“You got serious with Geoffrey Goldilocks?” I ask her. “Or before he got serious with you?”
Even under all the heavy layers of makeup, I can tell that Gloria is blushing. She opens her mouth in an attempt to say something, but no words come out. Instead, she just adds more huffing noises, her eyes scanning the hall as if she could find an answer there.
“It’s true, isn’t it?” I ask her. “I’m not the only one who fell in love with someone else.”
“What?” Elodie breathes next to me.
Fuck. Did I really just say that?
Gloria raises one of her eyebrows, casting me a mischievous smirk.
I try to ignore her and turn to Elodie, who’s staring up at me, her eye makeup is smeared from crying and her hair is a mess, strands of it sticking to the dried-up tears on her cheeks. Her lower lip is trembling, and so are her talented hands.
“You… love me?” she asks with a voice so low that it’s barely audible.
I don’t know. I don’t fucking know what it feels like to love someone. Why the hell did I just say that?
Why does my tongue feel so dry? Is the building spinning? I feel dizzy. Did they put something in our drinks?
“I-I, well, I mean it’s –“
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Kingston,” Gloria hisses next to me. “Be a man for once.”
“Shut up!” I bark at her. “This is not… why are you even here?”
Now, both of them are looking at me as if I’ve lost my mind.
Gloria rolls her eyes at me again.
“We don’t have time for this. We have to tell these people something,” she says, gesturing behind herself to the hallway. “They’re waiting for an explanation, and I’m not going back in there by myself.”
She has a point. We will have to explain this together. But explain what?
“What do you want to tell them?” I ask her.
Gloria purses her lips and cocks her head to the side.
“That the wedding is off,” she says as if it’s the most apparent thing to say. “What else?”
“So, I was right,” I assume. “You want the wedding off?”
She shrugs. “You don’t?”
I nod hesitantly. This seems almost too easy, even though I know it won’t be, even if Gloria is as willing to go along as she appears to be right now.
“What will you tell your parents?” I ask her. “This deal was for your sake, too.”
“You see, Kingston,” Gloria says, going to back to the snarky tone that I’m used to. “It’s a lot easier for me because I can replace you. Geoffrey is just as good a match as you are, and he’d be willing to take your place. We’ve already talked about it.”
I furl my eyebrows at her. “You can’t be serious.”
“Surprised?” she asks, arching her eyebrows provocatively. “To be honest, if you guys hadn’t performed this little scene in front of everybody, we probably would have.”
She pauses and throws an annoyed look at Elodie.
“It just bugs me that you went first,” she says. “Have you never thought about how this will make me look?”
Elodie frowns at her, but doesn’t say a word.
“Now I look like the poor, lost woman who got cheated on right before her wedding, and –”
I can’t help but laugh at her words, causing Gloria to stop mid-sentence. She throws me a dark look.
“Anyone who knows you will know that that’s far from the truth,” I say. “Don’t worry, I’ll handle this.”
Chapter XXXII
Elodie
Kingston told me that it would be okay for me not to head back into the engagement party, but I objected. I needed to face the mess that I had created. Also, there was a part of me that still couldn’t believe what had just happened. I’d been hoping for a crazy outburst, tears, people yelling and calling off the wedding in a dramatic scene. And then it happened… just not in the way I expected.
There will always be that nagging question inside of me, what would have happened if I hadn’t run out of the ballroom during Kingston’s speech. Would Gloria really have done what she said she’d do? She was to speak right after Kingston. Was that the moment she was waiting for to tell people that she no longer wanted to marry him?
She blamed me for making her look bad, but I can’t feel too bad about it. Especially not after the scene she displayed once we walked back into the ballroom, all eyes instantly turning in our direction, followed by exasperated gasps and exclamations when Kingston opened his arms as if he was welcoming the entire room and announcing that he and Gloria had just decided to cancel their wedding plans. I believe Gloria’s mother e
ven fainted.
The awkward tension that spread through the room was only worsened by the yelling fathers, who jumped up from their seats and started accusing each other of having the worst and most unreliable offspring ever.
No one ever looked at me, no one asked about the connection between me leaving the room, and Gloria and Kingston deciding to call off their wedding.
No one but Mrs. Abrams.
I caught her eyes from far across the room, looking at me and… smiling. She was smiling. I was too puzzled to react in any way and just averted my eyes, putting a little distance between me and Kingston, just to make sure that there were no assumptions when we weren’t ready to be open about whatever we had become now.
This was almost a week ago. Kingston and I haven’t seen each other since that day, but we have talked a lot. We’ve texted and talked on the phone about everything - except one thing. I couldn’t bring myself to confront him about that one thing he said while he was yelling at Gloria.
That thing about being in love with someone else, with me. I’m too afraid to ask him about that one.
Also, I was as busy as always because I couldn’t afford to put my life on hold just because of that unexpected development at the engagement party.
Meanwhile, Kingston tried his best to deal with the fury of his father. I’m glad I wasn’t involved in those fights, but from what he told me, it must have been awful. His father won’t back off from his position, and if anything, it has only gotten worse now that Kingston and Gloria made “such fools of themselves and their families”, as he called it. I feel terrible for causing him all this trouble, even though I know that marrying Gloria wouldn’t have made him happy. But at least it would’ve enabled him to gain the respect he needs from his father to be able to become his successor.
I’m not a good match. I know I can’t replace a Gloria Waldorf in that regard. I have no money, no big family name, no connections, no esteem.
It’s no surprise that Kingston hasn’t mentioned me in front of his parents. He told me that he no longer wants us to be a secret, but there’s a time and place to tell his parents, and that time hasn’t come yet.
He asked to see me on my next free afternoon, which is today. It feels like we’re going on our first real date, and in a way, we are. I’m nervous and took forever to doll myself up, watched and mocked by Kim, who now knows about me and Kingston. I reckoned that it would only be a matter of time before Benjamin started spreading nasty rumors about me being the reason for the cancelation of the Abrams-Waldorf wedding, so I figured I should be one step ahead of him, even though he doesn’t seem to have told anyone at this point.
I’ve been at Kingston’s beautiful penthouse home so many times before, but today everything seems new and special. It’s already dark by the time we walk inside and the place is bathed in dim and warm lights, with a candlelight dinner waiting for us on the dining table close to the open kitchen.
“You cooked?” I ask, half jokingly.
“You sound surprised,” he says, while helping me out of my coat. “What makes you think I can’t cook?”
“I didn’t say that. It just… surprises me.”
He chuckles and puts my coat away, gesturing for me to take a seat.
“Well, you can calm down,” he says, placing a kiss on my neck before he moves the chair for me to sit down. “I just ordered us some sushi.”
I sit down, watching as he walks around the table, preparing two glasses of champagne and giving me one of them before he sits down himself, opposite me.
He’s looking dashingly handsome tonight, all dressed up in a black suit with a silver tie, his hair gelled to the side and his dark eyes reflecting an ease that I haven’t seen on him before.
“I just realized I’ve never properly fed you when you were here,” he says, raising his glass to me. “It’s time for that to change.”
We clink glasses and I can’t help but feel so utterly awkward about all of this. He makes my heart flutter, and it only seems to have gotten worse since the first time we hooked up.
“Well, thank you,” I say, helping myself to the first of many sushi rolls that are laid out on the table for us. “This is delicious!”
He smiles at me, and it’s the cutest expression I could imagine. He has never looked at me like this, like a young boy on his first date, shy but yet confident. I know he’s hungry for me, and the need is reciprocal. It’s been too long since I’ve felt his strong and skillful hands on me.
“Are you doing okay?” he asks. “I hope your week has been better than mine.”
I hesitate, my gaze darkening for a moment as I’m reminded of all the trouble he had to go through, while I haven’t really faced any repercussions so far.
“You know my life has been less affected by this,” I say. “I’ve had classes, working at the coffee place, practice. All the usual, except for the lack of practicing hours at the Abrams residence.”
He chuckles. “Yeah, Wally and my mother both miss you.”
“Your mother?” I ask. “But she doesn’t know that-?”
“I think she has known for a while,” he says, interrupting me. “She hasn’t said anything to that effect, but she doesn’t have to. The fact alone that she’s defending me in front of my father is telltale enough.”
He pauses to indulge on another maki roll before he continues.
“But she’s mentioned you,” he adds. “A lot. Saying how much she misses your music, and how she’s concerned about you, now that you’ve lost a potential appointment now that there’s no wedding.”
I let out an awkward laugh. “She’s worried about me?”
He nods. “I wouldn’t say worried, but interested. As am I.”
He puts his chopsticks aside and leans back in his chair, taking another sip from his champagne.
“Tell me,” he says. “What is it you want to do after you’re done with Juilliard? You’re graduating soon, aren’t you?”
I’m a bit taken aback at his interest in my career, and I can feel how my mind is turning to defense mode right away. Every time I’ve been asked that question before, it was by someone who objected to my interest in a musical career, with my father leading the way. There is a reason why I have barely spoken to him in recent years, as he made it very clear that he’d be done with me if I chose to follow a fruitless path and will no longer be his obligation.
Of course, my teachers and mentors at Juilliard were different. But while their advice was more supportive, they also had to act as the voice of reason, stopping me every time I dared to dream of a freelance career as a solo pianist. It can’t be done, at least not for people like me who have no financial support or a valuable network of wealthy clients.
“Well, it’s really not that easy,” I tell him. “It’s hard to make it as an artist. I could play in an orchestra, or become a teacher myself, or-”
“I’m asking what it is you want,” he insists. “Not what you could do. What do you want to do, Elodie?”
I look at him, unsure whether I dare to be honest. No one has ever asked me that, not like this.
“I want to be a solo pianist,” I say blatantly. “I want to be a freelancer, focusing on classical arrangements for high-end events and performances at private and public events.”
Kingston nods. “So, events like the wedding that never happened?”
I smirk at him. “I’d prefer to play for happy couples, but yes, events like that. Or fundraisers, birthdays, anniversaries. You know, the kind that keeps families like yours busy.”
Kingston eats another sushi roll and nods.
“Yeah, I’m familiar with the kind,” he says. “I just never liked them. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to be a part of them if they don’t have to.”
I smile and take another sip of the heavenly champagne he opened up for us. I will never get used to delicacies like this, and I’m glad about that. My poor upbringing and the struggles of my years at Juilliard may have been tough, but all of it
made me the person I am today. A person who truly enjoys the luxuries a life with a man like Kingston offers.
“You and I grew up very differently,” I remind him. “But I see where you’re coming from. I don’t know if I would enjoy them as much as a guest. But it’s different when I get to play my music. As a musician, I help to create that atmosphere people want for their celebrations. Like a painter who can draw a world that only exists in his head, or a writer who brings a story to life with his words - a musician provides that final touch that makes an occasion special.”
I pause, trying to find the right words to conclude my stream of thought.
“Artists are always expressive in nature, even when they like to hide behind their instrument, like a pianist does,” I say. “While I do mostly play for myself, I need the satisfaction of having people listen to me. I want to share the music I love. Being able to do that… I consider that a privilege.”
Kingston raises his eyebrows as he reflects on my words.
“I’m not an artist, so I’ve never looked at it this way,” he admits. “But I like it. Your words, your passion, it’s…”
He hesitates, looking at me with a mischievous smile.
“Beautiful,” he finishes his sentence. “Honestly, it makes me want to fuck you.”
I blush and avert my eyes from him as I giggle like a shy school girl.
“What a romantic you are, Mr. Abrams.”
His eyes flicker with a dark promise.
“Come here,” he orders - and I get up from my chair and obey his command.
Chapter XXXIII
Kingston
Elodie’s eyes reflect the flames of the candles as she comes closer to me in cautious and slow steps. As always, she’s completely calm on the outside while I know her insides are in turmoil. It’s only her heaving chest that belies the excitement that my sudden change in demeanor causes for her.
She comes to a halt right next to my chair and I turn around, remaining seated while placing my hands on her behind and pulling her closer, my legs parting to give her room. She’s wearing another dress I bought for her, a dark and very short cocktail dress with a laced hem. My hands travel across the curves of her ass, moving along the back side of her upper thighs until I reach the hem of her dress, pausing for a moment before my fingers move underneath the fabric. My intention was to pull down the pantyhose she’s wearing underneath, but when my fingertips find the bare skin of her thighs, I realize that she’s wearing stockings tonight.
