A Nordic King(95)

“I do trust you!” she yells, pleads. “I do. I was going to tell you.”

“When? When?” I throw my arms out. “One day? Is this why you don’t want to tell the girls, is this why you didn’t want us to become anything?”

“I want us to become something!” she yells. “But, damn it, Aksel. You’ve got your head in the clouds.”

In the clouds? “Is that what you think? That the fact that I want babies with you, that I want to tell my girls, the world about you, the fact that I want to marry you and make you my queen, you think that means I have my head in the clouds?”

Suddenly she falls silent, her mouth clamped shut, eyes wide as she stares at me. “You…you want to marry me?” she whispers.

I fight the urge to roll my eyes. “Yes. I figured that was apparent when I asked you to be the mother of my children.”

“You didn’t propose…”

“Propose?” I cry out. “How could I propose when I can’t even get you to admit to the world we’re together. If I got down on one knee here and asked you to be my wife, would you have said yes?”

She grows silent again. I suppose most proposals don’t involve a lot of yelling. I wasn’t even planning on it while we were here, though I did have a ring picked out just in case.

The more she doesn’t say anything though, the more I hope she never does.

I’m not sure if I could take it.

I’m not sure if—

“I wouldn’t have said yes,” she says quietly. “I’m sorry.”

And that’s when the walls collapse in on me.

I can’t even breathe. There’s concrete in my chest. “What?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t think we can be together. Not now, not after this. Not ever.”

This pain is brutal. Sharp, swift, slicing me up from gut to mouth. I’m bleeding heartache right here. I lean against the dresser behind me, trying to hold on.

“Why?” I manage to say, my voice breaking, everything breaking.

I am not a man anymore, I am just shell.

A fragile, breakable shell.

“Why?” she repeats and that’s when I see the tears stream down her face. “Because we can never work. This just proves it.”

“But we work better than anything!”

“When it’s just the two of us,” she cries out softly. “But it’s not just the two of us. You’re a king and you have a country and more importantly, your daughters. I can’t even stay your nanny after this. I’m a criminal in everyone’s eyes. Your daughters are going to be hurt by this and if I stay, they’ll be hurt even more. I love you to death, Aksel, but I won’t jeopardize them in order to be with you. And you know that’s the right thing to do. It’s the only thing to do.”

She’s talking bullshit. I know why she’s saying it but she’s already going into it ready to give up, ready to roll over. That’s not how I do things.

“Listen,” I tell her, trying to keep my voice from rising. “I love you. I love my daughters. And you don’t get to tell me how I feel about anything, nor do you get to tell me what’s important and what’s not. I’m aware that I am a fucking king and I have a country. But I make the calls in my life, no one else.”

I lean over and grab her by the shoulders, forcing her to look me in the eyes. “The girls will understand,” I tell her. “They don’t read the tabloids anyway, not at their age, but we can certainly explain to them in our own words what happened to you. That’s what we should be doing at this stage of their lives anyway. We should be giving them the heads up about things that might get printed.”

“What about everyone else?”

“Everyone else? Maja? She’s my aunt and she’s your friend. I doubt your past has any role in her life or the way she thinks about you. Same goes for Stella. The people closest to me aren’t the types to be easily swayed. They’re human. They get it. They’ve all made mistakes.”

“But the people.”

“The people are the people and they can think what they want. I’ll issue a statement, we both will, and if they want to go on with it then they can. Look, the people, the press, they all ran with a million stories about me, about Helena, about my parents and about their parents. That’s the price you pay being a royal. But I’m not going to let you go and walk out of my fucking life just so they won’t say anything bad about us. Fuck it. Fuck them.”

“I’ll just feel so guilty.”

“And I feel guilty too. About so many things. I have been drowning in my guilt over Helena for the last two years and I’ve felt like I didn’t deserve love and I certainly didn’t deserve you. But you, you had a way of making me better. Your love, your kindness, your devotion helped heal me and I couldn’t have done that on my own.” I pause, studying her face, hoping I’m getting through to her. “We’re all just broken children covering our guilt with adult clothing. We make peace with our guilt or we don’t but either way, we keep moving on. The only question is, will you move on with me?”

She averts her eyes, a single tear rolling down her cheek and in that one tear I feel my heart going with it. There’s nothing in my chest but a hollow and empty space.