The Prince
“So…” Nora came out onto the dock and stood at his side. “Feeding the catfish?”
He didn’t look at her when he nodded. “Yup. Watch this.”
He picked up a metal scoop of what looked like dog food and tossed it across the pond.
“Good arm,” Nora said. The dog food had arced high in the air and now floated on the surface thirty feet out from the dock.
“That’s not the cool part. This is.”
“What is—oh, my God, what was that?” Nora heard a loud splash and saw the water start to churn.
“The catfish.” Wesley smiled. “Damn city girl.”
She stuck her tongue out at him. “That’s so…holy crap, there’s millions of them.”
The water began to writhe with what seemed like hundreds of long brown bodies flipping and flopping and turning in the water.
“Only about a hundred, I think.” Wesley threw another scoop of food across the water. “Can’t remember how many they counted last time. They sleep on the bottom all day, come up at night. Especially if you feed them. We’ve got a couple albino ones in there. You see a gray one anywhere?”
“No mini Moby Dicks.” Nora dropped to her hands and knees at the edge of the dock and studied the water. Long scaly whiskers peeked out of it, far cuter and less intimidating than shark fins. “Wes, they’re so cool. Can I have one?”
She reached out and touched the back of one of the writhing catfish. It felt warm and clammy against her finger. Squealing as it splashed her, Nora jumped back up to her feet.
“You can have them all.”
“Thank you. I’ll just keep them in the pond for now.”
“Good plan.”
Wesley sat the metal scoop back down, crossed his arms over his chest and looked up into the night. Nora followed his gaze. They didn’t seem to be staring at the moon or even the stars, but the few dark places in between.
The fish ate their fill and the water went still once more. Nora found herself holding her breath and not quite knowing why.
Wesley inhaled and exhaled deeply and slowly.
“Nora…I should hate you. You know that, right?”
She glanced at him and nodded. Turning her eyes up to the sky, she found one bright star and studied it. “Yes. I know.”
“You electrocuted people. I’m trying to wrap my mind around that.”
“Don’t try. There’s no need to. It’s just part of the job. Some people like being flogged. Other people like being whipped. Some people like having electrical currents run through their bodies. Everybody has their kinks.”
“I don’t.”
“Not being kinky is a kink in itself.”
“Thanks for not telling me again how vanilla I am.”
“Wesley…why am I here?”
“We’re feeding the catfish. That’s why you’re here.”
“You know what I mean.”
He shook his head. “If you don’t know why you’re here, then I certainly can’t tell you.”
Nora laughed awkwardly. She never knew how to handle Wesley when he got like this—so distant that two feet between them seemed like two miles.
“It’s nice here. Beautiful. I like the gazebo.”
“My parents got married in there.” Wesley turned and looked at it. “Right under that arch. All the guests lined up on the dock like some kind of honor guard. Wedding of the year, they said. They said I’d get married out here, too.”
Wesley walked to the arched entryway of the white gazebo and stared down the long dock. “I used to come out here to get away from everything. It was a nice safe place to think about you. Or try not to think about you, really.”
“I thought about you every day we were apart,” Nora confessed. “Every single day.”
“Me, too. No matter how hard I tried not to. I’d come here and stand and look at the stars. And when I turned around I’d see you walking down the deck toward me.”
“I did that tonight.”
“Not the way I dreamed of.” He smiled shyly. “In my dreams…you were in a wedding dress.”
Nora flinched, but only on the inside. “I think I’d look a little silly in a big white wedding dress.”
“Not in my dreams. In my dreams…you looked beautiful.”
She took a step closer to him, wanting to touch him, but suddenly afraid to.
“Wes, you shouldn’t love me this much. I’m a lot of things, but good for you is not one of them. I don’t know why I’m here other than I can’t be anywhere else right now. I couldn’t leave if I tried.”
“Not yet, anyway. But you will leave again, won’t you?”
Nora exhaled heavily. “Someday you’ll learn not to ask questions you don’t want the answer to.”
“No reason not to ask the questions. You can’t hurt me anymore, Nora. Not more than you already have. You broke me.”
“I never meant to hurt you. I was trying to save you.”
“Save me? From what?”
“Me. My life. My world.”
“I didn’t need saving. I just needed you. I needed our life together in our house. That was our house, you know. You bought it—I know that. But it was ours.”
A lump swelled in Nora’s throat and she had to swallow twice to get rid of it.
“I could have bought your house from you with the money I had in my checking account,” Wesley continued. “That’s pocket change in the Railey family. You don’t know this, you probably didn’t even notice, but every now and then, when you’d send in your mortgage payment to the bank…I’d take the check and tear it up. And I’d make the payment myself, just because I could. So yeah, it was our house.”