Tiffany Reisz - The Queen

“You told me once what would have happened if you’d seen me first. But I never told you what would have happened if I’d seen you first,” she said.

“What would have happened?”

She met his eyes. “I would have fallen in love with you. I still remember that night I first saw you. The night of the wedding at Sacred Heart. I thought I’d never meet a man who tempted me like Søren did. And then you waltzed in whistling and wearing those boots and your bad attitude and you threatened to lose your watch in me. The reason I didn’t fall in love with you that night was because I’d already given my whole heart to him. But if I’d seen you first...and wasn’t in love with him, I would have loved you.”

“Yes,” he said. “I believe that. And I would have fallen in love with you.”

“Do you think that’s what was meant to happen? You and me in love?” Nora asked. “Søren came to see you because he needed your help to get me out of jail. But if I’d stolen your car...”

“I might never have seen Søren again,” Kingsley said. “I was in a bad place when he showed up here in my music room asking me to help him help you. And he helped me pull myself together. But if I’d seen you first in that police station, fifteen, scared, alone...I would have pulled myself together to take care of you.”

She’d seen the way Kingsley treated his assistant, Calliope. He protected her, adored her, watched over her... He would have done the same for her had she moved in with him at age sixteen. She would have, too. A father in jail, a mother who was a religious fanatic...easy enough to get her legally emancipated. By age eighteen she would have been Kingsley’s second-in-command. His second, his partner in crime, his dominant, his submissive, his lover, his everything. Kingsley had never fallen in love with her because she was always Søren’s. But with Søren out of the picture...

“And it all happened because my piece-of-shit father got caught stealing a hundred bucks’ worth of spare parts from a junkyard. Something he’d done a thousand times before. One choice, one mistake, one tiny twist of fate...”

“Chills the blood to think of it, doesn’t it?” Kingsley asked, and she could see it did trouble him to realize how tangled was the thread that tied their three lives together.

“If he’d never met me, he would never have broken his vows. What if that’s how it should have been?”

“Is that what you wish had happened?” Kingsley asked. “Do you wish we’d seen each other first?”

“All I know is that looking back I can see where the road forks. But I also see that if I’d ended up on the other path, with you...I still would have found my way to this moment. I’m saying this feels like destiny, like both paths would have brought me here, like every path would have brought me here. But I could have been here so much sooner if he...”

Her voice trailed off. Anger choked her throat, strangling her words. Her hands clenched and unclenched. She wanted to hit someone, something. Set fires, burn the old world down and rise up from the ashes. If Søren were here right now she would teach him a new pain...

Nora saw the flogger in Kingsley’s hand. She took it from him and walked to the towel still pinned on the wall.

“Søren knew I was a switch the whole time, and he never said a fucking thing to me about it. If I’d never met him, I would have been doing this since I was sixteen.”

With all her anger and sorrow and bitterness, she threw the flogger with a fearsome snap.

The towel went sailing to the floor. It sat limp and defeated at her feet. She wished it was Søren’s heart.

Nora turned to face him.

“Well, look at that,” Nora said, smiling at Kingsley.

“By George, I think she’s got it.”

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