“Are you worried?” I blurt suddenly.
Her head turns slowly until she’s facing me. “About what?”
“About me losing the duel. About you not getting your tiara back.”
She smiles weakly and places a hand lightly on my upper arm. I resist the urge to shrug off that touch, even though it’s making my skin crawl. Because her touch is something I don’t think I could refuse.
“You’re not going to lose,” she states. “I believe in you.”
“The tiara is very valuable.” It’s not a question, but I have been wondering its worth for a while. Its personal worth.
She nods.
“Is it made of diamonds and precious gems?”
“Not diamonds, no. It does have monetary value, but that’s not why it’s important to me. It’s more about sentimental value.”
“What’s the sentimental value, then?”
She licks her lips and looks at me for a long time. In fact, the silence stretches out so long that I think she’s not going to answer.
After a long sigh, she clears her throat and speaks. “I’ve never talked about this to anyone outside my own family, so it’s kind of hard to put into words. It’s so rooted in emotion that I’m not sure you’ll understand.”
“I’m not a robot, Jenna. I have emotions.”
She smiles. “I know you do.” She winds a long strand of her bright angel hair around her index finger, then tucks it behind her ear. I’m transfixed by the gesture. Not only do I want to draw and paint that ear, I also want to feel that soft lobe in my mouth and between my teeth again.
“It’s hard for me just…” She shakes her head and sniffs. “When I was little, I didn’t want to come to the US. I told you that. It was scary, and my parents weren’t coming with me. I also told you the story about my mom saying I’d live next to Mickey Mouse, but that isn’t the real reason I agreed to leave.”
I frown. “It isn’t?”
“I mean, that actually happened, but what truly convinced me was my dad. He sat me down and made up this crazy story about how I was a secret princess and the tiara was my crown. It’s true that tiara had been passed down in my family for a long time. It had been given to my grandma, who gave it to her only child, my father. My dad gave it to me on that day—the last day I ever saw him. He said he wanted me to be safe, so I had to hide in another country for a while and grow and learn and become educated so that I could come back and become the queen someday.”
Now there are tears trailing out of the corners of her eyes, but she’s laughing at the same time. I’m completely confused by this. Is she happy or sad? Or maybe both?
“You know how long I believed that story?” She hunched in her seat. “Far longer than I care to admit without dying from embarrassment.”
“It makes sense.” I nodded. “When we are little, we especially want to believe everything our parents tell us.”
I’m trying to picture the events as she recounts them to me. I imagine her father, a man in his thirties, perhaps as blond as she is, or maybe dark-haired with a strong jaw. He’s stroking her beautiful angel hair and telling her she’ll be a queen someday, but his face is serious and he doesn’t want her to know that he’s afraid.
And suddenly I’m even sadder.
“The tiara was his last gift to you?”
She looks down at her hands, still folded in her lap. “I don’t think of it exactly like that, but yes, that is true.”
“I assumed it was valuable to you, but I had no idea it had that kind of personal value. I don’t understand something though.”
“What’s that?”
“If it means so much to you, why did you put it up for the loan?”
Her mouth thins. “It was a last resort. I did it for Maja, my sister. She wanted to get married, but her fiancé’s family wouldn’t allow it until the bride’s family could pay for the wedding. She never asked for the money, but she also doesn’t know what I had to do in order to get it. I’m never going to tell her. She is expecting me to bring the tiara with me to Bosnia so that she can wear it on her wedding day.”
“Why didn’t you tell her?”
She shrugs and leans forward, rubbing her hands over her face. “Why do you ask so many questions?”
“I’m sorry. I guess sometimes I just don’t understand things that are easy for others.”
She turns to me. “All this time you thought it was just some old, valuable piece of jewelry with no feelings attached to it. Yet you vowed to get it back for me without knowing why I did it or why it was important to me.”
I have no idea what to say, so I don’t answer her. It wasn’t a question anyway.
“These past few weeks of training, of working with me…” She trailed off and shook her head.
I know she thinks these were unpleasant sacrifices for me, but I’d hardly call spending time with her a punishment.
She shakes her head. “You must have thought I was so shallow and frivolous to have just hocked it like that.”
“It didn’t matter what your reasons were, Jenna. What mattered to me was that you wanted it back and it was important to you. I didn’t need to know why.”
A look crosses her face—I can’t tell what it means, but she’s biting her pretty pink lip with her white teeth. “You’re sweet.”
“You say that a lot.”
She smiles. “Because it’s true.”
“It might be true, but I do have a very good memory. Repetition isn’t necessary.”
She laughs. It’s that beautiful, musical sound I love. “So what if I’m saying it to remind myself?”
Now I’m really confused. “You have to remind yourself that I’m sweet?”
She throws her head back, laughing, and I can’t take my eyes off that long stretch of pale neck that I want to taste again.
“I guess I do.” She turns to me again and leans forward, kissing me on the cheek. I turn my head to capture her lips with mine.
At first her kiss is unsure, tentative. Like she’s not sure if she wants to pull away or not. Before she can, I bring my hands up to hold her head to mine.
But she’s resisting by keeping her mouth closed, and I get this weird idea in my head that if I can just get her to open up—open to me—that I can win her over and she’ll be mine.