Make Me Beg, Daddy

Chapter 37

I come out. This time, I turn without being told.

“Better neckline,” Kane says.

“Thank you.”

“And then somebody hung a curtain over your hips.”

Ekaterina takes hold of the fabric at my left hip and pulls it back so it lies flat against me. Even I can see the difference in the mirror across the room. Then she lets go and it puffs out again.

“You see,” she says.

Kane sits forward. “It’s designed by a coward. Someone looked at a woman shaped like her and decided the answer was to build a room around her and let her hide inside it. Take it off.”

I frown. “You know, most people just say, ‘Not my favorite.’“

He just points at the curtain. “Next, Lilah.”

The third one takes longer. It’s black and structured, with a sheer panel across the middle that I can feel gripping me like a hand. As the zipper goes up, I have to suck in and get myself as tall as possible to make it work.

I look at myself in the little mirror. Not half-bad, actually. My waist is narrower. My stomach looks flatter. Comfortable is the wrong word for it, but so is bad.

“Okay,” I announce through the curtain. “I think this one’s good.”

“Come out.”

I emerge—and instantly, Kane’s face curdles.

“Take it off.”

“Are you kidding?” I look down at myself. “This one’s the best one. This one actually… It holds everything in.”

“Yes.” He stands up, his head almost scraping the low, pressed tin ceiling. “That’s what’s wrong with it.”

“That’s the point of the dress, you dolt.”

“f**k that. It’s a machine for making you smaller.” He comes over and stops maybe two feet away, and he doesn’t touch me, but he sneers down at the garment like it offended him. “You can’t breathe in it. You’ll sit down by ten o’clock and by midnight, you’ll be working out whether you’re allowed to eat anything. Am I wrong?”

Obviously, he isn’t, which is why I stay quiet.

“You’ve put on three things, and each of them has disrespected you. Didn’t I tell you I wouldn’t allow that?”

“I think you are once again being a wee bit dramatic about⁠—”

He holds up three fingers. “One covered you. One hid you. One constricted you.” He turns to Ekaterina and barks, “Find me something that shows her.”

Shows her.

Shows. As in, does not cover. Does not hide. Does not squeeze me into a shape that isn’t mine.

My whole adult wardrobe is built on the exact opposite idea. Cardigans in July. Aprons over everything. The entire purpose is to stay invisible, so that no one says the thing about myself that I already know to be true:

That I’m not good enough.

I’m not as skinny as Vivian. Or as pretty. Or as carefree.

I’d rather stay out of sight than be reminded of those failings. Now, this green-eyed menace has come barging into my life, and he wants to take that away from me. Tonight, in front of whoever’s going to be wherever we’re going.

I feel my hands start to drift up toward my stomach, but I make them stop. That’s another bad habit. Touching my imperfections won’t make them go away.

But surely showing them off won’t, either?

“I have one thing,” Ekaterina replies slowly. “In the back. Not finished. Cut for a bride who changed her mind about everything, including the groom.”

Kane nods, eyes bright. “Bring it.”

She shuffles off. And for a short span of time, it’s just the two of us.

I’m standing in a corset dress on a scuffed floor under a bare bulb.

Until the thing my family put in me twenty years ago comes right up out of my throat before I can stop it.

“You know,” I say brightly, “it’s okay if this one doesn’t work out. Ekaterina can only do so much with the raw material she’s working with. It’s like trying to gift wrap a beanbag chair, right?”

Usually, that kind of self-deprecating barb would get a laugh. I’ve trotted out similar lines before to defuse the awkward tension in rooms just like this.

But this time, it’s met with a silence so cold it takes my breath away.

Kane goes very still. Then he turns his head toward the back of the shop.

“Ekaterina. Would you wait outside, please?” He’s polite, but there’s no mistaking a command when it comes from his lips.

She stops in the doorway with a garment bag over her arm and looks at him, then at me, then nods and scurries off, leaving the bag on a hook on the wall.

The door with the frosted glass clicks shut behind her.

Then Kane turns to tower over me.

“I told you,” Kane says.

“Huh?”

“In the pantry. And again in your bakery. I told you what I would do if you said it a third time.”

“If I did what…?”

He crosses the floor. He doesn’t storm this time. He simply walks, in no hurry, until he’s close enough that I have to tip my head back.

And then closer than that, so my back finds the edge of the pressing table and there’s nowhere left for me to go.

My heart starts going hard against the bones of the dress.

“Disrespecting yourself. A beanbag chair? You cannot be serious.”

“It was a joke,” I protest.

“No, it f*****g wasn’t. It was the cruel things that other people have flung at you, repurposed as self-defense. But you bleed exactly the same when you cut yourself open just so no one else does it instead, Lilah. I won’t tolerate that.” He’s closer. Closer. Closer. His eyes are burning fire now. “Who was it? Your mother, your sister, your husband?”

I lick my dry lips. “All of the above, I guess. It was kind of a group project.”

“And you’re still doing their work for them, even after you threw them out of your life?” He doesn’t move an inch. “Why?”

I don’t answer. How could I? There’s nothing to say.

“Look at me, sladkaya.”

I look at him. That, it turns out, is a mistake. Up close, in this light, those eyes are downright unfair. So is his scent. He’s cold air and woodsmoke and cedar, and he’s radiating heat that seeps into my skin.

“We’re not going any further tonight,” he says, “until you say it correctly.”

“Say what correctly?”

“‘I am not too much.’“

That’s it? That’s so simple. That’s five pitiful little words. They’re one syllable each, for goodness’s sake!

… So why can’t I say them?

My mouth is open and my throat is working, but no sound is coming out.

Say it, dummy, I scold myself. How hard can it be?

I.

Am.

Not.

Too.

Much.

A kindergartener could do it. Why can’t I?

Kane’s hand floats up. It’s as if he wants to touch my face but he won’t let himself, so his fingertips stay just half an inch away. “There is nothing wrong with you, Lilah. You are not damaged goods. You are not broken. You are not wrong. You are not too much.”

My eyes sting. “This is stupid.”

“Then say it and be done with it.”

“You’re really going to make me?”

“I really am.”

I take a deep breath, summon all my willpower, and say, “I’mn’t’much.”

Close enough, right?

Not for Kane Makov, apparently.

His fingertips land on my throat. Light as butterflies, but they might as well be railroad spikes pinning me in place. “Again.”

“I’mn’t’much,” I mutter again.

“Again.”

“I’m not t’much.”

“Again.”

“I’m not too much! I’m not too f*****g much. There, it’s done, okay?” I shove him in the chest and he lets the momentum, as sad as it must be to a man of his size, carry him a step backward. “Can you leave me alone now, please? I didn’t sign up for f*****g psychotherapy. This is a business arrangement, remember?”

If my angry outburst bothers him, he shows no sign of it. He just nods once, slow.

“Good,” he says.

Then he steps back, and all the air in the room comes back at once. I have to put my hand on the pressing table to steady myself. He takes the garment bag off the hook and holds it out.

“Put this on.”

Then he opens the door, calls down the stairs for Ekaterina in Russian, and sits back down in his chair like nothing happened.

I retreat behind the curtain, breathing hard. That was so silly. Who does he think he is, lecturing me like that? I don’t want his feedback on my life; I just want him to leave my damn bakery alone.

The sooner we get this dumb arrangement over with, the better.

Once the last of the furious fumes has stopped pouring out of my ears, I unzip the garment bag. The dress inside is wine-colored. It has a neckline that goes wide and deep, with sleeves that sit off the shoulder and no engineering in it whatsoever. It’s just cut to go where a body goes.

I wriggle free of the black monstrosity, step into the wine-colored one, and pull it up. When I step out, I don’t bother with the turn. I just meet Kane’s eyes and park my fists on my hips.

“Well?” I snap. “Does this please Your Majesty?”

Kane doesn’t say anything for a long time.

Then, finally, he nods. “That’ll work.”

It’s dark by the time we come out.