Falling for Your Madness (10 page)

Then I heard a siren.

“David, let’s get out of here!”

“I said, EN GARDE! Say
pret
,
you arrogant piece of mouse dung!
”

“David!”

Trey ran across the street to the Public Garden. David chased him with the foil in his hand. Trey stopped at the wrought iron fence that surrounded it. He turned around and froze like a trapped animal. David approached him, holding the weapon still and steady. In his fear, Trey fell to his knees. David placed the tip of the weapon inches from Trey’s face. I ran up to him. I wasn’t flattered any more. I was terrified something bad was going to happen. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt.

I saw a squad car’s lights flashing out of the corner of my eye. I ran up to David’s arm and touched him. “Let him go. He’s not worth it. Let’s get out of here.”

Trey yelled. “Let me go!”

David’s voice was commanding. “I will let you go when you tell her what she is to you.”

“Huh?”

David’s voice sent chills up my spine. “You tell the young woman, whom you just insulted, what she is to you.” His voice was calm and low. I wouldn’t have compared David Bowles to Clint Eastwood, but I did now. This was his Dirty Harry moment. “Is she your friend? Is she your sweetheart? You tell me the truth, and then, my good man, I will let you go.”

Trey whimpered. “She’s nothing. She’s just a girl.”

“Speak up, you coward.”

“She’s just a girl.” Trey started to cry. “She means nothing.”

“Laura, my dear,” David turned to me. He was much calmer. “I’m so sorry to ask you this, but did you hear that?”

“Yes. Please let him go.” I saw police officers with guns drawn. I would have thought that they would have stopped this by now.

David looked back at Trey. “Your intention all along was to take advantage of her, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t …”

“Wasn’t it?” David gritted his teeth and put his foot on Trey’s chest.

“Yes.”

David withdrew the sword. Police surrounded him. David threw his sword on the ground and submitted to them. They led him, the tweed-jacketed, well-mannered literature professor who’d made my date wet his pants, into a squad car.

David looked at me. “Laura. He was not a gentleman.”

They shut the door. Officers walked around the crowd asking everyone, “Did you see what happened here? Can you give us any information?” The crowd pointed at Trey and then pointed to David. No one was pointing at me. I was in the middle of all of it but felt, somehow, that I was invisible.

An officer next to me spoke up. She was so close to me that I could read her name badge. “Can anyone else give us information about what happened here?” She looked right at me and never saw me. “Anyone?”

I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. I turned around. It was Merle. “Miss Laura. Come with me. I think you need to know something about David.”

“What’s going to happen to him?”

“Assault charges, at the very least. Do not worry. He has magic on his side.”

Saturday, September 29, 2012

121 Commonwealth Avenue #2

Boston, Massachusetts

11:01 p.m.

David’s apartment on Commonwealth Avenue was beautiful. It had high ceilings and those great bowed windows that look out over the romantic Back Bay. The living room was exactly what you would expect of a professor of literature. Walnut bookcases lined the perimeter. A leather sofa sat in the middle. A large, old-fashioned desk, with a laptop, was in the corner. Rich draperies hung from the windows, and along one wall was a tapestry that featured a medieval scene. An oriental rug was on the floor.

Merle went to the bar and poured a snifter of brandy for me. “I assure you, Madam, I have no intention of trying to get you drunk. I am, however, concerned about your emotional state.”

I believed him. If he laid a hand on me, David would clean his clock.

He sat across from me on a leather ottoman. “David has told you that I do very bad card tricks.”

I nodded and took a sip of brandy.

“Would you like to see one?”

“I suppose so.”

He held his empty hand in the air and turned it, and a new, sealed deck cards appeared. “Would you do me the honor of unwrapping this deck?”

I put the brandy down on the end table, unwrapped the box, and handed it back to him. He opened the box and took out the cards and offered them to me. “Would you examine the deck, please, and tell me what cards you see?”

“This is a normal deck of cards.”

“Exactly.”

He took them back, shuffled them, and fanned them out in his hands. Now they were all kings, all of them, alternating perfectly, spades, hearts, clubs, and diamonds.

“That’s very impressive.”

“That’s one of David’s favorites.” He then gathered the cards and did one of those maneuvers that I had seen blackjack dealers do on television.

“Forgive me. This is such a cliché.”

I laughed.

“Now.” He fanned the cards out again, face down. “Please, pick a card, but do not look at it. Put it on the sofa to your right.”

I did as I was told.

“Now, pick eight more from anywhere in the deck. Do not look at those either.” Merle put the deck aside and took the eight cards from me. He turned them over, one by one, and handed them to me. They were no longer kings, but photographs of David and a woman. A much younger David was with a Korean girl who was wearing a fedora and holding an iris. Another had David with shorter hair and a girl who looked exotic, either Middle Eastern or Greek, and she was holding a hibiscus. Another was of a boyish David and a girl with a mane of red curls holding a daffodil. The African American girl with the beautiful smile was holding orange blossoms.

I didn’t know what to think about this. I had assumed I wasn’t the first girl to meet him for tea, lunch, and dinner, but I had never thought about them specifically.

I knew David. At least I thought I did. He was so dapper and gallant, I think that part of me expected him to only go out with leggy models. Part of me believed that, because I was
so not a leggy model
, he was, in a way, out of my league.

These cards told a different story. One girl had a nose ring. One had purple hair. Two were decidedly plus-size, but they were smiling at the camera and holding their flowers as if they were a prize. All of the girls were
ordinary.

“David has unexpected taste in women. What did he see in them?”

“He saw that they were beautiful, smart, talented, romantic, and sensitive. He saw that they were ladies.”

“Were they his friends, or his sweethearts, or his fiancées?”

“Mostly sweethearts. Never fiancées. Never once.”

That meant that at the very most, he had kissed them goodnight. He was never in their apartments alone. These girls were treated well. If I had seen Trey’s or Chase’s or Andrew’s face with a lineup of girls, I would have assumed that the girls were conquests. I would have been desperate to be the one who was different. I would have wanted to be the one who was treated better. The one who was special.

“So, all of them met him for at tea, lunch, and dinner?”

“When we first designed the project, we didn’t structure it quite that way. We’ve worked out the kinks since then.”

“We?”

He looked at me as if he had said too much. This bothered me.

“So then, all of these girls released him. Why?”

“The most common complaint against David is that he is
too intense.
And that he talks too much. This one, Bianca, she was lovely, but felt overpowered by the hundreds of texts David sent her daily.”

“Texts? David doesn’t have a phone.”

“He doesn’t now. We took it away from him. This one, Lisa, lasted only a week. She made a comment about how great it was that someone took that
Lord of the Rings
film and made it into a book.”

“She didn’t!”

“And then Susannah. She called it off because David parked his car in front of her house a few too many times.”

“Wait, you took the car away from him too?”

“David’s complete freedom was one of the kinks that had to be ironed out. He is, however, very good with boundaries.”

Boundaries. Like
not being alone in my apartment.
I fell back into the sofa. Who was this man? Is this the same David who had texted a girl hundreds of times a day? Who’d stalked another?

“He’s never been arrested or had a court order against him or anything, has he?”

“Not since high school. He’s come a long way since then. We—and I might as well tell you, I mean his father, his aunt, and I—created the rules for him. The rules are there to protect him, as much as to protect the lady, and he knows it. The Arthurian codes of Chivalry provide a very helpful context.”

I felt like I needed more brandy. “What does he get out of following the rules?”

“We hope, eventually, a bride. Until then, we reward him with fountain pens, cashmere socks, and Bacco Bucci shoes in a sixteen and a half. He is so terribly vain.”

“This is all so weird. Why can’t he just be like all the other guys? Something normal?”

“Because he is
not
normal, not at all. He is behaving in a way that is fitting for him. I know that he has told you that he is bound by the rules of chivalry, body and soul. This is not an exaggeration. It is true. He sees himself as a knight of the highest order. His quest for a bride cannot be and must not be reduced to what young men do today.”

“What do you mean by a knight of the highest order?”

“It is his story to tell. I’ve probably told you too much. Now, the last card. Turn it over.”

I did and gasped. It was a photo from the first Friday. Only a week ago. The first time I agreed to be his friend. It was me with the Gerbera daisy.

“What is in this picture that is not in the others?”

When I saw it, I almost choked. “It’s his gaze.”

“You do have good eyes. In all the others, he’s looking at the camera. But in this one, in yours, he’s looking at the lady. That gaze, and his aunt and I agree, is significant. He is moved by
you,
and he’s never done that before.”

“Am I safe with him?”

“Yes. Undoubtedly. As long as you help him keep the rules.”

“Should I release him?” I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to after last night. I certainly didn’t want to this morning after reading that letter. I sure didn’t want to after he chased Trey around with a sword in his hand, but now I was not so sure.

Merle took my hand. “That I can’t say. If you are going to break it off, you must do it as soon as possible. Monday at tea. Do not wait. He needs time to grieve you and move on. Your loss to him will be the most severe. Now, I am expecting a phone call any second from David’s sister. You are not to fret. After I take the call, I will take you right home. While you are waiting, I suggest that you use those observant eyes of yours and look around. There are still many things about David you don’t know, and perhaps you’ll learn a bit before you leave. If you need to spend a penny, I mean, powder your nose, use the loo off his room. His is infinitely cleaner than mine.”

“You’re asking me to snoop around?”

“Never snoop, dear. That behavior is unbecoming a lady. But you can
look
carefully.
I will answer your questions if I can.”

The phone rang.

I didn’t even know where to look. I started by looking at the titles on the shelves. I wasn’t surprised to see Chaucer and Milton, Malory and Shakespeare. There were plenty of books I had never heard of, like
The Life of Saint Audrey
and
Historia Regum Britannia
and the
Prophecy of Merlin.
This didn’t tell me anything. He was a literature professor, after all.