The Frog Prince (13 page)

“Isabella said that you only knew her a week before you flew her to Barcelona,” I blurt out and immediately regret it. It sounds like a lame T-shirt:
I met the Crown Prince of Austria and all I got was a trip to Aspen
.

Roman chuckles. “Classic Isabella. What she didn’t tell you was that I had just started dancing with her. There was a competition in Barcelona, so I offered to fly her and her L.A. group there. You can ask Mikhail…he was nice enough to put all of us up for the weekend.”

He’s still running his fingers down the side of my face and into my hair so my language center is incapacitated, leaving me temporarily mute. His hands move to my shoulders, skimming down the sides of my arms before taking my hands in his.

“I asked you to come with me because I want to spend time with
you
,” he says. “I hope that part at least is all cleared up.”

A silence descends on our
tete-a-tete
. I try my best to ride it out and wait for him to say something else romantic, but the Balloon of Silence finally overpowers me. “With your family's history of inbreeding, the last thing you should do is date your cousin,” I say.

Roman laughs, the natural indentation in his cheek collapsing into the massive sinkhole that is his adorable dimple. He raises my right hand to about chest level and then sort of shakes it back and forth between us.

“What are you doing?” I manage to say even as I drown in self-loathing.

“Looking for your medical alert bracelet,” he says with a laugh, and gives my arm another shake. “You have terrible frame,” he adds.

My arm automatically goes taut, just the way Shea showed us in her class Friday. Roman raises his arm, and I hesitate before slowly turning under it, unsure if this is what he wants me to do. He pulls us close together…and stops. Now our lips are about an inch apart, and we just freeze like that.

“So you’ll stay?” he says.

“Well,” I manage to whisper, “it’s a really long walk back to Denver.” I close my eyes with the expectation that he will close the distance between us.

And he doesn’t disappoint.

Chapter Eleven

The office Tuesday morning feels like a coach that’s been turned back into a pumpkin. No–it feels like trying to quit heroin cold-turkey. In fact, I would consider injecting something between my toes if it would take me back to the fairy tale weekend in the mountains.

The gray cubicles, the rows of identical offices, all of the drab people roaming the hallways under the fluorescent lights...I shut my office door just so I don’t have to look at it. I push my laptop into the docking station on my desk and stab the “on” button, then reluctantly sink into my chair. After a few moments I pick up the phone and retrieve Friday and Monday’s voicemail messages.

Kat barges in without knocking. “Your desk is very large!” she says in a chirpy, sing-song voice, setting her coffee and a green folder on my desk.

“
Your
desk is very large,” I respond half-heartedly.

This has been our standard workplace greeting for six years, a substitution for “good morning.” The sorry story behind this custom: The research campus and all its buildings were new when I came on board with the company. My new office was empty so I was given a budget and sent out to find furniture to fill it. I found a slightly beaten-up floor-model cherry desk and hutch for five hundred dollars. I snatched it up, prepared for my new boss to marvel at my bargain-hunting talent.

Apparently I had committed the big no-no of having furniture larger and nicer than my boss. The email from his assistant was curt and to the point: “Your desk has arrived. It is very large.”

Today Kat’s greeting only serves to further contrast my hostile work environment—let’s call it “the evil stepmother”– with the magical weekend I spent with Roman.

“You know what I think?” I say, leaning back in my chair. “I think the whole world should be Photoshopped.” Kat eyes me warily as she takes a seat in one of the spare chairs. “I wish…I don’t know…that there were glasses you could put on that would automatically make everything look better.”

“There are,” she says. “They’re called beer goggles.” She leans back in her chair to shut the door. “How was the weekend in Aspen?”

“Let’s see…I threatened to duct tape his ex-girlfriend’s mouth, told Roman that he was probably a non-royal, illegitimate love-child, and gave a panic-attack lecture on dildos.”

“Well, I hope you don’t mind, but Roman told Christine and Christine told me that you were the hit of the party and that he had one of the best times of his life.”

I stare at her for a few seconds. “Did you hear the part about the dildos?”

She groans. “You could use some of those Photoshop glasses. You always remember the worst parts of everything.” She smiles mischievously. “So…did you sleep with him or not? He wouldn’t tell Christine either way.”

“Define ‘sleep with him,’” I say. Through the window in the office door I see our friend Rick waving at us.

“Your desk is very large!” he says, letting himself in and tossing a notepad on the desk.

“Jesus, Rick,” I say, looking at his face. “What happened to you?”

He touches a raw spot on his cheek the size of a quarter. “I had a pre-cancerous lesion frozen off Friday.”

“Frozen off?” says Kat. “I thought science had brought the world new treatments for that kind of stuff.”

“Well it was this or the chemo cream,” he says. “I would have had to put it on twice a day for two weeks.”

“And you chose to have your flesh frozen off?” she says. “Why didn’t you just do the chemo cream instead?”

Rick shrugs. “I was afraid I’d accidentally use it to masturbate and my penis would fall off.”

I cover my face with my hands. Despite this rather colorful addition to the morning, I would still rather be back in Aspen. “Thanks, Rick,” I say. “That visual is going to take a few hundred hours of counseling and a gallon of bleach to fully remove from my brain.”

“Sure,” he says cheerfully. He turns to Kat. “So is Leigh the king’s new wench or what?”

“He’s a prince,” says Kat over my loud groan, “and we were just getting to that.”

“We slept together, but we didn’t sleep together, okay?” I say.

Kat and Rick look at each other and then back at me. “Uh…the judges are going to need more information before they can make a decision,” says Rick.

“We fell asleep on the couch watching a movie Sunday night,” I explain. “He helped me to my room in the middle of the night. When I woke up I was in my bed…
alone
,” I emphasize. “Then we flew home yesterday after lunch. He had to turn around and fly to Seattle last night so he needed time to pack and stuff.”

“Maybe he pawed you a little while you were sleeping?” says Kat hopefully.

“God, you guys are gross. Give him some points for chivalry.”

“‘Points?’” says Rick. “I’m about to call him up and give him
pointers
.” He shakes his head sadly.

“Are we done discussing my sex life?” I say.

“The lack thereof…yes,” says Kat, taking the folder off the desk. Rick follows suit and grabs his notepad.

“Okay,” I say. “Someone needs to call Charlene Johnston. She was the one here last Wednesday for the pornography study. She left me a message…her boyfriend wants to know where we get our porn.”

“I’ll call her,” says Kat.

I hand Rick a stapled document. “This is the consent form for the thirty plus BMI psych study. Please replace ‘fat women admirers’ to ‘overweight female enthusiast’ or something like that. It’s going to be a little hard to recruit fat women if we actually call them ‘fat.’”

Rick starts flipping through the form and making notes in the margins. “I’m on it,” he says.

“We got a few calls from women interested in the female arousal MRI study,” I say, leaning towards Kat with a sheet of paper.

“I’ll take those,” says Rick, snatching it out of my hand.

I roll my eyes. “I’m
sure
they’re going to want to discuss their sexual arousal history with you, Rick.”

“Yeah, perv,” says Kat, grabbing it back from him. “On the other hand, you could wow them with the chemo cream masturbation story. It turned me on.”

“Really?”

“No.”

“Out, out, get out!” I yell, just as my phone rings. I look at the caller ID as the two of them scramble to the door. “Oh, crap, it’s my mom…shut the door…hello?”

“Did we do anything interesting this weekend?” says my mom.

“What do you mean?” Open-ended questions and the inaccurate use of plural pronouns are never a good thing from my mother. It’s always best to hedge.

“I just got off with the phone with the queen of Uganda–”

“Princess of Ethiopia,” I say, my mind racing. Why would Menen be calling my mother? And how did she get her number?

“–and she asked me about that violet dress I made for you last–“

Luckily for me my other line lights up. “Hey, Mom, I have to go, I have a call.” I nail the button for the second line without giving her time to respond. “Hi, this is Leigh.”

“Leigh? It’s Roman Lorraine.”

I find the fact that he gives his last name strangely endearing. As if I would otherwise mix him up with all the other Romans I know.

“Roman!” In a panic I grab a pen and a pad of paper…to do what I have no idea. Take notes? Write a haiku? “Um, how is Seattle?” I manage to say.

“A total mess,” he says happily. “The materials we ordered aren’t here and the client changed his mind about the start date. I thought I would be here for two weeks, but I’m leaving a few guys behind to finish the surveying and heading back to Denver on Friday.”

“Oh, that’s too bad…about the project delay, I mean.”

“No, no, it’s great!”

“Great?” I say. “Why?”

“Because now we can start.”

“Start…what?”

“Dancing. You still willing?”

“Oh, right…Shea’s lessons are Friday night.”

“
Shea’s
class is Friday night. I’m talking about private lessons.”

“Private lessons? With who?”

He laughs. “With me…who else? And there’s actually a live band at the Merc Friday night from eight o’clock until midnight. So I’ll meet you there, give you a private lesson, and take you to dinner. Then we’ll head back after Shea’s lessons are over and you can meet everyone.”

“Okaaay…” I say. “What time Friday are we talking about?”

“What time do you get off of work?”

“My schedule’s pretty flexible. I can pretty much leave whenever I want.”

“I’ll be back in Denver by three o’clock Friday,” he says. “Why don’t you meet me at the Merc at four o’clock? I’ll make reservations for dinner for six o’clock or six thirty.”

“What should I wear?” I say. I had high heels on for Shea’s impromptu dance lesson last week, and they nearly crippled me.

“Tennis shoes or something without a heel is fine for now,” he says. “You can ask the other girls tonight where they get their dance shoes.”

“What about dinner, should I bring a change of clothes?” I ask, ingeniously assuming by the word “reservations” that we will not be going to the Taco Shack.

“Yeah, I guess we should both bring something to change into for dinner.”

“Okay, well I’ll see you at the Mercury Café at four o’clock on Friday then,” I say.

“See you then,” he says before hanging up.

Twenty minutes later Kat barges into my office. “Christine told me that you and Roman have a date Friday!” she says.

“Was this tidbit of information exchanged at a sleepover with lots of Beanie Babies and Spice Girls music?”

“Maybe,” she says with a smile.

“Why does Roman feel the need to share all the intimate details of his life with Christine?” I grumble. I have never been particularly close to my cousin, likely a result of the time she pinned me to the floor when I was eleven and spit directly into my mouth.

“I think it’s a normal thing to tell the people you’re staying with when you’re going to be traipsing in and out of their house,” says Kat. “You know…so they don’t, like, shoot you in the middle of the night?” She puts her hands on my desk and leans forward. “So, where are you going?”

“He’s giving me a private dance lesson at the Mercury Café Friday afternoon.”

“Private dance lessons,” she says, raising one eyebrow. “As in the horizontal hustle? Back seat tango?”

I roll my eyes. “Kat, will you please ask Mitchell to have sex with you tonight? Otherwise I’m going to enroll you in the female arousal study.”

She blows out a huffy breath. “Okay, fine, I won’t ask any more questions. Just
please
tell me when you finally get to see him naked. I don’t want specifics; I just want to know if he looks as good without clothes on as he does with them.”

“
You’re
the one married to a former Levi’s model,” I point out.

“Mitchell’s on service this week,” she says with a frown.

This means that he’s at the hospital almost twenty-hours a day and is useless for anything except phone sex.

“Then take some of his underwear pictures into your bedroom with you where you can be alone with your thoughts. And then enroll in the masturbation study.”

Kat performs a snappy salute. “Aye-aye, Captain,” she says before about-facing out of my office.

Chapter Twelve

“It’s kind of overwhelming, isn’t it?” says Roman.

I’m not sure if he’s referring to how hot he looks in his black, long-sleeved sweater, our two-hour dance lesson, or the fact that we appear to be sitting inside a log cabin with faux kerosene lanterns hanging from the ceiling, chain saws randomly sticking out of the walls, sheer white curtains billowing around our table and aspen trees growing through the floor.

“The restaurant?” I guess. “This is the first time I’ve been here.”

He smiles. “I was actually talking about our dance lesson.”

Yes, that
was
a little overwhelming. On the other hand, I am now able to follow the lead for a swing-out, a tuck turn, and an underarm turn, as well as do the Charleston basic. According to Roman, this is the basic knowledge needed to actually dance with someone through an entire song.