Wickedly Charming

by Kristine Grayson

  “I’m perfectly serious,” she said, not sure at all what he was referring to. So she got to choose the topic. “Not all stepmothers are wicked.”

  She turned toward him as she said that, and realized that she was a half an inch away from pressing her entire body against his. For a second, she was tempted. Then she took a step back to put a proper distance between them.

  “I know that about stepmothers,” he said. “I happen to like mine.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Your father remarried?”

  He shook his head, the look of annoyance on his face growing. “My stepmother-in-law,” he said. “Ella’s stepmother. I like her. She’s a strong woman, who had a few bad breaks.”

  “See?” Mellie said, forcing herself to smile. “My sign is right.”

  “I’m not talking about your damn sign!” he snapped. “You want to ban books. Don’t you?”

  The fury in his voice startled her. She had rarely seen any man that angry, let alone a Charming. (Well, she had never seen a Charming angry at all, but she had seen a lot of angry men—some of whom had some real magic behind the anger. Charming didn’t need magic. He had strength of personality. His anger was… formidable.)

  “I don’t want to ban books, exactly,” she said, forcing herself to remain calm. “I just want to reduce the lies a bit.”

  “By banning books,” he said.

  “Not all of them,” she said. “Just the ones that lie.”

  “Just the ones that lie,” he repeated. “You mean fiction?”

  She shrugged. “I suppose. It’s—”

  “Fiction is very, very important,” he said, his voice rising. “Storytelling is how people learn. You get people to understand new cultures and other lives through stories. Made-up stories. Fiction.”

  “Yes, exactly,” she said. “Which is why it can’t lie.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Fiction lies for the truth.”

  “Then tell me,” she said, “what truth do fairy tales tell?”

  “Fairy tales?” he asked. “This is all about fairy tales?”

  “Yes,” she said. “They misrepresent us.”

  Then she shrugged, feeling a bit angry herself.

  “Well, they misrepresent some of us. You, for example, have nothing to fear from them. They don’t attack you and call you evil and wicked and—”

  “Don’t start with that ‘people like you’ crap again,” he snapped. “People like me know that happily-ever-after is a crock. I’m divorced, remember?”

  She bit her lower lip. She really hadn’t put that together.

  “I’m divorced, I don’t see my kids enough, for heaven’s sake, and I’m not perfect.” His voice was rising. “Do you know how hard it is to go through life when everyone expects you to be perfect?”

  She almost said, Obviously not, but thought the better of it. He was angry enough.

  “Do you know what your problem is?” he said, leaning close to her. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”

  His arrogance took her breath away. “Lucky?”

  “Lucky,” he said. “You’re beautiful, you’re smart, you’re successful enough to travel the Greater World, for heaven’s sake, and all you care about is what people think of you.”

  “I do not,” she said.

  “You do too.” He swept an arm toward the protestors. “Are you really an Archetype? Nowadays? Maybe a century ago, when women didn’t have as many opportunities. And maybe when you couldn’t choose your own identity. But who in this world knows who you are unless you point it out to them? And when you do, they think you’re crazy.”

  “You don’t know—”

  “I do know!” He was yelling now. “Of course I know. Do you know what some officious little American government prick did when I told him my real name after I passed my driving test? Do you?”

  She swallowed. “No.”

  “He laughed.” Charming lowered his voice. “He laughed and said my parents ought to be shot.”

  She smiled. She couldn’t help herself. She could picture that. She, at least, didn’t have to go around introducing herself as the Evil Stepmother because that wasn’t her real name. Never had been.

  “Go ahead,” he said, with some heat. “Laugh. But it’s not fun. I actually prefer Dave. No one laughs when I say my name is Dave.”

  “Hey!” A door opened near Mellie. A man peered out. “Can you people pipe down? We’re taping in here.”

  One of the ogres—whose name she always forgot—raised his sign and waved it in the man’s face. “This book fair is unfair!” the ogre growled. “It’s—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the man said. “Someone is always publishing something someone else objects to. Whoop dee ding dong do.”

  Then he slammed the door closed.

  Mellie stared at it for a moment. Her heart sank. Whoop dee ding dong do. Whoop dee ding dong do?

  That man, a man she didn’t know, had just dismissed all of her hard work with a single whoop dee ding dong do.

  And don’t forget his other comment, some small voice said inside her head. That someone is always publishing something someone else objects to. Like it’s normal.

  Charming was watching her. He looked at the closed door, then looked at her, as if he realized that man’s comment had made some kind of impression—although he clearly wasn’t sure what kind.

  The protestors had stopped marching and shouting.

  “What do you want us to do, Mellie?” the selkie asked.

  She didn’t know. She had no idea anymore.

  So she shrugged. “Take a lunch break.”

  They set their signs down and bolted out of the hallway. She wondered if she’d ever see them again.

  She didn’t want to look at Charming. He would be laughing. He would gloat. Or he would be gone already.

  But she couldn’t help herself.

  She looked.

  He had an expression of compassion on his face. “It really bothers you what they think, doesn’t it?”

  Her lower lip trembled, and she bit it. Hard. Evil stepmothers weren’t supposed to cry. Nor were they supposed to care about the opinion of a Charming.

  But here she was, on the verge of tears, in front of a Charming who actually appealed to her.

  “Back when I was thin and shapely and beautiful and oh, so young, I didn’t care,” she said. “But then more thin and shapely and beautiful and oh, so young things showed up and I stopped being important, and I would say something a little sarcastic, and I suddenly got called old and bitter and jealous, and it just went downhill, no matter what I did. Words hurt, Charming. Words hurt.”

  He nodded. “So you thought you could control the words.”

  “Isn’t that what you do with that golden voice of yours and that marvelously soothing manner? Don’t you control the words?”

  He gave her a rueful smile. “If I did, don’t you think I would have ended up with custody of my daughters?”

  Mellie looked at him, really looked at him, for the first time. He was very handsome. Elegant, not quite as trim as he could be, and just a hint of a bald spot that he might not even know about. A few lines around the eyes.

  Not as young as he used to be either.

  Seasoned.

  Like her.

  Only no one called him old and bitter and jealous.

  But, back when she first met him (all of a few hours ago), he had called himself a nerd.

  “What are you really doing here in the Greater World?” she asked.

  “Me?” his voice squeaked just a little. “Getting books. I told you. I read a lot.”

  She picked up his badge. It was purple, not for royalty, like she’d initially thought, but for booksellers. “You got an illegal badge?”

  “No,” he said. “I sell books back home.”

  “You’re a merchant?” She couldn’t quite keep the incredulousness from her tone.

  He straightened his shoulders as if by making himself taller he would become more p
owerful. “It’s an honorable profession.”

  He was being defensive. That surprised her. “I just thought being prince was profession enough.”

  “Maybe in the Greater World,” he said. “Here princes have to give speeches and do good works and have meetings with other princes. Back home, all I do is wait for my father to die.”

  He flushed a dark red.

  “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” he said.

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “You like it better here.”

  He nodded.

  “Why?”

  He waved his badge at her. “People don’t have any expectations of Dave the Bookseller. Except one.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, actually curious.

  “They expect him to know a lot about books.”

  ***

  As he said that, he suddenly knew how to solve her problem. Charming held out his hand.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  The hallway was quiet, now that her people weren’t shouting. The signs still lined the corridor. Her small team had left them behind. Fliers littered the floor. She had made a mess.

  She wasn’t looking at the mess. She was looking at his hand as if she expected him to be holding a dagger. “Why should I come with you?”

  “Because you’re going about this all wrong,” he said.

  She frowned, turning her head slightly in that way people had when they were considering something they hadn’t thought of before. Or maybe she just wasn’t sure if she should walk away with a crazy man who had been angry with her a moment before, and who now believed he had the solution to all her problems.

  Because he did. He did have the solution to all her problems.

  Or at least, to what she thought her problems were.

  “I’m going about what all wrong?” she asked.

  “Getting them to think better of you,” he said. Although he wasn’t exactly sure who “they” were—the folks in the Greater World? Clearly, or she wouldn’t be here protesting. What about the folks back home? Did she want them to think better of her too? Because that would be harder.

  She said, “They need to know that we’re not evil. We’re just people, doing the best we could with a bad hand—”

  “I know,” he said. “I know what the perception is, and I know how wrong it is. But you can’t change it by telling people they’re wrong. That whole ‘people like you’ thing—”

  “I’m sorry I said that,” she said. “It’s rude.”

  “So are these placards,” he said. “They insult book people.”

  “They do?” she asked.

  She clearly didn’t understand.

  He sighed and let his hand drop. “Book people love books. Most book people love books more than anything in the whole world.”

  His voice shook. He was talking about himself. He knew that. He wondered if she did.

  “When you tell book people that they should change books or censor them or ban them, you’re taking away the one thing that makes books so wonderful.”

  “There would be other books,” she said.

  He shook his head. “You miss the point. The point isn’t that there would be other books. Or even that there would be more appropriate books. The point is that books themselves are an adventure. They challenge us, change our perceptions, make us more than we are.”

  There it was: the first person plural. Right after he had sworn to avoid it. He was revealing himself, but he didn’t know how to do this any other way.

  “We need to know that all kinds of books exist. Books that make us fall in love. Books that scare us. Books that are so full of lies they make us angry.”

  “Why would you want that?” she asked.

  “Why would you not want it?” he asked.

  “Because they’re lying about us,” she said.

  “Do they ever call you by name?” he asked. Then he frowned. “What is your name, by the way? I only know the Disney name, and that can’t be right—”

  “It’s Mellie,” she said.

  “So Disney had it right?” he asked, trying to remember. Was it Millificent? Millicent? Mill—

  “Melvina,” she said. “My name is Melvina. Which is actually a good name. It means—”

  “The female form of Melvin,” he said. “It means ‘chieftain.’”

  Her mouth was open just slightly. “How did you know that?”

  He smiled, happy to give her the answer. “Books,” he said. “I have an eidetic memory. So I remember everything I read.”

  “Good heavens,” she said. “Doesn’t that clutter up your brain?”

  Which was a fairy tale character’s answer if he had ever heard one. But he didn’t say that to her. He didn’t want to insult her.

  Instead, he said gently, “I don’t have much more to clutter it up with. My whole life is about—”

  “Waiting for your father to die, I know,” she said, not without a bit of compassion.

  He didn’t want to talk about that. He was sorry he had said it earlier. Something about this woman made him more honest than he usually was.

  Mellie. It suited her. Just like Melvina did. Only Melvina was one of those formal names, the name that a person used when they needed the dignity of their full name. Like David. The Biblical King wasn’t King Dave. He was King David. But Charming would have wagered that all his friends called him Dave.

  “What I was asking,” Charming said, keeping his voice gentle, “before I sidetracked us, was do any of these fairy tales mention you by name?”

  She looked away from him, as if the door behind them—the door that got slammed a few moments ago—had suddenly become very interesting.

  “No,” she said sullenly, rather like one of his daughters when he caught them in a lie.

  “Do these fairy tales describe you accurately?” he asked.

  Her gaze snapped back to his. “That’s the whole point. Of course they don’t. Why else would I be—”

  “No, no,” he said. “I mean, do they describe you accurately physically? From that lovely dark hair of yours to those emerald eyes.”

  He took her hand. It was soft. Her skin was as smooth as he remembered it from a few hours ago, and he didn’t need to know that. He didn’t need reminding about how attractive he found her.

  He wanted to kiss her, and wouldn’t that startle her? Just the urge startled him.

  He leaned toward her, traced the side of her face with his thumb. She watched him, her mouth open just slightly.

  “Do those fairy tales you hate describe the way that your cheeks flush just slightly when you’re feeling passionate about something?” he asked quietly. “Or the rich, almost musical timbre of your voice?”

  That flush he had mentioned had grown in her cheeks. He had unnerved her.

  He was beginning to unnerve himself. He knew he could pour on the charm. He had just never done it unintentionally before.

  His thumb had a mind of its own, touching that soft skin of hers. And if he got any closer, he would kiss her, and wouldn’t that just scare her to death?

  It scared him.

  So he talked. He talked instead of kissing her because he didn’t want her to run away.

  But he kept his voice soft and gentle, as if he were talking to a frightened rabbit.

  “I mean,” he said, “do those fairy tales mention any identifying marks, anything about you that’s unique to you, something that someone—when they first meet you—would say, ‘Why look, Gladys! That’s the Evil Stepmother from the Snow White tale.’”

  She let out a reluctant bark of a laugh. “No, of course not.”

  “Then what angers you so?” he asked.

  She sighed. Her hand moved in his, as if she thought of taking it out of his grasp, but she didn’t.

  Instead, she leaned into his caressing thumb, just a little, as if she didn’t realize that she had done so.

  “It affects all of us stepmothers,” she said as if she were confiding in him. Ma
ybe she was. “We’ve become a cultural stereotype, especially here, in the Greater World. We’re expected to be hateful and evil, to try to kill our husbands’ children, and to try to destroy his family when in reality, most of us do our best to become part of the family—sometimes to heal it. It’s a destructive, horrible myth. Think about it. Children read stories about horrible stepmothers, and then their mother dies or leaves in a divorce, and suddenly they have a stepmother. Whom they’re programmed to hate. We have not just the difficulties of blending families. We have to fight this horrible perception all the time.”

  Charming sighed. Ella had hated her stepmother. Lavinia had come into Ella’s house with her father, already married (which Charming blamed on the father) and with two daughters of her own, and, Ella said, seemed nice enough. Then Ella’s father died, and everything changed. Ella got treated poorly. (She ran wild, Lavinia said. I just imposed some discipline; not well, because I was in terrible, horrible grief.)

  “You don’t agree, do you?” Mellie said. He had been silent too long, lost in his own thoughts, a problem he’d had his whole life.

  She moved that beautiful head away from his thumb. Then she pulled her hand back.

  “You don’t think this is a problem at all,” she said, her tone becoming strident again.

  Maybe that was how she dealt with embarrassment. She used her anger, her power, to keep people from seeing how vulnerable she was.

  He couldn’t grab her hand again; that would be wrong. But he felt like he had missed an important moment—and he didn’t want to. He didn’t want that closeness to go away.

  “Actually, I do think this is a problem,” he said. “It’s a serious one, and no amount of picketing will change it.”

  She blinked hard, looking away from him. He could sense her frustration. Unless he missed his guess, she was very close to tears.

  “So tell me, Mr. Perfectly Charming? What am I doing wrong? I suppose I’m not nice enough or charming enough to make my point properly.”

  She did have a wicked tongue, he would give that to the storytellers. But she only seemed to wield it when she was frustrated.

  “You can make your point any way you want,” he said. “But you need to use the right vehicle.”

  “I’m trying to get on television. I’m trying to get interviews—”