"I worked in a..."
"Oh, fuck off. Those clothes have nothing to do with dress code. The woman who took my last deposit had half her tits hanging out of her dress. Those clothes have everything to do with the part you play."
"The part I play?"
"The nine-to-fiver. The woman who pays her bills on time. The woman who can take care of herself. The woman who is not the offspring of a man who can't hold down a steady job or pay the lights before they were cut off."
"Oh, please," I said, rolling my eyes, finally taking the step in retreat I had wanted to earlier. I needed space. Because something about what he said, it settled heavy down inside.
"Never met a woman trying so fucking hard to pretend to be someone she's not. And, babe, I've dated fucking actresses."
"I don't know what you're talking about," I objected, but there was an uncomfortable feeling inside, something akin to something breaking open, something being unearthed after being buried for so long I had forgotten it was even there.
"How long did it take? Ten, twelve years?"
"How long did what take?" I asked, trying to swallow, but finding my mouth suddenly chalk-dry.
"For you to perfect this act? This good girl who always does and says the right things, who wears the right things, who never fucks up act?"
I shook my head slightly, but I was pretty sure at that point that I was just desperately trying to cling to my denial, to wrap the comfort of it around myself, to shield myself from the cold, hard, ugly, and ultimately inescapable truth: he was right.
"It's not an act. It's who I am."
"Prue..." he said, taking the step I took by moving toward me. With the counter at my back, I was trapped there by his chest, his dominating presence commanding all the air between us, making my chest feel tight and my head feel light.
"Don't," I said, shaking my head a little frantically, the closest I could bring myself to begging him to let it go, let it drop, leave me and my false sense of self alone.
His mouth opened, then closed. His breath exhaled hard. Then he gave me a small nod. "So these cookies, are they poisoned?"
Surprised, I felt my lips curve upward. "I considered it. But I didn't want your poor, brainwashed employees all dropping dead too."
To that, I was actually awarded a smile and, for once, it wasn't cruel, condescending, sinister, or sly. It was just a smile. I didn't get full teeth, but I got a curve that made his eyes crinkle a little.
And it did not... totally did not make my lady bits quiver.
"My brainwashed employees?" he asked, reaching for a cookie that was still on the sheet I had taken out of the oven.
"Yeah, well," I said, moving sideways and pretending to put all my attention into checking on the cake inside the oven, "Aaron said you were a nice guy," I informed him. "I figured there must have been some kind of mental manipulation going on there to make anyone swallow and then spew out that load of crap."
"That high an opinion of me, Miss. Marlow?" he asked, his voice a shade more guarded than it had been moments before, making me almost wonder if I had imagined the softness there, the openness.
"Can't imagine what I think matters to you," I said, reaching for the spatula and scraping the rest of the cookies off the sheet, feeling almost a little sad that the conversation had taken a turn. But that was so ridiculous that once I finished with the cookie-scraping, I went right to the sink to start scrubbing. Focus, I needed to focus.
"Who taught you to bake? Mack doesn't seem like the kitchen type," he commented, grabbing another few cookies off the tray which, unfortunately, only helped to improve my opinion of him. I, by principle, didn't trust people who didn't have a sweet tooth. There must have been something seriously evil about a person who didn't appreciate sugar and chocolate.
"I taught myself I guess," I shrugged, scrubbing the oily traces of the baking spray off the cookie sheet. "We needed to eat and take-out gets expensive when it's an everyday type of thing. I cooked because I had to. I baked because I learned I loved it."
"And yet you worked in a bank."
I exhaled, trying to convince myself that didn't smart a little. It was something that kept me awake some nights, thinking about the missed opportunity that was going straight to work instead of attending culinary school. But work was necessary, learning how to bake the perfect, flaky, buttery croissant from a genuine French pastry chef was not.
"I had bills to pay."
"And your father to bail out."
My hands stilled as I looked down into the running water. "Can you not?" I asked, exhaling hard as I lifted my head to look out the window at his expansive property. How could someone like him, someone as well-off, someone financially secure no matter what should befall him, possibly understand what it was like to live in constant fear of having to drain your bank account to settle a debt, to have to borrow from the phone bill fund to pay the water? How could you even begin to describe poor to a rich person?