Page 37 of Will You (Not) Marry Me

“We need to talk,” said Tobias, keeping a polite smile on his face for the other guests’ benefit, but his voice brooked no argument. Without waiting for an answer from Finn, he turned heel and left the room.

While his family had initially peppered him with questions about his more repressed mood which leaked out now and then, Finn had downplayed it and brushed it off enough times that the questions petered out. Tobias’s questions about how he was doing, however, had gotten more pointed and far less forgiving over the last week, and Finn had been trying to prepare himself for a confrontation from the only person who would be willing to really dig into what had happened. Well, here it was, and Finn definitely didn’t feel prepared. But he sighed and followed his friend out the door and into an empty room where they could talk in private.

Tobias was waiting with a scowl and folded arms.

“What did you want to talk about?” Finn asked, playing dumb. He didn’t have the energy to do much else.

“Well, Finn,” Tobias said, his voice sarcastically cheerful. “You’ve been a little glum lately. No one else has noticed, or maybe they just haven’t wanted to acknowledge it and ask awkward questions. But it’s a bit of a slap in the face for you to think I wouldn’t notice. That I wouldn’t care.”

Finn had the decency to look down at his shoes at that. The reason they’d become friends, and why they had stayed friends for so long, was to have someone to be completely honest with, without royal and political protocol getting in the way. Finn had been hiding from him.

“I’m sorry,” he said sincerely. The last thing he wanted was to hurt his best friend as well.

“Ha.” Tobias laughed, shaking his head. It was the most humorless laugh Finn had ever heard. An exasperated, frustrated sort of laugh. The laugh of a friend who was trying to help but didn’t know how. “I don’t want a ‘sorry,’ Finn. I want…” Tobias bit his tongue and shook his head, infuriated.

“Just say it,” said Finn.

“Say what?”

“Whatever it is you think I need to hear. Don’t worry about saying itthe right way. Don’t worry about hurting my feelings. Just say it.”

Oh, it was going to hurt, whatever it was that Tobias wanted to say. But that was real friendship, wasn’t it? Sometimes you had to say hard things, as long as it meant growing afterward. Finn did his best to brace himself.

Tobias looked Finn up and down again like he was some fragile vase that would break with a gust of wind blowing in the wrong direction. Which was pretty accurate, actually, to how Finn felt. But he just stared back at his friend, waiting.

Finally running out of patience, Tobias shook his head and took a sharp breath through his nose.

“I don’t know what sort of hold that woman had on you,” he said. “But you need to let it go, Finn.”

Finn kept his face immaculately blank, a lifetime’s worth of practice coming into play. Right now, he was grateful for his ill-fitting mask.

“I don’t know what you’re talking ab—”

“Don’t,” Tobias interrupted, voice sharp and severe. “Don’t pull that, not with me. I know you too well for that rubbish. You’ve beenmiserableever since you called off the engagement, and I honestly cannot figure out why. It was the right decision, Finn. She wasn’t a good match for you.”

“Wasn’t she?” Finn asked bitterly. He only thought of her seeing his sketchbook for the first time, how much she’d praised it, praised him for something he liked to do, instead of turning her nose up at it like so many other people in his life would have done. How her fingers had hovered reverently above his drawings as if they were something precious. As ifhewere worth something other than his title.

Tobias looked shocked at his tone. “Has she put a spell on you or something?”

“Why? Because I’m not a good, cheerful little prince anymore?”

“No, because you told me how she treated you when she was here. How she didn’t want to be here, not really. How she sneered at every tradition and rule your families had. How hard you tried to just be a decent human being towards her, and how she still messed with your head and acted like an angel to everyone else. And now she’s got you acting like you’re miserable, like she’s broken you, so please help me understand what is going on with you?”

What followed was a terribly dense silence, with Tobias staring at him, almost without blinking, refusing to move or speak until Finn answered him.

“It was an act,” said Finn quietly.

Tobias narrowed his eyes as if he thought Finn wasn’t in complete charge of his mental faculties right now. Which maybe he wasn’t.

“What was an act?” Tobias asked, suspicious.

“How she behaved. It was all an act. That nastiness, the shallowness… it wasn’t her.”

Tobias rolled his eyes so hard Finn wouldn’t have been shocked if they’d fallen out of his head.

“Finn,” Tobias said as if talking to a very small, very stupid child. “She was manipulating you. Who knows why or what her end goal was, if she even had one. Maybe she just wanted the entertainment of messing with your head. But normal people don’t just have split personalities like that, all right? You need help if you believe anything that came out of her mouth.”

Finn folded his arms across his chest, an incredulous smile showing up on his face unbidden. There was a fire in his chest, deep but hot, and he relished the feeling of it. Anger was a much better feeling than the hollowness he’d been wading through for so long now.

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