Chapter 2: The Language of Flowers
The first lesson was how to stand next to him.
"You're doing the thing," Bruce said out of the side of his mouth, on the steps of the Gotham Museum of Art, while forty photographers screamed his name.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you look like you're being held hostage."
"I'm smiling."
"You're smiling like a hostage." He bent his head toward you, laughing for the cameras, big and golden and careless, his hand warm at the small of your back. Into your ear, in the other voice, he said, "Think of something you actually like. Not me. Anything."
You thought about ranunculus. The way the petals layer, hundreds of them, tissue-thin, like a rose that got carried away. Your face did something. The cameras went off like a hailstorm.
"Better," he murmured. "What was that?"
"Ranunculus."
"I don't know what that is."
"I know you don't," you said. "It's tragic."
The season ran from December to March, and it turned out to be mostly standing.
You stood next to him at the Gotham Philharmonic's New Year concert and at the ribbon-cutting for the new Martha Wayne Wing at Gotham General, where he gave a speech so short and so plain that three reporters asked you afterward if he'd had a stroke. You stood next to him at a charity polo match he lost on purpose, and at a dinner for the mayor where he got so convincingly drunk on sparkling cider that he had to be helped to the car by two waiters and Alfred. You stood next to him while people asked you when the wedding was, and whether you'd sign a prenup, and what it was like, honestly, between us girls, to be with Bruce Wayne.
"Exhausting," you told the wife of a hedge-fund manager.
"Oh," she said, with feeling. "I bet."
You learned his tells. That was the thing nobody warned you about. You started out pretending to know him and ended up actually knowing him, in small, specific, unwanted ways. You learned that the public grin used every tooth and the real one used about four. You learned that he hated olives and ate them at parties anyway because the Bruce Wayne in the papers would. You learned that he never sat with his back to a door. That he read three newspapers every morning in the breakfast room, all the way through, including the obituaries, with a pen. That he came home most nights after you'd gone to bed, and some nights not until morning, and that on those mornings he walked a little carefully and didn't eat much, and Alfred brought him tea with something in it that smelled like cloves and arnica.
You didn't ask. You'd written that clause yourself.
He learned things too. He learned that you were up at four every morning out of habit, that you'd kept the shop open on a handshake with your landlord and a third of your first payment, and that you made coffee strong enough to strip paint. He learned the difference between a peony and a garden rose because you made him, on a slow Tuesday in the greenhouse at the manor, which his mother had built and which nobody had touched in thirty years until you asked Alfred if you could.
"Ranunculus," you said, holding one up. "Now you know."
"It looks like a rose that's overthinking it."
"That's exactly what it looks like."
He was standing in the greenhouse doorway in his shirtsleeves, watching you repot a lemon tree that had somehow survived three decades of neglect, and he had the strangest expression on his face. Like someone listening to music through a wall.
"My mother used to do that," he said. "Talk to them while she worked."
"I wasn't talking to it."
"You told it to stop being dramatic."
"Well, it was being dramatic." You pressed the soil down around the roots. When you looked up he'd gone, and the door was swinging, and you sat there in the warm green light with dirt on your hands and your heart doing something it had no contractual right to do.
The Botanical Society's winter ball was in February, in the great glass conservatory at the north end of Robinson Park, and you'd been asked to do the flowers.
Not because you were engaged to Bruce Wayne. That's what you told yourself, and that's what the Society's president told you, a sharp old woman with a cane who'd seen your amaryllis at the Wayne gala and said, "Finally, somebody in this city who isn't afraid of a dark color." You did black calla lilies and white anemones with inky centers and long, wild trailing ropes of jasmine from the iron ribs of the glass roof. When the doors opened and the guests came in out of the snow, the whole room smelled like a summer night.
Bruce came in last, in a black tuxedo, and stopped dead in the doorway.
He looked up at the jasmine. He looked at the lilies. He looked for you, and found you, and for one unguarded second his face was the face of the man in the greenhouse door, not the man in the papers. Then a photographer called his name and it was gone.
He crossed the floor to you through the crowd. People turned to watch.
"You did this," he said.
"I did this."
"It's." He stopped. You'd never heard Bruce Wayne run out of words before. He had several prepared vocabularies and you'd seen him switch between them in a single sentence. "Dance with me."
"You hate dancing."
"Bruce Wayne loves dancing," he said, and took your hand, and led you out.
He was a good dancer. Of course he was. He moved like someone who'd had lessons long ago and then a great many other kinds of lessons later, controlled and balanced and light on his feet for a man his size. His hand was big and warm on your back. You laid your hand on his side, under his jacket, the way the dance asked.
He flinched.
It was tiny. You'd never have caught it if you hadn't spent three months learning him. A hitch in his breath, the muscles under your palm locking for half a beat. You moved your hand an inch higher and felt, through his shirt, the stiff edge of a bandage wound tight around his ribs.
"Polo?" you said quietly.
"Polo," he agreed.
"In February."
"Indoor polo."
"Bruce."
His eyes came down to yours. The orchestra was playing something slow. Around you couples turned under the jasmine, and nobody could hear, and for a few bars he simply looked at you, and you saw him consider telling you the truth. You saw it come all the way up to his mouth.
"Nine A," he said softly.
So you said nothing. You moved your hand lower, off the bandage, and let him lead.
"Well," said a voice beside you when the song ended. "Aren't you two a picture."
Gerald Kessler wore his tan like a medal. He had a glass of champagne in one hand and he tapped his signet ring against it as he smiled at you, ting, ting, ting.
"Lovely flowers," he said. "My compliments. It must be so nice to have work again. I understand you had a rough autumn. A partner who ran off. Some loans." Ting. "Four hundred thousand, was it? Quite a lot for a little flower shop."
Bruce's arm went still around your waist.
"Gerald," he said, all teeth. "Have you met my fiancée's right hook? I hear it's terrific."
"I'm only making conversation, Bruce."
"You're making a mistake," you said pleasantly, before Bruce could, "if you think I need his money to put up with him. Honestly, Mr. Kessler. Look at him. Nobody could pay me enough."
Kessler laughed. It didn't reach his eyes. Then he glanced past you, up through the glass roof of the conservatory, at the low grey clouds over the city, and you followed his look without meaning to.
There was a light in the clouds. A pale circle, and in the middle of it, black, the unmistakable shape of a bat.
When you looked back, Bruce was smiling down at you, a big careless public smile, and saying, "Champagne, sweetheart? I'll get you champagne," and pressing a kiss to your temple, and walking away through the crowd toward the bar. He didn't come back from the bar.
You stood under the jasmine for forty minutes making his excuses. Migraine. He gets them. He's lying down in the car. Kessler watched you the whole time, ting, ting, ting, like a man counting.
He came home at a quarter past five.
You knew because you hadn't gone to bed. You'd sat up in the library in your coat with the fire going out and your shoes off and the ring turning and turning on your finger, and around four you'd stopped pretending to read. You heard the car. You heard a door somewhere deep in the house that wasn't the front door. Then nothing, for a long time, and then slow footsteps in the hall.
He stopped in the library doorway when he saw you.
He'd changed. Black turtleneck, grey trousers, hair damp like he'd showered somewhere. There was a fresh bruise along his cheekbone, purple at the center, and he was holding himself in a way that made your own ribs ache to look at.
"You waited up," he said.
"I wasn't waiting. I was reading."
He looked at the book on the floor by your feet, face down, spine cracked. "You were reading 'Fluid Mechanics, Volume Two.'"
"It's very gripping."
He came into the room. He moved like every step was a negotiation. He stopped in front of your chair, close, and stood there looking down at you in the grey light from the tall windows.
"I came back," he said.
It was nothing. Three words. It was Clause Nine A, read back to you like a man reporting in. But his voice cracked a little on the last one, and you stood up, and you were very close to him, close enough to see the shadow of stubble on his jaw and a tiny cut through one eyebrow, and the smell of him was rain and antiseptic and, faintly, jasmine from the conservatory, still caught in his hair.
"You did," you said. "Thank you."
He lifted his hand. Slowly, like he wasn't sure he was allowed, he touched the side of your face. His knuckles were scraped raw. His thumb moved once along your cheekbone.
"I'm going to breach it," he said, very low. "Nine. I think I've been breaching it for weeks."
Your heart stopped.
"Bruce—"
"Sir."
Alfred stood in the doorway in his dressing gown. He was holding the morning edition of the Gotham Gazette, and his face, for the first time since you'd known him, was not neutral at all.
"I'm very sorry," Alfred said. "But you'll both want to see this."
He turned the paper around. Above the fold, under a photo of the two of you dancing under the jasmine, the headline ran in letters three inches high.
WAYNE ENGAGEMENT A SHAM: GAZETTE OBTAINS SIGNED CONTRACT. And beneath it, a photograph of page four, of Clause Nine, of your own handwriting in the margin.