fragile divinity | self para
Scholarship.
The word felt filthy on the edges of his tongue. Before it even left his throat, stuck there at the wall of his too-white teeth. It felt like a betrayal. It felt like a confession that would tumble him apart. It felt like a truth so ugly it made all his lies feel like beautiful, caressing companions.
Scholarship. He lived in fear of the way the word exposed him, and as he stood in the men’s room, palms gripping the edge of the damp, marble counters, he hoped to God it never came up with his date sitting across the table from him. Hoped she hadn’t heard, somehow, through a furiously whispered rumour that he sometimes felt certain was ghosting at his tailcoat as he strutted through the corridors of Oxford. He was haunted by any remnants of his past still surface enough to peer through the veil of glass and sand he’d tried to bury it with.
He’s spent years perfecting his walk, his talk, his privileged smile and he’s so good at it now that he at times can even convince himself. Some days, he’s almost reinvented the truth. Has become so familiar with the lies that they’ve made him a nest in a safe, new reality.
But the rest of the time he lived in constant fear of that other shoe dropping.
The back splash tiles of the bathroom sink were pitch black and so shiny he could see himself in them. It was like even the room was laughing at him, and his reluctancy to look himself in the mirror with any kind of conviction. Too cowardly to face the twisted boy that Oxford had mangled him into. It was easier to blame the school. Easier to say that the pressure of the Riot Club and the prestige he was so constantly cloaked in, was responsible for his poorly justified choices, for his backburner-ing of integrity. His pride was forged in the cold grey slate of his artifice, and if you looked too closely you could see the places it was chipped.
The echoing sound of the door opening, of cutlery and chatter swooping into the space before the door slid shut again, shook him from his reverie and he twisted ornate taps with hurried fingers, running his palms under the flow as the sound of fine-Italian soles clacked behind his back and stopped at a urinal.
He breathed. Exhaled the breath he’d been holding, actually, and cupped cool water into his hands to splash it over his face. He didn’t always lose his cool. In fact, in company, he rarely did. The fact that he’d gotten so God damn good at this was half the reason guilt feasted on him as savagely as it did. He didn’t crack with an audience, but the pressure to perform so consistently made his solitude more of a place of unwanted reflection than of refuge. The silence gave him time to stop and think and hate and regret; all things he neither needed nor had the energy for. What he needed was to be kept busy. Moving constantly, his performance uninterrupted, so that in doing so he might forget everything it was he was running from. Everything he was covering up.
It was all Lana’s fault. He’d been holding the door open for his date (a pretty blonde thing with jewels around her neck worth the same dollar value as the tits sitting too-high and too-solid on her narrow ribcage to be natural) when Lana Chambers had strolled passed clutching her handbag and ducking under the umbrella of whatever current company she was in. And he’d seen it in her eyes—the nugget of truth she wielded, a weapon that could so easily destroy him. He’d seen the shadow of knowledge flick across her raven’s wings eyes as she’d glanced at him, then at his date.
He hated the way she looked at him—regardless of what she was thinking, he could’t shake the feeling she knew what he was up to. Knew all his darkest secrets, all the workings of his seduction on these women who would stabilize his status as top-tier. Couldn’t help but fear she would find a way to air his dirty laundry for the world to see—even if she hadn’t been privy to much of it. There was no way she could know the things he’d never told a soul. No way she could know how deeply his seduction of these women was a lie. No way she could know the way he looked at Lucas.
She couldn’t know. But his best friend was the only thing in his world among the elite that felt genuine and he couldn’t help but fear she’d find a way to take that from him. She was the only one with the power to.
So fragile, he was, for such a God among mortals. So tenuous was his falsified confidence, his calculated swagger. He could be taken apart so easily by a woman who knew too much. One thread was all it would take to unravel his web of lies. How long until he cracked under the heavy choke of his sacrifices? What he was giving up in order to obtain the one thing that he could count on making him memorable? Maintaining his significance.
And there was nothing worse he could think of, in this world of material, power and prestige, than being rendered insignificant.
