Chapter 14
Rupert sat in his office, tallying up invoices to file away for this month’s sales, when he heard someone lightly rapping on the door. Without lifting his eyes from the task at hand, he said, “Come in.”
The door opened, and he knew without looking that it was Joyce when he heard her loud sigh. He smiled so that she could not see, punching numbers into a calculator with the eraser on his pencil.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.” He heard her fingernails sliding along the edge of the desk beside him, as if merely perusing the items he kept there, before he heard a swish of her skirt and then she was sitting three inches from his calculator, on top of his Post-its on the edge of his desk.
“Excuse me, I am working here,” he said, leaning back in his chair to show her the slight irritation marring his brow.
Her lips were pressed together in mirth, her arms folded, and if it weren’t for the wrinkles around her eyes, he would have thought she looked like an impish little girl, scheming and plotting behind her glimmering eyes. It was a look he once found so alluring that she would have been naked within minutes of showing it to him. It only served to amuse him now.
“Something happened with the kids last night,” she said, her fingernails tapping excitedly on her arm, her chin lifting.
“Oh?” He added an invoice’s subtotal on the calculator, licking the tip of his middle finger, meticulously pulling the right-hand corner of the page down and lifting it to place it atop a stack of finished invoices.
“Did Spike seem strange when he came home last night?” she asked innocently, her motives as obvious as the shoulder pads she wore beneath her silk blouse.
“I suppose there is no point in telling you that I am very busy.” He tallied the next invoice.
“Nope.” She plucked the pencil from his hand, holding it out of reach. There was no use fighting her, she’d hold the damn thing until she was finished with whatever she’d come here to say. He sighed, laced his fingers together over his belly and waited.
“I want to know what he did to her.” She looked so sure, so certain that Spike had been the cause for whatever turmoil her daughter had gone through the previous evening.
“How do you know she didn’t do something to him?”
Joyce scoffed as if that were the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard. “Buffy doesn’t have a mean bone in her body.”
“Aside from all the sweet comments she makes and her pleasant and amiable demeanor,” he said teasingly.
“You know what I mean. She’s a teenager, that’s how teenage girls are. But she’s a good person beneath all of that. She’s warm and lovable and easily hurt and I want to know what Spike did to her!”
“Why don’t you ask her?” Annoyed, he sat up straight in his chair once more and began tallying invoices with his fingers. He hated doing it this way because the damn buttons were too small, but he needed a distraction, and Joyce was not going to win by stealing his preferred implement.
“I tried, Rupert! All night long, I tried to get her to talk to me but she just kept crying. Honestly, I don’t understand why she was so worked up. She’s never acted that way before, even on the few occasions she and Angel were having problems. She’d always tell me about it. Always talk to me.” Joyce squeezed the pencil she pilfered from him with both hands, twisting her fists around it nervously as if she were about to be scolded.
“Buffy was crying?” Rupert sat back in his chair again, his interest piquing when Joyce dropped the act and showed real distress.
“Wailing is more like it. And I tried to soothe her, but she was too worked up to even speak. And then she trashed her bedroom.”
Rupert blinked rapidly, trying to sort this out. “What do you mean, trashed?”
Joyce stood up, drumming the tip of the pencil in the palm of one hand idly as she walked about the room, concern wrinkling the corners of her mouth. “There was this painting that her father gave her a long time ago, this gorgeous painting of a ballerina by some impressionist that he met when he was purchasing a resort in Tuscany. She loved it, immediately hung it up in her bedroom, and would just sit and stare at it for hours. She was only ten, and at the time, she was almost as big as the painting itself.” Joyce smiled a bit as she recalled the memory.
“Anyway, last night, I’d given up trying to console her, and she used a few choice words about me to make the decision to leave her alone rather easy, let me tell you. Not even five seconds pass after I shut the door and start walking down the hall before I hear this loud crash and Buffy shouting something. I run back to her room, and Rupert, she’d torn the painting off the wall!”
“Oh…”
“It landed against her bed post and ripped a hole right through it. It’s ruined, irreplaceable, and she didn’t even care! She just started tearing the room apart and I had to use all my strength to calm her down. She glared at me, this horrible, awful glare that made me feel disgusted with myself. I’ve never seen her so angry, so…just hateful.”
“Well.” Rupert set his glasses on his desk and took a deep breath. “I know that young girls have a tendency towards rather emotional and melodramatic fits when their feelings and hormones become difficult to manage.”
Joyce laughed cynically, her worry morphing from digging a trench in the floorboards to exasperated sighing. “This was not just hormones, Rupert.”
“I don’t know what advice I can give you, but I’m certainly not divulging any details that were given to me in confidentiality.”
“So you do know something!” She hurried to sit on the desk again. “Rupert, what did he say? What happened last night?”
“Nothing to warrant such an outburst, I assure you,” he said, plucking the pencil from her limp hand, and he attempted to start his work again. “If anyone should be trashing rooms and throwing a fit, it’s my nephew. I can’t answer for Buffy as I am unable to read her mind.”
“Oh, I get it,” she said, that elitist tone of hers dragging out every syllable. “You’re withholding information that could help me because you’re a little too familiar with the subject matter. Trying to get back at me through your nephew is pretty low, Rupert. I had thought better of you.”
“Joyce…this is hardly the time or the place for that.” He was quite proud that the volume of his voice remained calm, though he clenched the hell out of his jaw in restraint.
“And when is the time?” She stamped her foot like a petulant child, her eyes wide, her hair bouncing from the exertion of hopping to her feet. “I invite you over for dinner and you talk about Voltaire for hours. I try to speak to you at work and you avoid me. Then you toss the gift I gave you in my face as if it meant nothing!”
“Gift?” Rupert laughed, practically cackled. “You insulted my home!”
“Well I wasn’t going to stay the night with you on that damn futon!”
“I’m sorry, did you feel a pea beneath it, princess?”
“Oh! You! You are just…that was antique French lace, you ass!”
“I never asked for it! I have made it quite clear that I prefer simple and practical things, but you continued to use me as your toy, as a…a…” He snapped his fingers as he tried to think of the right word. “As an experiment!”
“Please,” she said, folding her arms and narrowing her eyes. “You were a mess when I found you! A mess, Rupert! Don’t walk away from me!”
Rupert turned around, inches from the office door, cracking his neck. “The only reason you’re angry is because I’m the only person that has ever said no to you. It’s over. It has been over for two bloody years! Let it go!”
Silence came as abruptly as their quarrel. Looking at Joyce now no longer had the same affect on him. There had been a time when just the slightest glance at her had his heart fluttering like a schoolboy. Though he had once imagined a future with her, rather foolishly, he had none of those desires now. Even with the knowledge that she still cared for him, he would not be swayed. Love had never been enough for them, and he no longer had any to give.
“I am worth more than living in Hank’s shadow. I am worth more than hiding, than being your secret.”
She was sniffling, but he didn’t care. He sighed, acceptance for what needed to be done fueling his exhausted body, and he walked past her to his desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out an envelope.
“I was going to wait, but I’m not sure what I was waiting for. No matter.” He handed it to her, nodding gently. “Go on, open it.”
She did as he asked, took one look inside, and then she craned her face towards the ceiling to keep her tears in check. “I don’t want this. It wasn’t a loan.”
“I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t pay you back. And now that I have, there is nothing to keep you here.”
She gasped in shock, starting to panic. “I like working here. Rupert, surely we can come to some understanding as adults.”
“If you want to continue working here, that’s up to you. But do not fool yourself into thinking that one day you and I will ever go back to the way things were. If that is your intention, then I suggest you leave.”
She ran her hands down her stomach, smoothing the wrinkles in her dress, her sniffling and teary-eyes almost pulling at his heartstrings. Almost. “You think I’m a coward, don’t you.”
Rupert sat on the edge of his desk. “Do you want my honest opinion?” When she nodded, bracing herself, he sighed heavily and rubbed his forehead.
“Yes, Joyce. I think you are a coward. I think you are too comfortable with your material possessions to give them up for something that might bring real happiness. I think you convinced yourself that we could go on forever having an affair without taking into consideration my wants and needs. No amount of fake leather shoes and marked down dresses that you wear will make up for the things you still possess, and frankly, I find it insulting.” He held up a hand when she tried to speak, and part of him was surprised that she remained silent.
Without any hesitation, he continued his diatribe. “In spite of all this, of all the things you know to be true, you still indoctrinate your daughter with the same cowardice. Money and status do not bring happiness and I am appalled that you would encourage Buffy to give up her dreams only to treat it as a hobby. That you would rather her cling to the coattails of a man with power than let her live her life to her fullest potential.”
She was crying silently, staying stoic in her posture, chin held high. “I don’t want her to go without. I don’t want her to suffer or worry about bills or how she’s going to eat because she doesn’t have the money. Angel will give her stability and she loves him so I don’t see what the problem is.”
Rupert supposed it was easier to speak of the children instead of each other, and he’d said what he needed anyway. There was no reason to backtrack if she desired a change of subject.
“What you want and what she wants is not one in the same. Of course you don’t wish her to suffer. You’re her mother. However, a trashed painting and hours of wailing are a good clue that your daughter is trying to tell you something. Do you wish her to suffer as you suffer now?”
Her back stiffened a little, and she blinked away the last of her tears, slowly gaining composure. “No, of course not.”
“I am sorry you are under stress, and I apologize for shouting earlier, but I do have work that needs finishing. Unless you decide to discontinue your services here at the store, I would like to get back to it now.”
She wiped her wet cheeks, and said, “If it’s all right with you, I would like to stay.”
He smiled a little, and nodded. “All right. If you’re sure.”
“Thank you for being honest with me. I think that I…” She inhaled, smiling, calmed. “I needed to hear that. I do hope that you’re happy one day, Rupert. I mean it.”
“I hope so, too. Life’s too short to waste it pining over rich girls, even if they do have the finest backside I’ve ever seen,” he lifted one roguish eyebrow and smiled at her.
Joyce snickered, blushing prettily, and the tension seemed to ease as their familiar and comfortable level of teasing returned. She leaned in the doorway, gripping the frame with one hand and leaning her cheek against it. “Friends?”
“As long as you need one.”
“Always.” She stood there a moment longer, looking at him kindly before she softly closed the office door behind her.
Rupert returned to his chair, swiveling around to face the desk and get back to work. He put his glasses on, picked up the discarded pencil, and felt a sudden surge of sensations in his chest that seemed to come out of nowhere. He started to breathe gently, smiling, focusing on the tiny pinpricks of relief that spread from his core out to his limbs, charging him, making him feel light and airy. The weight, the burden of obligation to a woman that could never love him properly, had finally lifted.
He licked his middle finger, turned an invoice over with a flourish, and laid it on the growing pile of papers, humming to himself as he continued his work.