From Diamond to Coal

Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE

William figured he was probably driving James insane. The poor man was supposed to watch after his safety, but William kept insisting on going to place he shouldn't have gone to himself.

"Just five minutes, come on," William pleaded. He jiggled around, desperate to go into the little curio shop.

James gave the dark and creepy store a distasteful look, but finally nodded. "Five minutes."

"Yay!" William held up two fists of joy in front of his chest and gave James a grin, then ran inside the store.

He'd always had a fondness for the strange. It was one of those traits that had manifested young with him and just grown along with him.

Curio shops were the best, always with such a mix of things in them. From costume jewelry to real jewelry, strange statues and paintings and ceramics, everything mixed together in glittering disarray. It made him think of circuses and magic and just stepping into the store made him want to smile. And boy did he need to.

He'd been under a lot of stress lately. He'd never thought that planning a wedding would be so hard. It taxed even his high intellect and left him wanting to crawl into his bed until everything worked itself out.

If he could have, he would have jumped into the future to a time when they were already married and all the hard parts were already over. Instead, he got to taste cakes and check out music groups.

He never would have suspected that Alan was such a diva, but there it was. Underneath his stern veneer there was someone that desperately wanted to have the perfect white wedding.

Alan was a bridezilla. It was the most awful thing William had never wanted to find out about the love of his life. He almost wished that Alan was a thief instead. It would be a lot less terrifying.

So being able to step inside a curio shop and feel all that busy buzzing disappear out of the back of his head, he could let himself think that everything was okay. Everything would work itself out and he wouldn't completely lose his mind and go running off into the night.

He was standing inside the musty dimness of a curio shop. All was right with the world.

William carefully fingered the various knickknacks on the shelf. He'd already chosen a hand-painted ceramic knight in full armor standing next to a rather recalcitrant looking pony--there was no way that was supposed to be a horse.

"What are you even going to do with that?" James asked from behind him.

William shrugged. "I don't know. I thought I'd start a collection. You don't like it?"

"It's fine if you're a fourteen year old girl and someone's grandmother," James said, "but I don't hate it or anything. It just seems kind of weird, since you've never shown any interest in ceramics before."

"I have depths to me," William said, picking up a hairy dwarf guy before putting him back down. "I'm not just Congressman Trent's boytoy."

"Ah, so you heard that, huh?"

William turned to look at him. "How could I not?" His hands twisted the handle of the plastic shopping basket. "They think Alan's just marrying me for my looks."

"Well, he kinda is."

William gaped at him. "What?"

James shrugged, his eyes sliding around the room attentively. "Well, your looks are pretty much attached to your face, so he is marrying you for your looks. He's also marrying you for your personality, including the good traits and the bad ones you like to pretend you don't have."