Royal Disaster

the disastrous lunch

Okay... So maybe he wasn't so bad. I turned fully to face him, extending a hand. I rolled my eyes. "Fine. We'll start over again."

I could see the relief in his eyes. He took my hand gently and squeezed. "I'm Kaia Castor, and you are?"

"Arthur Bennett."

Our hands dropped to our sides and then we found ourselves in another silence.

∞ ∞ ∞

We ended up finding ourselves in a mostly tense period of trying to get along. I found out that I was a little wrong on the front of him being self-absorbed. He might have just been responding to my stubbornness in the last three days. But that doesn't mean I excused him for his asshole-ish attitude when I picked him up at the airport and on the drive here, and then, after that with the not letting me- 

Y'know what, he wasn't self-absorbed. He was just really commanding. The trait tended to piss me off when it made an appearance. Luckily, in that period, he seemed to be reigning it in.

"What do you want for dinner?" he asked me as I came down from my shower later on that afternoon. It was a relief to finally shower properly and I inhaled the scent of my shampoo on my hair.

"Don't you mean lunch?"

He looked up, his eyes straying down my body. I stopped myself from stepping back into the hallway, knowing I wasn't wearing anything "inappropriate". I was in another tank with some basketball shorts. There was a towel wrapped around my shoulders to keep my clothes from getting damp from my hair.

I raised my brow as I took a seat.

He cleared his throat, brown eyes looking away before I could detect his reaction, saying, "We're going out for lunch."

"What, why?"

He ran a hand through his hair, looking out at the beach through the kitchen window. "I figured, since you've been stuck down there for the last three days that you would like to go out."

Hmm. Not a total bad guy, but I still don't like him. We may have formed a truce, but that could only last so long.

"Oh."

"So what do you want for dinner?"

I shrugged. "Anything's fine with me."

He looked at me, doubtfully. "Are you sure?" The look in his eyes was wary, as if I was going to blow up at anything second. It peeved me off.

"I'm sure." He watched me cautiously, as if waiting for me to explode. Exasperated, I sighed. "I'm fine. Choose anything!"

And then there was a flicker in his eyes, as if that was what he was looking for. Now that- that was going to provoke my explosion. "Look, I know I have a short temper, but it's not as short as you think it is. So stop looking at me as if I'm a ticking bomb and just find some place!"

I moved to exit the room before he cleared his throat. Stopping, I waited. "I-" he coughed, a hint of embarrassment making his voice crack. Curious, I turned around. "I, actually, don't know of many places around here... unless you want something fancy."

Looking at my attire, I got what he meant. But I wasn't going to leave the house like this. "I can change, but not into anything fancy." I looked at the clock. "If you can wait for ten minutes, I can get dressed and call up Aiko. She knows a lot of places."

I looked to him questioningly. "Yeah, go call her."

"You don't mind?"

Aiko arrived in twenty minutes, adorning her typical summer day garb of a white summer dress, sandal wedges, camera, and extremely eye catching fedora. I met her at the door and she stepped in, cautiously.