PLAYBOY PRINCESS (gxg) ✓

10. Rory Preston

✫✫✫

                "I CAN'T FUCKING DO THIS."

                Helpless—Rory felt stupidly, utterly helpless as she tried to stand. The cast covering her entire right leg felt like deadweight. She was uncoordinated, graceless, and she hadn't felt like that since her mother had left. When it seemed like the world had been swept out from underneath her.

               And it felt like that now. Like she was balancing on seawater and tightropes and the edge of a fucking cliff.

               "You can do this," Paris said encouragingly.

               "Shut up," Rory scowled. "I look like a damn idiot."

               "It's okay to look like an idiot once in a while."

               "I pride in myself in never looking like an idiot, thanks."

              Paris made a thoughtful sound. "I think that's the problem here, then. Pride."

              "What about it?" Rory growled, clutching the sides of her wheelchair with white knuckles. Why couldn't she just walk? 

              "You're arrogant," Paris stated.

              "I prefer to think of it as being hot and knowing it."

              "That's not what I'm talking about. You're afraid of looking like an idiot—you have too much pride to just let yourself fall."

              "I don't want to fall!" Rory snapped. "I want to walk." 

              Paris moved closer to Rory. They were in the physical therapy room, with various machinery and obstacles and bars around the room. Next to them, a thick glass window spanned the entire wall, revealing the heavy snowfall.

              "You can't always be perfect, you know," said Paris quietly. "You don't always have to put on a show."

              Don't I? 

             That was how Rory survived growing up in the palace. How she survived the media attention and the publicity. 

             If nobody who the real Rory was, then nothing could hurt her. 

             The princess they wrote about—the playboy who appeared in headlines—that wasn't her. So when they talked about her, when they mentioned her in the news as irresponsible and reckless, she didn't have to let it touch her.

             "I can't do it," Rory repeated.

             But right now . . . in this room with Paris . . . it was real. 

             Everything was real.

             And if she couldn't get up, if she couldn't walk, then that was real, too. The accident, the helplessness, the falling.

            She didn't want any of it to be real.

            But Paris was still standing there, her cinnamon-gold eyes glittering bright under the fluorescent lights. 

            Rory didn't mind looking like an idiot sometimes.

            She just didn't want to look like an idiot in front of Paris.