For the First Time: Twenty-One Brand New Stories of First Love (58 page)

“Where does it hurt?” he asked quietly.

It wouldn’t make sense for a man who was so concerned he may have injured her accidentally, to then actively seek to harm her. If he wanted to hurt her—really hurt her—he wouldn’t care if she was already hurting, right? The thought made her breath come easier.

The knight stared down into her eyes with concern, and for the first time she felt like she was seeing him,
really
seeing him. Now that her initial blind fear had slightly dissipated, the tunnel vision that had clamped down on her in her panic fell away.

His skin was tanned by the sun she’d never felt on her own face. His eyes were deep and brown, a color so unlike her own blue eyes or the witch’s fiery orange ones. His thick black hair contrasted sharply with her own pale locks.

But what seemed so strange to her, so new, was the pure masculinity he exuded. His face was shadowed by tiny stubbles of dark hair along the sharp jawline. His body was wider than two of her own put side-by-side. He may as well have been an entirely different species.

Wherever she was soft and smooth, he was hard and rough. Where she was light, he was dark. Where she was frightened, he was…scary. And yet, the man was beautiful in his own strange, different way.

What did this man want with her, now that he was in the tower with her?

“You’re fine,” he said finally.

Am I?
Nothing felt broken. His bulky, muscled arm had shielded her from injury during the fall. Her scalp was on fire, though, from all of his weight on the remaining part of the braid.

Then the man picked up the scissors.

“Don’t!” she cried, her speech finally returning.

“Look what you’ve done to your hair,” he murmured.

“Don’t touch me.”

“I have rope. I can get you safely to the ground without the braid,” he said, misunderstanding her protestation. “Your hair will just get in my way, anyhow.”

Safely to the ground.

The words swirled in her mind. The ground. Rope. What would she do if he kidnapped her and took her from the tower? How could she—having never even set foot on the grass below—handle a world so much larger than her tower?

What if other men, men like those the witch feared, found her out there?

“You can’t just take me. I won’t go.”

“You don’t have a choice, sweetheart,” the man said. “You are the one and only reason the witch still terrorizes the kingdom. With you as her hostage, no one will kill her for fear that you will die with her.”

Rapunzel tried to scoot away from him, her long skirts catching under his knees. He still held her wrists in a death grip. Escaping him was impossible.

“Why do people want to kill Mother?”

“She kidnapped you as an infant, and has held you prisoner for nearly two decades,” he said harshly. “We couldn’t even hold her in jail because she would taunt us, reminding us of how a poor child would
starve to death
alone in the tallest tower in the kingdom, one with no stairs, and no way up but by flying in the window on a broomstick.”

Yes—starve to death. That did sound like Mother. And yet as wicked as she was, the witch was also the only one who had ever taken care of Rapunzel. The only one in her life, period.

“I’m safe here,” she said, repeating the mantra she’d been taught. “Protected. I can never leave my tower, because men are dangerous.”

The man stood, dragging her up with him by the wrists. He was so big, so tall. Rapunzel stared up at him, briefly wondering if he had grown taller the same way her hair had grown longer.

“Do you believe I’m dangerous?” he asked.

“No.” Yet her instinctual response flew in the face of everything Mother had taught her. “Yes. I don’t know, sir. Yes.”

“I’m your only hope of rescue, that’s what I am,” he said. His dark eyes flashed. “I mean you no harm—but I’m getting you out of this tower before the sun rises, whether you come with me willingly, or tied up in a sack over my shoulder as I climb down. So you better think carefully about giving me trouble.”

Rapunzel swiveled her head, looking for a place to hide. But there was no place to hide he wouldn’t be able to retrieve her from; no escape except out the window to her death. And as harshly as the man spoke, he wasn’t worth dying over.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Desperate apologies sometimes mollified the witch. Being tied up in a sack sounded scary. And then what would happen, once he opened the sack? “Please don’t hurt me, sir.”

His tone softened. “Rapunzel—I am not here to hurt you. I’m here to help you…but I can’t even imagine how difficult that must be to understand, from your point of view.”

“You can help me by leaving, and not saying a word about it,” she said. “If the witch finds out you were in here, I don’t know what she’d do to me.” Her breath hitched at the thought.

“Enough.” He put his finger under her chin and forced her to look up at his face. His fingers were hard, calloused. “I’m going to let go of your hands,” the man said, “so I can cut the rest of your hair. It’s a hindrance.”

“No,” she whispered. “Don’t you touch my hair.”

“Don’t move when I let go,” he warned. “Be good for me, and I’ll take extra care to trim your hair properly and make it look nice for you. But,” he added, “if you do move, I’ll have to hold you still again, and just cut as best I can with one hand and a struggling girl thrashing about.
It won’t look pretty
.”

The thought of her hair not looking pretty made her stomach drop. That may sound silly to any other in such dire circumstances, but for Rapunzel, her world was so small—and her hair such a huge part of it.

“I won’t move,” she whispered.

The man released her and she resisted rubbed her aching wrists, afraid to move an inch lest it cause him to grab her again. He ran his fingers through her hair, straightening it, and paused when he reached the part that was still long enough to reach the ground outside the tower. His large, warm fingers brushed against the thin material of her dress, and she trembled.

“Good girl,” he whispered, his hand firm on her waist, where he’d do the cutting.

Snip. Snip snip snip.

Rapunzel screamed as hair fell away, expecting a sudden veil of horror and pain to accompany the final amputation.

All at once, her long, coiled braid fell to the floor to join the rest of it with a muted thump.

Tears stung her eyes—in that moment, all was surely lost. But no! Instead, she felt as light as a bird. The braid she’d worn her whole life had weighed on her like a bag of heavy building stones—and now her neck felt relaxed, released from the pressure.

“Is it terrible?” she asked the man. Her hands shook as she fingered the severed edges of her shorter, waist-length hair, and she struggled to bring a lock up to her face to inspect the damage. “Am I…ugly now?”

He turned her around, his hands still on her waist, and looked her over. “You are very beautiful, Rapunzel. Even more so than before. You can go to the mirror and see for yourself.”

Walking without trailing the weighty braid felt like floating. So smooth and easy. The looking-glass reflected back a young woman with tear-stained cheeks and hair that flowed like water out of a pitcher. It was different, very different. It felt
good
.

But something the young knight had said hadn’t made sense, and it just now clicked.

“Mother doesn’t fly on a broomstick,” Rapunzel said slowly. “She doesn’t even clean the floors with a broomstick.”

“Interesting—she really can’t fly on a broomstick at all?”

None of this made sense. “Why would Mother say that?”

“I imagine she didn’t want us to learn how to really get into your tower,” he said simply, “so the witch lied to us. Just as she’s lied to you.”

A lie… In her eighteen years, she’d never even been introduced to the concept.

“Mother said something that she knew to be…untrue?” Rapunzel had to be sure she understood what the man meant.

“Yes.”

“What’s the point of anyone ever saying anything at all, if it could be a lie?” she protested. “How does anyone trust each other to be truthful?”

Rapunzel could tell by how thin his full lips had gotten that his patience was wearing thin—something that happened often with the witch, usually with undesirable consequences. But she couldn’t let it go.

“Maybe lies exist out in the world,” she said, “but not in my tower. I’ve never even known the word existed until you came here. That has to mean something.”

“Yes, it means you are naive, under her spell, or both,” he said, his voice gruff. “And stop calling her ‘Mother.’ The witch killed your
real
mother when she ripped you from her womb. They found the poor woman gutted like a fish.”

Rapunzel swallowed hard as the words assaulted her. “No.”

The man winced. “I shouldn’t be so harsh. I keep forgetting this is all new to you.”

Wait—a
real mother
. She clung to those words and pushed aside the context.

Someone other than the witch was her mother. Someone who wouldn’t hurt her or put spells on her one moment, even as she kissed Rapunzel’s head and brushed her hair another. A real mother who would never leave her daughter frightened and alone, sometimes for days.

Rapunzel had always wondered why she herself hadn’t inherited the witch’s powers. Now it made perfect sense.

The thought of not being the witch’s true child wasn’t difficult for Rapunzel to grasp onto. She’d fantasized about just that for so many years. It was easy to take the comforting thought of a
real mother
—a good mother, a good person—and wrap it around her like a warm blanket.

But then a vision flashed before her eyes of her mother
gutted like a fish
, as the man had told her. The blood drained from Rapunzel’s face as the entirety of what he’d just said hit her in full.

“Was my real mother really…murdered? To get to me, still inside of her?”

Who could even perform such a malicious act?
Was the witch really capable of such a gruesome crime?
Yes.

“It was back when I was a boy,” the man said. His tone was gentler now. “Seven years old. The men were up in arms, ready for vengeance. Everyone knew who the killer was, but with you in her clutches, the King ordered the witch remain unharmed.”

He sat on her iron-framed feather bed, taking up most of the space with his large body. How perfectly masculine he was, so completely opposite from Rapunzel. Even the way he sat was different—with his legs spread wide in a way she had never even thought to sit. The man’s knees pointed in different directions.

She sat on the chair by her vanity, her knees together, her ankles crossed, and looked at him. Did he sit that way for a reason? Slowly, she spread her thighs until her own knees pointed away from each other, her feet planted apart.

The man’s eyes widened as he stared back at her. Something wasn’t right with how she was sitting now—his expression had changed. She slammed her thighs shut and stood.

“Perhaps you should go,” Rapunzel said, suddenly uneasy.

But why now, when he was merely sitting on her bed? He hadn’t done anything to hurt her. He just… had an enticing aura about him, a masculine presence that seemed to fill the room.

“Mother—I mean, the witch—is always back by morning,” she said. “I don’t know what she’ll do when she realizes I can’t help her into the tower. I can only imagine it will be quite awful. She’s mean when she’s upset.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” the man said.

He kicked off his black boots and lay back on her bed with his feet crossed casually, as if he had no fear of the witch who had terrorized Rapunzel her entire life. If only she could be as brave as he.

“In the morning when the witch asks you to let down your hair,” he said, “I will indeed hold onto your braid and throw it to her. When she is nearly to the top…I let go. The witch falls to her death, and you are free. We’ll hook the rope up and rappel down.”

“You can’t,” Rapunzel whispered. “You mustn’t. She’ll kill you and then she’ll punish me.”

“I won’t let that happen,” he said sternly. “The prize is too priceless to not see this through.”

“How much?” Money was a concept she knew of, because the witch always told her how much gold and silver it took to pay for Rapunzel’s beautiful dresses, or the feather bedding, or the fine fresh fruits she ate for breakfast. “Sir—I’ll match it. I have an armoire full of dresses fit for a princess. And jewelry, too. You can have it all.”

“You can’t match it,” he said.

“You haven’t even looked at my belongings. Please, maybe I can.”

“It’s
you
, Rapunzel. You are my prize.”

She stared at him in confusion. “I’m not worth anything at all.”

He shook his head and smiled. “I wouldn’t be here if that was true.”

There was something about the way he looked at her when he spoke those words that made her smile at him with true gratitude for the first time since he’d thrown himself into her window.

“I still don’t understand,” she said. “I no longer even have my only treasure—my long hair.” And her hair was the only part of her the witch ever truly seemed to cherish.

“Whomsoever does kill the Witch and free the Virgin Captive in the Tower shall be granted her hand in Marriage, by Order of the King.” He spoke the edict as if he’d said it many times, or heard it many times, or both.

Why would the King speak of her?

“No one’s been able to do it yet,” he said. “The witch has killed twenty-seven young, strong men in the past three years, all who felt your value so high to be worth dying for.”

Twenty-seven men. She’d never even known anyone knew about her, or cared. None of those men had ever even gotten close enough to her for her to notice them, much less be saved by them.

Rapunzel wasn’t sure how she felt about being part of an official edict she’d never even known about. What did it mean, to be a prize? Was her captivity to be exchanged for another? There was, however, definitely something intriguing about this knight. He inspired something strange inside of her, something that the witch certainly never had.

“So I’ll belong to you, then, sir—instead of the witch?”