Chapter Two: The Rebirth of Chivalry
A/N: Thank you to those who have read, reviewed and followed so far! This is my first rumbelle fanfic and any feedback would be great! I'm going to be going back and editing these chapters at a later date because I usually take several edits to squeeze out all the bugs. Thanks for reading, and if anyone is interested in being a beta reader be sure to PM me! This fic is going to be a long one, and my goal is to update at least once a week, carrying us through spring. Happy reading!
There is no greater exhibition of the true character of human nature, Belle thought, than the line at Starbucks on a Wednesday morning, 8 a.m. sharp. Peering over the shoulders of the line in front of her, which was really more of a mosh pit pushing and shoving for dominance, Belle wondered how long it would take for society to crumble to ash if the world's coffee bean supply ever ran out.
Rubbing her bleary eyes again, Belle felt a yawn overtake her. She had been working with Mr. Gold for only three days, and in that time had managed to read the majority of his novels and even a few of his short stories. Some small and guilty part of her felt as though she had stepped back into her years as an undergraduate, staying up late to read reading assignments that had been given weeks in advance, only to attend seminars in which no one really wanted to engage with each other. Belle glanced at her watch – should she just forgo her coffee for this morning? – when all at once she felt a hand gently touch her shoulder.
"Excuse me, miss?" Came a warm voice. Belle looked up to see a handsome young man with gentle dark eyes looking down at her. She couldn't quite place it, but she knew that she had seen those same dark eyes somewhere else. "I'm going to try to push to the front here; let me get your order too."
I think chivalry just came back from the dead, Belle thought, and nodded. "Um, okay… thank you…?"
"Neal," the young man said, nodding up toward the menu display above the counter, "What can I get you…?"
"Belle," Belle smiled graciously, "Um, a salted caramel macchiato Grande, please. I'll pay you back once we get out of this crowd."
Neal flashed her a killer smile, "Nah, this one's on me."
Pushing his way up to the front, Neal leaned across the counter and nodded in the direction of a petite brunette barista, whose uniform could scarcely conceal a voluptuous bosom and whose deep red lipstick seemed to pop against her pale skin and large, dark eyes.
"What can I do yah for?" The barista said, leaning over the counter provocatively as she eyed Neal up and down appreciatively. Neal avoided her seductive gaze, "Just a Venti black for me, and a salted caramel macchiato Grande for the lady," he said, nodding back over his shoulder toward Belle.
The barista followed his gaze and gave Belle a sly wink, "Ain't she lucky," she smirked.
Once they were outside, Neal handed Belle her cup and smiled. Belle smiled back up at him and said, "Are you sure I can't pay you back? I'd still be standing there if you hadn't swooped in to save me."
Neal shrugged, "It was nothing… maybe we can do it again sometime?"
"I'd like that," Belle said, nodding back over her shoulder, "I'm already late for work… do you have a pen?"
Neal nodded, fishing around in his briefcase and then lifting a pen from its folds. Taking her coffee cup back into his hands, he quickly jotted down his number underneath the place where the barista had scrawled in black Sharpie, "Lucky Lady". Neal handed back the cup, and Belle blushed as her eyes scanned it.
"Well, I'm late for work too," Neal said, "Maybe I'll see you around sometime?"
"I'll call you," Belle nodded, turning to scan the street for sign of a taxi she could flag down. She turned back to say thank you again, but already Neal had faded back into the sea of people flowing down the sidewalk in the snow.
Belle should have known that her luck would not last. While chivalry had briefly ghosted back into her life, it was soon snuffed out like the fragile flame that it was, replaced instead by Mr. Gold's ill temper. She arrived to find a distressed Ashley cleaning in the kitchen.
"Where is Mr. Gold?"
Ashley turned abruptly, "How did you get in!?"
Belle shrugged, "The agency still had a house key. Where is Mr. Gold? I'm late… I thought he might be down here, waiting for me."
Ashley sighed, shaking her head in a little bewilderment. "You'll soon learn that Mr. Gold doesn't wait for anyone, because he doesn't go by the same clock. You'd think that the man were immortal or something!"
Belle rolled her eyes, turning to sit at the kitchen nook. Ashley came to join her, a cup of tea readily in hand. As Belle sipped at it and reached into her bag to fish out her file folder, her eyes happened to catch on some of the paperwork spread across the table.
"Divorce papers?" Belle wondered aloud.
"Quite the scandal," Ashley said, shaking her head sadly. "Such a shame… he was ill tempered before, but this whole divorce business has driven him into a kind of madness. I haven't seen him eat in days."
"What happened?" Belle said, her eyebrows knitting together.
Ashley shifted uncomfortably, "Well, you didn't hear it from me… His wife has been seeing another man for some time, and –"
"Another man? Well, that certainly explains the sunny disposition I've been seeing!"
"A much younger man," Ashley continued. "She's been seeing him for quite some time, but she only just recently decided to divorce poor Mr. Gold because she's been ashamed to tell the son about it."
"Oh," Belle said, "That's… that's awful. Did he know?"
Ashley nodded, "They haven't really been married in practise for some time. She's never lived here, not so long as I've been Mr. Gold's secretary. I think he always secretly hoped that it would end between the two before it ever got to this… this legal business. The finality of divorce has really struck him."
Belle felt her heart ache a little for Mr. Gold, and she glanced up to look around the walls. No wonder there were no family pictures… Still, not even a divorce would stand up against his contract. Rising from her seat, Belle made her way up the stairs to the study door.
When there came no response to her knocking, she jiggled the door handle and found the door to be unlocked. Entering the study quietly, she came to stand above him. He was lying on his chaise, staring up at the ceiling blindly.
Seating herself at his desk, Belle began to sort through the scattered papers there. "Where is the manuscript, Mr. Gold?"
"In the manila envelope, by the lamp," Mr. Gold said, gesturing vaguely with his hand as he continued to stare up at the ceiling. Belle nodded slowly, having found the envelope, and quietly slid the pages from its hold. "Do you mind if I look it over here?"
Taking his grunt to be a sign of approval, Belle settled back in the uncomfortable wooden chair and began to read. As she shifted around in the chair, trying to get comfortable, she happened to glance in Mr. Gold's direction again. That was when she noticed the half-empty whiskey bottle on the floor beside the chaise, and the empty glass dangling from his hand over the side of that chaise. Mr. Gold's eyes squinted open as he felt her gaze on him, and he grimaced, dropping the glass to the floor.
"How many of those have you had today?" Belle said, eyeing the whiskey.
Mr. Gold let out a long-winded sigh and rolled onto his side, his dark eyes intent on Belle and fogged with drowsiness. "Come now, Belle… the drink is a comfort for fellows of the word." Pushing up from the chaise, he sat up and poured another glass of whiskey and held it out to her in offering, "Here; it will soften the blow of that terrible draft."
Belle wrinkled her nose and lifted her tea cup to her lips again, "Oh, um, no thank you… I don't drink anymore."
"Ah, what a shame…" Mr. Gold said, knocking back the whiskey, "from the way you were eyeing my liquor, I thought we'd finally found something in common." In that moment, a bolt of electricity charged through them as their eyes met. Belle blushed under the heat of his stare, and her eyes flickered down to his manuscript again.
"What are you looking at?" Belle said, her voice quivering.
"You, dearie," Mr. Gold said, settling back into the chaise. "Just drinking in the view while it lasts."
"And what is that supposed to mean?"
Mr. Gold sighed, "My family has left, as has every other agent. Why should you be any different?"
His words felt like a cold splash of water in Belle's face. Who did she think she was? If seasoned literary agents hadn't been able to handle this bastard, why should she be any different indeed? Jumping to her feet, Belle clutched the manuscript to her chest and quickly left the room, feeling his heated gaze on her back as she fled.
"Don't let the door hit you on the way out!" Mr. Gold's sharp and angry words followed her. After she had gone, he turned his gaze back to the ceiling. He highly doubted that he would ever be seeing that pretty little face again, and some small part of him almost regretted this. But then he was lifting the whiskey bottle to his lips, forcing himself into the comforting state of numbness once again.
Several hours later, Leroy got the call. Before he even had a chance to speak, Belle's anxious voice was jolting him into panic mode. "Slow down, sister. Where's the fire?"
"It's his manuscript, Leroy! It's… it's not ready to be shown to an editor! His wife and his son and now this manuscript has gone to shit… It's so rough, whole connecting passages have been summarized in point form plot notes! This can't be the same guy whose books I've been reading, I – "
"Whoa there, Belle!" Leroy interjected, trying his best to convince himself that he could still pretend to be composed. "You're not there as his therapist, you're there as his agent! Do you have the manuscript?"
"Well, yes…" Belle reluctantly admitted, "But-!"
"Easy!" Leroy continued soothingly, "The great American novel wasn't born overnight, Belle. Do you remember what I told you when you came to intern here again last summer?"
Inhaling a deep, steadying breath, Belle responded, "Diamonds aren't given, they're harvested and polished."
"Exactly," Leroy nodded slowly, "What Mr. Gold has dumped in your lap, sister, is a lump of coal. Now all you've gotta do is take a pickaxe to that thing, find the gems, cut and polish them."
Belle nodded slowly, "But I'm not the writer!"
"So coax him, Belle," Leroy said warily, massaging his temples in exhaustion. There was silence on Belle's end of the line, and all at once Leroy's voice took on a new tone. "Wait a minute…This isn't about the manuscript, is it?"
Silence.
"Are you backing out on me, sister? Don't you dare back out on this client; I've lost too many agents to him already!"
"He…"
"What!? He what, Belle!?"
"He looked at me… I mean, he was drunk and everything, and it didn't mean anything, but Leroy, the way that he looked at me!"
Leroy took a steadying breath, then said, "Now you listen to me, sister. You do not throw this opportunity away. You drag him out of his drunken cell and you polish that manuscript for his editor. You cannot afford to be distracted by wandering eyes right now! Now take a deep breath."
Belle followed his instructions, inhaling deeply. "Okay."
Regina tapped her long, manicured red nails against the surface of her glass top desk impatiently. "What do you mean, 'he's indisposed'? That bastard owes me a manuscript, and I intend to get it! Now you tell that feral imp that if he doesn't turn in that damned manuscript by Monday morning, he'll never publish so much as a grocery slip in this city ever again! And next time he avoids talking to me on the phone, I'll drive to that damned mansion of his, and then you know what I'm going to do? I'll light it on fire and burn his precious hideout to the ground, that's what I'll do! It'll be ashes, you hear me? Now get me that damned manuscript!"
The dial tone suddenly cut in, heavy and flat, indicating that the aggravated editor had finally hung up. With a weary sigh, Belle flipped her cell phone shut and pressed the power button until the phone clicked off. There, one less stress factor for the time being. Then she tucked it down inside her briefcase and turned back to the task at hand. Raising up onto her tiptoes, Belle knocked on the door to Mr. Gold's study again, more firmly this time.
"What the hell are you still doing here? I thought you would have been long gone by now, dearie," Came Mr. Gold's tauntingly drunk voice from the other side of the door. She could just see it in her mind's eye; him lying on his chaise, papers scattered across every surface, staring off into nothingness.
"You're not that lucky," Belle spat. Jiggling the door handle violently, Belle realized in frustration that Mr. Gold had locked the door behind her when she had left his study earlier that morning.
"You have your bloody manuscript, now leave me be!"
"So help me Mr. Gold, if you don't let me in right now, I am going to take this door off its hinges!" Belle called back through the door, her voice beginning to rise angrily. Belle waited several minutes longer, then turned on her heel and quickly made her way down to the kitchen.
"Ashley," she said, already setting to work searching the kitchen cupboards, "Where does Mr. Gold keep his screwdrivers?"
A few minutes later, Belle was marching back up the stairs, the gardener's tool box in hand. "Can't believe he doesn't even have his own tool box…" She was muttering, shaking the snow from the walk to the garden shed out back out of her hair. Dropping the toolbox at the foot of the door, Belle set to work taking out the screwdrivers holding the study door's hinges in place. One by one the hinges popped out of place, until at last the door was free.
"Ashley!" Belle called. Ashley took the stairs two at a time, and was soon standing at the door beside Belle, who nodded toward the door that she was steadying with both hands. "Help me with this, would you?"
Ashley nodded, and together they each took an end and began carrying the door downstairs. They were halfway down the staircase when a dishevelled Mr. Gold appeared in the doorway, disoriented from his dozing on the chaise, but indignant just the same.
"What the hell are you doing with my door!?"