She hadn’t answered the question, at least not directly, and the way that she had answered it was a bit jarring for him. A way out? That sort of wording sounded like he’d gotten into some minor debt while gambling on a game of troll boxing, or he’d “forgotten” to pay someone off after a purchase on the black market. Some objectively poor decision that had resulted in some truly awful consequences, and he would now have to find a way out in order to go about his normal life. Ben had been in that sort of situation before, plenty of times, and this was not that.

“I’m not looking for a way out,” he responded, his tone harsh despite how he’d been determined only moments earlier to keep emotion out of this conversation as much as possible for the sake of getting through things smoothly. “I asked about you.”

He should have just left it there, but the implication behind what she’d said — that he would be looking for some quick and easy escape route, and that he would take it when it presented itself without so much as a backwards glance at her — hurt. It aligned, he supposed, with what he now knew about her in the light of last night’s events: she didn’t trust him at all, and maybe more than that, she didn’t seem to know him very well, despite all of the time they’d spent together and all he’d risked (both when they originally met and over the past two months) for her sake.

And now they were married — maybe forever, if things had really played out the way she said they had this morning. Ben was married to someone who didn’t even think he had the integrity to consider more than one side of the coin, or the empathy to realize that his actions would have consequences for her, too —

So yeah, forget leaving emotion out of it. Ben wanted to say some of this shit, and maybe she needed to hear it.

“And you know why I asked?” he began hotly. “Because the two of us being married is objectively bad for both of us. There is no dimension of this that’s good. Do you know where I live, Melody? In a rented room at a men’s club — and not even one of those ‘let’s all sit around and smoke cigars and be respectable’ men’s clubs, either. Excalibur, best known for staging drunken broomstick races in the middle of the night and hosting boxing matches. So where are you going to live? I have no fucking clue, Princess,” he said with an aggressive shrug. “And you know what I do for a living? I get paid — not an exceptionally large amount, by the way — to drink with people. I drink for a living, and on the side I hustle people out of their money in gambling rackets, which aren’t always legal. And what are you going to do if I get arrested some day, hm? What happens then?” he asked. “I’ve gotten pretty close before. I’ve been in the holding cells at the Department of Law Enforcement. I’m not legally allowed to requisition my own portkeys.” None of which she would have known, because it wasn’t as though he advertised any of this — certainly not to young ladies he was in the middle of flirting with — but he had told her many times that marrying him was not an option, and she apparently hadn’t believed him — so he was going to explain a few of the reasons why and hope she caught on.

“I’m not trying to ‘find a way out,’ here,” he continued in a tone of exasperation. “But I am not fucking husband material. If you have any other options, they’re better fucking options,” he insisted. “So I’d like it — Princess — if you’d answer my question.”