[fic] The Love Pawn - "En Passant"

[konstantya]

Title: En Passant
Fandom: The Love Pawn (Short Story)
Genre: Drama, romance?
Characters/pairings: Paula Ingram/Red (Jack Delafield)
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 1,370
Summary: She glared up at him, though she tried to not be too obvious about it. “I thought I was supposed to be looking for my true love,” she said tartly. “I’ve seen you hold down a full conversation with one of your girlfriends while dancing,” he shot back coolly. “Don’t tell me you can’t manage merely looking around. Besides, this will give you a better vantage point than simply sticking to one side of the room.” (Or, tropetastic enemies-to-lovers involving kidnapping, a masquerade ball, and a proposed bank robbery.)

(Absolutely no one has read this short story since the 1930s, so don’t worry if you aren’t familiar with it, I give a rundown of the plot in the pre-fic notes for context.)

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A/N: So, yes, “The Love Pawn” is a short story by Hortense McRaven, that was published in the March 10, 1934 issue of Love Story, a pulp romance magazine. In a nutshell, it’s an utterly batshit story of kidnapping, revenge, cross-country travel, masquerade balls, bank robberies, and more, all told in an extremely keyed-up, melodramatic tone (practically every other sentence ends with an exclamation mark, just to give you some idea of style), and it is honestly one of the most gloriously fun things I’ve read in a long time. Also, despite not containing anything steamier than kisses, it is surprisingly hot and downright simmering with sexual tension. It hits so many of my favorite tropes, it isn’t even funny. It is a romp. I love it. You can read it for yourself here (it’s not even 15 pages long), but the basic plot is this: Heroine Paula gets kidnapped a week before her wedding by anti-hero Red, who intends to use her in a scheme to steal a quarter of a million dollars that should rightfully be his. Her job will be to seduce some information out of Eric, the man she really loves (different from the one she was going to marry), and then run distraction on the day of the robbery, as Eric is a cashier at the bank the money is passing through. Red is, of course, super handsome despite his villainous ways, and while Paula is attracted to him despite herself, she also finds she’s really into the danger and excitement of the whole situation. In the end, she proves herself to be even more hardcore than Red, the two insanely declare their love for each other while on the run from the police, and the whole thing—believe it or not—ends happily. It’s amazing. Go and read it.

Anyway, this takes place after Red has spirited Paula across the country, and they’ve both just recently arrived at a masquerade ball that Eric is also supposed to be attending.

- En Passant -

“Any sign of your dear, darling Eric?”

Over the noise of the ball, Red’s voice came low, almost intimately at her temple. Paula suppressed a shiver and turned, her eyes flashing briefly at him through her mask.

“No,” she said.

It wasn’t a lie. Despite herself, she had been looking for him. A part of her desperately wanted to see him again—his blond hair, his clever blue eyes, his broad shoulders. How she had missed him so! But then another part of her hoped she’d never find him, hoped he wasn’t even there at all. Maybe that way she could avoid dragging him into this dastardly plot, could avoid having to deceive and use him, just like Red had deceived and was using—

Her captor set his now-empty champagne coupe down on a waiter’s passing tray, and the ring of the glass hitting the metal pulled Paula from her tense rumination. “Let’s dance,” Red said abruptly, and before she knew it, he had guided her onto the floor just as a waltz began.

She glared up at him, though she tried to not be too obvious about it. “I thought I was supposed to be looking for my true love,” she said tartly.

“I’ve seen you hold down a full conversation with one of your girlfriends while dancing,” he shot back coolly. “Don’t tell me you can’t manage merely looking around. Besides, this will give you a better vantage point than simply sticking to one side of the room.”

For not the first time, she cursed him and the fact that he knew her so well. And then she cursed herself for never even noticing him before. Sure, he’d only been the substitute butler, there for Sundays and holidays and whenever Price, their main man, had been sick, but the oversight still seemed awfully tragic in hindsight. All that time he’d spent in her home, literally spying on her! She resolved then and there to pay more attention to the servants in the future. Even supposing they didn’t turn out to be kidnappers, it just seemed like the decent thing to do.

She glared at him again, more fully this time, but his slate-grey eyes behind his black half-mask remained unmoved. He held her closely as they waltzed, the plum-colored satin of his frock coat brushing up against her bodice, his fingers spread elegantly against the back of her ribs, and she was suddenly reminded of the way he’d touched her the night before. Was it possible he was thinking about the same thing? She could hardly tell, from his maddeningly stony expression. It was almost a blessing, to be wearing such a heavy costume with all its old-fashioned boning—at least it dulled the sensation of his hand somewhat. Not like last night, with her fully exposed back, and his bare palm momentarily burning against the small of it.

A flush—deeper than the one anger had already caused—rose in her cheeks, and though she was loath to be the one to break the gaze between them, she couldn’t help it. He was so grimly intense, so cruelly determined, and she looked away, adding a theatrical tilt to her chin at the last second, as if to make the whole exchange look like some sort of role-play act to anyone who might be watching. Like he wasn’t forcing her into this at all, like she was actually his willing accomplice.

Accomplice. The word echoed wildly in her head. Like Bonnie Parker to his Clyde Barrow. Just last year there’d been a great dump of photographs of the pair in the newspapers, and despite the fact that they were outlaws, still wanted for murder even now, Paula couldn’t deny there’d been something magnificently impudent about the woman—particularly the image that had seen her posing by herself, at the front of a car, her foot propped up, a cigar clamped between her teeth, and a gun at her hip.

The room swayed. It was warm. She wasn’t accustomed to the California heat—especially not after just barely emerging from a Delaware winter—and all the people and candles weren’t helping. Red’s hand was strong on her back, leading her confidently, and a distant part of her marveled at how gracefully he moved. Maybe he really was Jack Delafield after all, the now-impoverished son of a once wealthy and powerful family. Between tonight’s dancing and last night’s dinner conversation, it was obvious he’d had a very good upbringing, even if he’d since fallen on comparatively hard times.

In a way, she almost couldn’t blame him for the crime he was so intent on committing. After all, he wasn’t out to steal everything his family had lost in the Crash, just the remaining amount that would have been his inheritance, had his father not been swindled out of it. How terrible it must have been, and how lonely, too, losing both his parents so shortly after the family fortune had gone. Paula was an orphan herself, of course, but her mother had died when she was a very young girl, and her father had similarly passed long enough ago that the loss no longer stung—and, perhaps most crucially, neither of them had gone the gruesome way of suicide. And anyway, she still had Uncle Jerry to give her familial love and companionship. What did Red—Jack—have left? A couple loyal servants and a small apartment filled with the vestiges of grand furnishings. She hated to admit it, but a part of her heart did, in fact, go out to him in sympathy.

But, oh, if only he hadn’t kidnapped her! She would have had no problem with his revenge scheme, would have practically wished him well in the endeavor, if only he’d had the decency to leave her out of it. Her brows knitted together anxiously under her mask. Her gloved hand felt so small in his, and it all seemed like such a shame. A shame his family had lost the money in the first place, a shame he was so dedicated to going down such a dark path to retrieve it, a shame he’d felt it necessary to draw her into the plan, and a shame—

Her eyes landed on a familiar blond head and a familiar breadth of shoulders beneath black velvet, and Paula’s breath caught. She faltered on the last step as the waltz came to an end, and Red—startlingly perceptive Red—followed her gaze over to the other side of the ballroom.

“Ah,” he drawled, his voice slipping down her ear like mink oil, “now you get to work your feminine magic.” He let go of her, and Paula whipped her head around, strangely shocked by the absence of his touch, by the feel of finally being free. She stared up at him, blood racing in something that wasn’t quite fear, cheeks coloring with something that wasn’t quite fury.

“Mind you,” he added, lowering his head just a little, his grey eyes cold in warning, “I’ll know if you try any funny business.” He was close enough that she could pick up the scent of his aftershave, could see the way his black whiskers looked blue against the smooth skin of his jaw, and something inside Paula flamed. Truly, he was such a handsome young man, such an intelligent young man, and this was how he chose to make use of those qualities.

Well, best to go along with him once more. Maybe if she could somehow get Eric alone she could explain everything to him. Maybe they could yet run off together and elope (if nothing else, Red had been right when he’d said she didn’t love Monty Lewis, no matter how much her uncle approved of him). And maybe she could finally put this whole insane adventure behind her. Wordlessly, she lifted her chin at Red, then turned away with a frosty—but not exactly defiant—flounce.

But as she made her way through the throng of people, holding her skirts up so she wouldn’t trip on them, there in her mind was the image of Bonnie Parker, her own skirt hitched up as she leaned boldly against a headlamp.




-----

A/N: The now-infamous photo of Bonnie Parker. (I’m not saying Bonnie and Clyde should be romanticized, but they definitely were romanticized, especially during their lives, due to their antiestablishment, “fuck the police” vibes. And even though Paula’s part of the upper class—which is to say, not the demographic the pair’s crimes typically resonated with—I still think the image of Bonnie would have spoken to her on some deep, subconsciously-adventurous, and maybe even taboo, level.)

The illustration of the masquerade ball, as seen in the original magazine I linked to at the beginning, has Paula maskless, but this must have been some oversight on the artist’s part, because she’s clearly stated to be wearing one in-story. (I guess it’s possible that Red doesn’t have one, but, I mean, masquerade ball? Aren’t masks usually considered a requirement of those?)

I would honestly love to write more fanfiction for these two characters (ugh, the SEXUAL TENSIONNN), but I don’t really know if I can. The original short story is so fast-paced, it’s really hard to find any gaps to fill in, and while I could definitely go the “expanded scene” route, would I keep the bonkers purple prose, or rewrite the dialogue to sound vaguely more human? I feel I’d be doing the original some sort of disservice if I did that (I honestly love the bonkers purple prose), but I also don’t think I could effectively replicate it. Already, this fic ended up as some sort of weird hybrid between my usual writing style and the high-key melodrama of the original…

But all that aside, thanks for reading!!! (Especially as my fandom choices get more and more obscure, ahahahaha!)

All other fics can be found here.