Cilla turned to me with a piercing, all-business glare. “Let’s look at the facts here, Bex. Number one: Do you actually like Clive?”
“Yes,” I said. “He’s way better in bed than he is at just kissing.”
The mother of two German girls at the next table gave a pointed cough in our direction.
“That’s not technically what I asked you, but regardless, what about Ni— Steve?” Cilla amended, lowering her voice.
That was more complicated. I couldn’t deny that whenever I thought of Nick, or caught his eye across a room, or even just spied him in the quad from my window, my heart practically bruised itself against my ribs. I’d previously written it off as Extreme Friendship, but the events of Fawkesoween had made it hard to keep up that fiction. And then there was the matter of Clive, and India, and the magnitude of the man Nick would be to the rest of the country, versus the boy he’d been in my room and that wheelbarrow. My heart and mind were doing a bang-on impression of one of Nick’s cryptic crossword puzzles—so, speaking to me in tongues.
“I can’t pretend he’s not really hot,” I finally said, as Cilla poured me a fresh cup of tea. “But what if he doesn’t even remember writing this? I don’t think I should bring it up. Do you? It’s not worth it. Right?”
Lacey wriggled to the edge of her squashy, low-slung chair and reached for a petite egg salad sandwich wearing a tiny poached quail egg on top.
“I’ve never seen you be this unsure of yourself,” she said. She turned to Cilla. “When we were twelve, Bex decided she liked this smoking hot soccer player in the grade above us, so one day she marched up to him and kissed him, right in front of the Coke machine. And then she just walked away and didn’t talk to him again.”
I shrugged. “We didn’t have any chemistry.”
Cilla smirked. “Well, you can’t say that about Steve,” she said.
“Steve is the future king,” I said, “and he’s taken, therefore I can’t—”
“Stop assuming you have the whole story. You’ll never know it until you talk to him,” Cilla said, pointing lightly at me with a knife coated in strawberry jam. “And as my great-aunt Gladys used to say, ‘Don’t mess about so long that someone else shags your man.’”
“Steve is getting plenty shagged, I’m sure,” I said, opting for a second scone. “I don’t even know if I want to shag him.”
Cilla rolled her eyes dramatically. “Of course you do,” she said. “You can lie about your feelings all you want, but for God’s sake, let’s not lie about that.”
“Good afternoon, ladies.”
Nick suddenly appeared, in olive cargo pants and a button-down shirt, swinging a chair over from a nearby table and straddling it to sit down between Lacey and me. She gasped, and our server, Jacques—a French guy who was surprisingly supercilious given that we were at a hipster tea and he had a Mohawk—nearly fell over from shock. He grabbed the sandwich-and-pastry tower off a nearby table just as an elderly woman was reaching for a macaron, and whipped it under Nick’s nose.
“As many as you please, Your Royal Highness,” he sputtered.
“Thank you very much,” Nick said, helping himself to a tiny fruit torte and a lemon bar.
As Jacques frittered off to check the structural integrity of his Mohawk in the mirrored kitchen doors, Nick offered a friendly hand to Lacey. “I’m dreadfully sorry I missed you last night,” he said. “I was being a gloomy, selfish git, and your sister had to save me from myself.”
Lacey, who had turned bright red when Nick sat down beside her, recovered nicely.
“Great to meet you,” she said, shaking his proffered hand. “Not that I’ve heard anything about you at all. And I for sure don’t have any DVDs in my suitcase that would be of interest.”
“Pity. I was hoping for some home movies. There’s a certain hamster I’d been wanting to see,” Nick said, filching a cucumber sandwich from my plate. Cilla’s eyes bored into me.
Lacey laughed. “There wasn’t much resemblance,” she said. “He was on the short side.”
“Better hair than you, though,” I said.
Nick grinned. “This is the kind of abuse she hands out regularly,” he told Lacey. “I’m considering having her deported.”
“What are you doing here, Nick?” Cilla asked, trying to sound casual.
Nick glanced at his watch. “Family business, Miss Nosy, and I’m actually running a bit late,” he said. “But as for how I knew where to find you, I have sources everywhere.”
Lacey’s eyes grew huge.
“I’m having you on. It was only Gaz,” Nick said. “I ran into him in the hallway when I went by Bex’s room to apologize for being so rude yesterday, and to give you something.”
Nick fished around in his pockets and pulled out two small enameled pins, each one depicting an American and a British flag on poles that crossed at the bottom. He passed one to a stunned Lacey, and when he dropped mine into my palm, it felt surprisingly weighty in my hand.
“I know Bex misses you,” Nick told Lacey. “And it’s your birthday, and these made me think of you two. Like a nod to both places you can call home.”
Nick addressed the last part more to me. My mouth went dry.
“This is so sweet,” Lacey said.
“Thank you, Nick,” I managed.
“Let’s Devour later,” Nick said to me. “I think the jig is about up for one of those panthers.”
The Germans next to us looked up from their guidebooks just in time to hear this and frowned, while Jacques, back with a bonus plate of cookies and two hot pots of tea, looked despondent to see Nick leaving so soon.
“Tremendous food and service,” Nick assured him, clapping him on the back. “I’ll be sure to tell Her Majesty.”
And with that he was gone. The Germans stared at us with naked curiosity, and Jacques bustled around with a much more approving air, even leaving us the extra snacks. Cilla plucked the pin from my hand and studied it; Lacey looked as shell-shocked as if Nick had kissed her.
I met Cilla’s eyes. She set the pin in front of me on the table, where it landed with an almost I told you so click. I picked it up and spun it between my fingers, feeling my pulse accelerate as the little stars and stripes started to blur with the iconic British crosses.
“Oh, hell,” I said. “I think I’m in trouble.”
* * *
Nick’s Little White Lie made it extremely hard to tell any more of my own to myself. I became so much more conscious of his every move, of the times our bodies brushed, of how snug his shirts were on his biceps. I could not stop thinking about how he smelled, how his hands looked, about how the hair on the back of his neck curled when he needed a haircut. In the period after Lacey’s visit, I seesawed between wanting to throw myself at him and wanting to escape to the safe, familiar confines of Cornell and my sister, where I always knew where I stood, and where it felt as though nothing I valued could possibly be lost to me.
I began ducking Clive. Lacey was right: I’d never known myself to be so gutless—there are several incidents from my youth in the vein of that barbwire fence—but I’d also never been confronted with a complicated romantic situation, and I didn’t trust myself to say the right thing to him. And, as time passed, I was afraid he was going to get mad at me, and that I would deserve it. So, because I was exactly the kind of emotional coward a lot of people are at age twenty, I chickened out and rested on the laurels of our no-strings policy, hoping Clive would see on his own that the wind was blowing him into the Friend Zone.