“And you’re completely naïve if you think that footage wouldn’t have gotten picked apart,” he rattled on. “They’re going to eat you alive.”
“Okay. I think you are getting way, way ahead of yourself here. I don’t even—”
He held up a hand and took a folded square of newspaper out of his shirt pocket. “You should also know that the Mail columnist is reporting that Nick got a Lyons ancestral ring for India.”
He had come armed and ready. My hands shook slightly as I unfolded the paper to reveal an article headlined GOING FOR (BOLING)BROKE. Nausea hit me as I tossed it onto the bed, next to Clive. I’d gone and uncorked myself and now the jealousy was flowing.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?” Clive said, sounding satisfied.
“I’m glad to see you’re enjoying this,” I said. “I guess I deserve that.”
“I’m not,” he insisted, softening. “But this is what you’re up against.”
“It’s just a rumor. The Daily Mail is full of them.”
“India is Richard’s pick,” Clive reasoned, standing up and stretching. “Someone is working hard to make this happen. And if it’s not Nick, it’s the family. Which is actually worse for you. You can’t compete with that. You’re an American and you don’t have any kind of background. Will the Queen even agree to meet you? And if not, what then? You mess about for a bit in secret? Regardless, it all ends the same way: He marries someone else.”
“I’m not looking to—”
“And neither is he, yet, but he will, and he has to. It’s his job,” Clive said. “And then you’ll be out in the cold.”
I must have looked miserable. Clive may have enjoyed that, but to his credit, he reached down and tucked my hair behind my cheek with a sad smile, bringing with it the memory of Nick so recently doing exactly the same thing and inspiring completely opposite feelings.
“You always would have been my first priority,” he said.
I felt remorse, but not regret. “You deserve better than what I can offer,” I said softly.
Clive nodded, resigned, and turned to leave. “I’m not rooting against you, Bex.” He paused, searching for words. “His world is messy. It’s not like being with the homecoming king, or…whatever you have in the States.”
“I know,” I said, touched. “Thank you. And—”
“Right, I know, it’s not me, it’s you,” he said, allowing himself the levity as he walked to the door. “It probably is you. Fortunately, I covered my bases and have plans with another girl in twenty minutes. Good luck.”
As the door closed behind him, I flopped onto the bed, my head spinning. Then I grabbed the Mail article. It was much easier to scrutinize it now that Clive was gone. There was a photo of Nick and India leaving Clarence House a day or two earlier, his hand on her back, and two different shots of India and Prince Richard in recent months, looking very compatible. I didn’t believe for a second she and Nick were getting engaged. Bea was right; it was too soon. And it seemed impossible that the Nick I knew—the one I’d seen almost every day for so long, the one I would have sworn was about to kiss me—was in so deep with a person he barely mentioned to me. Even with the evidence of a united front plastered all over the papers, a voice in the back of my head kept telling me I couldn’t have developed my feelings for him in a vacuum. I wasn’t a stalker sociopath inventing stories and scenes and memories, seeing things the way I wanted to see them instead of for what they were. Was I?
Then again, India was there, and I was here. Maybe Nick, right now, was assuring her of exactly what I’d been assuring Clive: that nothing had happened, that the grainy still from Edwin’s camera was grossly misleading. Maybe, unlike Clive and me, they’d both believed that. And maybe Nick’s universe, the whole machine of the monarchy, was bigger than some fleeting foreign friend in his residence hall who liked crappy TV shows and Cracker Jack. Clive was right—it was absurd to imagine me in all of that. India was the crystal decanter of brandy, while I was wine poured from a plastic spout, and Nick and I were doomed before we even started. I curled up with my glass of Shiraz and cried.
In the dramatic film of my story, the camera would have pulled back on me lying there, fetal, weeping all over my quilt, then cut to me bravely soldiering forth until my prince returned and swooned at my sexy dignity. In the rom-com, I’d go get a sassy new haircut and realize Gaz is the love of my life. In reality, the crying and wine slurping lasted about ten minutes before I sat up and glared into the mirror at my red, puffy face.
“Get a grip,” I said.
I may not have come to England to fall in love, but it had happened anyway. And I’d never been the sort of girl who willingly took a seat on the bench without fighting for a starting spot; I wasn’t going to let England change that about me, too. If Nick didn’t want me, that was his call, but I couldn’t just sit back and wait to see if it occurred to him to pick me. I wasn’t going to play dirty, but I was going to play.
Chapter Nine
Nick comes from a long line of people who love a grand romantic gesture—the grandest and arguably most romantic being the statue that the first Queen Victoria commissioned of her cherished husband Prince Albert, sitting golden and humongous across from his eponymous concert hall. King Arthur II delivered his proposal on a white horse—the 1930s version of Lloyd Dobler hoisting the boom box in Say Anything—and Queen Victoria II sent her beloved Smudgy a daily carrier pigeon bearing one letter on a scrap of paper, which all would have unscrambled to profess her desire for him to get on with it already, but poor Crown Prince “Smudgy” Sigmund of Germany was never one for puzzles and died of a dog bite before he solved it. Still, I now understood where all of these people were coming from: Keeping the secret of my feelings for Nick was torture. I wanted to confess myself and either move on to the euphoria or the Grief Ice Cream phase. But above all, I just wanted to see him.
I was thwarted on all counts. I didn’t even know where Nick was, or when he was coming back to Oxford; I was fidgety, and I could barely sleep. My solution was to stay busy. I hung out in the Pembroke JCR a lot more, doing everything from schoolwork to watching part of a three-day test match between the England cricket team and Sri Lanka, which was nearly as incomprehensible to me as Gaz’s rhyming slang, as much as he tried to explain both. I went for long runs, and this time, I actually ran. In a rare moment after one too many gins, Bea even attempted to teach me chess. Unlike cricket, I had no problem mastering the basic rules, but strategy—seeing three moves ahead in a way that forged my path to victory—was, and is, completely beyond me. Bea got so fed up after ten minutes that she dropped my king in my beer and swept out of there.
The first week passed agonizingly slowly. During the second, I had just started to settle into a rhythm of distracting myself, when Lacey sent me a photo of the annual Thanksgiving Cake that we usually make together—neither of us likes pie, which is thoroughly un-American of us—and it hit me how much I missed my family. While they were snug at home in Iowa gorging on my mother’s biscuit stuffing, homemade Chex Mix, and several pounds of turkey, I spent Thanksgiving huddled over a table with my distinguished tutor discussing the noteworthy differences in the iconic portraits of Queen Elizabeth, and gagging on my homesickness: for the Muscatine Turkey Trot, rooting against the Dallas Cowboys with Dad, even my mother’s fussy questions about why my jeans are so ratty and whether I might put on a little lipstick. Cilla took pity and corralled me for a late lunch at one of our regular spots, The Grand Café, a thin blue building on the high street that was allegedly the first coffeehouse in England (but noteworthy to me for making a decent Bellini). Joss had insisted on meeting us there, for reasons that became clear when she blew in and pressed into my hand something she claimed was a Thanksgiving gift: a white long-sleeved T-shirt with the word heart written on the sleeve.