by Holly Rayner
After a few minutes of this welcome peace, Kehlan spoke.
“So, do you have questions? Usually, people have questions.”
Paige felt her eyebrows involuntarily raise.
“Oh, definitely. I’m just not sure what they are yet.”
“That’s fair. I’m here when you want to ask them. Although it’s really not as big of a deal as most people think it is. It’s just a title, more than anything.”
Paige struggled to cut through the satisfied haze that surrounded her feelings of last night.
“Supporting role?”
He nodded.
“My presence is required for things. Grand openings, social occasions. But it’s nothing to do with me. It’s all just status, just…” he paused, as though he weren’t sure he wanted to get into it. But then he pushed onward.
“Have you ever heard of wasta?” he asked.
“Is that some kind of food?”
“No, it’s an Arabic word that’s…hmm, hard to translate exactly. It means something like social standing, or clout. It’s a mixture of who you know and what you do. Reputation, as well as family reputation.”
Paige poured syrup over her perfect waffle as she replied.
“I think I understand.”
“Right. So, just by virtue of being born who I am, I automatically have a large amount of wasta. And that’s useful to people. To anyone. It doesn’t matter that I don’t hold any actual power—just being able to credibly say you know me makes it easier to get things done in my country. So, people get to know me, and are always trying to get a piece of my time. Not because of anything I do, or anything actually about me, but just because I’m a walking wellspring of wasta.”
“That sounds…tiring.”
Was she actually sympathizing with a prince? It seemed as though she was. If anyone had asked her a day ago, she wouldn’t have thought it possible, but here she was, listening to him talk about his impossibly remote life while sitting in her cluttered dining room, and seeing the genuine regret for his own position in his expression. Kehlan wasn’t complaining. He was just explaining. But the explanation struck Paige as horribly sad, and horribly tiring.
“That’s why I’ve spent so much time in other countries. To some extent, that may be why I became a doctor. I wanted to actually do something, rather than just be something. You understand?”
“I understand. But you went back? You live there now.”
He nodded.
“It was a compromise. My family would allow me to practice, so long as they also got to loan me out for ceremonial events and parties for people who the crown wants to favor. I feel used, sometimes, but it’s a truce. And it lets me do what I need to do to feel like I’m making a difference with my life, while still making my family not feel as though I’m a waste of a privileged upbringing.”
“That feels…” Paige searched for the word she meant, but couldn’t quite find it. “Harsh.”
He shrugged.
“It may sound that way to you, but that’s mostly culture, I think. We found a way to get on with things and keep everyone happy. Or equally unhappy. On the whole, it’s worked out.”
Her breakfast temporarily forgotten, Paige leaned back with her hands wrapped around her coffee cup. There was something sad in the way he said things had worked out. Something worrying him. She pressed him gently.
“Doesn’t seem like it worked out if you’re stuck living somewhere you don’t want to live, always feeling used.”
“To be honest, I never minded being stuck there so much before I met you.”
The same feeling of stunned disbelief that had hit Paige when she first realized he was flirting with her at the Coffee Cup hit her again. He’d been a distraction. A completely impossible distraction when she’d met him yesterday. Telling him about Dylan had brought him closer to her real life—to the real world where she lived—but then the news that he was a prince had just pushed him further out of it again.
To have him talk like this now felt like new territory. It was a threshold that Paige both wanted to cross and felt that she couldn’t. So, she stepped back over to the safe, distant side of it and changed the subject.
“Well, you’ve still got two more days, don’t you?”
If it bothered him that she redirected them to less emotionally charged ground, he didn’t show it.
“I do. I was rather hoping my official Stockton tour guide would have another great day in store for me.”
A smile. More butterflies. This man was the best distraction ever.
“As a matter of fact,” she said with a grin, “I do.”
They finished breakfast with nothing but light, flirty conversation, though the thought of how good it had felt to fall asleep in Kehlan’s strong arms the night before kept surfacing in Paige’s mind when she least expected it. After that, he waited while she took a shower, and changed her clothes, and desperately tried to corral her wild, unpredictable emotions, and stop them from running away from her the way they had the day before.
Today would be different. Today, she would keep it under control, and not forget who he was. She would not forget that he was just a tourist. He was just passing through. And she’d known for a long time that there was too much she was responsible for to let herself get all bent out of shape over a man who wouldn’t stick around.
But she knew, as soon as she saw Kehlan’s excited face waiting for her in the living room, that that was going to be easier said than done.
Chapter 10
Kehlan
He put himself entirely in her hands, and he told her so. He liked the feeling of it—giving up control over his time, when in so much of his life, he had always been left to dictate exactly what would happen when, and how. It was a novel feeling, to be under someone else’s command.
He didn’t know when she’d come up with their itinerary for the day, but she seemed to have it all planned out. They began the morning with a casual stroll through Stockton’s historic downtown area.
Paige might not have officially worked as a tour guide, but Kehlan couldn’t help but think, as she gave him an ongoing commentary of the history of the buildings as had been passed down through local legend, as well as from her own research, that she definitely could have been. In fact, he couldn’t remember ever having been given a tour with a more naturally engaging guide, who seemed both so intensely interested and knowledgeable.
As they walked, Kehlan found himself getting wrapped up in the fun little exercise of trying to match up the buildings as he’d seen them from the overlook they’d gone to at sunset yesterday with the ones he saw now from ground level. He kept asking Paige if this is the one where this story she’d told him yesterday had happened, or where that person she’d told him about had lived. And every time he did so, he was gratified to see a look of pleasant surprise cross her face.
What, did she think that he hadn’t been listening to her? Was it really so hard for her to understand that every ounce of his attention was hanging on every word she said? It felt so painfully, almost embarrassingly obvious to him that that was the case.
There was a difference in focus between the tour he was getting now and the overview she’d given him from the overlook, though. Today, she was more focused on the history of the place, from the founding gold prospectors back in the nineteenth century all the way through the various booms and busts the town had undergone through various prominent local businesses coming and going, and succeeding and failing. But through it all, Stockton persisted, and Paige’s pride in that persistence was constantly evident.
The personal anecdotes about people she knew were fewer and further between today, though still sprinkled them throughout. Kehlan couldn’t tell if his unexpected growing personal investment here was just making him paranoid in a way that was unusual for him, or if his suspicions were correct and she was trying to distance herself from him in a way she hadn’t been yesterday. Before, it had felt like she was holding something back specifica
lly, and it had all fallen into place when she had told him about her son. But today, it felt like she was holding back something of herself more generally.
The most frustrating part was that he couldn’t call her on it. That would only push her further away. All he could do was go back and forth, wishing he hadn’t told her about his royal status, and reminding himself that it would have come out eventually, and that the longer he put it off, the more likely that she would have felt lied to and betrayed when she did eventually find out.
There was a part of him, for a short time, that wondered if it might have been possible to have kept it from her indefinitely. To have just cut ties with his family the way he’d thought of doing so many times, when he was a brooding, ungrateful teenager. But, of course, that was a pipe dream. And however much it might have prevented this strange distance with Paige, he knew he could never have really done that to his mother.
His mother. There was a subject that stung. With the way Paige so thoroughly distracted him, he’d managed not to think of her and her mysteriously declining condition for some time now. But at the thought, at the little pinprick of memory, it all came rushing back. He struggled to force it back into the box he’d put it in. He tried to come back to the here and now, where there was so much that was more pleasant to think about.
He got unexpected help in this, and was drawn back entirely to Stockton, and the world directly before his eyes, by a sudden, distinct change that came over Paige’s demeanor. She was looking down a side street at an old, abandoned house with a posted sign announcing that it was condemned, and that entry was strictly forbidden. Kehlan felt himself drawn towards the object of her attention.
“And what is this one?” he asked. “Haunted house? Home of the famous Stockton Strangler? Previous mayoral residence?”
She shook her head, seemingly drawn after him in much the same automatic way as he was drawn toward the house. While they spoke, they both walked towards it, until they were standing in front of the overgrown lawn, staring at the falling-down turrets and elaborate, sun-bleached trim with all traces of paint long since peeled off.
“No, this isn’t anything important. Not historically speaking, I mean. I was just a house. It belonged to wealthy people who fell on hard times, and eventually, it fell into disrepair. Common story. Nothing special.”
Nothing special. That clearly wasn’t true. Paige’s voice had changed entirely as she spoke about it. All day, she’d been animated and authoritative. She’d reminded him in so many ways of the perpetually cheerful, attractive young tour guides that had been the only reason he’d gone to so many museums in Europe. But now, her voice and aura was much closer to the way he had known it before—to the more genuine, subdued tone that she’d taken with him over lunch at the chalet or over wine on the living room couch.
He tried not to get too excited about the change, but he couldn’t help but feel it represented some kind of progress in breaking down the wall she’d unexpectedly erected this morning.
“I just haven’t been down this street in a while,” she hedged. “Haven’t seen this house. It brings back memories. When we were kids, my sister and I had a tutor that lived down the road a bit, so we would always pass this house. It turned into a sort of fort for us. We were always sneaking in there. They keep putting up new signs saying they were going to knock it down, but the city never follows through…”
As soon as he heard her say the words, Kehlan’s feet were in motion. He was accustomed to being told that he had to respect the rule of law in other countries, and trespassing was something he was certainly not supposed to do. One of the things that had always kept Al-Derra out of the headlines was that its royal family did not make a spectacle of itself by disregarding other nations’ laws.
So, trespassing into a condemned property went against everything that Kehlan had had instilled in him from a young age. And yet, he couldn’t help but do it. If standing outside the house make Paige want to open up to him, he had to follow that thread as far as it went.
She protested behind him, but only halfheartedly. When he offered his hand to help her over the fence, she took it, giggling like a much younger woman.
“We need to go around back,” she said, motioning towards a path worn into the tall weeds. “The front door lock somehow still works, but the back door is easy to open.”
He followed behind her, enjoying the spring in her step, but wondering at why this house seemed to make her so sad even as the thrill of breaking in like the old days energized her. And he was delighted by the way her muscle memory took over when they reached the back door, as she undertook a complicated set of motions that brought it open and let them inside. The way this piece of her past still had an impression on her mind and in her body was precious, and he was looking forward to finding out more of these treasures as he got to know her.
If she gave him the chance, that was.
As they had done the previous day on their trip down the mountain, they got out their phones to use as flashlights. Light filtered in from a few broken windows and some holes in the roof, illuminating the dust that Paige delicately coughed on.
It was beautiful. There were traces of grandeur here long forgotten, all mixed up with evidence of decades of youthful rebellion. An old Ouija board by the fireplace. Some dusty bottles of cheap beer by an open window that looked to have been thrown down in a hurry a long, long time ago.
“Step where I step,” Paige instructed, although she needn’t have told him. The places there the floorboards had broken had convinced him to follow his guide exactly already.
They went upstairs, up two flights, past a grand open landing and up to a high turret that Kehlan had noticed from the outside.
Up here, there were enough windows that, even though they were coated in a thick covering of dust, Paige and Kehlan could put their phones away and maneuver safely by the available light. It made them feel less like exploring archeologists, and more like they were entering a real, living space.
No sooner had they entered the room, then Paige went back to the opposite side of the room, where she moved aside a battered but still substantial velvet curtain to reveal a hole in the paneling with a secret compartment behind it.
She pulled out a deck of cards and gave them a stiff blow to expel the dust. She smiled—that beautiful, pure smile.
“We were always so sure someone was going to steal them,” she said, motioning to the hidden compartment. “Honestly, I’m not sure why. Kids, you know?”
He arched an eyebrow like a villain in an old melodrama.
“Well, now I know where they’re hidden. You’ve made a terrible mistake.”
He was hoping to hear her laugh fill the oddly-shaped room, and he was happy when it did, even if there was still something sad in her laughter. Pushing his luck, he walked out to the middle of the floor, and sat down cross-legged.
“All right, you’ve convinced me. Deal me in.”
She looked at him skeptically.
“You can’t want to play cards in an abandoned house on one of your few days of freedom.”
He looked around, and then looked back at her.
“Is that not what this looks like to you? Come on, deal me in. What do you usually play?”
Unsteadily, but with a growing smile, she stepped towards him.
“Have you ever heard of speed?” she asked.
He put his hand on his chest in mock offense.
“Paige! I’m a public figure!”
Laughing again, she sat.
“No, the card game. Here, I’ll show you.”
With that, she began to deal and explain to him the rules of the game. They all felt vaguely familiar, but he had a feeling he had known it under a different name at some point in the past.
They played for a while, their spirits rising with the game. But that same sadness that he’d seen in her since she first caught a glance of the house never quite left her.
Finally, when they’d settled into playin
g enough that he felt he could hold a conversation and play at the same time, he asked her about it.
“You miss her, don’t you?”
He half expected her to play dumb and ask who he meant, as a way of distancing herself and changing the subject the way she had been doing since that morning. But he was pleasantly surprised to find she didn’t. Instead, she nodded.
“I do. Some days more than others. You don’t realize how important someone is to you until they’re gone.”
“You wish she hadn’t moved away?”
She shrugged.
“I used to, when she first went. I was emotional, with a young child, and Dylan’s father had left not too long before, so I think I projected all that onto her. I’ve never really apologized properly for that. I probably should.”
Paige sighed contemplatively before continuing. “These days, I don’t blame her. She wanted the big city, and all the opportunities there. She wanted things we just don’t have in Stockton, and I can’t hold that against her. Mostly, I just feel grateful that she isn’t too far away. We always used to dream we’d both live in houses like this, next door to one another. Raise our families together. But now, I’m a single mom, and she lives in a one-bedroom condo in the city. Things just don’t always work out the way you expect them to.”
He let that sit in the air for a bit, sensing she had more to add. She seemed to be working through something in her head, and when she spoke, it was almost as though she were realizing the words as she said them.
“Mostly, I think I wish I went out and visited her more. Seattle isn’t that far. I mean, Dylan’s there right now.”
“And why don’t you?”
It could have been a harsh question, but he kept his tone gentle and she didn’t seem offended.
“I don’t know. Just don’t think of it, I guess. There’s always just so much life to get through, I hardly feel like I can breathe. There are plenty of things that I would do if I had the time, or even just the headspace to think of it.”