My Faire Lady

by Laura Wettersten

  I make a mental note to stand far back from the barriers after a hard rain. “So Blaze is yours?”

  Christian pauses, stroking Blaze’s thick neck. “He’s technically King Geoffrey’s property. He’s used all year round for the various festivals on site. But I think of him as mine. We’ve been together for the past three years, haven’t we, buddy? And it’s for the best. He doesn’t respond well to anyone but me.”

  He leans his head against the horse and it makes me melt that this cool, collected knight cares so much about his animal.

  “He does have good taste, then,” I say with a wink.

  “Of course, and look at him. Have you seen a prettier horse? He can afford to choose whoever he wants.” Christian looks at me, his gaze on me like the way I’d see Kyle size up the goal at a lacrosse game. “Want to help me groom him?”

  “Sure,” I say. “What do I do?”

  Christian leans down, undoing something on Blaze’s saddle so that he can lift it off the horse’s back and put it on a rail close by. The horse’s hair is gleaming white, though there’s a darker patch where he had sweated underneath the saddle. Christian runs a hand through his own hair, pulling a sour face.

  “You and I could both use a good brushing, huh, boy?”

  Christian bends down, digging through a plastic bucket in the corner of the stall. I take the opportunity to study the way his tunic pulls taut over his back, his riding pants accenting a feature I hadn’t had the chance to inspect before now—his butt.

  Christian stands and I look away quickly (though I’m sure that image will be burned into my memory for a long time, thank goodness), and he holds out a brush to me. It’s about the size of my hand and oval, with yellow bristles. It looks more like something you’d use to scrub the floors than brush a horse.

  Christian slips a thick elastic strap over the back of my hand, the small contact with his skin nearly making me gasp. He takes my hand, lifts it so the bristles are against Blaze’s skin and his hand is over mine, and whispers to me, “He likes a lot of pressure. Don’t be afraid to brush hard.”

  Then Christian pushes my hand under his, showing me exactly how much pressure, and in tandem, we begin to move the brush in long strokes across the horse’s body.

  “See? He loves it,” Christian murmurs when Blaze lets out a soft whinny. “You’re good at this.”

  It’s just brushing a horse, but I’m proud of myself, and happy that Christian approves. He moves closer behind me, his chest flush against my back, and I let myself lean into him as we continue to brush the horse, his hand on mine. For a moment we don’t speak, just breathe, the sweet, tangy smell of the stables and the heat of his body becoming the only thoughts in my head as we fall into a steady but lazy pattern of brush strokes.

  “Ro?” I hear him ask me, breaking my reverie. His voice sounds a bit strained, and I pride myself on that, too.

  “Hmm?”

  Christian turns me, gently but with purpose, so that my back is against Blaze. He’s looking at me with purpose as well, and I suck in a breath, knowing this is it: He’s going to kiss me. For real this time. I close my eyes and wait for his delicious lips to touch mine.

  “Yo, Christian! You okay? I thought I may have accidentally caught you with my lance.”

  My eyes fly open and I turn back around, my brush on the horse again, as if that’s what I’d been doing all along. I’m happy to hear Christian let out of a low groan of frustration.

  Sage pulls her horse up to our stall—Big Red, if I remember right. It’s a pretty chestnut-colored horse, but nowhere near as lovely as Blaze. If Sage has any idea what she just interrupted, she doesn’t let on. She smiles wide at me and runs a hand through her fiery hair.

  “Hey, Ro. Learning how to groom?”

  “Um, yeah.” I glance at Christian nervously. “Just helping a little.”

  “You didn’t hurt me,” Christian says to Sage, his voice cutting.

  “Of course not,” Sage says, making a face at him. “No one could hurt you, you big hunk of man, you. Sorry for suggesting you were vulnerable.”

  Christian looks at her, his frustration and anger softening slightly. “That’s more like it.”

  Sage rolls her eyes and looks over at me. “Men,” she says, and I nod as if I totally understand. “He’s just sore because I’m better with a sword than he is.”

  “In your dreams, O’Brien,” Christian taunts, and Sage merely grins at him.

  “Care to put your money where your mouth is? Eddie dropped off two new swords at the encampment this morning. They could use some breaking in.”

  Christian looks over at me and although I can tell he’s just as annoyed as I am that we didn’t get to kiss, I can also tell he’s looking for permission.

  “Go ahead,” I say to him, playing along. “You can’t let her run her mouth like that.”

  “You sure?”

  I nod, dropping my voice lower so that maybe Sage won’t hear. “It’s okay. Maybe I’ll see you later and we can pick up where we left off?”

  I toss my hair over my shoulder and give him my most smoldering look, and I have the brief thought that Suze would be proud of me right now.

  “Can’t wait,” Christian says, and gives me a smoldering look right back, so that I feel it long after he’s gone, standing there like an idiot with a horse brush on my hand, unkissed and abandoned.

  Last night, I was surrounded by nearly fifty people, all laughing and loud and boisterous. Tonight, I’m alone in my tent. The difference is staggering, and for the first time since arriving, I feel a little homesick.

  Suze is off with Grant, hanging out or . . . whatever. She told me not to wait up. I brought the B.A.B. back with me so I could look over the designs and maybe practice some of them, but I’m definitely not in the mood right now. I keep thinking about Christian and our almost-kiss today and last night.

  “Lock it down,” Suze said. Locking it down is proving to be infinitely harder than I imagined. We need to be somewhere far away from other people who rudely interrupt, and without any cell phones that rudely interrupt. Completely alone.

  At the thought of a cell phone, I take out my own. Three days without talking to Kara and Meg is pretty much an eternity in our universe, and I’m still not sure how mad they are at me. The guilt over my last words to Kara has been hiding these past few days, waiting for the right time to spring and remind me what a jerk I am. With the solitude tonight, however, there’s nothing to hold it back. It wells up inside me, giving my stomach a permanent sinking feeling and making my throat tight.

  It’s been two days without electricity and my cell phone is dead, leaving me without a way to call Kara and apologize for being a royal asshat. I put the phone down, right on my pair of flip-flops, so I won’t forget to take it and look for a place to charge it tomorrow.

  At a loss, I spend a few minutes tidying up my small living space, which seems to have somehow exploded into utter chaos in the past day. Then I spend an even longer time trying to make my hair somewhat manageable. I haven’t washed it since my last shower at home, which means it looks like a hawk has built a nest on my head. I practice twisting the sides back, like Suze did yesterday at the tavern, and it’s while I’m tying it back with an elastic that I hear the soft footsteps of boots on dried grass.

  Will pops his head into my tent, and the relief at seeing a familiar face is almost overwhelming. “Hey!” I greet him, waving him inside. “What are you up to?”

  Will takes my invitation and quickly makes himself at home on Suze’s air mattress. He’s wearing glasses again, and he adjusts them before explaining his sudden appearance. “Bored. Searching out people to annoy.”

  “Do your worst, Fuller,” I say, and he accepts the challenge.

  “Well, I could start with ‘Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.’ Then move on to the ‘Song That Never Ends.’ Then I could run through my list of favorite Christmas carols.”

  I jab a finger in his direction. “Two can
play at this game, you know. I can recite the entire Constitution and the Gettysburg Address. Plus, I think I still remember half the periodic table of elements. Hydrogen, lithium, sodium . . .”

  “Oh dear God, no.” Will holds his hands up in surrender. “Make it stop. Besides, I’ve had the periodic table of elements memorized since sixth grade and I could probably say them a lot faster than you.”

  We stick our tongues out at each other and hold that pose for a long moment, and that’s when I realize: I like the glasses. They look kind of natural on him, really, as if they’re just part of his face.

  “I didn’t know you wore glasses.”

  Will taps on the frames. “Yeah. Jeff doesn’t like them during the day.”

  “Because eyeglasses were invented after the Renaissance?”

  “During the Renaissance, actually,” he corrects with fake haughtiness. “But mine look a little too modern.”

  “You could get another pair.”

  Will shrugs me off. “Contacts are useful during the day. What’s this?”

  Will reaches across the walkway and takes the B.A.B. in hand, flipping through the pages with mild interest. “Are these the patterns you’re supposed to follow?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “They’re easy. I’m kind of bored with them, although I think Cassie’s going to give birth to kittens if I keep going off-book.”

  Will’s lips twist into a smirk. “You’re too good for the book, huh?”

  “I didn’t mean it to come out that way,” I say, but then consider his words. “Yeah, I am. I really don’t mean to brag, but the book is easy stuff. I’ve been doing more complicated things since I was a freshman.”

  “Can I see?”

  The question surprises me. I hadn’t expected anyone to ask to see my art except Jeff. Kara and Meg are sometimes interested back at home, if they know I’m working on something involving them, but Kyle’s eyes would glaze over if I started talking about it, and if I brought it up to my parents, they would usually smile and nod and then ask how AP English was going.

  “Um, sure. I didn’t really bring anything completed with me,” I say as an excuse, or an apology, or a little of both. “But I figured I’d have a lot of time to work on a few pieces.”

  I open a separate bag in my suitcase, a large vinyl one that holds all my art supplies and my sketchbook. I pull out the sketchbook and hand it to Will, my stomach tightening into a sickening knot. It was one thing for Jeff to look at the completed art on my phone. It’s another entirely to let Will see something I haven’t finished.

  He opens it, pausing on the first page for a long moment before turning to the next. He repeats that for every page, for all six of my uncompleted works, lingering over each picture until finally moving on without a word. When he’s done he looks up at me, surprise coating his voice.

  “You’re good.”

  “You sound shocked.”

  “Well, no offense, but you don’t need to be Picasso to be a face painter,” Will says. He glances back down at my sketchbook. “You should go talk to Robbie. She’s a great artist and I bet she’d love the company.”

  “Sure thing,” I promise.

  Will flips through the pages again, eyes flicking over the images quickly. “So are you going to major in art in college?”

  “No,” I say, a little more short with him than I mean to be. I take the sketchbook out of his hands and set it on the mattress next to me. “I think I’m going to Boston College. If I get in. I have to write all these essays, and the test scores they expect . . .”

  “High?”

  “Impossible,” I answer. “No, not impossible, just higher than I think I can get.”

  “Study. That’s what I did, and it paid off.”

  I cock my head at Will, studying him. “Oh, really? And what were your test scores?”

  Will flushes at my rude question and deftly sidesteps it. “Good enough to get into MIT.”

  I gawk at him. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. I’m into physics. I really like how balanced everything is, you know? The equal and opposite reaction. And how there are so many rules of the universe, but so much we still don’t know.” Will looks up at me, embarrassed at himself. “Sorry, I’m rambling. You get me talking physics and you’ll have me here all night.”

  “No, that’s cool,” I say, totally taken aback by this new information. I mean, I wouldn’t have called any of his friends brainiacs, certainly, and I had assumed Will was the same. And what’s more surprising than his choice of major is how passionate he is about it. “It’s great that you’re into something that way. I have no idea what I’m going to major in. Heck, I don’t even know what to write about in my admission essays.”

  Will wrinkles his nose. “They’re always about life-changing experiences or moments of self-realization, right?”

  “Yeah, cheesy stuff.”

  Will laughs. “Mine were about my upbringing. About how my parents have always been nomads, traveling from festivals to faires to circuses and back again, and how that affected my relationships.”

  “Must have been hard, always moving,” I say gently.

  “I guess it was, but I didn’t know any different. And I learned a lot from them. My dad is an entertainer; my mom is a seamstress like Lindy. So when I got old enough to work on my own, I wanted someplace familiar. I found King Geoffrey’s, made some friends here like Davis, and stuck around.” Will grins. “Seems normal, right? If you can call being friends with Davis normal.”

  I laugh, but sober quickly. “The whole reason my parents let me come out here was because they thought I could write an essay about it.”

  “I’m sure the admission board at Boston would love to hear all about Jeff’s anal-retentive demands for historical accuracy. Or maybe you can center the whole thing around the theories about Ramón’s mystery stew, make it an analogy for your own self-discoveries. ‘Secret Ingredients to Rowena Duncan’s Soul Stew.’ ”

  “You’re ridiculous.”

  “So I’m told.” Will makes a grab for my sketchbook before I can stop him, and flips to a colorful page I started a few weeks ago, a watercolor of my favorite spot at the beach. It makes me long for the beach, long for my friends, and long for Kyle. I look away.

  “You shouldn’t be shy about showing this to people,” Will says. “You’re really great, Ro. This especially. It’s so realistic. How did you do that?”

  I jerk my shoulder, still not looking at the painting. “It’s not hard.”

  Will gives me a look that says he thinks I’m full of it.

  “What? It’s not. I’ll show you, if you want.”

  Will ducks down so that I’m forced to look at him. “I’d like that.”

  I take the sketchpad from him and find a blank page before giving it back to him. Will arranges it on his lap like it’s an infant he cannot drop. Then I take out my watercolor set and a brush with a blunt tip. “What color do you want to use?”

  “Green,” Will answers right away, causing me to smile. I hand him my paintbrush and the palette of watercolors and he holds them in the same cautious way he holds the sketchpad. Amused, I begin my instruction.

  “So watercolors are, well, runny. When you use them, they all tend to drip and meld together, so instead of working against that, we work with it.” I place my hand over his, lowering it until he can dip the paint brush into the green. “Sometimes what we intend to happen doesn’t happen at all. Shapes come out fuzzy, colors mix together wrong, but you’ve got to just roll with it and explore where the watercolors take you, no matter how screwed up it seems. My art teacher calls them happy accidents.”

  “Happy accidents are my favorite kind of accidents,” Will says. “Far better than miserable accidents, or painful accidents.”

  “Indeed.” I take his paintbrush hand and move it close to the sketchpad. “So start with a shape and see what happens.”

  Will contemplates the paint, the brush, and the sketchbook seriously, l
ifts his hand, and promptly paints the tip of my nose.

  “How’s that for a starting shape?”

  “You, sir . . .”

  “Not a knight.”

  “You, my lord, have just started a battle you cannot possibly win.”

  “Oh?” Will asks, brandishing his paintbrush in front of my face like a weapon. “I don’t think so. Face painter or not, you don’t have to be skilled to make a mess.”

  “No,” I say and reach behind myself, pulling three tubes of paint from the folds of my blanket. “But I have more paint.”

  Will has just enough time to mutter “Oh crap” before I lunge.

  9

  WEEK 1—THURSDAY

  When I wake up the next morning, Suze’s bed is empty. Although I’m happy for her that she found a fairemance, I also find myself missing someone to chat with, especially since it’s clear that I need to shower and I have no idea what awaits me in the showers at King Geoffrey’s Faire. If it’s anything like the tents, there could be bugs everywhere, and minimal privacy, and neither of those things are particularly inviting this early in the morning. Or any time.

  Regardless, I can’t put off showering anymore even if I wanted to. There’s a layer of what I can only call “faire grime” on my skin. Not just dirt, but paints and bonfire smells and, after yesterday, horse. It was totally worth it, but now that I’m smelling myself, I know there’s no way Christian would ever invite me to repeat it if he got close enough.

  I grab my towel and my little bucket of toiletries and head toward the showers. They’re in a long, narrow building, and to my relief, it’s all separate stalls and they’re relatively clean. Bonus: I only see one bug, and it’s spinning a web on one of the doors that lead outside, not anywhere close to my feet.