“So the future sovereign just heard me accuse his relative of having syphilis?” I asked faintly.
“Oh, that’s a good one,” Cilla said. “But don’t worry. Gaz once threw up all over him and Nick didn’t even bat an eyelash, and that’s saying something because Gaz eats a lot and there were loads of chunks.” She grabbed a bag and barged past me into my room.
I finagled my other suitcase through the doorway and took in my new home. There was an irony in coming all the way to Oxford to find that my room resembled the ones in every dorm in America: a twin bed with a metal bedframe, a radiator under the window, and a desk with a hutch that looked like it came from an office supply warehouse.
Cilla nodded at a heap in the corner. “I filched some of Ceres’s things that she didn’t take when she left,” she said. “A rug, some throw pillows. Whatever might make it less awful in here. We can decorate later, though. First let’s get you to the bar for a welcome drink.”
“Shouldn’t I change?” I asked, wondering if I smelled bad to people whose noses weren’t as close to me as my own was.
Cilla waved at her torn jeans, creased boots, and woolly sweater. “Yes, we stand on formality here at Pembroke,” she intoned. “Actually, Ceres would put on high heels and lipstick to go down and get the mail. If you’re going to take that long, I’ll just meet you downstairs.”
I shook my head. “Can’t walk in heels and never met a lipstick I didn’t get on my teeth.”
Cilla beamed broadly. “We’ll get on splendidly, then, Rebecca.”
“Bex. Please.”
“Okay, Bex. Get on with it already. It’s been ten whole minutes since my last pint.”
* * *
It turned out the bar was the JCR—a dim undergraduate common area that looked cramped thanks to the jumble stuffed into it: mismatched chairs and chipped tables; a haphazardly hung flat-screen showing soccer highlights; and a substantial but inexpensive beer and booze collection, stocked by that year’s Bar Tsar (his elaborately framed photo hung on the wall). Even with the haze of cigarette smoke hanging in the air, it was easy to spot Nick because at least half the room was ogling him, and I had only to follow the stares. He was perched on a stool in a snug corner, relaxed and quiet, with two guys and a punky girl who did not wear her pink hair with much authority. Cilla steered me through the crowd right in their direction. She may have been small, but she was solid, efficiently built, and clearly not to be trifled with, because people parted for her as if by magic.
“These are more of the people in our corridor,” she said when she reached Nick’s corner. “Everyone, this is Bex, just in from America.”
One of them bounced to his feet so fast he almost knocked over the table. He had a kind face, bulbous nose, freckles, and a thick tuffet of orange-red hair—rather like Ron Weasley, but with scruff, and a round, compact belly that was either the product of a lot of lager, or his (ineffective) attempts to draw in enough air to appear taller than five foot six. Possibly both.
“Brilliant,” he said. “I’m Gaz. I expect Cilla’s told you all about me.”
“Just the vomity bits,” Cilla said.
Gaz grinned even wider. “That’s about all of it.”
A bespectacled dark-haired guy rose to his feet. “Please, sit. I’ll get drinks,” he said, gesturing to the threadbare, oversize chair he’d just vacated, and pulling out folded bills that were tucked into his back pocket with the same precision as the plaid collared shirt tucked into his jeans.
“That wonderful person with the fat wad of cash is Clive,” Gaz said. “And this young lady with the shirt that looks like she made it out of tea towels is Joss.”
“And I did make it out of tea towels,” Joss said, appraising me as Cilla and I squeezed into Clive’s empty seat. “Ceres was my fit model, but you’ll do nicely. Built just like her. Tall, no boobs.”
“Finally, being flat chested is an advantage,” I said. “My twin sister will be astonished.”
“Oooh, twins, eh?” Gaz said, wiggling his eyebrows.
“Get off it,” Cilla scoffed. “Gaz thinks he’s dead suave, but his father is a disgraced finance minister, so it’s more like dead broke. He still owes me thirty quid from last term.”
“I make up for it with piles of charm,” Gaz said. “And this bloke here,” he said, gesturing at Nick, “is…Steve.”
He adopted a deep, dramatic intonation, lingering on the word like it was a rich dessert to be savored. Nick buried his face in his beer, but the telltale bubbles gave away his laughter.
“Steve,” I echoed, trying on Gaz’s tone for size. “Sure. I can roll with that, Steve.”
Gaz slapped the table, which reverberated under his meaty hand. “You told her?”
“She’d have figured it out anyway,” Cilla said. “So take it down about three point sizes, please, Garamond.”
Clive was back and sliding the drinks onto the scarred coffee table. “‘Gaz’ is short for ‘Garamond,’ of the Fonty Garamonds,” he explained.
“As in, the actual font,” Joss piped up. “His grandfather invented it.”
“He’s mad as pants. Won’t even read anything in sans serif,” Gaz said. “Couldn’t he have invented something cooler to be named after? Like Garamond the Time-Traveling Motorbike, or Garamond the Lady-Killing Love Tonic?”
“I thought you were Garamond the Lady-Killing Love Tonic,” Cilla cracked.
“Well, as long as we’re talking stupid names,” he said irritably, “somebody tell me why we bother with Steve if none of you uses it.”
Nick rubbed the top of his head absently. “It’s not really supposed to fool anyone,” he said. “It’s more for if I’m caught in trouble or doing anything embarrassing.”
I met his eyes. “Embarrassing, like joking to a prince that all his relatives have an STD?”
“Exactly,” he said. “Although no one in polite society would actually do that.”
We smiled at each other.
Clive turned to me and pretended to study me deeply, as if my eyelashes were tea leaves he could read. “And you are…Rebecca Porter, almost twenty, from Iowa, father invented a sofa that employs a mini-fridge as a base—”
“Can you get us one?” Gaz interjected.
“…and you once got arrested for public indecency and trespassing because you accidentally tore off your trousers while climbing a barbed-wire fence,” Clive finished.
“I maintain it tried to climb me,” I quipped. “What else does my dossier say? Or do you just have ESP?”
“Of course there’s a dossier,” Gaz said, clapping a hand on Nick’s shoulder. “The Firm has to know who’s living twenty feet from the future of the bloodline.”
Nick’s discomfort was clear (one of his tells is that the tops of his ears start to vibrate—it’s the strangest thing). He drained the last of his pint. “While you lot are busy frightening Bex, I need to go say hello to some people.”
“Yes, right. Back to the grind.” Clive grinned, nodding toward a giggling, coquettish cluster of blondes across the way.
“There are probably worse fates,” Nick said. “I hear syphilis is a beast.”
He slipped off into the room, but didn’t make it far before he was waylaid by a cranky-looking patrician brunette in a high-collared blouse, who pulled him over to whisper in his ear.
Clive whacked Gaz on the arm. “You know he’s sensitive about the king stuff.”
“But it’s exciting!” Gaz argued. “Big intrigue. I’m very respectful.”
Cilla looked doubtful as Joss checked her cell phone. “I’m meeting Tank at the new punk bar over by the Ashmolean,” she said. “Anybody want to come?”
I glanced around for guidance. Cilla shook her head.
“Suit yourselves,” Joss said, leaving behind a quarter of a pint.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Gaz said brightly, reaching over and swigging it.
“Really, Gaz,” Cilla nagged. “You’ll be sweating lager next. My great-grandmother
’s great-uncle Algernon had that happen when he was courting the Spanish infanta and—”
“Ah, yes, here we go again,” grunted Gaz.
“Cilla has more stories than Nick has stalkers,” Clive told me. “I’ve no clue if any of it’s true, but it’s bloody entertaining.”
“…and then of course she broke it off with him by trying to thrust a letter opener into his ear at her brother’s coronation,” Cilla was saying.
To better bark at him, Cilla clambered into the empty chair next to Gaz. Clive responded by settling into her old spot, smashed up next to me, our thighs touching. It wasn’t unpleasant. He was the Hollywood archetype of a sensitive yet smoldering Brit—wavy jet-black hair, strong jaw, and a voice that was smooth and husky all at once.
“So, Bex, what are you reading?”
“Reading?”
“Studying,” he clarified.
“It’s not in my file?”
Clive smiled. “We only got the juicy bits,” he said, sipping his drink and then licking the froth off his lip in a way that suggested he enjoyed my watching him do it.
“Well, theoretically I’m reading British history, toward my degree at home, but what I really want to do over here is draw,” I said. “I mostly work in pencils, and so much of the architecture here lends itself to dramatic gray and black areas. The arches, the carvings, the gargoyles…”
“Did I hear you say gargoyles?” Gaz interrupted. “That reminds me.” He pointed at the stern brunette. “That is our other floor-mate, Lady Beatrix Larchmont-Kent-Smythe. Otherwise known as Lady Bollocks, because of her initials, and also, she can be a bloody load of it.”
Lacey later described Bea as looking and acting exactly the way you would expect a Lady Beatrix Larchmont-Kent-Smythe to look and act. Her posture is as impeccable as her tailoring, she never loses her keys nor her cool nor so much as a chip from her manicure, and I believe she intentionally waxes her eyebrows so that she always appears to be raising them at you with deepest skepticism. Clive explained that Lady Bollocks was a lifelong friend of Nick’s family, and in fact, as we alternated pints and gin-filled highballs, he turned out to be full of tidbits: that Cilla’s ancestors lost their money in a lusty Downton Abbey–style scandal; that the girl tending bar once had a pop hit called “Fish and Chips” about a memorable weekend with a famous boy band; that two hundred people had money on whether Cilla and Gaz would sleep together or murder each other (he had a hundred pounds on them doing both); and that Joss’s continued enrollment was a mystery to everyone, because she rarely did anything except follow around her boyfriends and make clothes in her room, to the consternation of her pushy father—the Queen’s gynecologist.
“She’s a good enough sort, but we don’t see her much,” Clive said. “Her father requested she be on Nick’s floor, to light a fire under her or some such, and you don’t run afoul of a man who has such, er, sensitive personal information.”
“Keep your friends close, keep the secrets of the Royal Birth Canal closer,” I said.
“Something like that.” His hand brushed my leg again.
“And you’re the person everyone wants to sit next to at a wedding,” I said. “You’d have dirt on everyone in the room and at least two of their relatives.”
“Only two?” Clive feigned shock. “I do want to be a reporter, actually. I like learning about people. My brothers think it’s just an excuse for the fact that I’m afraid of having my ears torn off.” At my quizzical expression, he added, “They play rugby. Professionally. The biggest, thickest clods you’ve ever seen. Cauliflower ears and broken noses and all.”
“So how did you end up on Nick’s floor?”
“My dad was mates with Nick’s dad at St. Andrews,” Clive said. “So we’ve known each other since we were born, same as Bea.”
I glanced at Lady Bollocks. An immaculate blonde with a creamy tan was wresting Nick’s arm from her, to the visible chagrin of nearly every woman in the room and a few hopeful men besides.
“India Bolingbroke,” Clive said, with the precision of a spy. “The new girlfriend. Daughter of Prince Richard’s second cousin twice removed.”
“Good luck to her,” I said. “I think the whole room is out for her blood.”
“We tease him about it, but it’s a bit unremitting,” Clive said. “Last year Nick was with Ceres, the girl whose room you’re taking, but she cheated on him with the polo captain. I think everyone hoped it’d be open season again.”
Nick leaned into India as if she were the only one in the room. It was a technique he eventually told me he developed to freeze out the sensation of being devoured by hungry eyes, two of which, that day, belonged to Lady Beatrix Larchmont-Kent-Smythe.
“She’s like a guard dog, that one,” Clive said, tipping his beer at her.
And then her steely gaze found me. I saluted her comically with my gin.
“Well, nobody has anything to fear from me,” I said, downing the dregs of my drink like a pro. “I’m not here for any of that bullshit. I just want to have fun.”
“Bravo to that,” Clive said. “And when poor old Nick is forced to marry one of these squealing aristocrats, promise you’ll sit next to me, just like this”—he made a point of shifting so that I was half on his lap—“so I can whisper secrets to you.”
“Deal,” I said.
He held my gaze. An excited shiver ran up my spine. I wasn’t there to get married, but I was definitely up for a good time.
And that’s the true story of the day I met Nick: I left the bar with another guy.
Chapter Two
I am one minute older than my twin sister, and she seemed to view that accident of biology as some kind of challenge. If I got As, Lacey got A-pluses. When I hit five foot nine, she was already half an inch taller. She was school president and the head cheerleader, while I was just the softball team’s least-effective relief pitcher (Lacey never understood playing for fun; to her, if you didn’t dominate, it wasn’t worth doing). When our dad had heart problems, we both studied medical textbooks, but she full-on memorized them and decided to go into cardiology—and then, I think, stuck with it mostly because wants to be a doctor looked so impressive next to valedictorian on our graduation program. So as I stared at the mountain of library books on my desk after just one day of term, I wondered what crossed wire had landed me at the very top university in the world when Lacey always had the edge in the Superstar Stakes (even if she was the only one who thought of it that way). My relatively brief settling-in period had ended when the calendar flipped to October, bringing with it the beginning of term—Oxford calls it First Week—and a raft of stern lectures from the academic fellows on the rigors of independent study, a stultifying pile of reading with which I had to be conversant in a hurry, and warnings from Nick’s personal protection officers about acting completely normal yet maintaining constant vigilance. I needed moral support. But Lacey needed dish, and Lacey is good at getting what she wants.
“So how many times have you hooked up, exactly?” she pressed.
“It’s barely even an interesting amount,” I hedged.
“You’re the artist,” Lacey said. “Paint me a picture.”
Bedsprings creaked through the phone line. I could picture Lacey the way she talks on the phone: on her stomach, legs bent, covering the receiver with a giggle to repeat what the person on the other end was saying. It was strange being that person. Especially because up to now, we’d always dissected our romantic lives over a messy plate of cheese and crackers, and that wasn’t nearly as fun long-distance.
“I don’t know,” I said, pulling open a block of English cheddar. “Three. Ish. Okay, four. Anyway, you should see the beard on my history fellow—”
“Four times in like ten days? You must be into him!” Lacey squealed.
“No!” I said, perhaps a bit too loudly. “It’s casual! We’re young. Consequence-free making out is the entire point.”
“You’re such a guy sometimes.”
I could practically hear Lacey roll her eyes. I did hear Lacey tapping away on her laptop.
“It’s super frustrating that I can’t find anything but grainy pictures of him on the Internet,” she said. “The whole point of Google is stalking your sister’s foreign hookups.”
“He’s dishy. You’d approve,” I said, lifting up my cheese plate to pull my quilt over my toes. My radiator had one setting: inefficient. “Kind of a Clark Kent type.”
“Ooh, I do approve,” Lacey said. Then her tone turned wistful. “I can’t believe I’m not there. Or that you’re not here. It’s so bizarre. I feel like half my inner monologue went silent.”
Before Oxford, the longest Lacey and I had been apart was eight hours. We picked wildly divergent bedroom décor, yet ended up sleeping in the same room every night rather than retreating to our separate corners. Her school schedule never aligned with mine, but by dinnertime we’d snap back into place like a rubber band. We’d go to the same summer camps, and I’d bring home demerits for skipping sessions to skinny dip in the river, while she’d have an armload of excellence awards and sheaves of phone numbers from excited acolytes she’d immediately forget; it was enough to have secured them. We never deliberately froze anybody out, but it was challenging for other people to get very close. Scientists needed fifty years to split the atom. Our classmates didn’t stand a chance.
Neither had boys. Lacey always dated whatever guy was currently the hottest commodity—our school’s all-state point guard, or the kid who won a ton of cash on high-school Jeopardy!—and I’d drift along with whatever plus-one of his she fixed me up with, and inevitably our double dates would turn into them staring awkwardly off into space as Lacey and I monopolized each other’s conversation. In fact, our classmates voted us Cutest Couple, and I don’t think it was a joke. I even dumped my freshman-year boyfriend at Cornell when I overheard him referring to Lacey as The Trojan, because, as he disparagingly told his fraternity brother, she was around so much that she was the world’s most effective birth control.
The Royal We Page 2