The Royal We

by Heather Cocks

  “Must not have eaten enough,” he said once he was upright again.

  “After all your training?” moaned Gaz. “We could’ve made history! I bet thirty quid on you to crack a minute!”

  I could swear Nick winked at me, but it was so slight, I may have imagined it. Terrance turned purple when he realized what happened, and when he was righted fifteen seconds later, he was roundly cheered by the entire crowd for this small individual victory against both Glug royalty and the real thing.

  “Well done! You thumped me,” Nick said, clapping Terrance on the back.

  Terrance just nodded, looking as though he was trying very hard to keep an avalanche of Pimm’s from decorating Nick’s shoes.

  “Bloody sportsmanship,” Gaz grumbled, even as the Lemonhead declared us the winners.

  Gaz was mollified by the fact that, as the Glugger with the best time, we gave him the Glug Mug trophy—a giant bottle entirely papered over with old Pimm’s labels—to keep in his window facing the quad. By the time we folded our arms around each other for the team photo that would hang in the JCR, everyone’s spirits and blood-alcohol levels were equally high. I remember Clive wriggling in and giving me a firm, overlong kiss on the cheek, and as the camera flashed, I had the distinct feeling that I’d been marked.

  So when a knock came at my door much later that night, I was surprised that it was not Clive but Nick, holding the Glug Mug in one hand and a large carryall in the other. He still wore the traditional Glug uniform of microscopic shorts and a sweat headband.

  “I talked to Gaz,” he announced, “and we decided this should go to you. Consider it your Cy Young trophy.”

  “For baseball’s best pitcher?”

  “Unless the Internet lied to me,” Nick said. “A pitcher can also be called a jug, which you chugged very nicely at your first Glug, so the Mug…” He paused. “I think I just wrote a poem.”

  “It was beautiful,” I said. “I will take my Cy Young award and streak the quad with it.”

  “Precisely what Gaz had hoped, I’m sure,” Nick said. “And Mr. Young, too.”

  The polite thing to do was to invite him in, but my brain boiled over on me—was there a protocol for this? Was it crass to encourage a royal to park his stately behind on an unmade bed, even when there was nowhere else to sit? Was Nick even allowed to be here, given that my room was not bulletproof? Was my room bulletproof? No one had given me a dossier.

  I came up with a workaround.

  “Where should I put it?” I asked, pushing the door wide and gesturing at the space, which was an avalanche of books and printed pages. Oxford prefers intimate, often one-on-one sessions with professors, rather than seminars. It sounds great, but there is nowhere to hide, and I was learning that the hard way. I’d promised myself I would return to the grind after The Glug, but naturally, I was too wasted to do anything but shuffle some papers around and then watch DVDs.

  Nick strode confidently inside—etiquette problem solved—and put the trophy on my desk. “Are you actually studying after a Glug? That has to be a first.”

  “It’s my special time with Hans Holbein,” I said, flopping dramatically onto my bed. “Which is a problem, because I just realized our discussion is supposed to be about Hans Holbein the Younger, so now I have to start over.”

  “Just say this: ‘Hans Holbein the Younger is the man whose portraits of Nicholas’s corpulent great-great-great-something-or-other Henry the Eighth are routinely ignored by filmmakers who want him to be a chiseled Adonis,’” Nick offered. “And maybe these will help.”

  He handed me the bag he’d been holding. I peered inside and saw a mélange of weird-yet-delicious American junk food: Cracker Jack, Twinkies, Chiken in a Biskit, a slightly crushed box of strawberry Pop-Tarts, and a crumbled bag of Bugles. It looked like someone ransacked a 7-Eleven.

  “This is perfect,” I said. “This is unbelievable.”

  Nick looked pleased. “It’s to combat homesickness,” he said. “When you talked about your sister, it was like your volume setting got turned down a bit. Not that it needed to be,” he amended. “You just seemed blue. So I looked up America’s most revolting-sounding snack food and had someone in my network of spies send me a package.”

  “Ceres?” I asked around the foil Pop-Tart wrapping I was opening with my teeth.

  “I would never reveal my sources,” Nick said. “More importantly, is that woman surfing on a coffin?”

  He gestured toward my open laptop. I had forgotten to pause what I was watching on it.

  “If that’s Holbein research, then I seriously underestimated him,” Nick said.

  “Turns out you can’t watch a DVD and type at the same time, so obviously I prioritized,” I said. “And yes, she is. A coven buried her alive. Her vampire brothers blackmailed someone into breaking all magical bonds for five minutes, but that started a tsunami. She’s making the best of it.”

  Nick stared at me. “Pause that,” he said, walking over and quietly shutting the door.

  I obeyed, thinking of how Lacey would react to me watching Devour with a prince dressed more like one of the Royal Tenenbaums while I wore ratty pajama bottoms and a Cubs T-shirt with no bra. She would stroke out.

  “Right,” Nick said, sinking onto my bed. “I need a complete account of what’s going on here. And not a word to Gaz or Clive, or I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  I scooted back on the bed to put a little social distance between us.

  “Lacey promised to send me every new episode of our favorite show, which is this crazy-bad supernatural soap opera. I think the writers make all their decisions by throwing darts at a bulletin board,” I said. “There are vampires, werewolves, witches, one shape-shifter, a private investigator who can smell the future, and two panthers who seem like they know too much. Actual panthers, not CGI.”

  Nick blinked. “Oh no. Night Nick is about to become obsessed with this.”

  “Is that your insomniac side?” I guessed.

  “More like his evil twin,” he said. “Freddie and I have a running joke about how once it gets late enough, Night Nick takes over, and Night Nick is a total bastard to Day Nick. He does things like watch TV for hours, instead of going to bed. Night Nick once watched all three Lord of the Rings movies instead of resting up for an official appearance with Gran. Day Nick got his ears boxed for it.” He sighed. “At least those are good. Night Nick usually has the worst taste.”

  This is true. He is the only person I know who has sought out every cut-rate sequel to every dance movie of the past twenty-odd years, and I once caught him voting in the finals of a web series called So You Wanna Be the Next Real Housewife? (“It will be a crime if Ashleigh doesn’t win this, Bex,” he’d told me seriously. “Just look at her lip implants.”) I’d almost choked on my breakfast when the Guardian recently reported that our go-to TV program is Morning Worship.

  Nick rewound the bit of Devour I’d been watching.

  “Amazing,” he said. “You’d think the coffin would sink.”

  “That’s the part that’s bugging you?”

  A knock came at the door. Cilla barged in just as Nick slammed shut the laptop, closely followed by Clive, who tossed him a newspaper. On the front page, in the bottom right corner, a headline read, NICK SAYS NO TO POLO: “Horses Are Terrifying Beasts.”

  “Crikey, who did you plant that one with?” Nick asked.

  Clive looked smug. “Penelope Six-Names. I told you she was weak.”

  “She comes from a long line of fools,” Cilla said. “My great-granddad once saved the life of her great-granddad after he fell on a pitchfork during a routine game of lawn bowling.”

  “Oh, ‘fell on,’ right,” Clive said. “Remind me never to play any games with your family.”

  “How did you pass the security check?” I joked.

  “My dad used to be one of Richard’s PPOs,” Cilla said. “Skills with unconventional weapons were an asset.”

  “Did you have to say ‘terrifyin
g beasts’?” Nick frowned, examining the paper. “I don’t have to sound wimpy in these things, you know.”

  “Well, I was feeling colorful,” Clive hedged. “And it worked, didn’t it? Penelope is busted. Besides, everyone already thinks you’re afraid of polo.”

  “I’m allergic to horses!” Nick yelped. “If this keeps up, I’m going to go on TV and sit on one and then get wheezy and faint and fall off and break my neck and then who will be sorry?”

  “Well, I’m glad to see you’re not overreacting,” Clive said mildly. “Speaking of, I haven’t told Gaz about this one yet. I’m not sure how he’ll take it.”

  “Why on earth would Gaz care?” Cilla asked, poking through my mail nosily. “It doesn’t involve free beer or potted meat products.”

  “He’s shagging Penelope Six-Names,” Clive informed her.

  “What?” Cilla was startled. “He never. That useless tart? Since when?”

  “The other night at The Bird,” Clive replied. “But now he’ll have to scrap her, I guess, as she’s clearly untrustworthy. Why are you so bothered?”

  “I’m not bothered in the slightest,” Cilla said, nose in the air. “I just had hoped for his sake that he had better taste in girls than he does in shirts. Apparently not.”

  She turned to me, and I detected a faint blush in her cheeks. “We’re going to The Head of the River. Kitchen is open late tonight and I’m dying for fish and chips. Are you in?” she asked.

  “That sounds great,” I said, but just then I saw Nick’s finger twitch. He was jonesing, and besides, I had something that I wanted to ask him. “Um, but I can’t. I’m having some trouble with one of the Hans Holbeins, and Nick agreed to help me out.”

  Cilla let out a braying laugh. “Art, Nick? Can you even draw stick people?”

  “It’s art history,” he said. “These people painted my entire bloodline. I’m very useful.”

  Clive looked disappointed. And, admittedly, rather cute in his England rugby shirt, his glasses slightly crooked, his hair still a Gluggy mess.

  “Are you sure?” he asked me. “It’s pub trivia night. Hugh von Huber is hosting, which means it’ll all be questions about historical Germans who were actually very kind.”

  “Thanks,” I said, getting up to give him a kiss on the cheek. “Another night, I promise. If I screw up the actual university part of Oxford, I’m on the next plane.”

  “Suit yourselves,” Cilla said, closing the door, but not before an appraising look at us.

  Nick and I were alone again. There was a moment of silence.

  “I don’t want you to think—” he began.

  “Which story did you plant with me?” I said at the same time.

  “See, the thing is,” Nick said, fidgeting, “there are always people with big mouths, or bad intentions, or who just can’t say no in the face of a fat pile of cash. Father told the press to back off and let me be, but sometimes they try to get crafty with the people on the ground here.”

  “And you all tell different lies to see which ones end up in the paper,” I reasoned. “Like a trap.”

  “It’s harmless,” Nick said. “It’s not like we’re having her executed. Just maybe thrown in the Tower for a week.”

  “So what lie did you feed me by the bridge the other day?” I crossed my arms, hurt and put off. “Or was the entire conversation a test?”

  “I was hardly camped out there waiting for you to come trotting by at dawn,” he said, sounding defensive. Then he picked uneasily at my quilt. “When I was a child, you couldn’t pick up a paper without reading something salacious about my parents,” he said quietly. “A miscarriage my mother had, some terrible fight, a story about her up all night crying because she’d hugged an old childhood friend and everyone decided he was actually my father. True stories that only someone inside our house would know. My mum…” His voice faltered. “I’ve learnt to be careful. I don’t know how else to do it.”

  I studied him for a second.

  “I guess I can see your point,” I said. “If every stupid thing I said ran the risk of being in The New York Times, I’d have duct-taped my mouth by now and become a recluse.”

  An expression of sadness crossed his face, and realizing what I’d just said, I wished I could’ve done exactly that.

  “Dammit,” I cursed. “I’m sorry, I forgot that your mom doesn’t—”

  “Never mind,” Nick said. “I know you meant well. She’s…just shy.”

  I reached over to squeeze his hand, but caught myself and ended up patting his knee like an affectionate old aunt. “I just mean, I don’t have a right to be mad. I obviously don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  He met my eyes. “If it helps, it was different with you. Everything I told you that morning was true.”

  Then he opened my laptop. “And I will buy you three plates of fish and chips in exchange for letting me experience this show, and perhaps one of those Twinkies, which look like an equally bad idea,” he said, hitting play. “Let’s get to work.”

  Chapter Five

  Night Nick and Night Bex were equal parts compatible and self-destructive. One Devour episode led to another, and one shipment of Twinkies became three (Nick liked to stick his fingers in them and eat them like corn dogs, and also prod me in the face). Lacey sent us her DVDs of old seasons so Nick and I could binge on the whole saga from the beginning while we waited for the newest hours, and she was delighted to have what she viewed as a profound impact on Nick’s life.

  The more fun I had feeding Nick’s obsession, though, the more often Clive found himself displaced from my bed. While I was never in love with Clive—the closest we got to being official was agreeing that, officially, there were no strings attached—we definitely were involved. There’s no denying it, no revising it, no editing my behavior into something more innocent. Nick’s great-grandmother, Marta, the Queen Mum, once asked me if I was nervous about—and I quote—losing my maidenhead on our wedding night. I snickered before I could catch myself, and she playfully wiggled the scotch in her hand and said, “Too right. A woman can’t bloody well pick her signature drink without sampling the whole bar.”

  Not looking to fall in love didn’t mean I didn’t want to sample the cocktails, so to speak, but at Oxford, the bar wasn’t as open as I’d have liked. Half the men we met wanted an in with the Crown, were prone to spouting off on the plight of the landed estates, or just wanted to ask endless conspiracy theory questions, like whether the Queen ever rigged the horse races (no) or requested certain Coronation Street storylines (she says no, but I don’t believe it). Any promising guys without Nick-related agendas lost interest in me once they got wind of who my friends were, and decided I wasn’t worth the fuss. It turned out to be less agita just to walk down the hall, and Clive made himself a habit that was hard to break. He was attentive and witty, and with a bit of coaching, his kissing vastly improved (he’d always been skilled at the rest of it). I thought it was sweet that he’d put his hand on the small of my back to steer me through crowds, and that he bought a hypoallergenic pillow in case I wanted to sleep in his room. But it was hard to untangle that warmth and comfort and familiarity—that pure like—from the other truth of the circumstance: I enjoyed Clive’s company, but I also enjoyed the company Clive kept. Cutting the umbilical cord that yoked me to Lacey for twenty years was so much easier thanks to everyone on my floor not named Bea, and over time, their friendship became my cocoon. Especially because the instant the grapevine gleaned that I had gotten tight with Nick, polite nods and interest in the American newcomer gave way to under-the-breath jokes about my nationality, or snickers about the origin of my family’s money. Assumptions about my motivations had been made, and I was being assessed and found wanting.

  “All hail the Sofa Queen,” one guy said at a pub.

  “Cheers, BHS!” said another, at breakfast, referencing a British furniture store.

  “Are you getting the next round, Bex?” Lady Bollocks said one night in the
JCR. “Don’t forget, here at Oxford we keep the drinks all the way up at the bar rather than under our bums.”

  Most of the teasing was casual, except possibly Bea’s—although even that I could handle; I wasn’t ashamed of my dad actually working for his wealth. But my friends never succumbed to nor stood for those jokes, nor made any of their own, and my gratitude for that loyalty colored and heightened my appreciation of everything. Which therefore kept me from acknowledging the raging case of Clivus interruptus that was developing every time Nick and I settled in for a Devour marathon, and I wasn’t doing anything to stop it.

  What nobody knew, and neither he nor I said aloud, was that my room had become a safe haven for Nick. Although he trusted his friends with his life, he wasn’t as liberal with his self, yet something about those uncinematic, quotidian hangouts in my room relaxed his grip on the real Nick. He grew comfortable shuffling in wearing the old Snoopy pajama pants that had been Freddie’s Christmas gag gift; bringing in coffee and crosswords when it was too cold to take them outside; tasting and rating the relative wretchedness of the microwaved meals we bought at the market. Certain columnists claim Nick liked me in spite of my being an American, but—not to discount my sweatshirts and ripped jeans, nor the alluring way I stopped bothering to brush my hair when he came by—I think it was because of it. Imagine knowing everyone in your life would one day have to stop calling you by your name and honor you as their sovereign. It’s impossible for that not to erect walls, even subconsciously. But with me that wasn’t an issue, and I enjoyed letting Nick be, for perhaps the first time in his life, unremarkable.

  Meanwhile, Devour—never exactly a critical favorite—was pulling out all the stops to get ratings in its sixth season, like trapping the shape-shifter in the body of a ninety-three-year-old nun, and delivering a cliffhanger that involved an actual cliff and, unexpectedly, an actual hanger. Night Nick and Night Bex had been fiending, so when a disc arrived in late October with a Post-it in Lacey’s perfect script reading simply, Minotaur alert, I stuck it under Nick’s door and returned to my room to wait him out.