“He will,” echoed the barkeep. “I’ll waive the fee.”
“No, Steve would want you to have it,” I said. “He stole it from his brother’s wallet.”
We made our way to a table near the front, Nick pulling nervously at his mask as a balding old man sang “My Way” like he was Frank Sinatra’s long-lost brother.
“I was right, this is a bad plan,” Nick whispered. “That man is a marvel and I am nothing.”
I rolled my eyes, grabbed my Sharpie, and wrote on my own shirt, I have the voice of an angel. Then I went up and sang the first song I knew from the list: “Umbrella” by Rihanna. It was a rotten choice. Chances are, if you are not Rihanna, you sound fairly stupid singing that chorus. But going first allowed me to write down Steve after my own name, pick his song for him, and buoy—or shame—Nick into stepping up to meet or beat my weak challenge.
“What song am I doing?” he asked.
The opening bars to Wham’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” played. Nick froze. The first lines came and went without him.
“Can’t read, eh, Batman?” shouted Faux Sinatra. “Get off!”
“Pay ’im no mind, Steve,” shouted the barman. “Let ’er rip.”
And rip it he did. Once Nick started, it was hard to get him to stop, as if every suppressed public-partying impulse erupted out of him. I could swear he was working steps from his beloved dance movies into whatever weird prancing he was doing, and the crowd of forty- and fiftysomething cigarette-puffing locals were so enamored of the mystery bat that they cheered his every move. Four pints later, he’d performed a novelty song about fast food, “Bye Bye Bye” by NSYNC complete with the dance, an exaggeratedly wrenching rendition of an Oasis ballad, and a Shania Twain song that was popular when he was at Eton (for which I served as his air guitarist). By the time we rolled out, to wild cheers, Nick was exhilarated.
“That was the worst best thing I have ever done,” he announced, tipping over slightly before catching himself. “I am very happy sad that everyone did not see it.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “You just passed Teenager 101.”
“I think I lost eight pounds from sweating,” he said. He swiped the Sharpie still hanging from my belt loop and started writing on the back of my shirt. “Where to next?”
“Are you sure you don’t want to head back?” I asked. “It’s one in the morning.”
“Absolutely not!” he said. “Bats are nocturnal, just like Night Nick.”
“Well, I did have one other thought,” I said, patting my purse.
And so it was that we rambled over to South Park, a fifty-acre expanse east of Oxford’s heart. It was big enough for us to hide in plain sight when, after obtaining a cheap cigarette lighter, we lit some Roman candles I’d purloined from Gaz’s party stash. And it was when we were fleeing from burning a very slight hole in the park’s hallowed ground that Nick realized he was way too drunk to get home under his own power.
“You are really heavy. What did you eat while you were in London?” I asked, huffing heavily as I inched the wheelbarrow down a slender side street.
“My feelings,” Nick slurred, his Batman mask now dangling from the tips of his fingers. “And rocks. I love rocks. Rocks rock. Roxford rocks.”
“At this rate your eventual biography is going to come with its own drinking game.”
“And a long chapter on paternity,” he said, bitterness seeping into his voice. “The DNA test came up in my favor, you know. If you could call it that.”
I said nothing. What could I say?
“The esteemed Prince of Wales made me and Freddie take one. Thought it might be ‘useful information,’” he said. “Never mind what he thought he was going to do if it turned up negative. And the pathetic thing is, I caught myself hoping…” He traced the wheelbarrow bin with his finger, without much accuracy. “Because maybe if I weren’t his, it would explain why he never felt…why we never felt…”
He shrugged helplessly. I was glad I was behind him, because I know I looked so sorry that it would have made him feel worse. We traveled the rest of the way in silence, and when I carefully parked the wheelbarrow alongside Pembroke’s back entrance, the college was as quiet as he was. But before I could head up to give PPO Twiggy the Too Drunk for Stairs code knock, Nick’s hand grabbed my wrist.
“Thanks,” he slurred. “For not telling anyone what you saw. With Father. They know, but…they don’t know, you know?”
“It’s in the vault,” I promised, kneeling next to him. “I saw nothing, I heard nothing.”
“No, you did,” he said, giving me a beseeching look. “It’s important to me that you did.”
I reached out and touched his face before I could help it. His head lolled into my palm. It felt so natural that my thumb moved to stroke his cheek.
“Happy birthday, Bex,” he murmured.
And then I remembered myself: He wasn’t single, I was hooking up with his friend, and I had missed midnight with my sister. Lacey and I had developed a tradition of spending the very last minute of our birthday slamming a bolt of liquor we liked to call the Parting Shot. But tonight I had ditched her. And forgotten I’d ditched her.
Yet still I let myself linger one more second, before withdrawing my hand.
“Let me get Twiggy, okay? You need to get some sleep.”
Once Nick was safely in his quarters, I snuck inside my own room and promptly tripped over a body on the floor. It appeared to be Smoking Hot Chemistry Guy, and he was completely naked except for one of Ceres’s leftover throw pillows placed discreetly atop his junk.
Lacey stirred and pushed up her sleep mask.
“Bex?” she whispered. “Where did you go?”
“Long story,” I said, pulling off my costume and putting on my nightshirt, a jersey Dad wore when he coached my Little League team. “I’m so sorry, Lace. I don’t even have a good explanation. It just sort of happened.”
“You missed the Parting Shot,” she said sleepily.
“I know. And I’m so, so sorry. I promise I will make it up to you.”
Lacey snuggled deeper under the covers. “I consoled myself by dancing on the bar and then getting very naughty with Damian on your bedroom floor. It really helped.”
She tugged her mask back into place. “As long as you don’t do it again,” she added.
I hated that I’d disappointed her. I’d just gotten so swept up in the heady feeling of delighting Nick when he needed it most that everything else flew out of my mind. I was still electrified by the residual feel of his skin, and as I lay next to my sister, I felt a creeping awareness that maybe, just maybe, I’d wanted to keep Nick to myself a little bit longer.
Lacey’s breathing regulated as she slipped back asleep. Crawling back to the foot of my bed, I grabbed my crumpled Little White Lie shirt and used the light from my alarm clock to search it. Nick had doodled in various spots all night, but there was one where I knew he’d written something longer. And right where my shoulder blade would have been, I found his lie.
“You are not my favorite,” it read.
And near it, in Clive’s handwriting: “I don’t want strings.”
Chapter Eight
Cilla took the T-shirt and spread it out on her lap.
“That’s Clive’s all right,” she said. “And that’s Nick’s writing for sure.”
Lacey practically swooned into her teacup. “Sexual geometry. That’s so hot, Bex.”
“Only you would call a love triangle ‘sexual geometry,’” I said, taking back the shirt and jamming it into my purse. “But it’s not a love triangle. That shirt isn’t love. It’s a craft project.”
Cilla slammed down her teacup so hard that it rattled both the saucer and the patrons around us. “Is she this difficult at home?” she asked.
“Mmm,” Lacey nodded, scone crumbs tumbling from her lip, which she tried to catch with her napkin.
Cilla had insisted high tea was a must for any visiting relations, but n
ot anyplace she deemed too stuffy. So we’d gone to London to do some sightseeing before Lacey’s red-eye back to New York, and capped it at a funky, artsy spot near Liberty called Sketch—a gleefully odd place that fancied itself equal parts a restaurant, a club, and a museum. (To wit: Its bathroom is a unisex, sterile space whose multicolored glass ceiling hovers over a futuristic cluster of toilet eggs—literally, pods with lavatories inside—that are buffed periodically by a woman in a French maid costume.) We sat in a small tearoom done up like a tiki lounge, with dark, tropical wallpaper, and a giant chandelier made of intertwined branches that hung over us like a very glamorous threat.
“You guys can’t tell me to believe what Nick drunkenly wrote on a T-shirt,” I said, snagging a delicate croque madame, wrapped like a gift in tissue paper and yellow ribbon. “It doesn’t mean anything. It could just be a compliment. I’m more worried about the Clive one.”
Cilla turned to me with a piercing, all-business glare. “Let’s look at the facts here, Bex. Number one: Do you actually like Clive?”
“Yes,” I said. “He’s way better in bed than he is at just kissing.”
The mother of two German girls at the next table gave a pointed cough in our direction.
“That’s not technically what I asked you, but regardless, what about Ni— Steve?” Cilla amended, lowering her voice.
That was more complicated. I couldn’t deny that whenever I thought of Nick, or caught his eye across a room, or even just spied him in the quad from my window, my heart practically bruised itself against my ribs. I’d previously written it off as Extreme Friendship, but the events of Fawkesoween had made it hard to keep up that fiction. And then there was the matter of Clive, and India, and the magnitude of the man Nick would be to the rest of the country, versus the boy he’d been in my room and that wheelbarrow. My heart and mind were doing a bang-on impression of one of Nick’s cryptic crossword puzzles—so, speaking to me in tongues.
“I can’t pretend he’s not really hot,” I finally said, as Cilla poured me a fresh cup of tea. “But what if he doesn’t even remember writing this? I don’t think I should bring it up. Do you? It’s not worth it. Right?”
Lacey wriggled to the edge of her squashy, low-slung chair and reached for a petite egg salad sandwich wearing a tiny poached quail egg on top.
“I’ve never seen you be this unsure of yourself,” she said. She turned to Cilla. “When we were twelve, Bex decided she liked this smoking hot soccer player in the grade above us, so one day she marched up to him and kissed him, right in front of the Coke machine. And then she just walked away and didn’t talk to him again.”
I shrugged. “We didn’t have any chemistry.”
Cilla smirked. “Well, you can’t say that about Steve,” she said.
“Steve is the future king,” I said, “and he’s taken, therefore I can’t—”
“Stop assuming you have the whole story. You’ll never know it until you talk to him,” Cilla said, pointing lightly at me with a knife coated in strawberry jam. “And as my great-aunt Gladys used to say, ‘Don’t mess about so long that someone else shags your man.’”
“Steve is getting plenty shagged, I’m sure,” I said, opting for a second scone. “I don’t even know if I want to shag him.”
Cilla rolled her eyes dramatically. “Of course you do,” she said. “You can lie about your feelings all you want, but for God’s sake, let’s not lie about that.”
“Good afternoon, ladies.”
Nick suddenly appeared, in olive cargo pants and a button-down shirt, swinging a chair over from a nearby table and straddling it to sit down between Lacey and me. She gasped, and our server, Jacques—a French guy who was surprisingly supercilious given that we were at a hipster tea and he had a Mohawk—nearly fell over from shock. He grabbed the sandwich-and-pastry tower off a nearby table just as an elderly woman was reaching for a macaron, and whipped it under Nick’s nose.
“As many as you please, Your Royal Highness,” he sputtered.
“Thank you very much,” Nick said, helping himself to a tiny fruit torte and a lemon bar.
As Jacques frittered off to check the structural integrity of his Mohawk in the mirrored kitchen doors, Nick offered a friendly hand to Lacey. “I’m dreadfully sorry I missed you last night,” he said. “I was being a gloomy, selfish git, and your sister had to save me from myself.”
Lacey, who had turned bright red when Nick sat down beside her, recovered nicely.
“Great to meet you,” she said, shaking his proffered hand. “Not that I’ve heard anything about you at all. And I for sure don’t have any DVDs in my suitcase that would be of interest.”
“Pity. I was hoping for some home movies. There’s a certain hamster I’d been wanting to see,” Nick said, filching a cucumber sandwich from my plate. Cilla’s eyes bored into me.
Lacey laughed. “There wasn’t much resemblance,” she said. “He was on the short side.”
“Better hair than you, though,” I said.
Nick grinned. “This is the kind of abuse she hands out regularly,” he told Lacey. “I’m considering having her deported.”
“What are you doing here, Nick?” Cilla asked, trying to sound casual.
Nick glanced at his watch. “Family business, Miss Nosy, and I’m actually running a bit late,” he said. “But as for how I knew where to find you, I have sources everywhere.”
Lacey’s eyes grew huge.
“I’m having you on. It was only Gaz,” Nick said. “I ran into him in the hallway when I went by Bex’s room to apologize for being so rude yesterday, and to give you something.”
Nick fished around in his pockets and pulled out two small enameled pins, each one depicting an American and a British flag on poles that crossed at the bottom. He passed one to a stunned Lacey, and when he dropped mine into my palm, it felt surprisingly weighty in my hand.
“I know Bex misses you,” Nick told Lacey. “And it’s your birthday, and these made me think of you two. Like a nod to both places you can call home.”
Nick addressed the last part more to me. My mouth went dry.
“This is so sweet,” Lacey said.
“Thank you, Nick,” I managed.
“Let’s Devour later,” Nick said to me. “I think the jig is about up for one of those panthers.”
The Germans next to us looked up from their guidebooks just in time to hear this and frowned, while Jacques, back with a bonus plate of cookies and two hot pots of tea, looked despondent to see Nick leaving so soon.
“Tremendous food and service,” Nick assured him, clapping him on the back. “I’ll be sure to tell Her Majesty.”
And with that he was gone. The Germans stared at us with naked curiosity, and Jacques bustled around with a much more approving air, even leaving us the extra snacks. Cilla plucked the pin from my hand and studied it; Lacey looked as shell-shocked as if Nick had kissed her.
I met Cilla’s eyes. She set the pin in front of me on the table, where it landed with an almost I told you so click. I picked it up and spun it between my fingers, feeling my pulse accelerate as the little stars and stripes started to blur with the iconic British crosses.
“Oh, hell,” I said. “I think I’m in trouble.”
* * *
Nick’s Little White Lie made it extremely hard to tell any more of my own to myself. I became so much more conscious of his every move, of the times our bodies brushed, of how snug his shirts were on his biceps. I could not stop thinking about how he smelled, how his hands looked, about how the hair on the back of his neck curled when he needed a haircut. In the period after Lacey’s visit, I seesawed between wanting to throw myself at him and wanting to escape to the safe, familiar confines of Cornell and my sister, where I always knew where I stood, and where it felt as though nothing I valued could possibly be lost to me.
I began ducking Clive. Lacey was right: I’d never known myself to be so gutless—there are several incidents from my youth in the vein of that barbwire
fence—but I’d also never been confronted with a complicated romantic situation, and I didn’t trust myself to say the right thing to him. And, as time passed, I was afraid he was going to get mad at me, and that I would deserve it. So, because I was exactly the kind of emotional coward a lot of people are at age twenty, I chickened out and rested on the laurels of our no-strings policy, hoping Clive would see on his own that the wind was blowing him into the Friend Zone.
I’d also curtailed my Devourfests with Nick, although in fairness, we’d also run out of episodes. It was a handy excuse to step away while I sorted out my feelings, but I couldn’t—and desperately didn’t want to—avoid him forever. I took to suggesting safer, more academic outings where there would be crowds of people and no inviting-looking beds, like studying at the library, or group movie outings, or one particularly amusing foray to a local theater revival of Cats. We’d bought last-minute tickets in the back row after a long Sunday at the Bodleian, and watched agape as the legendary musical unfolded like a disjointed feline fever dream. Everyone tumbled into the dark night after the show, laughing at the absurdity of it, feeling very young and superior.
“That was the oddest thing I’ve ever seen,” Nick said.
“I can’t believe you tripped that actor,” Cilla said to Gaz. “He’s probably going to sue.”
“A man has a right to stretch his legs without worrying some bloody great giant in spandex and cat makeup is going to come running past him,” Gaz protested.
Cilla threw her hands wide. “You were at Cats! What did you think would happen?”
“I should sue him for terrifying me,” Gaz said.
“I wish I could have had a crack at those costumes,” Joss ruminated as we began to head back toward the high street. “All those catsuits were so obvious.”
“THEY ARE PLAYING CATS. IN CATS,” boomed Cilla. “I am going to need a drink to deal with you lot. Come on, there’s a pub ’round the corner.”
“I can’t. I promised India I’d stop by Christ Church for a nightcap,” Nick said apologetically. “And it’s already…Crikey, it’s almost nine o’clock.”
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