“Good plan,” I said, scooting to the stairs as Cilla roughly backed Gaz against the wall oven and Joss slipped out the front door, a protective hand over her eyes. I stared with trepidation up the steps, then started to climb toward what I’d been dreading.
* * *
Joss’s flat was decorated in the style of someone with a pathological addiction to flea markets: odd geometric tables, fringed lampshades, colored glass jugs, and one entire shelf of brass candlesticks. Despite my nerves, I still almost snickered at the sight of Nicholas Wales lying on her green and pink-flowered bedspread, holding a bag of frozen corn over his face while a three-foot statue of David made out of chicken wire stood watch. I hadn’t thought to ask if Nick knew I was coming, but when his eye opened and he saw me, he answered the unspoken question by sitting up so fast that the vegetable bag dropped onto his thigh. A vibrant bruise bloomed over his right cheekbone and up around to his temple, a butterfly bandage held together a cut over one eye, and his left hand was red and swollen and cut.
“What are you doing here?” he stammered.
I perched on the edge of the bed. It felt too intimate, but there was nowhere else to sit in Joss’s room. “I heard the fastest fists in Britain were on the premises and I had to see for myself.”
He glanced at his hand. “Pretty gruesome.”
“I was talking about Gaz.”
Nick’s laugh quickly morphed into a sigh. “How’s he faring?”
“I suspect he has never been better,” I said, “considering he and Cilla are finally going at it downstairs. Apparently getting clocked in the jaw is an aphrodisiac.”
Nick looked surprised, then very pleased, then agonized. “Be that as it may, I strongly recommend against getting into a fistfight,” he said. “Everything hurts. Even my feet are screaming at me.”
“So are Barnes, and Marj, I’ll bet,” I said.
“I made Freddie talk to them for me.”
“You didn’t have to do it,” I said softly.
“Of course I did.” He swung his legs around to sit next to me. “Freddie never does anything responsible. It was glorious making him handle those calls.”
“What did he say?” I asked. “And don’t give me any glib crap about Freddie. I’m talking about Mustache.”
“I’d rather not repeat it.”
“What do you think I’m going to do about it, Nick? Punch him?” I gave him a reproachful look. “Who’d be that stupid?”
“No one,” Nick agreed. “That would be epically stupid.”
“Even stupider than drinking Pimm’s from a hose,” I said.
“Even stupider than Cats.”
“Even stupider than Devour.”
“See, now you’ve gone too far,” Nick said. “Don’t make me defend your honor and Devour’s in the same night.”
“Just tell me.”
Nick looked queasy. “He said, ‘So are you done slumming it with that Sofa Queen slag? Are we shot of that low-class bitch at last?’”
I let that wash over me; surprisingly, sadly, I found I’d heard its equal enough that I was now immune. Nick got up, creakily, and tugged at his hair, as if weighing what and how much more to say.
“He’s been needling me for a while. I’d been out with Ceres a bit”—at this, he paused, but I managed to remain impassive—“and he’d started tossing out stuff here and there about your bikinis, or who you’d been with. You know how he is. Loves to get a rise. But he must’ve really wanted me to crack, because suddenly it got worse. Really misogynistic. I shouldn’t have repeated it.”
I shrugged. “He’s said it to me, too. Nothing as American as bitch, but you English have a vibrant array of words for what he thinks I am. Slapper, that’s a good one.”
“None of them gives a toss about Freddie sleeping with half of London, but you chat up a movie star and it’s open season,” Nick said. “It’s vile.”
I closed my eyes briefly, and when I opened them again, he was looking at me protectively. But there was also a new emotional distance between us. I had been afraid I would come here and break down and dive at him, but instead maybe the tide was ebbing. I waited to have a feeling—of sadness, or remorse, of lust, of anything—but it was like I’d vomited them out hours ago and a country away, and so it was time, in classic Bex fashion, to just open my mouth and see what else came out of it.
“Thank you. I mean it,” I said. “I’m touched that you stuck up for me. But you can’t fight my battles anymore, Nick. It’ll just make things worse for you.”
“I am not going to let people talk about you like that,” Nick said fiercely.
“And I lo—” I caught myself. “I appreciate you for feeling that way,” I amended. “Mustache is a chauvinistic oaf, but let him be my problem. You have enough to worry about on your own.”
Nick went quiet for a second. “What happened to you at Joss’s party?” he asked.
I hadn’t remembered to come up with a suave excuse for that one.
“Are you dating Ceres?” I asked instead.
“It’s casual,” he said. “Are you dating anyone?”
I thought of Clive. “Not even casually,” I said, perhaps too emphatically, but Nick didn’t seem to notice. “Did you really yell something in Majorca about being free at last?”
“I think I was referring to being off the ship, but I was rat-arsed at the time, so who knows,” he said. “And you didn’t answer my question about Joss’s party.”
“Okay, fine. I ran away,” I confessed.
“From me?”
“Did you see my pants?”
“Only very briefly. You were moving quite fast,” he said.
“Yeah. Well. This whole thing hasn’t been easy for me,” I told him.
“That makes two of us.” He flexed his bruised hand. “You know, in that second before I swung, it felt really good to just do what I actually wanted to do, damn the consequences.”
That he’d realized this, months beyond the point where it could have saved us, was something I’d rather not have known.
“Just don’t get hurt punching people for me anymore,” I said. “I can throw my own.”
Nick looked at me for a long time. “I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “I will try not to assault people in your name if you stop running off anytime we bump into each other.”
“I don’t know if I can, Nick,” I said. “I really am okay, or at least I will be. But I’m not ready to pal around London with you like we never happened.”
He looked sad. “But this was a good step, right? Seeing each other, I mean. Not the Mustache part.”
“It was a very good step. Let’s take another one sometime.”
We lapsed into silence, companionable, but still more remote than I could fathom feeling around someone I’d loved so much. Back in that stale Paris hotel room, I’d known I had to make some changes, but Nick’s black eye drove home that I wasn’t the only person who would benefit from me putting down the bottle and picking myself up instead.
“Is it always going to be like this, do you think?” I wondered.
“Like what?”
“Well, it’s funny,” I said. “When we were together, whatever I did blew back on you. Once we broke up, I assumed that would stop, but it hasn’t. People will always connect the dots, and wonder if I’m pining for you, or if we’re secretly hooking up, or if we hate each other. It never ends.”
“You make it sound so appealing to have been with me,” he said wryly.
“It was. I don’t regret it for a second,” I told him. “But it’s just…a strange feeling. To be so tied to you in public now, when we never got to be tied to each other in public then. I guess being your girlfriend was temporary, but being your ex is for life.” I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just annoyed I couldn’t go on as many dumb benders as it took to get over you without people judging me for it. And now it’s made trouble for both of us.”
“Bex, the only trouble you’ve ever been for
me is the fun kind,” he said gently.
And as our eyes met, the tide came in again. I had the turbulent thought that I could take his head in my hands and then just take him, like Cilla had with Gaz, and that he wanted me to and would let me. There was a softness in his bruised face, a hint of a question in his eyes. But if Nick and I were going to happen again, it couldn’t be three hours after Clive’s naked body inspired me to ralph in a hotel bathroom. I refused to be reckless with him. So I screwed up my nerve and turned away, and the charge fizzled as quickly as it had sparked.
Nick’s phone buzzed. I stood to leave, but he held up a finger before answering.
“Cer, can you hang on a tick? Thanks. I’ll just be a sec.” He pushed mute. “I’m glad we talked,” he said to me.
“I am, too.” I meant it.
“Do we hug good-bye?”
“Better not,” I said.
“Right,” he said, rubbing his phone with his thumb.
As I rounded the corner and crept down the stairs, I heard him take Ceres off hold.
“Thanks, I just needed to fix my ice pack,” he fibbed, his voice fainter as I got farther away. “Oh, just a bit puffy. I’m told it will be character-building…”
Joss’s now-empty flat was dark and stuffy and, but for Cilla’s bra swinging from a drawer pull in the kitchen, devoid of life. The clock said it was just gone eleven thirty a.m. but it felt like eleven at night. I wanted to talk to Lacey. I wanted to apologize to Dad. I wanted to take a shower. But most of all, I wanted to celebrate. I had seen Nick without bursting into tears, or flames, and as Joss’s front door clicked shut behind me, I knew, at last, that when I slept I would wake up to some kind of fresh start.
Chapter Four
Four losses in a row, Bex. Twelve total and April isn’t even near over.” Dad’s large, stubbly face filled the screen as he took off his battered ball cap and ran a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. “The Cubs are going to be the death of me.”
“Chin up, Dad,” I said, yawning. “Literally. I can only see half your face.”
It was a new baseball season, and Dad and I were picking one Cubs game each week and video chatting right after, when, as he put it, the agony or ecstasy was still fresh. I had woken up before dawn for today’s rant, and although we were both bleary and bummed, I wouldn’t have missed it. I’d spent too long being defensive and evasive with my parents because I was secretly upset with myself. It’s the cruelest coincidence that the meeting with Nick that I’d so dreaded turned out to be the exact thing I needed to pull myself together, and I still catch myself wondering what might have happened if I’d reached out to Nick sooner, or at least said hello. But I always come back to the fact that running away was a necessary act of cowardice, begetting a necessary act of stupidity. I needed to hit rock bottom; I needed bleary regret.
Half of Mom suddenly ducked into the video frame. “Good night, Rebecca,” she shouted, as if she had to carry her voice across the ocean.
“It’s only good night for you,” I said. “I still have to go to work.”
She clucked. “The things you do for that team.”
“It’s the truest love there is,” Dad intoned. “Well, except for one.”
“Thank you, Earl,” she said, right as Dad and I said in unison, “Cracker Jack.”
“Oh, well, that’s lovely. See if I make you my famous beef Wellington again,” she huffed, as Dad pulled her onto his lap. “It was highly lauded by Hardware Pete and his wife. We had them over for dinner yesterday, Bex. Much nicer than Auto Sal from Sal’s Auto.”
She lovingly touched her screen, where I think my cheek must have been. “You do look so much better, sweetie. Happier. Or at least more solid.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I mean it. I know I was tough to take for a while there.”
“You want tough, try Mrs. Auto Sal’s brisket,” Mom said.
I smiled as she prattled on about the offending meat. I did feel more solid. The first step in my recovery, not unlike what we used to do before going out and getting blitzed, had been establishing a solid base. I skulked into the Soane museum, apologized for my spotty attendance, and promised my boss, Maud, that I’d fired Jack Daniel’s as my therapist. Maud is an extremely nice fortyish woman who is also a bit of a blank canvas—her hair is neither blond nor brown, yet also both; her features and wardrobe are plain, her thick hose as neutral as possible, and she and her mid-height, mid-weight boyfriend seem to eat only at mid-priced chains—and I think she was tickled that I confided in her, confidentiality agreements notwithstanding. I paid back her milky tea and sympathy by throwing myself into my job, the most successful product of which was convincing the Soane to turn an unused basement space into an art studio for at-risk children. We named it Paint Britain, and watching the kids revel in it inspired me to go back to my own art classes. And it was there that I met the first guy of about eight that I would date in the ensuing months—proper guys, employed, called when they said they would, stood when I got up from the table, remembered every detail a well-bred boyfriend ought. The one hitch was that I couldn’t make out with any of them without feeling like my heart was stuck in my windpipe. Another stage of my Irresponsible Ladies’ Home Journal Guide to Healing was supposed to be recalibrating via harmless romps—or, per the old adage, getting over someone by getting under someone else—but after my two-day tryst with the actor in Cannes, I’d lain awake worried that Nick had spoiled me on casual sex, because I couldn’t stop making comparisons to him. And yet I wasn’t ready for anything deeper; I had to hope someday I would be.
I focused in on my parents again as my mother was launching into an explanation of the origins of beef Wellington, and something caught my eye.
“Mom, what are you wearing?”
“Oh, this?” Mom fluffed the collar of her robe. “I’d gotten accustomed to the ones at The Dorch, so I bought one and personalized it, and now I have a piece of London here at home.”
“Does it say Lady Porter?”
“Damn right,” Dad said, nuzzling Mom’s arm. “I am an Earl, after all.”
“You two crazy kids,” I said. “I have to go. I haven’t had enough caffeine yet to watch my parents get all gross with each other.”
“When will we see you again?” Dad asked.
“Next week, right? The Pirates are going to murder us tonight, and then the Reds…ugh.”
“No, I mean, in person,” he said. “Come for a game!”
Iowa still bore the taint of my post-breakup trip, so I’d avoided it, including convincing my parents to spend last Christmas in England (I know they saw through me, but luckily, they were totally on board). I did pine for that crack-of-dawn pilgrimage to Wrigley Field, though, wandering around Chicago in a daze to kill time before the game, then guzzling stadium food and sodas to fuel the five-hour ride home—as if our electric indignance about their performance, win or lose, wasn’t enough. I missed that ritual.
“It’s a date,” I said. “Now go to sleep.”
“Will you be watching Nicholas tonight?” Mom asked.
“Honey, maybe she doesn’t want to talk about icholas-Nay,” Dad said, nudging her.
“I do speak pig Latin, Dad,” I said. “And it’s fine. I promise. Lacey and I are going to watch it together.”
“He’s a very nice young man,” Dad said. “I’m sure he’ll do great.”
“Earl!” Mom rapped his hat brim.
“What? He can be nice and still undeserving of our beloved firstborn,” he said.
“Good night, guys. I love you,” I said, laughing as I closed my laptop.
* * *
Nick hadn’t taken much of a beating, pun intended, for his fisticuffs with Gaz. Their cover had either worked, or Mustache’s colleagues played along with the party line to avoid a blacklisting, and the public forgot about the set-to as soon as something more interesting happened—like Prince Edwin’s wife Elizabeth delivering a “premature” baby boy seven-ish months after the wedding,
whose weight miraculously reached nine pounds by the time he equally miraculously went home three days later. So on the occasion of Freddie’s twenty-fifth birthday, instead of a party the likes of which had been thrown for Nick—if this bothered Freddie, he never said—the boys had agreed to a rare joint appearance on the BBC. Beyond the surface PR objective of showing them grown-up and diligently serving Britain, this interview had a slew of ulterior motives: to remind the public it was rather fond of Nick even if his decision-making was not unimpeachable, and to distract everyone from analyzing Elizabeth’s pregnancy timeline.
Lacey had moved to her own place in South Kensington—she claimed having a roommate cramped her personal life—and because I passed out at geriatric hours these days, I only ever saw her on weekends, if she wasn’t out with Freddie or a shiny new guy. But we’d both agreed that this weeknight special with the Brothers Wales deserved its own private viewing party, bolstered with port wine and a ripe Stilton. While we waited for it to start, she dove into my pile of newspapers.
“Not one report from that film festival in Brixton last night,” she complained.
“Since when are you a fan of…what was it? ‘Gritty Hungarian noir cinema’?” I asked.
“Obviously I don’t care about that,” she said. “But Philip emceed it, and he brought me, and I wore the best green dress. I even gave Clive a heads-up, but nothing.”
Interest in the Ivy League had waned once I stopped making a spectacle of myself, and it hadn’t escaped me that Lacey’s subsequent social choices had the warmth of the spotlight in common. She’d dallied with a lawyer named Maxwell, son of Baron Something-Something; an up-and-coming celebrity chef named Dev; and a footballer who’d immediately fallen off his game, and thus broke up with her before his debut with the Dutch national team. She was now seeing both Penelope Six-Names’s cohost, Philip Frogge-Whitworth (it was a hyphenpalooza on Morning Zoo) and some DJ I could never remember. I didn’t know how she had the energy.
Before I came up with anything ego-soothing to say, a graphic on the TV screen coalesced into the words On Heir with Katie Kenneth. Lacey plonked a massive slice of cheese onto a cracker.
The Royal We Page 27