Tilly Maguire and the Royal Wedding Mess

by Emma Grey

  ‘Let’s think about this, Tilly. In the last week you’ve flown across the world on your own to a city where you know no one. You’ve become the media’s number-one target, you’ve started writing a book and shared your writing with a virtual stranger, and now you’ve turned up alone to an A-list, red-carpet event knowing full well that you’re flavour of the week and a horde of hungry journalists is set to devour you. I’d say you’re living larger than most of the people I know who don’t have anxiety. Give yourself some credit.’

  She looks thoughtful. ‘You said you want me to hang out with you in your world. You want to see if I can handle it and I get that. But it works both ways, Reuben. This is what it’s like sometimes. Hanging out with me in mine.’

  He nods. He understands this is serious. His mind starts ticking over with the implications – and there are some.

  ‘Your life is intense,’ she says. ‘I could really hold you back. You don’t want to spend all your public appearances hiding in stairwells while I convince myself I’m not dying. It’s exhausting!’

  He wants to say something. To argue. What she is describing sounds horrible and he knows this kind of life would be exhausting for her in ways it likely never would be for him.

  ‘So, I’m giving you an out,’ she says. ‘Right now. Before this goes anywhere. I completely understand if this is just going to be too much troub—’

  That’s it. He stands up abruptly. ‘Maguire, you look hungry. I promised you a movie. And maybe some normal food. Nothing tortured.’

  She looks at him.

  He smiles. ‘Want to get out of here?’

  Chapter 33

  ‘What is this place?’ Tilly asks as they step through a door into a rooftop garden in Kensington.

  ‘This is an exclusive premiere,’ he explains, walking backwards, and pausing. ‘So exclusive nobody knows we’re here.’

  ‘Not even the owners?’

  He winks at her. ‘They’re away for a week.’

  Away? So, what – they’re trespassing now?

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he says. ‘Close your eyes.’

  She obeys him. And hears him flick a switch. He takes her hands and manoeuvres her to a certain point, then says, ‘Open.’

  If a place could be more magical, she hasn’t seen it. Arches. Spanish pavers. Vines. Flowers. Trickling water features. Fairy lights. It’s inside, but is so cleverly designed it feels al fresco, because there’s so much greenery, and the ceiling is made of glass that can be retracted in summer.

  ‘Reuben, are we allowed to be . . .’

  ‘Shush! It’s the same as the stairwell.’

  This is not the same as the stairwell. She sinks into a large, circular day bed, filled with enormous square cushions in vibrant clashing colours. He presses another button on the hi-tech dashboard at the wall, which opens a sliding trapdoor in the landscaped garden beside her, revealing a retractable gas fire pit that rises to the surface and bursts into flame.

  Reuben opens a wooden chest nearby and pulls out two thick blankets, which he tosses at her. She wraps one around her shoulders.

  The next button lowers a large silver screen at the end of the garden. She’s never been anywhere like this. She’s never met anyone like him.

  ‘Hope you like old movies,’ he says. ‘They’re the only kind they show here.’

  She is a writer. Of course she loves old movies. ‘Anything Audrey Hepburn?’ she asks. ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s? No, Roman Holiday!’

  He tosses her a printed movie listing. ‘You look through this lot and I’ll order pizza. What do you like?’

  She mumbles something about being so hungry she’ll eat anything. It’s nearly nine o’clock. And with the fire on, the blankets adjusted and the movie primed, Tilly settles back on the lounge and watches as Reuben walks in front of the screen talking on the phone to the pizza place, undoing his tie.

  She wonders if she is the first girl he’s brought here. As if! He appears to have the entire process down to a seamless string of suave moves.

  ‘Do you break in here often?’ she asks as he comes and sits beside her on the day bed.

  ‘Only in emergencies,’ he answers. And he winks. ‘Are you going to press “play” on that thing or what?’

  Something in his ambiguous answer causes her chest to knot. She tries to sweep it away. Of course Reuben has a past with other people. An extensive one. Look at him!

  As the opening credits roll, she puts that out of her mind. Thinking about how different they are in this regard is the very last thing her anxiety needs. It’s bizarre enough that they are even here, in this forbidden oasis.

  ‘Are you concentrating on the movie?’ Reuben asks. ‘Because there’ll be a quiz after.’

  She’s embarrassed that he’s caught her staring. She turns sideways to face him, propped on an elbow. ‘Reuben, I could tell you the plot of this movie in my sleep. Off-duty princess spends a whirlwind time in a foreign city with an international writer and love interest, who uncovers her true identi—’

  But he’s rolled to face her, too, and clamps his hand over her mouth, making her laugh. ‘Spoilers, Maguire! Please! I can’t take you anywhere!’

  Chapter 34

  Reuben hates this movie. The idea of Audrey Hepburn embracing just twenty-four hours of a normal existence, falling in love and being forced to abandon that and return to her endless, restrained, managed existence makes him sick.

  Tilly, though, is enthralled. ‘Gregory Peck. Oh my God. He’s so aloof and calculating and then he just can’t help it, can he? Can’t resist her! Because, hello! Audrey Hepburn – Most Beautiful Woman Ever.’

  She bites into a slice of pizza, while sitting cross-legged on the day bed a little way in front of him. Nothing and no one will distract her from this movie. It’s as if he isn’t even there.

  He picks up his phone and scrolls through social media behind her. Same old stuff. As per his personal rule, he ignores everything written about the band, or about him, and only clicks on his private accounts to catch up on what’s happening with his actual friends and family.

  There’s a message from Angus Marsden: What is it with Australian girls?

  Reuben contains a laugh.

  ‘I love this bit where she rides the motorbike all over Rome like a maniac and gets arrested!’ Tilly exclaims.

  ‘You would!’

  She hits his outstretched leg beside her, without turning around. The blanket slips from her shoulders in the process, and she doesn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Wanton disregard of road rules, Maguire. Right up your alley.’

  ‘And trespassing, now I’m with you,’ she adds without taking her eyes off the screen.

  Now she is with him. He clicks on Chrome and types: dating someone with anxiety. Immediately, a string of links pops up:

  Seven Things You Need to Know When Your Partner Has Anxiety

  Five Struggles of Dating Someone with Anxiety

  How to Deal with a Partner Who Has Anxiety

  Ten Things You Should Know If You’re Dating Someone with An Anxiety Disorder

  What to Say When Someone You Love Has Anxiety

  And one and a half million other results . . .

  He glances thoughtfully at Tilly. Then he looks back at the list and clicks on the last one.

  Our biggest fear is that we are wasting your time . . .

  She licks her fingers from the last slice of pizza and fist-pumps at the sight of Audrey Hepburn breaking a wooden board over a policeman’s head. ‘Yaaaassss! You go girl! Oh, you are my role model!’

  Don’t force us to do things . . .

  He wouldn’t. Ever. Hopefully, she’d know that after tonight when they snuck away from the premiere and came here, instead. He’d show her again if he was given the chance.

  She grasps his ankle, urgently, and he hurriedly locks his phone and shoves it into his pocket. ‘This is the best bit!’ she says.

  Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn emerge from t
he water near Castel Sant’Angelo. They drag themselves onto a rock fully clothed and dripping wet and kiss for the first time.

  Tilly visibly shivers. He reaches forward and wraps the blanket around her shoulders, and she grabs hold of it automatically and shivers again. ‘Take her back to your room, Mr Bradley!’ she yells at the screen.

  Reuben chuckles.

  ‘This is no laughing matter!’ she lectures. ‘Their entire future relationship depends on what happens next! Will they admit there’s something between them?’

  ‘They’ve known each other a day.’

  She finally turns away from the screen, and playfully thumps his leg. ‘Love at first sight is a thing. You should know!’

  He should?

  ‘You sing about it all the time!’

  He shakes his head, incredulously. ‘You fall for those lyrics?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Reuben. I don’t take my romantic education from boy bands! But I do believe in love at first sight. Always have. Even though I’ve never experienced it.’

  Right.

  ‘Have you?’ she asks.

  It’s a good question. The answer has always been a definite ‘no’. Seeing someone across a crowded room . . . knowing instantly that they are ‘the one’ without even saying a word? What an unrealistic concept.

  ‘I have to leave you, now,’ Audrey is saying to Gregory. ‘You must stay in the car and drive away. Promise not to watch me go beyond the corner. Just drive away and leave me as I leave you.’

  ‘This is the worst bit.’

  ‘This is the worst bit.’

  They say it in unison.

  ‘I thought you weren’t watching,’ she says, turning to face him. ‘Thought you were busy on your phone.’

  He frowns apologetically. ‘I needed to look something up,’ he explains.

  ‘It couldn’t wait?’

  He feels the phone in his pocket and thinks of the article, then looks at her, sitting indignantly in the firelight as the credits roll on the movie behind her. ‘No.’

  Tell us you’ll sit beside us and sort through this together, the article had said. No matter how long it takes.

  For a minute they look at each other, and he knows he’s in this for the long haul.

  ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s?’ he suggests.

  Chapter 35

  Tilly rolls over to avoid the sun on her face. Birds are warbling nearby and she pulls the blankets up around her shoulders again and burrows into the pillow. The air is crisp, but there’s warmth on her back, and she remembers the flames . . .

  Flames?

  She opens her eyes, and her consciousness jolts into place at the sight of Reuben lying beside her, asleep on the day bed in the indoor garden. They’d been here all night?

  The last thing she remembers was shutting her eyes, just for a second, during Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It had been such a huge day. A huge few days. And the fire had been so warm, and she’d been full from the late dinner. And she was so comfortable with him.

  She watches as the gentle play of the winter morning light filters through the glass ceiling and touches the angles of his face. There is nothing of the pop god about him, now. Just a normal guy. Vulnerable, as he sleeps, lips slightly parted, oblivious to being watched.

  Tilly fights an overwhelming urge to wake him up. It feels as though this is wasted time – time they could be talking. Learning about each other. She wants to find out why he’s different. Not just the idol stuff. Not the stuff she’s followed in magazines or heard him say in interviews. The real person, behind the public face.

  ‘Reuben,’ she whispers.

  He grunts. She waits impatiently.

  Eventually he opens his eyes, and they come to focus on her, travelling immediately and without apology over her hair, down the side of her face, to her throat and across the line of her shoulder to where it disappears under the blanket.

  She doesn’t care that she must look a mess – first thing in the morning, last night’s makeup, a stupidly late night . . . She doesn’t feel a mess. She feels surer of herself than she’s ever been. And surer of this than she imagined possible.

  ‘Maguire . . .’ He swallows, and she puts a finger to his lips to stop him speaking. Then she touches his cheek and threads her fingers through his hair as he shuts his eyes, and groans, and reaches for her under the blanket, pulling her towards him by the waist until there’s no space at all between their bodies.

  Her foot finds its way across his calf, entrapping his legs as his hand edges towards her hip, caressing her skin beneath the silk fabric of the jumpsuit. She traces the firm lines of his shoulder, his upper arm, his chest . . . and her fingers play with the top button of his shirt while she looks him in the eyes again. For what? Permission to continue?

  ‘I’ve never met anyone like you,’ he whispers, his forehead touching hers as his hand draws its way up her side and to the bare skin of her shoulder. His mouth brushes near hers, torturously close, and across her face. Down her neck. She shivers as she feels the warmth of his lips finally meet the hollow of her shoulder. He sweeps her hair back. Cradles her face. Touches her mouth gently with his thumb. It’s like he’s been studying the moves of Gregory Peck.

  In the past, this has always been the moment she’s mucked this up. The moment that familiar desire to run has taken hold in her mind, and let her body down. But with Reuben she feels safe. Certain. She feels every cell in her body doing what it is designed to do, and nothing it shouldn’t.

  He doesn’t break eye contact as his hand slips down her neck and his thumb traces her breastbone gently, then draws a line down her chest and along the neckline of her jumpsuit. Then he stops.

  ‘I love this,’ he says, and she doesn’t know if he means the jumpsuit, or what they are doing or just every single solitary thing about this entire situation. She hopes it’s the latter. Because that’s how she feels. ‘You’re uncharacteristically quiet, Maguire,’ he observes. ‘Is everything okay?’

  How to accurately convey her current state . . .

  She pushes him back onto the day bed, lifts herself across his chest and kisses him, as if she means to leave no doubt in his mind how she is. Whoever she is right now she loves it!

  Then she stops, and leans back to check the look on his face.

  ‘Come here,’ he says. He pulls her on top of him properly, her hair tumbling forward, teasing him as she supports her weight with her hands.

  Then he pulls her even closer. It’s as if he wants every part of her on every part of him. ‘You can stop any time you want to, okay, Maguire?’

  She stares at him.

  Stop? How?

  Chapter 36

  Tilly slips off the day bed and tells him she’ll be back in five minutes. Five. Whole. Minutes. Can he even bear the wait? The way it feels just being in the world with her is unlike anything he’s ever felt before, around anyone. And that’s before he even kisses her. The way he feels then comprises a whole other universe of emotion, not that he retains the capacity to articulate it once their limbs are entangled and he’s inhaling the scent of her shampoo or her perfume or whatever magic potion she wears that helps to cast her spell.

  There’s something about Tilly Maguire that has Reuben Vaughan enthralled, and completely reassessing his life. Suddenly every choice, every upcoming development, every simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ seems scrambled and complex. What would Tilly think? How would Tilly fit in? Would that work, if he was with Tilly?

  She definitely isn’t the kind of ‘pop star girlfriend’ who’d deliberately interfere. In fact, as impossible as it seems right now to imagine them having any time apart, he’s sure they could handle it. How is he even in this headspace, where he wants to consider her not as a casual add-on in his life but a central part of it? A person standing beside him and with him, facing the world.

  That’s something he’s never had. Never someone close enough to let right inside his life the way he wants to let Tilly in. So far in that he’d eve
n consider telling her about his father.

  ‘Reuben!’ she screeches as she emerges back onto the rooftop. Though, ‘emerges’ is not exactly the word. Storms?

  ‘How could you not tell me about this?’ she yells at him.

  He flinches.

  ‘UN-believable! I trusted you!’

  She knows?

  A thousand thoughts jostle for attention. How has she found out? And if she knows, does everyone? This is not good . . .

  ‘Tilly, I was going to tell you —’

  ‘Really? When? After the world found out? When I read about it in the papers? When the press called, wanting a tell-all interview?’

  He sighs. ‘I was actually going to tell you, just now.’

  She throws her arms in the air. ‘How convenient!’

  ‘I know it’s a lot to digest . . .’

  ‘Really? You think it’s hard to digest the fact that you don’t actually believe in me as a writer?’

  What?

  ‘That you’d go over my head, without even speaking to me about it, and organise a book deal with one of the top publishers in England? I mean, seriously, Reuben, how could you imagine there would be any actual reward in that for me?’

  It wasn’t him. Whatever the deal is, she has this wrong!

  ‘And you know the worst bit? You think I can be bought.’

  His heart lurches. ‘Tilly!’

  ‘What is all of this?’ She sweeps her hands around the rooftop view, nearly crying. ‘More lies?’

  He wants to tell her to calm down. Sit down. Talk through this. But he knows if he even speaks she’ll bite his head off. And with good reason, if she thinks he’s done this —

  ‘Jack Guthrie has just offered me an advance for my book,’ she explains, trembling with rage. ‘Based on a chapter outline, one sample chapter, my stupid Instagram account and a neglected blog he dug up when he googled my name, which wasn’t hard because it’s now all over the internet.’

  Jack Guthrie. Reuben feels sick.

  ‘This is stitched up,’ she continues ranting. ‘Nobody offers a book deal to a completely unknown teenage author with no track record and no evidence that she can pull together a whole book. Not unless it’s arranged by friends in high places. Just cut me right out of it. I’m only the author . . .’