The Royal We

by Heather Cocks

  “Proceed with caution,” Lacey said quietly, laying a hand on my arm.

  “What is this place?” Nick asked when he reached us, his motorcycle helmet tucked under his arm. “Are we sure Tony isn’t going to murder us all? What is that shirt?”

  At my expression, he kissed me very chastely on the cheek, which made me go stiff. “Happy birthday…?” he said loudly, the words for the bystanders’ benefit and the question mark for mine.

  “I told you not to worry about coming,” I said.

  “But it’s your birthday,” he said reasonably.

  “It is,” I said softly. “And it hasn’t been the best one.”

  He sagged a little. “Bex, let’s go talk about this someplace else,” he said.

  “No. Not tonight. I think you should just go.”

  “Bex,” he said, trying to look pleasant for the sake of appearances.

  “Nick,” I said, wiggling the vile potion in a cheap glass tumbler that was in my hand. “Don’t harsh my buzz. I’m trying to celebrate.”

  “Rebecca.”

  I didn’t care for his tone—whether he liked it or not, Nick had inherited a sliver of Richard’s flinty impatience, though he almost never deployed it—but I’d also known perfectly well my texts would freak him out, and I’d done nothing to correct that. I’ve never been patient; I wasn’t waiting for this fight any longer.

  Cilla stepped toward me. “Tony has a trailer parked out back that he’s been using as a makeshift office,” she whispered. “Go. I’ll send Nick in a minute.”

  The trailer was an Airstream that had clearly recently been a food truck, still tricked out with a restaurant-quality griddle and hot plates, and smelling faintly of old bacon grease. A crusty plastic squeeze bottle of ketchup lay unloved on the counter.

  Nick walked in ten minutes later. In that time, my hackles had gone down somewhat, leaving in their place that cold, goosebumpy feeling you get when the sun goes behind a cloud.

  “I didn’t want to do this tonight,” I blurted out at him. “Not here.”

  Nick set his helmet on the counter. “I am amazed anyone wants to do anything here.”

  He looked like he was wrestling with coming over to me, but I held up my hand.

  “No,” I said. “Please don’t. If you come over here, we’ll just end up having sex on the griddle or something and that won’t help.”

  “It might,” he said, but he stayed where he was.

  My mind raced for what to say first, but as usual, my mouth had its own ideas.

  “So, was Clive right?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Don’t be cute,” I said impatiently. “Clive told me I was destined to be discarded once you found someone more suitable.”

  “Clive had an ulterior motive.”

  “Doesn’t mean he was wrong,” I said. “Look at the facts, Nick. We’ve been together four years, and you still won’t be seen with me in public. I had Bea telling me I’m your safety play. I had Clive telling me I was a fool for doing this in the first place. The press is telling me I’ve been thrown over for your ex, you’re telling the press you’d rather die than be tied down—”

  “Please, don’t remind me,” Nick groaned.

  “—and all you are ever telling me is, ‘It’s not a good time,’ over and over, before going out and snuggling up with Gemma goddamn Sands. I had to sit there on your birthday and watch her kiss you, and act like it didn’t hurt, in front of a room full of people who knew enough to look over at me when it happened,” I said, heating up. “Watching you from afar I could take, but watching you do that, in front of my parents, in front of your family…But, you know what? I got through it. I passed that test. And then I got bumped for her again. Like I’m some mutt you picked up because it looked cute in the pet store but now you can’t make it presentable.”

  “Is that what you think?” he asked, incredulous.

  “What else can I think?” I asked. “I know that being who you are sucks for you sometimes, Nick. But I am who I am, and that cannot be someone who waits by the phone for her boyfriend to call and say she can come outside now. Especially because I’m starting to think that call won’t ever come.”

  He smacked his hand against the counter. “That is not fair,” he said. “You know I was nervous about being with anyone so seriously this soon. You know how much that scared me.”

  “And you know perfectly well that you said that didn’t matter anymore,” I spat. “I was there, Nick. You didn’t fuck me into amnesia that night at Windsor. You decided. We both decided. Let’s at least own that.”

  I hadn’t meant to go nuclear, but I was tired of being polite, and we were both past restraint.

  “Okay,” Nick said. “Then let’s also own you making the paparazzi chase you through London. Let’s own me telling you about my mother, the reason for everything I’m afraid of, and then nothing changing with Lacey for weeks after that. Let’s own you dancing with Clive at my birthday party and acting like it was the best time you’d ever had.”

  “I haven’t been perfect. I know that. But I have been lonely,” I said. “You left, Nick. Every day, little by little, since Klosters. The second our secret started to slip out, you started backing up. Straight into her.”

  “There is nothing going on with Gemma!” Nick said, exasperated. “God! I’m so tired of explaining myself.”

  “But that’s just it, Nick,” I said, beginning to shout. “You’re not explaining yourself. Not to the people who pick up the papers and see her walking into a wedding on your arm. You’re not explaining anything to the people who used to chase me around London, who are now writing that I’m being deported and that you and Gemma have a secret love nest in Surrey.”

  “We’ve been over this, Bex!” Nick said, throwing up his hands. “Talking to them only makes it worse. I will not give them any more ammunition.”

  “Your silence is the only ammunition they need anymore! How do you not see that?” I exploded. “I endured those people lying in wait for me, and said nothing about anything to them, because I love you enough to defer to your request. I told my sister to lay off your brother. I sucked it up while they picked me apart, and I’ve kept it together while they’ve laughed at me. I tried to fix what I messed up. I tried so hard to be perfect, to do exactly what you wanted me to do. And apparently I’m still not good enough.”

  “That has never been it.”

  “You made me look pathetic, Nick. And the worst part is, I let you. I can’t believe I put so much of myself into another person that all this petty shit tears me down, but it does, Nick, it rips away a piece of me every single time.”

  “It was never on purpose. Gem was just there—”

  “Then why does it keep happening?” I asked. “Explain it now. Explain it to me. Please, Nick.”

  “I—maybe that’s why,” he said, running a hand through his hair and staring at the floor. “There’s no explaining with Gemma. There’s nothing at stake. We’re friends, it’s easy. And you and I lately…” He sighed. “Everything has been a battle. All push and pull. Will we, won’t we, what’s Lacey doing, where is Freddie. It got so exhausting, and when the wedding got closer I just didn’t want—”

  He stopped himself, realizing what he’d said in the exact instant that I did.

  “The disinvitation didn’t come from on high, did it,” I said, stating the fact for both of us. “It came from you. You didn’t want me there.”

  In that moment the gulf between us widened without either of us moving. I sank against some decrepit old cabinetry and banged my palms onto my forehead.

  “Talk about choices,” I choked. “That is one hell of a choice. You can’t take that one back. You just proved my point. Oh God.”

  I wrapped my arms around my stomach and rocked forward, as if to hold myself together. There was a real possibility that I was going to throw up.

  “I was arguing with Barnes, and I had barely seen you, and suddenly I just got this vision of us goin
g public and everything falling apart,” he tried to explain, looking and sounding ashamed. “And I couldn’t go through with it.”

  I fought hysteria with everything I had. “In baseball they call that a balk.”

  “It wasn’t because I don’t love you,” he said desperately. “I do. I just got tired of thinking about everything so much, Bex. I just…”

  “Don’t say you snapped,” I said. “Just don’t.”

  “Mum’s shadow is over everything I do,” he whispered. “I can’t shake it. I don’t know how not to be paranoid, for me or for you.”

  My heart—my stomach, my head, everything—hurt for him. For both of us. Nick was adrift in something, and I couldn’t be his moor anymore. Which meant I was adrift, too.

  Nick was sucking on his lower lip hard now, rubbing the floor of the trailer with his shoe, trying to look at me but unable to do it.

  “This is it, isn’t it,” he said. “Is this really it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But it feels like it.”

  Something dawned on his face. “Our pin,” he said. “You’re not wearing it, are you?”

  I think he already knew the answer, but I shook my head anyway. I’d left it on my dresser. I hadn’t worn it in two weeks, and I’d known, on some level, that tonight wouldn’t end in a game of him finding it.

  “Did we ever really have a shot?” I asked almost wistfully. “Did you truly think this would work, or were you just hoping?”

  He thought about this. “Both,” he said. “I knew—I know—how I felt about you. But once the press got wind, I kept thinking that maybe if we stayed where we were, and kept everyone at bay, I could just…”

  “Delay the inevitable,” I said hollowly.

  He shook his head helplessly. “I always wanted you,” he said. “But I also just wanted things to be simple for a minute.” I could hear the emotion in his voice. “And they haven’t been with us. They probably never will be, for me, and it kills me, and it ruins things. I hate that we can’t just live the way we did in Oxford, forever.”

  “We were hiding there, too, Nick,” I said sadly. “Just because people weren’t chasing us doesn’t mean your demons weren’t.”

  He met my eyes. They were red-rimmed and wet with tears. “I don’t regret it,” he said brokenly. “I regret that we’re standing here, right now, doing this, in the stupidest location in the world.”

  That got a laugh out of me, halting though it was.

  “But I don’t regret trying,” he said. “I just wish we’d tried harder.”

  “Not harder,” I said. “Just better. We tried hard enough.”

  On the last word, I lost it. I heard him crying, too, so I turned away to give us each a moment and blotted my tears with my wrist. “There isn’t even enough cloth on this stupid shirt to use it as a Kleenex.”

  It was his turn to laugh. He pushed off the wall and picked up the helmet, then juggled it between his hands before putting it down again.

  “I don’t want to go,” he said. “Because if I walk out of here, I don’t know when I’ll get to touch you ever again, or even talk to you the same way, and I…” He swallowed a lump in his throat. “I don’t know what that life looks like,” he said, his voice tinny and strained.

  I nodded, over and over, for lack of knowing what else to say.

  “I love you,” he said, picking up the helmet again and walking to the door.

  “I love you, too,” I said as he walked through it.

  But it hadn’t been enough.

  Part Three

  Winter 2011

  “Your image fills my whole soul.…How that moment shines for me still when I was close to you, with your hand in mine.”

  —Prince Albert

  in a letter to Queen Victoria, 1839

  Chapter One

  The night we split was the last I saw of Nick for months—at least, in the flesh—and the pain from the hole he left consumed me. Our fight had been inevitable, and I’d gone cruising for it. I knew that. But I hadn’t thought ahead to after I picked it, when, like a scab, it would fall away and expose whatever hid beneath. I hadn’t even stopped to wonder what that would be. I certainly hadn’t imagined a mutual surrender. Maybe I should have gone after him when he walked out of that trailer, but there was nothing more to say—we’d carved each other up enough as it was—and so in his wake I found myself glued to that cold metal floor, knowing my next step would be the first in a string of them that would take us further and further away from each other. We’d had our last lazy Sunday morning. We’d had our last laugh. We’d had our last kiss—a hurried peck on the corner of my mouth on his way out the door. If only I’d known, I’d have appreciated the casual intimacy. Or turned my face an inch to the right.

  The trailer door banged open as Lacey and Cilla barged in, armed with water bottles and Kleenex.

  “Blistering hell,” Cilla said as soon as she saw my sodden face. Lacey said nothing; she simply snapped to my side and wrapped me in her arms.

  “Someone has to check on Nick.” I hiccupped. “He’s upset, he’s on that motorcycle—”

  “Bea and Clive went after him,” Cilla said, smoothing my hair. “He’ll be all right.”

  I gulped the water, then slowly found my feet and glanced through the chipped window. Misery was so packed that the crowd had overflowed outside. People sat slumped on the stoops of the crumbling converted tenement, or leaned against the carbon-crusted burnt-out walls, all nodding in deep existential appreciation of “Cat’s in the Cradle.”

  “Well, shit,” I said. “Now our great memories of this place are ruined.”

  They just looked at me, sad and sympathetic and worried.

  “I can’t believe it’s over,” I said, my voice cracking on the last word. “I don’t know what to do. This whole country feels like Nick to me.”

  Lacey stood decisively. “Then maybe it’s time to go home,” she said.

  * * *

  I’d expected to touch down in the States and feel healed—by the familiar territory, the beautiful sunsets, the cozy embrace of our two-story converted farmhouse. Mom and Dad sold their starter home once the Coucherator took off, swapping it for a larger, rural spread with a basement for his tinkering and enough bathrooms that Lacey could play with makeup for hours without me banging on the door. In typical Lacey fashion, she’d taken one look at the biggest of our two bedrooms, clasped her hands and spun around in it, and then spent the rest of our tour helpfully exclaiming over how the smaller one simply radiated me. And in typical me fashion, I didn’t care enough to stoke the squabble, so I’d expressed an agreeable passion for the garret-like room with the sloped ceiling and the bay window. I painted the walls a funky gunmetal color, positioned my bed so that the angled wall hovered over me when I slept, and hung posters on it of Cubs greats like Ryne Sandberg, Greg Maddux, and Mark Grace (and a small picture of Derek Jeter; it appalled my father to have a Yankee on my wall, but some forces of nature are too powerful to be denied). Art supplies littered the floor as I sat in the window and drew, tapping my foot to music, relishing my refuge—in a way, Lacey had been right—even as Lacey habitually insisted I crash for the night in hers. But now, the old watercolors and pencil sketches were stacked neatly atop a high shelf in my closet, next to a box of trophies and faded team photos. My old quilt with the softballs all over it had been boxed up when I left and replaced with an itchy, girly Laura Ashley floral that gave me metaphysical hay fever, and Mark Grace and Ryne Sandberg and Greg Maddux were, as in life, warped and curling at the edges. (Derek Jeter, also as in life, still looked perfect.) I’d wanted to return to Muscatine to feel like myself again, but instead I felt like a tourist.

  My first full day home, news broke that Nick had jetted off for a hunting weekend with Gemma, and it became obvious that I had underestimated the international appeal of my perceived role in this intrigue. The Mirror reported I’d flown home in a jealous tizzy; The Sun believed Nick and Gemma had been having
an affair for years but were afraid to tell me because I am so unpredictably violent. And they all—in a move I knew had to have Nick spitting nails—quoted an anonymous source saying Emma had expressed her distaste for the bawdy American with unrefined hair. Lacey and I used to wonder how it felt for celebrities who couldn’t dash out for toilet paper and ice cream without being surrounded by magazine stories about their fictional Baby Joy or their ex frisking someone new. That was now my life, and it was worse than I’d imagined. Two high-school-age girls at the local market started whispering and pointing as they pored through an Enquirer story titled JILTED BEX: “I’M KEEPING THE BABY,” to the point where I excused myself from the checkout line to grab the largest box of tampons I could find. A girl from Lacey’s cheerleading squad pretended not to see me at a gas station, then took a photo of my L.L.Bean duck boots that showed up later in a Glamour slideshow about shlubby breakup fashion. The anonymity I’d hoped to find in Muscatine proved as elusive as a warm hug from Barnes.

  And Gemma’s face haunted me. Of course she was the first place he ran. I knew tabloid appearances could be deceiving, but not all of them, not always, and those pictures with Gemma made me feel like the four years Nick spent with me might as well have been forty-five minutes. I wrote him a hundred frustrated emails I never sent. I couldn’t eat. I barely slept. I did nothing but go on long predawn runs and then sack out in front of the television, pretending I wasn’t Googling Nick and then secretly bingeing on whatever rumors I could find about him and the irresistible, illustrious, insidious Gemma Sands. By the time Lacey came home for Thanksgiving and marched into my room holding an open laptop, I was a stringy-haired wreck.