The Royal We

by Heather Cocks

  “Man up and get your ass out here, Captain Wales,” I said.

  “I’m holding precious cargo!” he protested, waving the Veuve bottle. But he took a step and then, feeling more secure, jumped up and down a bit. The bridge creaked cooperatively but did not give.

  “Pretty cool,” Freddie said. “Galahad will love this. He’s going to be an architect, see. Murgatroyd is more into science, and Bob will be a third-rate stage actor.”

  “Poor Bob.”

  He shrugged. “Bob’s also going to be a bit of a shithead.”

  I laughed, then raced the last few feet, which made the bridge quiver extra tenuously for Freddie’s final crossing; he looked relieved when he stepped onto the tree house roof. We weren’t quite high enough up to see over the lush hedges that flanked the property, but from this deep in the garden, the drunken cacophony of the party sounded more like a symphony, and the sky was starting to twinkle. As I retrieved the Veuve from Freddie, he looked at what we’d just traversed.

  “Stout should never have let me do that,” Freddie said. “Wherever he is.”

  Suddenly, a low moaning noise escaped from the fort underneath us. I put my finger to my lips and crept around until I spotted an open trapdoor in the roof, then lay down on my stomach and peeked through it. The moonlight bounced off a sequined dress lying in a heap on the floor, and a trail of clothes led partway behind the thick tree trunk. I shimmied further and ducked my head through the opening, and there was none other than Beatrix Larchmont-Kent-Smythe, clad only in underwear, her mouth working its passionate way down a pale leg.

  A very pale, very shapely, very female leg.

  I had scooted in a touch too far, and started to slip. I gasped, involuntarily, and just as I felt Freddie reach out to save me, Bea whipped around her head.

  “This tree house is occupied.”

  “Oh, it’s you,” Bea snapped.

  “Who is it, pet?” whispered the hidden woman, who must have sat up abruptly, because her long, wavy red tresses swung into view.

  Gemma Sands. Whose compelling heterosexuality I had feared was tempting Nick into all manner of disloyalties while we were dating; whose bed I’d assumed Nick took to after we ended. The notion of her and Bea as a couple didn’t hit me nearly so hard as the astonishment at how far off my paranoia had been…and the regret over whether I’d made a huge, huge mistake.

  “Well, this is juicy,” Freddie said, sticking his head through the trapdoor.

  Bea pursed her lips. “Yes, well, now you know,” she said. “I’m a highly erotic creature and I’m seeing a woman. Can we all close our mouths now?”

  She crossed her arms over her naked chest with an impressive amount of dignity.

  Gemma peeked around the tree. “Er, hello, Freddie. And you must be Bex.”

  “In the flesh,” I said, still stunned. “And I’ll be honest, part of me kind of wishes we’d met this way two or three years ago.”

  “No, this is much better.” Freddie wiggled his brows suggestively. “In fact, I might need a closer look. What if it’s their first time? They might need an advisor—”

  “Pass,” Gemma said tartly. “Now, I haven’t seen this one in two very long weeks, so would you mind leaving us to it?”

  “No, of course! I mean, yes. Good-bye,” I stammered, and pulled Freddie out of the trapdoor by the back of his collar.

  “You’re no fun,” he said, pouting, as we scurried back to ground level. “But may I just say, well played, Bea!”

  We cracked up, although in my own laugh I could hear a manic fringe. Bea had known Gemma wasn’t a threat. What if she’d told me? What if, what if, what if.

  I grabbed the Champagne and drank deeply all the way back to the house. Our delight—Freddie’s genuine, mine distracted—morphed into a tipsy mischief, and we decided it was our mission to ferret out as many other illicit lovebirds as we could find. We poked through everything from paisley-walled guest rooms to an impressive cathedral-ceilinged library, and managed to bust three more pairs—one of them being Clive and his brunette—before Freddie noticed a subtle knob in the large wooden wall under the staircase.

  “Oh, hello,” he said, giving it a tweak. It obliged by leaping open, the way everything does when Freddie tweaks it, revealing a dimly lit box of a room that appeared to be upholstered in red velvet—the walls, the stubby bench, even the telephone table. We barreled inside, and then Freddie stopped short, and I careened smack into him. Apparently the red velvet room was big enough for exactly one occupant.

  “I once slept with Bea,” he said, as the door clicked shut and left us in squished darkness. “What if I was the last man to sleep with Bea? What if I turned her off men forever?”

  I burst into a rude guffaw. “You? The Commonwealth’s most notorious Lothario?”

  “I can see the Mail now: FRED DEAD IN BED.”

  “SEX IS CRAP WITH GINGER SNAP.”

  We cracked up harder. “It doesn’t work like that, Freddie,” I managed to eke out, “so I think your reputation will survive.”

  “Where are we? We need a light,” he said, still wheezy with mirth.

  His hand searched futilely in the pitch black for a wall switch, and accidentally brushed my waist. We were giggling, in that heady way where the real laughter has subsided into a silly afterglow, and as we awkwardly squeezed around each other, our bodies smashed and collided. I felt a charge shoot through me and tipped up my head.

  “Whoops, I didn’t—”

  “Sorry, is that your—”

  The rest was lost, because then we were kissing.

  Chapter Six

  That night taught me why exactly Freddie is, fundamentally, so hard to quit. Kissing him was pure, ravenous heat, a thousand gigawatts blowing my every fuse. It swallowed my consciousness, my judgment, even my senses. I couldn’t smell or taste or touch or contemplate anything that wasn’t him.

  Until I instinctively wove my fingers into his hair, and thought to myself how much coarser and unrulier it was than Nick’s—

  Nick.

  Freddie and I sprang apart, gasping. I heard him stagger backward until he fell onto the bench, sitting with an inglorious plop as I felt wildly along the wall for a switch, finally finding one right about where we’d first fallen into each other. The dying bulb flickered on, casting a strange, jaundiced glow.

  “What the hell just happened?” I panted, sliding to the floor. The room was so small that I was now basically next to his shins.

  “Bex. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking,” he said, clearly longing to pace but having no room in which to do it. “One minute I was looking for the light and then…”

  “We just kind of…” I brought my hands together.

  “Like a magnet,” he finished. “That sounds rubbish, but I can’t explain it. I never, ever meant for that to happen.”

  “You’re like a brother to me—”

  “I know. I know! I’d never—”

  “And Lacey—”

  “And Nick, I mean…God, this room.” Freddie flapped his hand in front of his face. “Is there no actual air in here?”

  We stared at each other.

  “My coping skills are for shit,” I said. “I’ve been off-kilter all night, and apparently I react to that by kissing the least appropriate person within range.”

  “Bingo,” he said with a joyless laugh. “And we are never speaking of this again.” He tugged at his hair in exactly the worst moment for me to notice a Nick-like tic. “As soon as we open this door and go back to the party, it’ll be like it never happened.”

  “Deal.” I clambered to my feet. “Give me a decent head start, though.”

  “Wait.” Freddie tilted his head to the side. “Are we good?” he asked.

  He was so handsome, even with his shirt wrinkled and slightly dirty from our tree house escapade, and looked so earnest and sad and guilty. That kiss was blazing, but it had also been missing something—a sense of completion, of bone-deep ne
ed, and above all, the quintessential Nickness that would be absent from every boy I kissed until I found one who made me forget that I wanted it. I was hit with a bodily wallop of yearning for Nick more potent than I’d felt in a year, and a strange sense of calm settled over me. I felt a lot of things for Freddie right then, but neither lust nor anger was among them.

  “We’re good,” I said. “We’re the dumbest people alive, but we’re good.”

  I swung the door open and left him there. And nearly crashed into Clive, who looked curiously behind me.

  I pushed the door shut. “Just snooping,” I said, trying to steer him away without raising his hackles. “That’s some weird panic room. How’s your brunette?”

  “Quite fun, and also, full of tidbits,” he said. “The Heath-Hedwig divorce is in a ghastly state over custody of their peafowl, and she said the most awkward thing about Rich—” He stopped as we reached the terrace, a strange look on his face. “Is that Lacey?”

  “What’s wrong?” Freddie asked, appearing at my shoulder.

  “Where did you come from?” Clive asked. “Weren’t you outside?”

  But I ignored them. Everything had become fuzzy except the sight of my twin bolting frantically up the lawn. I could hear her calling my name, but it sounded distant, as if I were underwater. Her makeup was ruined. She was hyperventilating. A cold psychic misery gripped me; she didn’t have to say the words. As I felt a piece of me crack and fall away, I just knew.

  * * *

  The weeks following my father’s death were a devastating blur that, paradoxically, I can recall in the sharpest relief.

  I remember clinging to Lacey as Freddie and Clive hustled us to privacy. Hearing Gaz cry with us. Cilla getting us on a flight. Lady Bollocks waving us off down the long gravel drive, kinder than I had ever seen her. I remember my mother’s face, too, stoic and empty, more wrenching than if she had greeted us in tears. I remember how brave she was, moving her trembling finger down the phone list, repeating to friends what none of us could believe. I remember understanding what a brutal thing it is to be the bearer of truly bad news—to break off a piece of that misery and hand it to other people, one by one, and then have to comfort them; to put their grief on your shoulders on top of all your own; to be the calm one in the face of their shock and tears. And then learning that relative weight of grief is immaterial. Being smothered a little is no different than being smothered a lot. Either way, you can’t breathe.

  I remember saying good-bye. Caressing his cheek. Seeing his lively, joyous face reduced to a remote serenity, his mouth curled into a final half smile that was only an eighth of how big it had seemed when he turned that smile on you. I remember the sense that it wasn’t him. Not anymore. And I remember feeling gutted, hollow, as if someone had scraped out my insides. Busywork was all that sublimated the pain: planning, organizing, shepherding, greeting, hugging, hosting, organizing the casseroles—an endless parade of aluminum-wrapped apologies from friends who wished they could bring Dad back instead. I’d flip the switch and plow through the list with robotic efficiency, then flip it back and lie awake, destroyed, disbelieving, devastated.

  It was such a stupid damn thing, too. He’d missed going to games, so he drove to Cincinnati to see if he could break the Cubs’ five-game losing streak. He never made it. The doctors said it was fast, that he may not have known it was the end, likely never felt his heart quit on him, much less the median. And the Cubs still had the indecency to lose. There was cold, dark comedy in realizing he was right; the Cubs were the death of him.

  The church was packed. Dad would have been so embarrassed and so pleased. I kept making fruitless mental notes to tell him about all the people who’d come, from grade school friends whose soccer teams he coached, to employees at Coucherator, Inc., tearstained and swollen. There were the regulars and bartenders from his local, The Shortstop; classmates of ours who’d deemed him the parent they’d most like to acquire in a trade; and teachers from as many as two decades ago, armed with stories about what a great guy he was. Hardware Pete, Auto Sal, and Electric Bruce of Bruce’s Electric sat shoulder to shoulder in the same pew, with the barber who cut his hair. I don’t remember giving a eulogy, although I know I sat up all night trying to write it, my Hot Cubs of Yore looking at me with silent, yellowing support. I’d been compelled to chip Derek Jeter off the wall and hide him in a drawer, because my father thought the Yankees were Hell’s foot soldiers, and it seemed disloyal to let one stay.

  My friends called, kind and helpless: “Bex, I’m so sorry,” “Bex, if there’s anything I can do,” and from Gaz, whose mother died when he was fifteen, “Bex, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened. I love you all.” Bea sent a beautiful wreath, Cilla sent a ham. An enormous bouquet that required three men to carry it was simply signed Steve and family.

  For the better part of three weeks, we Porter women wandered around like zombies, every room full of Dad’s echo, as if he had just stepped away and would be back any minute. We avoided his spot on the couch like it was sacred, yet Lacey and I surreptitiously repositioned whatever might remind Mom too much of him. We emptied the Coucherator, we threw out the Funyuns, and I smuggled all the Cracker Jack up to my room, then binged on it while crying over the box of baseball souvenirs, still tucked under my bed—every gaudy plastic ring I’d ever found in the box of sticky sweet popcorn, every ticket stub, shirts I’d outgrown, and old cards and pencil nubs from when Dad and I would score the games together. I read about a change in the pitching rotation and thought, “Earl Porter will have feelings about this,” before realizing that he wouldn’t, that he’d never even know, and it seemed pointless suddenly that they bothered playing at all. And every night Lacey and I crawled into Mom’s king-size bed, the three of us a human chain, as if hanging on tight would prevent the universe from ripping off another link.

  “I’m sorry we fought,” Lacey had whispered one night.

  “Me too. Never again.”

  “Never again,” she repeated.

  It hurts to think about how much we meant it, lying there, crying into each other’s hair. We used to joke that we needed a safe word whenever we wanted to complain about subjects we’d already covered ad nauseam, so that we could save time by just saying Altoids, or whatever. I wish we’d made up one that could take us back and remind us how essential we are to each other, more priceless than any of Eleanor’s antiques.

  And yet, the whole time, I also yearned for Nick, the only man in the world I’d loved as fiercely as I loved my father. The criminal loss of one dredged up the egregious loss of the other, and I started to develop a very real antipathy for my hometown. My two most recent stays had coincided with two suffocating hazes of grief, and Muscatine had become synonymous with a dull, comatose emptiness. The people who would one day so glibly coin the name Fancy Nancy didn’t understand that England was an escape, that the ghosts in Iowa would sometimes become as unbearable to Mom as they already were to me. And as our third week without Dad drew to a close, my mother poured me and Lacey coffee at the breakfast table and, in the Lady Porter robe that had become her uniform, ordered us go back to London and to our lives.

  “Earl would not have wanted you to mope around with me,” she said. “Your aunt Kitty isn’t that far away in Michigan, if I need her, but I have to learn how to be on my own.”

  “But I don’t want you to be,” I said stubbornly.

  “Neither do I,” she said with a sad smile. “But we can’t always get what we want. And I think it is what I need.”

  The three of us hugged tightly at the airport, extracting promises to visit frequently, to call often, to be honest about our good days and bad. I cried through security in Des Moines, through the movie on the plane, through the sweltering customs line in London and the cab ride to Lacey’s flat, in Lacey’s arms when we dropped her off, and up the path and into my home. I was drained and devastated when I walked through that front door, and the last thing I expected to find inside was a miracle. But
there he was. Nick. Waiting for me.

  Chapter Seven

  For a long moment, we just stood there, Nick on the verge of motion, me swaying, still holding my luggage, wondering if the grief was making me hallucinate the one person in the world who could help me feel whole again. He wore a Cubs cap Dad sent for Christmas one year, and his cornflower-blue eyes were red-rimmed and wet.

  “I still had my keys,” he finally said awkwardly. “I pulled some strings to get off the ship. I just…had to be here.”

  My knees buckled. I let out a low sob and dropped my bags, and in a flash Nick crossed the room and scooped me into his arms. I felt his own tears on my hair, his body shaking as he wept with me, to the point where I don’t even know what we were crying for anymore: for Dad, for us, for the way my face still fit into that spot of his neck where it had always belonged. All the feelings I’d tried to ignore for the past two years came pouring into the empty spaces Dad had left, as if by magic an essential something was being restored to me, even though hours earlier I could’ve sworn my life would never have any magic in it ever again.

  I lifted my head and searched Nick’s face. He searched back, brimming with exquisite care and worry, and something deeper—something I hadn’t seen in such a long, awful time.

  So I kissed him. Our arms slid around each other in desperate sync, pressing us closer, tighter, dizzier.

  He broke away. “Are you sure?” he whispered.

  I silently pulled my sweater over my head, and then my tank top, and took his face in my hands. “I don’t want to be sad anymore, Nick. Please, help me not be sad. Just for a little while.”

  “My love,” he murmured, kissing me again, his hands warm on my body.

  * * *

  Afterward we lay in my bed, my head pillowed on his chest.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, stroking my hair.

  “Surely not for that,” I told him.