the same pea over and over again, so I fixed him with an expectant look and waited for him to meet my gaze.
“Bex,” he began, staring at the table.
“Nick,” I said. Then I lowered my voice. “Steve.”
He giggled. “I do love the way you say that,” he said. “It makes me feel like I’m my own evil twin.” He looked up at me. “We need to talk about what happens when our week here is up.”
“It’s so unfair. We just got here.” Every tick of the walnut carriage clock on the bookshop desk, its glass so fogged that the sound was our only proof it still told time, reminded me that this domesticity had an expiration date. “On to the next, I guess?”
“That’s just it.” Nick leaned toward me, a flush in his cheeks. “Maybe not. Maybe we don’t even have to go anywhere,” he said. “Picture it: you, me, a thatched roof, a garden in the back with tomatoes and plenty of room for you and an easel, me and my knitting…”
“You’re knitting now?” I asked.
“I read a very interesting book about it yesterday at the shop,” Nick said defensively. “How hard can it be?”
“Okay, well, that aside, this all sounds idyllic,” I said, “but how is it going to work?”
He scooted to the left and strained to grab his laptop from the nearby counter, then woke it up and turned it to face me. There it was: a thatched roof, a garden, a modest bedroom with a surprisingly big lead-paned window, a warmly shabby kitchen, a sitting room with a TV nook. I leaned closer.
“Is that an antenna on that thing?” I asked. “Can you live without satellite TV?”
“No,” Nick said. “I shall attend to that. But as for the rest…what do you think? It’s down the road near the edge of town. The owner hares off to Lisbon every year and it’s wide open.” He pushed the laptop away and took my hands. “We’ve been on the go for weeks, Bex. What if we just…stop?”
“Stop,” I echoed, turning the word over in my mouth and the concept over in my mind. We hadn’t stopped since we’d left the palace. This flat was the first time we’d even bothered to unpack our suitcases. A moving target would be harder for Queen Eleanor to hit, and the weight of her fury had been so crushing that I wasn’t keen to relive it. “Stopping feels like a mistake. Like we’re going to be found out.”
“I don’t think so. Certainly not now that I’m planning to let myself go.” He patted his stomach. “No one looks twice at us here. If they do, it’s to wonder how that crispy blonde snagged such a foxy continental toy boy.”
I snorted. “Be serious.”
“I seriously am,” Nick deadpanned. “Look, we’ve pulled it off, Bex. We’ve spent weeks being whomever we like, with no one the wiser. And now that we’ve managed to get lost up here, I want to relax for a bit. I want a slow pace and a kitchen full of groceries and a routine. I love you, and us, and this, and I want to focus on that. Don’t you want that, too?”
As I searched his face, considering what he’d said, suddenly I was back at Nick’s long-ago birthday party at Buckingham Palace—an event where he’d backed out of introducing me publicly as his girlfriend—and I was looking into the eyes of my father. I really do love him, Dad, I’d said then, my way of promising that the pain of loving Nick in secret was made right by the sincere depth of our feelings, and that the oddities of his life, of this life, were worth bringing into mine. My dad died before I got the chance to prove it. He’d missed my happiest hour, but also my lowest—the day I let myself get so lost that I nearly turned that promise into a lie.
The bizarre turns of the last few weeks had in so many ways brought me and Nick closer, both to each other and to the seeds of ourselves that wanted to grow outside the confines of the palace walls. If our former friend Clive hadn’t become the kind of reporter he’d always taught me to mistrust, if he hadn’t dug until he found a half-truth about me and Freddie that he spun into what I could only classify as an international sex scandal, then Nick and I would have had a week in paradise and then gone