Her Royal Highness (Royals #2) - Rachel Hawkins Page 0,65
front, smiling in a plaid-lined trench coat. She’s accepting flowers from an old lady in the crowd, and over her head, the headline reads, “Sweet Sixteen!”
“Neat,” I say, and then I try to shrug, but I’m pretty sure it looks like I have a muscle spasm in my shoulder. “I’ll look through this, I guess.”
Sakshi rolls her lips together, holding back a smile, and then she pats my arm. “You can keep it.”
An hour later, I’m alone in the room, lying on my bed, reading every word of that magazine. It’s a total puff piece, a tribute issue to how great Flora is, but it’s still kind of cool, seeing so many pictures of her throughout her life.
Flora in a christening gown.
Flora and Seb as toddlers, hand in hand and weirdly solemn in fancy clothes.
A surprisingly awkward Flora at around twelve or so, braces winking as she grins at the opening of a children’s literature exhibit.
Plenty of Flora surrounded by very pretty girls as she gets older.
Those are the ones I keep staring at. Maybe they’re all just friends, but some of them were probably more than that, and as I look at shiny head of hair after shiny head of hair, thin, long legs in designer jeans, perfect figures in ball gowns, I am suddenly painfully aware of the fact that I’m wearing old leggings and a hoodie that reads GEOLOGY: IT’S GNEISS!
There’s a knock at the door as it opens, and I shove the magazine under my pillow, flipping over onto my back with a paperback copy of The Mill on the Floss in hand.
“Hey!” I say to Flora, who stands in the doorway, watching me suspiciously.
“Quint,” she says. “I wanted to see if you wanted to study downstairs, but . . . What were you doing?”
I wiggle the book at her. “Reading.” Not actually a lie, after all.
She keeps staring at me, but finally seems to accept that answer, walking over to the bed and dropping down on the edge.
Then she frowns at me.
“What does your shirt say?”
“It’s a pun,” I tell her, tugging at the hem. “Gneiss/nice. See, that’s a real geology joke.”
I wait for an eye roll, but instead she looks over at the rocks on the dresser. “I see you’ve settled into your new room, then.”
“It rocks,” I say solemnly, and she bursts into those giggles that are so unprincesslike, but so cute.
Then, surprising me, she gets up and walks over to the dresser, tapping her nails along a few of my specimens.
“I never asked,” she says. “Which one is your favorite?”
It’s started to rain outside—again, some more—and the lamplight in the room is dim and cozy.
Feeling more than a little awkward, I get up and walk over to her. Flora is taller than me by several inches, just the right height for me to lean my cheek on her shoulder.
Not that I’d ever do that.
Instead, I pick up the hematite. “This one, probably. Hematite. It’s magnetic, for one thing, which is super cool. And I got this one when my dad took me to Yellowstone in the sixth grade, so it’s special.”
“What about this one?” Flora picks up the piece of rose quartz, holding it in her palm.
We’re standing close together, so close that when she tilts her head to look down at the rock, the ends of her hair brush over my fingers as I tap the quartz.
“That one’s just pretty,” I say. “It doesn’t have any other special qualities.”
Flora’s lips curve up. “I happen to think being pretty is a very special quality.”
“You would,” I huff out on a laugh, but then I look up, and our faces are just . . . right there.
Her lips are right there.
I can smell the lemony soap she uses, can feel the soft, warm exhale of her breath on my face, and if I moved closer—
The blooping sound from my laptop telling me someone is trying to Skype me has us both jumping back, and I shake my head, face hot as I pick my computer up off my bed, answering the call.
It’s Dad, and I smile at him, trying to seem normal.
“Hey!”
“Millipede!” he replies, and then Gus’s face nearly obscures the camera as he attempts to say hi, too.
Laughing, I sit on the edge of my bed. For the next few minutes, Dad and I chat about things back home while Gus babbles and attempts to show me at least three new toys.