Page 90 of Royal Rising

“Stay here.”

Her eyes are wide and wary as she looks up at me. “Kalle…”

“Stay with me. Like last night. Just… stay.”

I don’t want to say how much I want her to. That watching her leave will be too much for me tonight. That I was already close to breaking until she showed up, both here and in the hospital.

That she might not be my security blanket but she does make me feel safe.

Edie nods and I let out a ragged breath. “But you can’t hold what I gave you to wear last night against me,” she points out. “I don’t keep giant-sized clothes in my apartment.”

“Maybe you should start,” I tell her with a smile.

I have no idea what I’m waiting for; the perfect moment is never going to come. I’ve gone all out as Mr. Romance before and part of me thinks Edie deserves that and more.

And then I stop myself because I wonder if she deserves me. Not meme, but all the baggage I’ve been born with.

The whole royal thing.

I know now that I never took a chance with Edie because I wasn’t ready for it. It would have been good, but she would have eventually tired of my one-syllable answers and bad moods, and there where would I be? Without Edie or my friend.

It might have been Mathias’s interest in her that gave me a kick in the butt, or maybe just a coincidence, but it’s time to step out of the friend zone.

I’m standing in the batter’s box waiting for the perfect pitch and I’m afraid if I wait too long, I’m going to talk myself out of it, like I’ve been doing for years.

31

Edie

And that’s how Iend up sleeping beside Kalle for the second night in a row.

We don’t go to sleep right away. Kalle gets me a huge T-shirt to wear and I crawl into his equally huge bed. I haven’t been in his room for years. There are sports memorabilia on every surface and posters on every wall.

It smells like him.

I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling while Kalle climbs in and turns out the light.

“I think the storm is pretty much over,” he says.

“Good.”

“Why are you so freaked out about them?”

No one has ever asked me that, and not a lot of people know how afraid I am of storms.

Of course Kalle knows.

“When I was ten, I was out in Dad’s greenhouse and it started to rain,” I tell him, stating fact and not letting my memories bubble up. “And then thunder and lightning.”

“Is that the one with the glass roof?”

“The glass everything. It’s all glass. I was too afraid to run back to the house. I didn’t care about getting wet but I didn’t want the lightning to get me. I ended up waiting it out under a table. Dad thought I was happy as a clam out there watching the storm or he would have come and got me.”

“You know the chance of getting struck by lightning is like one in three million,” Kalle says. He sounds amused for the first time all night.

“No, it’s one in one point eight million, so that’s a lot less. And you weren’t around when I was ten to give me such helpful statistics.”

“You were cute when you were ten,” Kalle muses. “Those big eyes and the Laura Ingalls braids.”

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