Page 87 of The Thing About My Prince
“How have things been today? It must have been super awkward after last night?”
“Huh.” Her question brings my pacing to a sudden halt. It hadn’t occurred to me to think that today might have been awkward.
“Not at all. He woke me up and had me shut him in the trunk of the housekeeper’s car so we could drive out without photographers seeing him, and then we went to the waterfall he’d told me about last night. He’d gotten one of the staff to make a picnic for us.” I suppress the smile tugging at the corners of my mouth. “Anyway, we did that. And you know what? It wasn’t weird at all.”
Becca rests her chin on her hand and glares at me in silence.
“What?” I ask.
“You went on a date.”
“No, I did not,” I scoff.
She nods. “The guy you slept with last night woke you up and took you on a romantic picnic by a waterfall that he’d told you the night before meant something important to him. That’s pretty much the definition of a date.”
“It’s not what it was at all.” At least I hope it’s not. Or do I hope it is? “He hates being cooped up in that place and wanted to get out for a little bit. And it’s hard for me to interview him in the castle because there’s always a chance someone might overhear. I mentioned the bug, right? So getting off the property makes it easier to talk, and he’d just mentioned the waterfall last night and that he hadn’t everbeen back there, so I guess it must have been top of mind, and that’s why he came up with that idea, and he knew that by the time we’d get there it would be lunchtime and we’d be hungry so it would make sense for him to bring food with us.”
Yes. All perfectly logical.
“You’re panic-processing,” Becca says.
“I’m what?”
“That thing you do when you want to justify something you know isn’t really justifiable. Like that time you spent ten minutes explaining to me that buying those really expensive noise-canceling headphones was crucial to your workflow, when in fact you just wanted to use them to block out Lee Regus’s self-indulgent ramblings in the office. You never needed to justify it to anyone anyway.”
“That was six years ago, and I still use those headphones all the time for listening back to interviews while I go for a walk. As well as for blocking out Lee. So they turned out to be the great investment I always knew they were.”
“Maybe sleeping with your prince last night will be a great investment too.”
I gasp in horror. “Do you think I only did that to loosen him up and get him to tell me juicier stories to make the book better?”
“Um, that truthfully never crossed my mind. But ifyouthink you did…” She shrugs.
“I do not think I did. I would never do that. You know I would never do that.”
“Okay, then you did it for the same reason you slept with any of the other men you’ve slept with. Because you like him.”
“That didn’t apply to Ryan.” I point my finger at her. “He was obsessed with his pool league and had never read a singleNew York Timesarticle in his life. I really wasn’t thatinto him. But he did have incredible thighs and a really cute smile. A good time, not a long time, and all that.”
“Is the prince a Ryan?”
“No. Of course not. Oliver has a quick brain. And he’s worldly. On the flight over, he was reading an article about famine in East Africa and kept telling me shocking statistics from it.” I pause to think for a moment, trying to find a fault. “The only slightly odd thing is that he seems to have made a weird financial decision to buy a quarter share in a loserish soccer team. But I haven’t had a chance to ask him about that yet.”
Is that truly the only fault—and it’s not even a fault —that I can find with him? I can usually come up with a much longer list for every man I meet after spending way less time with them than I have with Oliver.
“Do you want my advice?” Becca asks.
“That look on your face says I’m not going to like it. So maybe I don’t. Maybe I only wanted to talk to you in your capacity as my unofficial therapist.”
“Well, you’re getting it anyway.”
“Of course I am.”
“You are not one to do rash things. You have a spreadsheet for your groceries, for God’s sake. So?—”
“In my defense, that’s an efficiency device. What’s the point of starting a list from scratch each time when I buy a lot of things over and over again every week? Also it makes me less likely to forget things I only buy occasionally. Honestly, it’s a great system. More people should adopt it.”
“Right, yeah. Anyway. You’re not one to do rash things. You are particularly not someone who sleeps with people on a whim. You made one guy wait for two months, for God’s sake.”
