Page 18 of Spearcrest Prince

“What dream?” I ask, keeping my voice as light as his. “Who’s dreaming of this?”

“Someone must dream of it somewhere. London, the city that inspired so many writers. The North where the Industrial Revolution started, the savage moors where Cathy and Heathcliff loved each other too fiercely. Right?”

“Maybe.” I smile at the phone, even though he can’t see me. I smile at the dreams his words weave. “Somebody’s dream, maybe, but not mine.”

“No,petite étoile. I know what your dream is. Soon, I promise.” He’s silent for a minute. “So… have you met him yet?”

I hesitate. “Met who?” I ask, even though I know who.

“The Montcroix heir.” Noël’s voice wobbles with a fake flourish. “The aristocrat boy with the divine eyes. The stranger-fiancé.”

“Yes.” I try to keep my voice calm and neutral so that Noël doesn’t guess the exact circumstances of our meeting. “I’ve met him.”

“Oh, you have, have you?” I hear him moving around, the clinking of spoons and ceramic. It must be early morning in Japan. I imagine Noël has just woken up and is pattering around his flat, making coffee and breakfast, his phone on loudspeaker. He doesn’t sound remotely sleepy, but Noël’s always been a morning person. “Well? What was your impression?”

I tap my chin with a finger, trying to find a good way of putting into words what Séverin feels like as a person.

“You remember Louis XIV?”

Noël bursts out laughing. “Le Roi Soleil?”

“Yes.” I nod and smile even though he can’t see me. “Picture him, and you can essentially picture Séverin Montcroix.”

“When I think about him, all I can think of is that picture of him dressed as the sun with feathers in his hair.”

“Yes.” My chest bounces as I let out a silent laugh. “That’s exactly it. You’ve got it.”

“Okay, okay.” Noël gets his laugh under control. “Alright. So… the Montcroix heir is, what? Self-obsessed, power-hungry and, presumably, a bit of a fuckboy. Is that about right?”

“Mm-hm.”

“You two aren’t getting along, then?”

That’s a loaded question and immediately sends a reel of images spinning through my mind: laughing and dancing in the kaleidoscopic lights of the club, Séverin’s body pressed to mine, his hands sliding under my shirt and his hot lips pressing wetly against the hypersensitive skin of my neck.

Not memories I want unspooling in my head while my older brother is on the phone. I shake my head and answer truthfully.

“No, not really.”

The laughter ebbs out of the conversation, dragged out to the distance to be replaced by a darker current. In that current, my sadness and anger swim like dark creatures below the surface.

I’ve been trying so hard to keep them at bay. They come from a place of inevitability: sadness that Noël had to leave me, that I had to leave my friends, my home. Anger that my parents drove Noël away, then forced me into this impossible situation.

We could be sitting together right now, helping each other through life, through heartache. Having breakfast together the way we used to, every morning,tartines aux chocolatdipped into bowls of coffee and talking about difficult things over card games.

But we’re not. And it’s all because of our parents.

“Everything alright?” Noël asks again. His intonation is different this time, as if he wants the real answer.

“No. Not really.”

“I see.”

Noël falls silent again. His silence is the space he makes for me to share my feelings, like a blank canvas ready for the painter’s brush. Even when we were young, Noël understood how difficult I found it to express myself sometimes. Talking with a brush or a pencil is fine, it comes easily and doesn’t feel taxing. But talking with words can sometimes feel like an almost insurmountable task.

“Anaïs.” Noël’s voice is gentle when he finally speaks. There’s no sadness in his tone, but I wouldn’t expect it anyway because Noël’s emotions are always kept private, even from me, sometimes even from himself. “We’ve bought the tickets. You only have to wait one year. One year is nothing, and we have a plan. Get your qualifications in the UK, use them for your university applications, then move here and continue your education. If you rush things now, if we change the plan, get you out, then what’s going to happen? You come to Japan without your qualifications, and then what? Struggle to catch up? Struggle with university applications?”

A lump rises in my throat. I know Noël is right. The only reason I went through with this whole move to begin with was to secure the English A-Levels. English qualifications will go over better in Japan because I’m applying for English-speaking courses.

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