Page 28

TWENTY-EIGHT

ROSE

When Molly approaches me out of the blue while I’m mid-conversation with my cousin Sukey, I’m so startled to find her talking to me at all that I brace for the worst before she even speaks. I excuse myself from Sukey and walk several steps with her, ducking my head closer so she can say whatever she needs to say to me without causing a scene. And though I’m anticipating conflict, I never expect the following words to leave her mouth.

“Danni told me what went down with you two last month,” Molly says in a low voice, and my world stops. Keeping my breath under control, and glancing at the surrounding partygoers to quickly ascertain that we weren’t overheard, I grab her by the arm and steer her out of the gala, down the hall, and into the nearest sitting room. There, I close the door behind us and whirl around.

“I’m sorry, can you repeat that, please?” I ask. “It was quite loud in there.”

Molly stands in the center of the room, atop a rug in the same shade of rich maroon as her dress, with her arms hugged tightly around her middle. “Danni told me what happened last month. With you two. I could tell something was off between the two of you, so I asked her. She told me everything.”

“Everything,” I repeat in a voice that’s rather more high-pitched than I mean it to be. “About…?”

“The lesbian stuff,” she says. “Or the bisexual stuff, she didn’t clarify that part. The… romantic feelings stuff. Whatever. Anyway, the important thing is that it’s obvious you’ve shut down on her, and in case you haven’t noticed, it’s hurting her. A lot. And the worst thing is, she’s convinced you’re upset for some reason.” She shakes her head. “Actually, she seems to think you mind so much you just can’t handle it. And Danni is a good person, so if she’s wrong, you need to let her down gently. But if she’s right, you need to figure out a way to handle it, because I’m not gonna let you shut her out like you did to me. She still has feelings for you, and you’re being cruel.”

There are myriad problems with everything Molly just said, but I triage and latch onto the most pressing point. “She… told you?” I ask, aghast.

“Yeah. I mean, I sort of dragged it out of her, she didn’t really want to, but it’s done now.”

“I can’t believe she told you,” I say, half to myself.

Molly ignores me. “So, be honest with me. Right now. Do you actually care?”

I flounder. “It’s none of your business,” I say. My head is spinning. How could Danni have told her? I trusted her. Deeply, in fact—more than I trust most people. More than I probably had any right to trust someone I’ve known for so little time. Why am I so shocked? What was it about Danni that had me so convinced she would never share something so private, so important?

“Danni’s my best friend, so if you hurt her, it’s my business. So: do you give a damn about her?”

Is Molly even the first person she’s told? What if she’s shared this with other people? I have no way of knowing. How could she do this? How could she?

“Rose?” Molly asks, a little too loudly, and I scrape my way to the surface of my swirling thoughts.

“Of course I do,” I snap. “I wouldn’t have been with her at all if I didn’t care about her. Not to mention, I don’t know if she left this part out, but she broke up with me .”

So if she’s sharing this around in some sort of ill-conceived revenge against me, it’s not even fair. I never wanted to break up. I all but begged her on my knees not to. No, I realize, she’s not doing this out of revenge. That’s not Danni. So, what, then? Did she simply forget the stakes?

“You wouldn’t have… what?” Molly asks. “She broke up with you?”

“Yes,” I repeat. “ She did.”

Molly could not possibly look more bewildered if she tried. Her confusion catches at me and slows me down, a parachute against free fall. Why does she look like that? Is it that hard for her to believe Danni broke my heart, and not the other way around?

She narrows her eyes like she has incoming migraine. “Wait, I’m lost. Are you telling me there was something between… you and Danni?”

The world stops as the implications of her words hit me. I frantically replay our conversation, and realize my mistake too late. At no point did Molly specifically confirm she knew about our trysts. I keep my mouth shut for once, unwilling to implicate myself further.

Molly bicycles her hands while she speaks. “Danni told me that she had a one-sided crush on you, and you knew about it, and that’s why there’s been weirdness between you two.”

Ah. Well, that’s something I can much more imagine Danni saying. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been quite so quick to believe her apparent betrayal of me.

“Quite right,” I say. “That’s what I meant to say. I’m homophobic, unfortunately.”

“I was trying to convince you to stop shutting her out and show her some empathy before you messed up your friendship with her forever.”

“Your feedback has been well-noted, and I’ll take it into consideration.” Feeling ill, I take a step toward leaving, but Molly grabs at my forearm.

“Rose, I didn’t know,” she says, and it’s the first time she’s spoken to me with any measure of kindness in months. That alone is enough to make me linger. I look at her, and she’s soft and earnest.

“Can we sit?” she asks, and I nod. Together, we move to the sage velvet love seat and take our places side by side. Molly leans her elbows on her knees. I let my back fall against the couch.

“You and Danni?” she asks.

I suppose there’s no point trying to deny it now. I dug myself well and truly into this hole, and now I’m stuck sitting in it. “Mm.”

“For how long?”

“Not too long.”

Not long enough.

“So you’re…”

“A lesbian.”

Molly shakes her head. “I had no idea.”

“Well, I didn’t tell you.”

“Is this new?”

“Me being queer?”

“You coming out.”

“I haven’t come out. Danni found out incidentally.”

“How?”

“I kissed her.”

“Oh. That’d do it.” Molly taps a nervous foot on the rug. “I was just wondering, I guess. I just mean that, if you’d been telling people, it wouldn’t surprise me if I didn’t get told.”

“Admittedly, you wouldn’t have been high on my list,” I say to the ceiling.

“Yeah. I can understand that.”

I purse my lips and grit my teeth and squeeze my hands together and tumble out with, “I still don’t understand why, though.”

Molly blinks. “Why you’re lesbian?”

“Why we stopped being friends.”

“Oh.”

It feels like squeezing an empty bottle in the hopes of finding a missed drop of water, but I have to ask again. Just one more time. “I don’t understand what I did that was so toxic,” I say. “Perhaps if I did, I could work on it, at least. Even if it’s too late for the two of us. But you haven’t always hated me, so for the last time, what, exactly, did I do, Molly?”

She shifts uncomfortably, refusing to meet my gaze. “You disappeared.”

“ I disappeared?” I ask, incredulous. “I was right there the whole time. You’re the one who vanished. A little more every day, and at first it was too subtle to comment on without sounding pathetic, and then suddenly it was too far gone to address. It was quite impressive, really.”

Or it would have been, if it hadn’t been quite so devastating.

“You were there physically, but you were not right there,” Molly says, looking straight ahead. “You never checked in on me. If I checked in on you, you changed the subject. If I tried to talk about Oscar, you changed the subject. If I tried to talk about how I was doing, you changed the subject . And you were fine. He was supposed to be your friend, and you watched him die, and you didn’t care even a little. The only thing you cared about was making sure you looked good in the public eye. I needed you,” she chokes. “I tried to come to you so many times. And I might as well have been telling you about a foreign news story or something for all you cared. Our friend died, Rose. And you and I were there when it happened. You should’ve been the person I could speak to the most about it. But you completely shut me out. I was crumbling, and you just watched me.”

I remember the day after Oscar died as clearly as if I were living it now. We all left the lodge that night, and I flew back home. Here. There was a flurry of activity as my parents spoke to me, together then individually, as well as meetings with William. My bodyguard, Elizabeth, was fired early that afternoon, because of me. Adults flew from room to room talking in urgent voices, concocting plans, composing statements. I remember walking to my bathroom, staring at my reflection in the mirror and urging myself to cry. It felt as though I should cry—both because of the ache in my chest that longed to be released, and the general sense that it was disrespectful to Oscar’s memory not to cry. But no matter how urgently I willed it, the tears never came.

I remember how loud my body seemed. My beating heart was a booming bass drum, my breaths were a howling wind, my parched lips stuck together and pulled apart with a dry ripping noise. Like Velcro, I remember noting.

Eventually, I gave up. Then I wandered to the study, pulled every book off the shelf, and placed them back one by one in alphabetical order.

I have no defense, because I’m sure Molly is correct. There’s much I can’t remember after that first day—the following weeks, and even months, are a blur with only a few snatches of clarity here and there—but I believe every bit of it. I’m sure I changed the subject away from Oscar as often as he was brought up, because my mind all but ceases to function when I remember him. I’m certain I never invited Molly to talk about him, or her grief, for the very same reason. As for my reputation—yes, I did focus on that, absolutely. It was the one thing I had any semblance of control over—the only thing I had any hope of fixing—while everything else lay in shattered pieces at my feet.

“That’s all true,” I tell her. “And you deserved so much better than that.”

“I just want to know why you didn’t care. Did you ever even like Oscar? Or me?”

A sigh seeps out, heavy, weary. “Of course I did. I just… the older I get, the less I’m able to feel… things. Bad things. If something’s somewhat bad, I can feel it, but it’s as though if it passes a certain threshold, it vanishes altogether. Even my thoughts disappear sometimes. I don’t know why it’s happening, and I know it’s not a good enough excuse. But that’s the reason, all the same.” I clasp my hands together tightly. “I suppose that’s why my eyes seem empty to you. Whenever I should be feeling sad, or angry, or afraid, it’s as though I do empty out on the inside. I don’t really think I’m there at all. I’m just sort of watching from a distance.”

“You could have at least pretended to care. You could have asked me how I was. You could have let me talk about it, for god’s sake, even if you weren’t actually listening. You have no problem saying the right things to strangers, even if you don’t believe them. You should have done that for me.”

“But we don’t lie to each other, Molly. It would be fake.”

I lie to so many people, for so many reasons. I say I’m happy to be at events I despise. I make people believe I remember them and care for them, when in reality I reviewed refresher notes on their names and lives hours earlier. I pretend endless small talk doesn’t make my brain shrink. I speak passionately on causes that aren’t close to my heart in the slightest.

There are so few people I let into my life voluntarily. And all of them are people I can be myself with, for better or for worse.

But the good version of myself—the one Danni seems so sure I could be—would she value authenticity over her friend’s well-being? Or would she happily play a role every now and then when it’s needed? Would she, perhaps, be more liberal with white lies than I am?

“I can try,” I offer, and Molly silently nods in response. I clear my head, and think of what I would say if Molly were a family friend, or a visiting diplomat, who had gone through a recent tragedy. “I can’t imagine what you must be going through,” I say. “Oscar was a wonderful, incredible person. He was kind, and funny, and loyal, and the loss of him is just… simply devastating. I know there’s nothing I can say that can erase this, or ease your burden, but if there’s anything you need from me—anything I can do—I will be there in a heartbeat. You’re my best friend,” I finish, and that part, at least, rings true. “And I’m so sorry you have to live through this.”

I sneak a glance at Molly to ascertain her reaction. She doesn’t look particularly moved. In fact, she appears to be fighting a smile of mirth.

“Yeah,” she says, her mouth trembling with the effort of remaining straight-faced. “That was, um… very fake.”

“I did warn you.”

“You did,” she agrees, finally letting the smile win. Sun peeking through clouds. “Thank you for trying, though. At least you tried.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t try earlier.” And again, it’s honest.

The smile fades in an instant, and all at once, Molly looks as though she’s on the verge of tears. She blinks up at the ceiling. “I just really thought you didn’t care. I thought we didn’t matter to you. I was so hurt, I was… I just…”

“I have cared about you since the day I met you,” I say quietly. “You matter to me more than almost anyone in the world, and there’s never been a moment that wasn’t true.”

The tears spill over now, slipping down her cheeks one by one. She makes no move to wipe them away. I watch them fall, and feel a pang of jealousy, which I know full well is an abominable reaction to someone I love crying, but I feel it all the same.

“Molly?” I say. “I’ve been trying to apologize and understand what happened between us for months. Why are we having this conversation now?”

She takes an awfully long time to reply, sniffling and swallowing and working her mouth as she mulls over her words. “Because I thought when you went distant, it was proof you didn’t care. I thought actions spoke louder than words, so I didn’t want to hear what you had to say. It wasn’t until Danni said she thinks you shut down when stuff goes really wrong that I even realized there could be another explanation. You were so good to me when my dad died, I thought it was evidence that you do know what to say, and you just didn’t care anymore. I didn’t click that the difference between Dad and Oscar is you were grieving Oscar as well. Maybe I should’ve figured it out myself. I definitely should’ve heard you out, I know . But I’ve just been so…”

“Sad,” I finish. “You lash out, and I lash in, I suppose.”

“I’ve been awful to you,” she says, and I get the sense that she’s realizing the truth of her words as she says them. “I’m so sorry. I was just… everything was so much, and I was so angry at everybody.”

Though her words don’t erase the hurt of the past several months—and though I’m sure she feels much the same about mine—I don’t have it in me to conjure up any bitterness. And I don’t believe it’s due to a lack of feeling, either. Mostly, I think, I’ve missed her far too much to have any interest in holding a grudge, and it feels so wonderful to be by her side and talking frankly that any less pleasant emotions simply aren’t loud enough to make themselves heard.

“I don’t suppose we’ll be able to forget this all happened,” I say.

“No.”

“So, what now?”

Molly finally glances at me. “I don’t want to be angry anymore,” she says.

It is, I suppose, as positive a step as I could hope for. “Do you think we could start speaking again?” I ask her.

“I’d like to.”

Neither of us has ever been any good at emotional displays of affection, even prior to the last six months. So we don’t celebrate our tentative reconciliation with an embrace. But when Molly stands and offers to return to the party with me—not ahead of me, or behind me, or sulking by my side, but with me—it feels like a warm blanket all the same.

And yet.

“I’m not ready to go out just yet,” I say. “I may stay in here for another minute.”

And so, she gives me a sad smile and leaves me alone with my thoughts.

My favorite room in a party has always been the quietest, farthest room from the festivities, and I’m sure Mum plans on cutting the cake soon, which will require me to be energetic, and bright, and sociable. And I can be exactly none of those things without a moment to breathe and prepare myself for round two. For about a minute, I simply sit and breathe, then I wander over to the curtains. If I part them, I’ll catch a glimpse of the crowd below, camping out in hopes they can glimpse me right back. I could do it. I could greet them. Maybe I even should, to connect with some of the people who still love me despite everything.

But I so prefer being alone.

Yet, when the door behind me opens, and I turn around to find Danni standing behind me, I feel anything but annoyance. I offer her a wordless smile, and she closes the door behind her and joins me to stare at the drawn curtains, as though we’re surveying a breathtaking view. From a mountaintop chalet, perhaps.

“Apparently the fireworks are starting soon,” Danni says.

“Ridiculous waste of money,” I say. “When I’m queen, there will be no fireworks.”

“You know what? I’m down with that. Taxpayers should not be funding fireworks displays. Or acrobats. Or champagne towers, honestly.”

“Absolutely agree. I will abolish all of it.”

“Good.”

“No more fireworks throughout the kingdom. In fact, no merriment at all.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of lowering the budget cap on royal birthday parties.” Danni grins. “I didn’t mean you should go all Footloose on the poor country.”

“No, no, I like the merriment ban. I’ll call it the Blythe Law, just so everyone knows where it came from.”

“I would like to go on record and say I was never in favor of a total fireworks ban.” She clears her throat, and looks away suddenly. “Um, also. Just a heads-up. I told Molly I have feelings for you, but I said they’re unrequited.”

I break into a silent laugh, and press my fingers to my lips to still them. Danni notices, and she tips her head to one side, quizzical. “Did Molly already tell you that?”

I will tell her exactly what Molly knows. Though I think I’ll leave out the misunderstanding, lest she takes on any responsibility for me unwittingly outing myself to Molly. But for now, that’s not what I want to discuss.

I want to take her hands in mine, but I don’t. Instead, eyes blazing, I turn to face her. “I think you just gave me my best friend back,” I say thickly, and her eyes widen in surprise.

“You and Molly made up?”

When I break into a smile, she throws her arms around me. Oh, I forgot how this feels. The warmth of her, the feel of her heartbeat against my ribs, the scent of her shampoo as my cheek presses against the top of her head. I clutch on to her like she’s a buoy, and I’ve only just realized I’ve been treading water for far too long.

She digs her fingertips into my back, and rests her head against mine. “Rose,” she whispers, and I don’t know if it’s a statement or a question. Or a warning.

I don’t even know who shifts first. All I know is, all at once, we’re kissing, and there’s nothing hesitant or gentle about it. It’s a desperate, frantic, hungry kiss, and her fingers are in my hair, and my hand is firm against her waist, and my back hits the wall hard before I even register that we’ve moved. With my other hand, I pull her in to deepen the kiss, and she lets out an involuntary moan at the back of her throat that almost causes my knees to buckle. If it weren’t for the support of the wall, I think they might have.

We were barely even together. Like a cherry blossom, we’d bloomed, and dazzled, and died, all in the span of weeks. Although trees don’t truly die once their leaves fall, do they? They simply lie dormant. As, I suppose, did we.

But still, we were so brief. Kissing her shouldn’t feel like this, as though I’ve finally reattached a lost limb, and I’m whole once more. Missing her shouldn’t matter this much. I’ve been missing her for longer than I ever even had her.

But god, she matters. I can’t help it. She matters.

When we pull apart, though, a horrible thought flashes across my mind. Was that our final kiss, then? The denouement?

The crystal-sharp panic of that thought snaps me out of the hazy fog of wanting that had drifted over me. I don’t want this, I realize. Not as it is, anyway.

“Don’t do this to me,” I plead, and Danni blinks up at me, hurt flashing across her hazel eyes.

“What?” she asks.

“You said you didn’t want to be with me, and I completely respect that. But if we can’t be together, then that means we can’t blur the lines. And that’s your responsibility,” I tell her firmly when she opens her mouth to protest, because, in fairness, we simultaneously kissed each other just now. “Because I wanted to be with you, and if I could, I would. It’s you who didn’t want to be with me. So don’t make me say no to you when I don’t even want to.”

She stares at me, and I despise it, because she’s mesmerizingly beautiful, and I wish she wasn’t. And all I want to do is roll back time by half a minute and somehow turn a moment into an eternity, erasing the “after” altogether. I may only get one life, but if I had the choice, any choice in the matter at all, I would spend the rest of it kissing her—every wretched second I have left—just so I would never have to face breaking apart for the last time, knowing that eventually even the memory of her taste will be lost to me.

“I did want to be with you,” she says. “I just wanted to get the breakup over with before it could hurt too bad.”

“And did it work for you?” I ask. “Because it’s hurt me quite effectively.”

“All I have done is hurt,” she says, and her voice cracks. “I thought it would be okay, because it was early, but I’ve never been less okay in my whole freaking life. I hate it, and I hate myself for choosing it, because it sucks. It was the wrong choice, and I keep waiting for it to get easier, and it’s not happening.”

“So, what’s the point?” I ask her.

“There is no point! I’m already screwed. I was screwed from the second I kissed you. I think I was screwed from the second I met you. You’re going to hurt me either way, and the worst thing is, if it means I can have you now, I don’t even think I mind anymore, because whatever happens months or years from now can’t hurt worse than this.”

She catches her breath, and I once more resist the urge to touch her. I don’t trust where it will lead, and I need to know exactly where we stand first. “What do you want, Danni?”

With a sigh, she raises her hands then lets them fall limply to her sides. “For things to be simple.”

I survey her soberly. “Well, I can’t give you that.”

“What can you give me, then?”

“Me,” I say. “Just me.”

She takes my hands, and I don’t tear them away, but I avert my eyes, to be safe. “Is that enough for you?” I ask over her head. “Being with me isn’t easy.”

“I don’t think it will be,” she agrees softly. “But being without you is impossible. Hurt me later, please. Not now.”

At this, finally, I look at her.

This time, she kisses me first.

This time, I’m not afraid for it to end.