Page 58 of The Thing About My Prince

“I said…” I strain my voice so she can hear it but hopefully no one else can. “Do you mean the awful headlines about her weight?”

“Yes. But why did they do it?”

The British press ripped into my mother for years, mainly while she was at university.

“Because she was average-sized,” I say. “They see it as some sort of a crime if the women of the family are anything other than skinny-royal-size.”

She sits up straight and cups her hand behind her ear. “Other thanwhat?”

“Skinny-royal-size,” I say again.

“Skimmed meat foil pies?”she says.

A laugh flies out of me before I can stop it. But then I realize I don’t need to stop it. I can let it rip, because laughing with your girlfriend is a perfectly acceptable activity.

Have I ever laughed as hard with any other woman as I have with Lexi these last few days?

“What?” she says through a giggle. “You and your perfect royal English accent weren’t talking about meat pies?”

I’m about to give her another whispered response because we’re back to the sensitive topic again, but I realize there’ll be the same issue of her not being able to hear me across the entire length of the bed.

I wrap the top blanket around me, because she has no reason on earth to want to see me in only my boxers, even in the dark, and climb over the carved wooden footboard until I’m sitting cross-legged at the bottom of the mattress.

“I said that she wasn’t skinny-royal-size. Apparently there’s some unwritten rule that princesses have to be stick thin.”

“Yeah, you’d certainly need thick skin to put up with those ridiculous articles.”

“I said stick thin, not thick skin.”

“What?” She leans forward a little, and I can tell her face is crinkled up by thewhat are you talking about?tone in her voice.

I drop to my hands and knees and crawl closer to her, stopping halfway up the bed, somewhere around her knees. “I said, there’s some unwritten rule that princesses have to bestick thin.”

“Oh, right.” She leans back onto her pillows. “The article where she’s eating an ice cream and it runs down her chin was absolutely fucking brutal.”

“Ah, the famous ‘Can’t Suck It Fast Enough’ headline.” Merely remembering that, never mind saying it out loud again, prompts a pain in my chest.

“Awful.” Lexi pulls the covers higher, tucking them under her armpits. “Anyway, when I was getting ready for bed, I was thinking after she’d gone through all of that, why wouldn’t everyone, and her in particular, have more compassion with how the press has treated you? Why wouldn’t they have more understanding of why you’d want to get away from it?”

“Yeah, you’d think, right? But that’s not how it works here.” I wrap the blanket tighter around my shoulders.

“Are you cold?” she asks.

“This place is really fucking drafty.”

She reaches across to the other side of the bed and heaves the covers back as if trying to shift a lead weight. “Get in. Then you can stay warmandI’ll be able to hear you. Two birds, one stone. And one comforter that feels like it’s made of stone.”

I freeze for a second. And not only because of the temperature in the room.

I realize it’s only a friendlyget in to stay warm while we talkinvitation. And that she wants to know my life story because she’s being paid to write it, not because she’s actuallyinterested in me. But she’s still asking me to get into bed next to her.

But I am bloody cold, so I crawl up to the top of the bed, shove my legs under the covers, and prop up a couple of pillows behind me to prevent the carvings of the flowers or the birds or the nymphs or the whatever the hell they are from digging into my back.

“So tell me why everyone seems to have such an utter lack of empathy when it comes to what the media puts you through,” she says, as we sit there, facing forward, like an old, dysfunctional couple who’ve spent so many nights in the same bed that there’s no longer any need for eye contact.

“My mother says that she went through it and had to find a way to keep going, so I should find a way to power through it too. That she didn’t run away, and I shouldn’t run away either. Basically, she had to suck it up without anyone defending her, and there was no reason I shouldn’t do the same.”

“Seriously?” she says, aghast.