I was about to reach for him when he nodded briskly, as if to shake off the blues. “All right, enough of that. I’ve got one more thing to show you.”
We doubled back to the Waterloo Chamber, an enormous banquet hall dedicated to the defeat of Napoleon. But unlike the first time we’d tromped though, there was a feast for two set up at one end of the twenty-foot-long dining table. Slowly, I walked toward it, stunned and delighted, because before me—on a dinner service older than Queen Eleanor herself—was roast turkey, mashed potatoes, and my mother’s biscuit stuffing and Dad’s homemade Chex Mix. It smelled wonderful; it smelled like home. My eyes filled as I whirled back to face Nick.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” he said softly.
“I’m so in love with you,” I blurted.
Nick’s eyes widened, and I clapped a hand over my lips.
“Oh my God,” I said. “That wasn’t how I wanted to say it. Shit. It’s just that this is the nicest thing anyone could have ever done for me and I’m sorry, Nick, but I’m totally crazy about you, and it’s so dumb to go another minute and not tell you that.”
He remained stunned. So I let the words pour out of me until there weren’t any left.
“I should have figured it out sooner, I guess, but there was India, and Clive, and he’s your friend, and you just said that you don’t want to date anyone seriously so this is probably really uncomfortable for you right now, so I’m sorry,” I rambled. “But I’m actually not sorry, because I can’t apologize for falling in love with my best friend. And you are my best friend. There is every reason in the world for you to be terrible, Nick, but you’re not. You’re amazing and thoughtful and funny, and I am in love with you, and yeah, to be honest, I also really want to jump you. But if you don’t feel the same way, please just tell me now. I swear someday we can pretend this never happened. I will get over you and we’ll both go back to normal.”
Nick tipped his head to the left. “And why on earth,” he said, “would I want to pretend this never happened?”
He came over, reaching out to wipe away the tear that had snuck over my lashes. His fingers stayed on my cheek, as they had once before, but this time he reached up with his other hand and slowly, softly, ran it down my hair, then traced my jaw, the line of my neck, my arm, the whole time looking at me with a blazing, intimate intensity. As his hand came to rest on my own, he twined his fingers with mine, and my knees wobbled like the heroine out of one of Lacey’s bodice rippers, several of which were probably set right here.
“I’ve wanted to do this ever since you showed up and started talking about syphilis,” Nick said, a smile playing around the corners of his mouth. “I told myself I couldn’t, because—”
“Nick, if it’s too awkward—”
“It doesn’t matter. It can’t matter,” he said. “Because I am completely, utterly, irrevocably in love with you. And if you really feel the same, then please don’t ever get over me and go back to normal.” His left hand snaked around my waist. “Besides, Bex, you’ve never been normal.”
“Nick.” My voice found me, throatier than usual, thanks to my acute awareness of his right hand letting go of mine to glide up my back, under my shirt, against my bare skin. His blue eyes were brighter that I’d ever seen them, searing my face as if committing it to memory.
“If we start this, I don’t think I can stop,” I managed. “I can’t just have a fling with you.”
“Good.” His breath was hot on my neck as he pulled our bodies together.
“Except for all your excellent reasons for not dating anyone right now.”
“Suddenly,” he said, his lips landing on the tender spot below my left ear, “none of those seem terribly important.”
I felt drunk, off-balance, elated. This couldn’t finally be happening, and yet everything from my heart to my hormones swore it was. I dizzily leaned backward so I was perched on the large banquet table.
“You are the best thing that’s happened to me this year,” Nick said huskily, pulling back to look at me. “And I want nothing more than to let your mother’s biscuit stuffing get stone cold, because if I spend another second not kissing you, I am going to go mad.”
I let out a shaky breath. “That stuffing tastes great cold.”
We both laughed, and in that same second, we were kissing. The moment of anticipation peaked, and passed, and as Keats had predicted, it was poetry. I don’t recall when exactly Nick laid me back onto the table, or when my legs wrapped around him. We were totally lost in each other.
“I don’t want to be forward,” Nick said, breaking away after a gloriously indeterminate period of time. “And I have never longed to defile a table so badly in my life. But there are guest rooms very nearby for state occasions and dear God, what is that shirt?”
“Joss,” I said simply.
“Say no more,” he replied. “Except…?”
He searched my face. I pushed him up and got to my feet, then took his hands.
“Yes,” I said.
Every week, thousands of tourists tromp down Windsor’s exit staircase, past an unremarkable door, never aware they’re at the place where Nicholas Wales carried his future fiancée—and then had to put her down, leave her briefly to go fetch the keys because he hadn’t realized the door was locked, fumble through a ring of old skeleton keys to see which one worked, swear creatively, try the ones on the second ring, then whoop and pick her up again for a night of little talking and less sleep. The turbulent love and lust we gave in to that day felt like completion, like kismet, like the beginning of a story that was always meant to be written. Nick and I had discovered a gravitational pull of our own, and it changed everything.
Part Two
Summer 2009
“You have no idea how hard it is to live out a great romance.”
—Wallis Simpson
Chapter One