Royal Date (30 page)

“Maybe?” I let out a short, bitter laugh. “You want me to give up my life, my whole future, for a maybe? That’s not enough. Look at us. We live on two different continents. You’re going to be a king, and I’m from a trailer park. It would never work, even if you maybe, might possibly, someday, change your mind.”

“I don’t want this to be it. I don’t want to never see you again. Can I come and visit you?”

My traitorous heart leapt up and said
yes, yes, yes
over and over again. But if I told him he could, if I held on to that hope, what would happen to me when he didn’t come? When I was disappointed because he was too busy or had found someone else? And how would I feel if he were in Colorado? Could I ever forget the way he made me feel last night? The anguish, the embarrassment, the complete blow to my self-esteem? I was afraid that every time I looked at him I would remember. It was too much. I needed to protect myself. So I shook my head. “I don’t want to see you again. I don’t want you to come to Colorado.”

My words sounded so false and empty.

We stood for several minutes, studying each other. I saw a storm of dark emotions in his bright blue eyes. Sadness, anger, concern, and finally, acceptance.

“This is your decision? This is what you want?”

“Yes, this is what I want. We both knew this would end. Goodbye, Nico.”

He still held on to my arm and I tugged against him, but he didn’t release me. I was perilously close to tears. I didn’t know if I could hold out for much longer.

“You need to say goodbye and let me go,” I told him, my voice breaking slightly.

Leaning in, he gently brushed his lips against mine, and they tingled in response to his very brief kiss. He let go of my arm.

“
Addio
,
amore mio
.”

I walked away from him without looking back. I climbed the stairs into the jet and sat down across from Lemon. I refused to think about the last time I’d been in this plane, on my way home from Paris.

I sighed. The fact that I had just thought of Nico’s palace as
home
was not lost on me.

I resisted the urge to look out the window to see if he was still there by closing the panel. The flight attendant came to check on us as the pilot announced that he was ready to take off.

We sat in silence as the plane taxied to the runway and then lifted up into the sky. When we were in the air and the pilot had turned off the seatbelt light, I asked Lemon, “Do you know what
amore mio
means?”

She looked so sympathetic. “I do. It means my love.”

His love. I wanted to laugh. Now I was his love. After he made me feel like crap and, as Lemon would say, lower than a bow-legged caterpillar. I wasn’t actually his love. Maybe it was another one of those Italian endearments that didn’t really mean anything. It was just something to say.

Liar
,
my heart whispered.
You know he meant it.

It didn’t matter, I argued back. I needed a future. I could never live my life on hopes and dreams. I had to have goals and plans. Things that were concrete. Things that made me feel settled. I needed to go back to what was familiar and just forget all of this had ever happened.

“Now you have to explain,” Lemon said. “Tell me everything.”

I felt wrung out, like I had nothing left inside me to give. But I knew she would never leave me alone until I told her the story. This time I didn’t leave anything out when I recounted everything with Violetta and then what had happened outside of my room, right up to seeing him a few minutes ago. I gave her every bloody, gory, gruesome detail. I spoke in a monotone voice because if I let any emotion creep in, I would never recover.

At some point in my story she had changed seats so that she could sit next to me and put her arm around my shoulders.

After I’d finished up with our encounter on the tarmac, she started shaking her head. “Y’all need to be slapped.”

“Why do I need to be slapped?” I asked indignantly.

“Because you’ve fallen in love with him.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. No one falls in love with someone they’ve only known for a couple of weeks. It’s insane.”

“Says who?”

“Common sense, for one.”

She pursed her lips and stared at me. “Oh. You’re in the denial stage.”

“No, I’m not.”

“See?”

If she were anyone else I would have pushed her arm off and walked away.

“Okay, maybe we won’t call it denial. Just being selective about the reality you’re choosing to accept.”

I shook my head. She didn’t understand. I couldn’t possibly be in love with him.

Could I? My heart started to beat faster.

“You don’t love someone you’ve only known for two weeks,” I repeated, as if this would convince both of us.

“Some people take two years and others take two minutes. Two weeks might just be how long it took for the two of you.”

I might actually love him. It might be why I took last night so hard. Because I loved him and I wanted to show him physically that I loved him, and so his rejection made me feel like he was rejecting my feelings for him.

My cheeks flushed red, and tears welled up in my eyes. I thought of how happy I was with him. How I lived for the moment when I would get to see him again. How he was always so tender and caring with me. How he’d become the most important person in the world to me.

I did. I did love him. I thought of all those confusing feelings I’d had while I was with him, and I just didn’t recognize what they were because I’d never been in love with someone before.

Oh, frak. I loved Nico. I was in love with Nico.

“And you know he loves you.”

“He doesn’t,” I denied. It was all I could do to deal with the new fragile realization that I loved him. I didn’t need my world turned any more upside down.

“There are only two reasons a man like Nico would say no to an invitation like that. He’s gay, or he’s in love with you and told you the truth of why he wouldn’t take advantage of you. And darlin’, that man is not gay. If he didn’t love you, he would have been more than happy to take you to bed.”

I didn’t have a response to that. Was Lemon right? Had I been making this situation all about me and not truly stopped to think of why he’d said no? I’d been so focused on how I felt and what I wanted that I hadn’t even considered
why
Nico had done it.

“Like how you wouldn’t take his money for the article. You couldn’t take his money because you love him.”

That wasn’t why I left the money behind. Was it?

I felt like I didn’t know myself or my own mind anymore.

“How could someone like Nico love someone like me?” I grasped for an argument to make this not true.

“Because you’re fabulous and he’s smart enough to see it. What did the man have to do? Write ‘I love Kat’ on his forehead? Because I don’t know how much more obvious he could have been.”

“He could have told me,” I said. “I asked him to give me a reason to stay, and he didn’t answer.”

“If he had told you he loved you, would you have really heard him? Would you have accepted it?”

No, I wouldn’t have. I would have thought he was trying to assuage a guilty conscience for hurting me. I wouldn’t have believed him. It probably would have made me angrier.

Had he somehow known that?

Did everybody else just know me better than I knew myself?

“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how I feel about him or how he feels about me. I’m going home. I’m finishing up my final semester, defending my thesis, and graduating. Then I’m becoming a social worker and helping kids. I have a plan.”

She looked angry as she pulled her arm away from me. “You and your plans! Life changes. People change. Plans change. What if you could have a life with Nico? What if you became a queen? How many more kids could you help as queen of an entire nation than you ever could as a social worker? The difference is exponential.”

I couldn’t live my life on what-ifs. I needed what would be.

“Tell the pilot to turn the plane around,” she said. “Don’t leave things like this with him. If you don’t, you will always regret it.”

The word
regret
snapped me back to my memories of last night, and I was in that moment again, acting unlike myself, feeling totally rejected. It made me feel irrational. “I’m not throwing away all of my hard work for some guy. I’m getting my degree.”

“No one’s arguing that. Of course you should get your degree. But take a couple of extra days and work things out with Nico.”

I wouldn’t do it. I was not that girl. I was not going to be pathetic and throw myself at him in the hopes that he might want to do more than just hang out.

I just shook my head.

Lemon sighed. “You are too stubborn for your own good. Like a mule at feeding time. Just once it would be nice to see you stand and face your problems instead of running away from them.”

It seemed like the plane’s walls were closing in on me. As if my psyche wanted to prove her correct, I found myself with a desperate need to escape. “I’m going to go take a nap,” I told her.

My breaths were hard and uneven. Some part of me knew what she was saying was true. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t turn around and beg him to love me when he’d given me up so easily. He hadn’t really tried to stop me. He hadn’t come on the plane to spend the next few hours trying to talk me out of it. He’d just stood there while I walked away.

I closed the bedroom door shut. I kicked off my shoes. I looked at the bandage on my left wrist. It had been two weeks. Time to take it off. I slowly unwrapped it, letting it fall on the floor in a pile. I climbed into his bed, and this time I got under the covers. His pillows still smelled like him. I buried my face in his scent and let my tears turn the pillowcase wet.

The flight attendant woke me up, and I stopped by the bathroom before I took my seat. My nose was red, making me look like Rudolph. The whites of my eyes had gone bright pink. I couldn’t remember ever crying this hard. Not even the night I left my mother’s trailer for good.

I picked up the pillow I had sobbed all over and brought it out with me. Even if it was stealing, I was going to have this piece of him. When I came back into the main part of the cabin, Lemon offered me her hand in a conciliatory gesture. I paused only for a second before I took it, and she squeezed. She was my best friend. She would always be my best friend. She only wanted to help me do what was right for me. I needed to remember that.

When the plane landed, the attendant moved to open the door. I grabbed my bag and pulled out a pair of sunglasses. The Colorado sun seemed brighter than I’d remembered. Maybe it was because of all the crying.

I stepped off the plane and into a flurry of flashbulbs. There were paparazzi everywhere. I froze, not able to understand what was happening.

“This way, Kat!”

“Kat, is it true that you’re dating Prince Dominic?”

“Why did he kick you out of the palace, Kat?”

“Is it true that you’re pregnant?”

My mouth dropped, and I could only stare. This could not be happening. On the worst day of my life, I did not need a pack of mangy hyenas feeding off of my carcass. I squeezed his pillow tightly against my chest, as if it could protect me.

“Keep walking,” Lemon said. We didn’t have any security here. There were no guards to clear a path for us or to keep us safe. It was just the two of us. “Don’t speak to any of them and keep your head down.”

She put her arm around me and we walked through the paparazzi, with flashes going off and them screaming questions in my ear.

“You should have given me my pictures,” one Irish voice said to me. I looked up to see Seamus O’Brien flash a camera in my face twenty times in a row. He sneered at me. “I’m about to make your life miserable.”

I knew it wouldn’t be the last time I saw him.

Lemon and I pushed through until we were inside the airport, and the reporters could no longer follow us.

“What am I going to do?” I asked her, looking back at the line of paparazzi who were still yelling and taking pictures behind the glass.

Lemon handed her bag and her passport to the customs agent. “I’ll tell you exactly what you’re going to do. From now on you’re going to wear the same exact outfit every day. A white T-shirt with jeans and tennis shoes.”

“Why?” I asked as the agent took my passport and stamped it. I tried not to look at the Italian stamp we’d received when we first arrived in Milan.

“The paparazzi need different pictures for the magazines. If you always wear the same outfit, it makes the pictures boring and no one can tell what day it is. It makes it seem like it’s all from the same set of pictures. Celebrities do it all the time. Also, don’t talk to the paparazzi. Don’t engage them, don’t give them good shots of you. Don’t respond to their insults or lies. Eventually they will leave you alone because there won’t be anything worth reporting.”

We made our way through the airport with our bags, heading to the front of the terminal to catch a taxi back to our apartment. But all of the reporters had moved out front and were waiting for me there.

“I can’t do this.” I couldn’t live this way, under constant scrutiny.