Chapter 13 Magnus Norway
magnus norway
LEXI
Ifollowed Clementine back into the shark-infested, laser-flashing waters, looking around and seeing shoulders and necks at my eye level.
It wasn’t just a fluke. Nicolai’s friend group was all tall, like, really tall.
I tried to find Nicolai in the crowd, but that crazy chandelier windmilling in the dark kept flashing in my eyes, its pinpoint spotlights lancing right to the backs of my eyeballs.
For a glance, I thought I saw him in the field of floating faces.
Nicolai was standing at one of the open bars we passed, talking to people I didn’t know, his black tousled hair, iron jaw, and distinctive sarcastic head-tilt drawing my attention, but Clementine towed me onward.
“I saw Nicolai back there,” I told her, pointing.
Clementine craned her head, looking over the crowd from several inches above where I could see, but she shook her head. “That’s Kostya. Have you met Nico’s little brother yet?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’ve met. Nicolai didn’t tell you about it?”
She shrugged one shoulder, blinking and ducking her chin in lieu of any facial expression.
“He was upset about the suddenness of us getting married,” I muttered to her. “Really upset. And a little drunk, for before lunch.”
“Yes, well, that’s to be expected,” Clementine said. “After their father died, Kostya was rather adrift. Nicolai did the best he could, considering he was merely a teenage boy. Kostya idolized him a bit too much for anyone to live up to.”
An entire psychoanalysis in three sentences. “Oh, that poor kid.”
“He’s doing all right, though a bit adamant about other people’s behavior. I suppose our behavior is on the reprehensible side, considering that common sense is considered rather common. I saw Nico over this way.”
We ducked under outstretched arms reaching for drinks on waitstaff’s trays and wove between clusters of dancing or jabbering people in the nightclub gloom.
Nicolai was now over to one side, still chatting with John Bourbon, but in a different spot, and with other guys.
Clementine threaded us into the group, keeping her arm linked through mine until she’d delivered me safely to him.
Nicolai was waiting with John Bourbon and the other people knotted around him, keeping him from getting away.
He signaled to a passing waitress. “I say, miss, club soda? Just a club soda.”
John Bourbon practically scowled at him. “Club soda? I mean it this time. Who are you, and what have you done with my drunken friend Nico?”
Nicolai threw a quick frown at him. “I’m still dehydrated from last night. I probably should’ve taken IV fluids this morning.”
John laughed at him. “That Ringer’s stuff is magic, isn’t it? I took two liters this morning to sober up. Plus an oxygen cannula.”
Nicolai began introducing me around, and I tried to look at each person and repeat their name over and over and over in my head while I stammered, “So nice to meet you.”
These were his friends. These people would talk about me behind my back. They’d talk about Nicolai behind his back because of me. “Lovely to meet you.”
Dozens of people. Scores of people. All of them were beautiful and tall with unusual names that I’d never heard someone called before in real life, and I wasn’t good at remembering names in general.
I’d never had to memorize new names. I hadn’t met anyone new since Scottsbluff’s two elementary schools had merged into the high school for ninth grade. Even then, I’d still known most of the girls from softball league, and everybody had small-town Midwestern names, anyway.
For hours, I chanted exotic names in my head: Ernst, Rasmus, Chalerm, Octavia, Lakshmi, Peregrine, Rose, Clemente, Edith, Algernon, Livinia, Jung-youn, Hubertus, Zahan, Mathonwy.
I was just smiling and nodding by that point, trailing in Nicolai’s wake as he meandered through the crowd, greeting everyone. “Great to meet you.”
Everyone knew Nicolai.
Everyone seemed excited to see him, hugging him and slapping his shoulders.
Nicolai seemed vaguely pleased, but set apart, as if his mind were on loftier thoughts.
Everyone tried to make plans with him over the next few days for suppers or insisted he visit them in other countries: Austria, Thailand, York, Edinburgh, France, Wales, India, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, and Switzerland.
Nicolai’s demeanor while he talked to them was passively amused, occasionally caustic if someone was snippy, and subtly sarcastic, especially when anyone demanded he come to them.
Looking into getting a passport went on my mental to-do list.
But maybe Nicolai wouldn’t want me to travel with him. These were his friends. I didn’t need to tag along and crash on their couches. Extra guests were an imposition.
If he could advance me some money, I could get a little apartment somewhere cheap, where I wouldn’t be a bother to anyone.
Nicolai called over the thumping dance music and gear-grinding chandelier, “Magnus! Magnus, this is my wife, Lexi.” He unfurled his hand toward me. “Lexi, I’d like you to meet my school chum and very close friend, Magnus Norway.”
I looked up, far, far up, because all these people were all inhumanly tall, into Magnus’s blue eyes that turned pale when the strobe lights flashed over us. I yelled over the pounding music, “Lovely to meet you!”
He smiled big at me and threw back another shot before he choked out, “Nice to meetcha, Lexi.”
Magnus was blondly cute with pale, unfreckled skin and a normal American accent, unlike everyone else’s kingly British-clipped words.
I was so disarmed that I opened my big mouth and let it run. “Wow, interesting last name! Norway? Like the country?”
He glanced at Nico, laughing a quick burst, and then yelled over the thumpy-thump techno beat at me, “Yeah! Weird, huh?”
Nicolai rolled his eyes at Magnus and turned me to meet another one of his friends: a white guy, brown hair, blue-hazel eyes, and cheekbones and a jawline like a manosphere avatar. “This is Ryan von Prussian, my cousin.”
“Ryan!” Finally, a nice normal name I wouldn’t have to make a flashcard for. “So great to meet you!”
Ryan was drinking a beer from a tall, curvy glass. He’d been watching me over the circle of people the whole time, his light eyes not missing a move. “Lexi, lovely to meet you.” He turned to his date and squinted. “This is, um—Zita, right?”
Probably-Zita rolled her huge, dark eyes, spun on her heel, and walked away.
“Damn,” Ryan said. “Lost another one. Nice to meet you, um, Lexus?”
“Lexi!” I yelled, holding out my hand to him to shake.
“Right, Lexi. Smashing of you to take on old Nico, here. Are you going to push me down the line of succession, then?”
“What?” I yelled over the music.
“The line of succession!” he hollered back.
“I don’t get it! What line?”
Nicolai’s smile was gone. “Ryan, you’ve had too much to drink tonight.”
“What, this?” He gestured to his beer. “Nonsense. American beer is like having sex in a canoe.”
Magnus rolled his eyes, and Nicolai warned, “Ryan.”
“Because they’re both fucking close to water!”
Nicolai turned me away from Ryan, steering me back toward Magnus and John Bourbon. “Ryan’s in fine form.”
Magnus raised a blond eyebrow and nodded. “All night, to everyone. He’ll be groveling tomorrow in the group text.”
“Oh yes, the group chat.” Nicolai plucked his phone from his suit jacket’s inner breast pocket and began thumbing the screen. “You don’t mind if I add Lexi to the chat, right?”
The dubious look Magnus and John shared was a five-alarm fire bell in my head.
Jimmy had never added me to his family’s private group chat because we hadn’t been officially married yet. I’d only been in satellite chats with his sisters and their friends.
I touched Nicolai’s arm. “Hey, sweetie. It’s okay. I don’t have to be in your text groups. I don’t care in the slightest.”
“No, no. It’s fine with them,” he said, like he hadn’t seen their reactions. “And you should friend her on your private social media accounts. You can find her profile in my friends list.”
“I don’t know that it is all right with them.” My phone buzzed in my reception bag hanging off my wrist. “But I guess it’s done now. Guys, um, Magnus and John.” I pointed to each of them because I had remembered their names and was proud of myself. “I can just leave the group. It’s not a problem.”
“Not at all,” John Bourbon said. “This should be quite interesting.”
“Why?” Dear God, I did not want to be in the middle of a gross dude-chat full of misogyny or worse. “Why should it be interesting?”
“It’s no prob,” Magnus said. “There are a lot of inside jokes about boarding school. Don’t be offended if some of them get a little weird. Also, we can be chatty. And maybe a little bitchy. You don’t have to read all the texts that come through because there are a lot of them.”
Magnus’s thoroughly American accent stood out so much in this very England-English crowd. “Are you American?” I asked him.
John Bourbon bobbled sideways, shoving Magnus with his shoulder.
Magnus winced. “It’s the accent, right?”
“All these guys sound British. You sound like you’re from California.”
“Yeah, that,” he said. “One of my grandfathers and a great-grandfather spent most of World War II in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was mostly orange orchards back then, and some other sorts of institutions, you know. One spent the war on one of the ranches with orange groves. Everyone in my family has been taught to speak English with a Southwestern American accent from the cradle ever since, to the point where everyone knows who we are, just by how we speak English.”
“That’s cool, though!”
Ryan smirked at Magnus. “If one wants to sound American, I suppose.”
Magnus didn’t even look at Ryan. “Some of our instructors at Le Rosey, the boarding school we all went to, preferred a southern-English accent to an American one. They were adamant about pronunciation, even rather snide, and so it came up on the playground.”
I nodded. “Kids are jerks.”
“Yes.” Magnus sipped his drink. “Kids are jerks.”
Ryan smirked again. “The problem is, if you take a mob of children from all over the world and insist that we all speak the King’s English as intended, we end up sounding boringly, generically English. Our pronunciation is the equivalent of off-brand beans on toast.”
Okay, so the subject of schoolyard bullying seemed to be a sore one.
I moved on. “So your great-grandfather got his accent while he was out on a farm picking oranges, huh? Was he a farmhand?”
Magnus glanced at Nico, who lay his hand on my arm. Magnus said to him, “You haven’t told her fuckin’ anything, have you?”
Oh, man. I was screwing up again. “Hey, how about that NCAA tournament this year? It was wild, huh? And the Summer Olympics coming up? Going to be a show!”
Magnus was still staring straight at Nico, their line of sight above my head. “Have you told her about yourself? Or did you marry a woman without telling her jack shit?”
“I told her about myself,” Nicolai said. “It wouldn’t be right to pull somebody into this kind of life without disclosure.”
“I don’t think there could ever be full disclosure.
Look at what happened to Harry. No matter how much he tried to warn her, no one outside can really understand until they’re inside the fuckin’ snow globe.
” He turned to me. “I hope you know at least a little bit of what you’ve gotten yourself into. ”
I wasn’t going to let this guy think Nicolai had suckered me. “I know what’s going on. He explained it. But I got to know him before he explained it, which is why I married him.”
“Then he should’ve explained to you who we are. It’s not fair to let you wander into these situations without knowing.”
“I thought we were talking about your grandfather and orange farms.”
“My grandfather’s father was the king during World War II.”
The music was really loud, too loud. “He was a what?”
Magnus continued, “My grandfather was young, probably seven years old, when the Blitzkrieg overran us. If they had gotten ahold of the king or the crown prince, it would’ve been a propaganda coup.
They could’ve held them hostage. So, the queen and the children went to America on one of the last planes out.
His father, the king, rode it out in London with the government-in-exile. ”
King? Like a—king? Countries didn’t have kings anymore. “I—wow. Wait, when you say he was the—what?”
Odd thoughts sneaked into my skull.
The people at this party were all so beautiful, and tall, and young.
Ageless, maybe.
And gorgeously dressed. And slim.
It was all a little—eerie.
Otherworldly, even.
Inhuman.
My heart accelerated in my chest like a jet plane revving to take off.