Chapter 1 #2
Jaime didn’t sound angry or like they hated me. A smile pulled at my lips as I replayed Sergio’s words. If I had any doubts, the answer was that they didn’t hate me. They might be a bit uncomfortable, though, and that didn’t sit right.
I just wasn’t sure what to do, other than heed their advice, I supposed.
The clothes they’d picked were oversized, thin sweaters and sweatshirts.
They were undoubtedly feminine, with pastel colors, detailed hems, and off the shoulder sleeves and even cleavages, but they had nothing to do with all the daring choices I’d added to the online cart the other day, when I’d been strangely fueled by too much bravado, and the endorphins from the best edging scene I’d had, ever.
“Thank you.”
I cleared my throat before my eyes got too misty, and I closed the curtain behind me once more. I wasn’t ashamed of crying per se, but it was something else that I struggled with, that I saw as associated with the parts of me that had never made it to the light until now.
Unlike my choices, the clothes Jaime had picked out were soft, too. Sergio got back to his usual hyperexcited self when he touched the material.
My parents had been begging me to update my wardrobe for years now. They wouldn’t bat an eye at the charges on the card they monitored more closely than anyone would be comfortable with.
“You still can come to my place, right?” Now that I was back in the clothes I entered the store with, that background sense of wrongness hit again. I tried to ignore it, but I’d never quite mastered the art of it. “I know we took longer shopping than I’d thought.”
“Yeah, of course.” Danny looked comical while carrying most of the bags he’d insisted on taking himself.
Very chivalrous, but I didn’t dare to tease him about it out loud, so I just snickered to myself as he pretended that he could handle all the bulkiness, and that he wasn’t glaring at everyone who spent more than two seconds staring at him.
“León is in a monthly meeting thing with Carlos and other vets.”
I nodded.
I had to set a reminder to reach out to Carlos about those meetings.
I was closer to Danny, but I didn’t know if I could share about Santos with just anyone.
Doing it with Carlos made sense. He’d left the military and had struggled with adjusting to civilian life.
He’d understand on a level that Danny might not.
It felt less intrusive, too, even if it would make it more of a challenge.
“I don’t know where Tony is,” Jaime huffed, “and I don’t care. Not all of us are obsessed with being dicked down.”
“You sure about that?” Danny winked.
There was some more bantering as we walked to the row of taxis I knew of a couple of blocks down. I didn’t check in on Sergio, but he was always game for any plan, and he’d been going on and on about wanting to see my place, and how low-key offensive it was that I hadn’t invited him yet, so…
“I’m shotgun,” Danny announced as I checked that the first taxi on the row was taking passengers.
Sometimes they were on a break, or about to leave because someone called, and they got so offended because I hadn’t had a way to read their mind ahead of time.
“Okay.”
The taxi driver looked more menacing than I’d expected, scowling at all of us equally, and with the kind of build that meant he could do some damage if he wanted to.
Or maybe I was just easily spooked because of all the clothes we were carrying.
He opened the truck for us and didn’t comment about the brand or any of the lace that peeked out from one of the bags, and even apologized for the dirt on the floor of the passenger’s seats that he hadn’t had time to clean up. So…yeah. I’d been in my head.
He didn’t say anything when I gave him the address, either. No, that was all Sergio and Jaime.
They’d sandwiched me between the two of them and were now drilling holes into my skull with how hard they were staring.
“Isn’t that where like, the princesses live or something?”
“No?” I squeaked. I couldn’t have this conversation here. “I mean, they have a vacation home, but they never really visit.”
I knew because I was in charge of managing it. I sometimes doubted they even knew it was here, and they could vacation in it or whatever they wanted to do, but that didn’t mean the Royal House would allow one single picture of it filtered where it didn’t look absolutely pristine.
“You have seen them, though?” Sergio tested how much give the seat belt had as he repositioned himself. “I mean, not in a royalist way. Like, all about the republic here, but they seem cool. That’s all.”
Everyone made some kind of amused sound at that, the taxi driver included.
If he had said that with any of the assigned drivers I was supposed to be using but never did unless my parents were in town, he would’ve been kicked out already.
It was a good thing that the anti-royalty sentiment was so widespread across the country, and it kept rising.
A bit scary for reasons, but…
I just had to survive the car ride. Then, after the three of them pretended not to awe with various degrees of success at the large expanse of perfectly manufactured grass that opened up once I’d unlocked the gates to the small villa I lived in, I could come clean about the thing Erika and Tony had been bugging me about for years now.
The thing that had almost gotten me in trouble at Plumas when I wasn’t the most discerning, and the thing I kept feeling guilty about, because these people were my friends, and the longer I went on without telling them, the harder it felt to come clean.
The harder it felt to convince them that I trusted them, that it wasn’t about them, or whether or not I thought they could keep things under wraps. I didn’t even doubt Sergio, and he was the one with zero filters.
“No butler?” Sergio quipped.
“There’s a cleaning service that comes twice a week.” A blush spread across my cheeks at the confession while we walked past the hall, and I led them to the main living room. “And when my parents are here, there’s a personal chef, too.”
Sometimes they brought their own butler, too, but I didn’t say that out loud. One thing at a time.
“Uh, you can grab blankets from the wardrobe there if you want.”
That wardrobe had initially stored a bunch of old and very expensive glasses and dishes, but I got inspired by Plumas and how they had blankets for aftercare in wardrobes spread over the different theme rooms. Now I had all the blankets, and no intrusive thoughts about destroying all those glasses by just breathing wrong around them.
“You have a chimney, too!” Sergio pointed to the gigantic thing as if anyone could’ve missed it.
“I don’t actually know how to turn it on, but yeah.”
My mother had left a notebook with instructions somewhere, so I technically could. It just felt like too much of a waste. Even more than having me live in this monstrosity as a single person.
Danny and Jaime were more silent in their perusal.
It was nerve-wracking. All the bags of clothes had been propped against the arch that opened into the living room.
I thought then that I should’ve grabbed them.
It would’ve given me something to do with my hands instead of just sitting on one of the couches while waiting to hear their initial verdicts.
“You live here alone?” Danny asked first.
“Yeah.” I swallowed down the knot in my throat. “Well, at least until next week. My parents are hiring Santos as my live-in bodyguard. Kind of. It’s all just an excuse, really.”
And probably not the best way to segue into this conversation by all the widened eyes now staring—and rushing—at me.
Sergio was the first to leap on the couch. “Are you okay? Is someone stalking you? Trying to kill you? What the fuck—I didn’t even know live-in bodyguards were a thing!”
“Of course they are,” Jaime snorted. “I’d hate to have someone on my ass 24/7, though.”
“Ohh, yeah.” Sergio nodded. “Are you okay with it? We can move in with you if you’re okay with cats. Well, one cat. My cat, I mean. I’m sure I can convince Daddy. Until you get used to it or something?”
“You just want to live here,” Danny deadpanned. He had sat down in an armchair facing the couch and had his arms propped up on his knees. “I can ask León for the place where he learned MMA, if you want. I’m sure they teach self-defense, too.”
How the fuck had this derailed so much?
“N-no, no.” I cleared my throat. “It’s all good.
Nothing’s happened. As I said, it’s just a formality.
And my parents getting tired of me ditching every protective detail they try to throw my way.
And Santos is like my childhood best friend.
We’re still in touch, so I mean, you can stay here if you want; there are plenty of rooms, but I’m more than okay with him being here.
“And,” I hated the sort of attention that came from what was starting to feel like a monologue, but I didn’t want them to misconstrue this more than they already had.
“The protective detail thing is also a formality. Always has been. It comes from, uh, being part of the royal family. I’m too far down the line to really matter at all, but my parents are big royalists?
I mean, some of the names you’ve seen on TV have had a much more relaxed childhood than I have. ”
I grimaced when Sergio jostled my arm right as I’d finished. “Okay, okay, you know I would never kill you, right? Like, I know I’m all about abolishing the monarchy, but it’s nothing personal against you, I swear—”
“It’s fine.” I snorted. “If it helps, I’m against it, too.
It’s just…I hate it, but if I went through the headache that would come with abdicating when I’m not even considered for shit, my parents would one hundred percent cut me off, and it’s not like I was raised to have the skills that actual jobs ask for. ”
Managing an estate—two of them, really—involved lots of skills that I thought would be valuable in the job market.
I’d tried, though, back in the day. Maybe I didn’t have the perseverance, but I’d rather have my monthly allowance while I could swing it, and do my little deeds to offset the injustice of it all.
“So…you’re a prince.”
“No.” I shivered. “Just a Baron something. I never bothered to keep track of it once my father gave up on his bonus schooling.”
“That sucks.” Sergio frowned. “But I’m glad you’re one of the cool ones.”
Jaime got comfortable on the couch eventually, sprawling on it with their head on my leg. It was probably the physically closest they’d been with me since we’d met, which meant I short-circuited for a second, but I managed to relax.
“So. Back to that childhood best friend.” He mused. Oh, no. Why had I forgotten to not lower my guard around them? “Is it a childhood bestie, or more like a childhood crush? And follow-up question, is the crush still part of the equation here?”
“Oooh. It’s right, you blushed a lot when you said that,” Sergio pointed out. Could the couch swallow me whole now? “Not that it’s a bad thing, but I have questions too.”
I grimaced.
Danny reached out to kick my foot. “What’s more uncomfortable, talking about your crush, or about the state of the monarchy?”
Well, if he put it like that…
“He’s… It’s always felt like it was him and I against the world, you know?
” I sighed. Talking about him with others came with a layer of strangeness I hadn’t accounted for.
All these years, I’d kept everything so separate.
I hadn’t considered that the people around me would just roll with it like they were doing.
“We actually made out…a lot. We shared a room in boarding school, so he was the first person I came out to, and it went from there? But his family was pretty bad, so they basically stopped coming to all the events and outings we’d meet at when we weren’t at school.
They didn’t take away his phone or anything, so we stayed in touch, but it was a whole ordeal.
And it got even worse when they basically had him enroll in the Air Force. ”
“Damn.” Jaime whistled. “That got dark fast.”
“Respect.”
“Rich people suck,” Sergio muttered. “No offense.”
“None taken.” I snorted. It was going to take him a while to get used to it, wasn’t it? “Anyway. He’s walking out now, and my parents heard about it because they have ears everywhere, so they’re the ones who came up with the plan to hire him?”
My parents were not actually the worst. We just had differences when it came to how to use our money, and our standing, and what the monarchy needed or didn’t need. Finding common ground between it needed to be abolished, and the king needed a firmer hand was pretty much impossible.
“I want updates,” Jaime recovered first. “Hourly, if possible. And is he kinky? Will he be at Plumas?”
“I don’t know.”
I had to talk with Erika about it. He might want to come to Plumas with me.
For one thing, it would technically be his job.
For another, I’d made the mistake of telling him about the times I was almost outed as a deviant pervert by people who weren’t members and hadn’t been as thoroughly vetted.
But if he wasn’t kinky, I didn’t know if I could just take him with me.
I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable—Santos least of all.
“Well, figure it out, stat. That’s important.”