Chapter 2
Two
CAMILLO
“Six…five…four…”
“I hate you.”
Janae laughed. “No you don’t, but if it helps you get through this last set, then cuss me out all you want.”
“I didn’t…ah—I didn’t…” I was going to fall if I kept it up, so I clamped my jaw shut, closed my eyes, and let them finish counting.
“…two…one. Release.”
Releasing meant nothing more than collapsing onto my side, and over fifteen years later, it never got less strange to hit the floor and only feel it from the stomach up. In the first few years after the accident, I was addicted to watching videos of spinal cord injury survivors go from bedridden to crawling, then eventually walking.
But that would never be my reality. Even stumbling on spasming legs strapped to braces felt like it would be a miracle for me.
I was the exception to the rule. Or, at least, I was the smaller statistic. I was somewhere in the thirtieth percentile of people whose spine injuries were complete. I had nothing below the place my spine had been severed.
Well, I supposed not nothing . There was pain, and there were spasms that kept me up at night, and yearly infections in my bladder from being a full-time catheter user. But after this long, my muscles were entirely atrophied. Not even the heinous electrodes I was strapped to every night could save them. There would be no standing for me. No walking. No crawling.
Just this. Balancing on knees I couldn’t feel until my core gave up on me and I collapsed on the ground.
It was fine though. Really. I wasn’t bitter anymore. Part of it was likely pretending that I was a brave, joyous soul to protect the image of the crown because God forbid anything make my family—especially my brother—look bad.
I wasn’t allowed to be angry. I had to be the boy who was “just lucky to be alive.”
Those words still caused bile to rise up in the back of my throat, even though I actually kind of believed them now. But how many times did I vomit that phrase out in press interviews before it became a personality trait?
And it wasn’t like I didn’t have bad days. I had a trusted team now that allowed me to be angry, but one must always smile in public if one is representing the Crown.
If I had a throne to abdicate, I would have done it by now.
In reality, the only reason I didn’t abandon my title was because I could do more with the family behind me than with them against me. My parents took me aside about a year and a half after my accident and told me they wouldn’t blame me if I wanted to retire from all my duties. They’d have to follow protocol and could gift me land, but I’d lose access to the protections my position as second-born prince offered me.
At the time, it had been tempting.
I was sick of cameras, sick of people staring, sick of them pointing and whispering and blaming me somehow even though I hadn’t been driving and the bastard that hit us had done it to try and spin our car out so he could get a better shot of me.
I don’t even think anyone remembered the scandal by the time I showed my face in public for the first time. The dickhead with the camera had followed me because I’d just been caught, the first royal with potential access to the throne, kissing a boy.
That was my own fault, of course. I’d snuck out after convincing myself I was falling in love with the captain of the upper-secondary rugby team. His name was Beckett. He was every gay teenager’s dream. Tall, muscular, that glorious mix of tan skin, black hair, and hazel eyes.
He was a walking stereotype with a pretty blonde girlfriend and an offer to go pro the moment he was finished with school. Then, one afternoon, he winked at me as I was collecting cones on the pitch. The wink turned into a lingering shower after all the other guys had gone.
That lingering shower turned into us touching ourselves.
Then he moaned my name.
In that moment, it was over for me.
We could never be public, of course. He had a career to chase, and I was, well, me. Prince Camillo Soriano, second-born son of King Brynn and Queen Jacenta Soriano of Caverna—one of the smallest countries that still had a monarchy.
Most of the world didn’t even know we existed, let alone had a king and queen, but our paparazzi cared a great deal about us when they spotted me pinned to a bookcase through a library window. The first worst thing had been the photo they took. The second worst thing was when Beckett punched me and then escaped out of a bathroom window.
The media never did get ahold of his face or his name. I had a vague memory of him sneaking into my hospital room after midnight three weeks after I’d come out of my coma. I think he paid off the guards, which should have alarmed me, but I was in too much pain to give a shit.
At first, I thought he was there to make sure I was okay. It turned out he’d come to beg.
“No one can know about this, Cam. No one. I will do anything if you swear it won’t get out.”
“Suck my flaccid dick,” I’d told him.
He thought I was serious and yanked down my hospital sheets, revealing the mess I was down below. I had a catheter that drained into a piss bag and a horrific wound from the four surgeries to save my life.
He recoiled at the sight, and in that moment, I wanted that to be the first and last time anyone ever looked at me naked again.
That resolve hadn’t lasted.
And now, here I was, doing baby crawls for cardio, and it was working because my heart was pounding . Never mind half the reason I was all worked up was that the god-awful television series was about to begin shooting.
I’d just come from the set to talk to the producers about what they expected from me. I’d had a run-in with a rude man who very clearly recognized me, though the way he spoke to me was off-putting.
I didn’t like him. But…I did like that he treated me the way he’d treat any other average person.
Being a prince and a disabled man, I had bullshit twofold, and it was no wonder I had zero intention of ever dating long term or getting married, which was something that was starting to really piss off my parents.
I think their breaking point with me was the last argument we had after I’d sabotaged a blind date my mother had set up with some random duchess I’d never heard of. But what was I supposed to do? They ambushed me with the whole event, and it happened to fall on the day I’d just learned that they’d signed the rights to my memoir away without even consulting me.
And that was the other joy about being a fucking prince. The Crown had more say-so about my life than I did.
One more in the column for abandon ship and leave this all behind.
But I wasn’t ready for that yet. Just like they weren’t ready to accept the fact that I was gay, always would be, and no blonde duchess with a kink for paralyzed legs was going to change that. Okay, that last bit was exaggerated. Probably.
Though I’d been through my fair share of people with weird kinks, and they always came from the people I least expected.
“Alright,” Janae said, leaning up on their knees. “You good?”
I was. I pushed up to sit, used my arm to tuck my legs to my chest, then felt the burn in my biceps as I scooted my ass all the way across the mat to my chair. Getting up was old hat now. I still fell every now and again, but it was usually when people were watching and I was trying to show off.
Today was as simple as getting in and out of bed—a task that used to take ten seconds and now took ten minutes. But ten minutes was better than the hour it was when I was first learning all this shit.
“Plans for the day?” Janae asked, grabbing their water bottle and handing mine off to me.
I shrugged. “Meeting with my manager so we can schedule in this new bullshit consultation job I have.”
“You’re so angry about it. Shouldn’t you be glad they agreed to have you on set?”
“They should have hired one of the thousands of disabled actors who could have done the role.”
They grimaced. “I mean, fair. But at least they went for a star, right?”
I snorted as I took a drink and almost choked. “If by star, you mean some washed-up former kid actor looking for a comeback? Then yeah.” I hadn’t known anything about Aleric King aside from the fact that he’d been retired for almost two decades.
The fact that his name was Aleric King was bad enough.
But the moment I learned he was just some able-bodied, pompous asshole looking for his Emmy moment, I refused to give a shit. I had his basic bio: a child actor who got heavy into drugs, had a meltdown on camera, was banned from cinema for ten years, and was now trying to work his way back to the award circuit.
And that was enough.
Those handfuls of words were all I’d ever need to know about Aleric King.
I didn’t care if he was hot. Hell, I didn’t even care if he was talented. I cared that he was wrong for the part, and nothing would ever change my mind about that.
My therapist might say those were famous last words, but in this case, I knew I was right. I was tired of people making money off stories like mine—winning awards and inspiring millions—while also leaving people like me out of the fucking conversation.
The studio tried to butter me up by pointing out how my book sales had gone up since the announcement of the show, but I didn’t give a shit about that. The only reason—and I mean the only reason—that I was giving my time to those people was that they’d agreed to make sure my character was gay.
My parents had tried to negotiate bisexuality. My mother pitched a two-episode arc where my character got some on-screen kisses with a man before introducing a woman love interest. Luckily, before I could take her to task for that, the studio said no.
“We want authenticity,” some nameless, faceless cog told them.
They wanted authenticity on paper—for sound bites and interview quotes. But I wasn’t going to try and fight them anymore. It was pointless, and the last thing I wanted to do was torment my lawyer by keeping him eyeballs-deep in paperwork for this.
If I didn’t sign off, the studio would make some poorly scripted mimic of my life, and that was not something I could handle.
“I loved Aleric King in The Faithless . I lived off those reruns. It was my total gay awakening in secondary school.”
I’d almost forgotten Janae and I were still talking about this guy.
“You ever seen it?”
“No. You know I don’t watch TV.” That was also true. Not because I was a pretentious ass who thought it was worthless but because after the accident, every time my family came on the news, all they wanted to talk about was me and all the things I’d never do again. I lost myself in books after that and never looked back.
“Anyway, I should head out. Lots to do. You can show yourself out, right?” That was a lie, but luckily, Jenae bought it and gave me a little wave as I turned my chair to head out.
“See you next month,” they called as I started away.
Gripping my wheels, I gave a hard push toward the swinging doors that led to the corridor, and I breathed a little easier now that I was out of the training room. My living room was waiting for me with a pile of snacks, several books to choose from, and maybe even the chance to forget all the bullshit currently going on.
There were better ways to spend my afternoon than rotting on the sofa, but there were worse ones too. My life was better now that I’d decided to live it—which consequently was the working title of my second novel. It was a follow-up to the first part of my story that I’d written when I was still clawing my way out of a depressive void, not sure I’d ever find the person I was meant to be.
But it was hard, writing something that needed a happily ever after when I didn’t have one. There wasn’t even a hint at it. I didn’t hinge my future on meeting a man and settling down, but that was a quiet fantasy of mine. One that I’d been too afraid to really speak into the universe.
My luck with relationships had started weird and gotten worse until I’d given up entirely. I had a single friend with benefits—a guy I’d met in wheelchair basketball—and he scratched the itch whenever I had it.
And I had friends…sort of. But that wasn’t unique to me. That was the fate of all royals. My brother’s luck with people he could trust was even worse than mine, and although he loved his wife beyond reason, the marriage had been arranged. It was something my parents had been hoping to do for me, though I’d been fighting them on it since I could remember.
But yeah. One horrifying, traumatic relationship after my accident, and I was starting to feel doomed to a life entirely alone. I felt like I was about to watch myself on this godforsaken TV show achieve all my unfulfilled goals, and I wondered if maybe that’s what I was so angry about. Maybe that’s what had crawled under my skin.
An actor doing better at living my own life than I could?
Ah, fuck. What a weird existence.
But I supposed I’d have to get over that because it was the only one I had.