15. Clean Shaven
15
Clean Shaven
JACOB
Alma’s stride lengthens. Her gym clothes, a loose wicking tank top and pair of cropped shorts, are those of a serious athlete. Her shoulders are strong, her legs are long. I catch myself looking and jerk my eyes to her face.
My mother didn’t raise a gym creeper.
“Charity work is great. I asked if you missed him.”
She scowls and my chest tightens. Her polite, royal demeanor chips off around me like bad plasterwork. I want to slide a finger under the ragged edge and hurry along the destruction. Some days, I want to start an earthquake.
“If a person doesn’t answer a question, you should find a better one.” She maintains her form even as she delivers the lesson.
“Not the boss of me,” I mutter.
“What?” she asks.
I lift my voice. “I have to agree.”
She nods but gives me a side-eye. I pull my hair back, raking my fingers through the roots until it’s secured in a band. I move to the treadmill, flick a towel over the handrail, and return to the puzzle which drove me down to the gym at this hour.
Alma didn’t miss her fiancé.
I know what I saw. She was in my arms, the memory of that midnight kiss crowding us together. When Pietor spoke her name—barked it like a foreman halting a workplace safety violation—her expression withdrew, packed up as neatly as a toolbox.
My jaw sets.
He was out of the country for six months on his expedition to save the world. The globe, stubbornly unsaved, turns on, indifferent to a man rowing across an ocean in a dinghy.
He’s tan and sleek, but I met his type every day at the Royal Academy. They walk around with a face full of old money, the question, “Do you know who my father is?” never out of reach. If you peer into the depths of their soul, you discover it’s not such a great distance to the pebbly bottom.
These things are forgivable.
What isn’t is how he didn’t miss Alma.
It’s not that I needed him to look at her like a carved saint in a church—eyes upturned, gazing into heaven, soft hands touching in prayer, a look I’m afraid I could wear too easily. But he needed to cross some lesser threshold to keep my contempt at bay. Relief. Longing. Pulling her into his arms no matter who was watching.
If I hadn’t seen Alma in six months, I would have kissed her so hard it would have shifted the earth’s axis. It would have solved climate change. Maybe even had a go at world peace.
Pietor grimaced.
“So, pickled herring,” I say. “Ten out of ten? You’re serving it at the wedding?”
She smiles. “I have to improve before the state visit.”
“If I can do Pankedruss, you can do herring.”
“You said Pankedruss tasted like a crime scene,” she says, flying through these miles, her pace eclipsing mine.
Her nose crinkles with silent laughter and I tip my head up, looking at the ceiling. How? How did he stay away for six months?
“You all right?” she asks.
“Mm. I’ll get used to the death yogurt if you come around on the herring. Do we have a deal?”
She reaches over and bumps my knuckles. “Deal.”
I last another mile, male pride holding me up by the back of the neck for most of it.
“How long can you run?” I ask when I’ve had enough. My chest is heaving, and bracing my feet apart, I punch the hexagonal “STOP” button and wipe my face on a towel. Hair brushes along my jawline. I can barely speak.
“How long do I have to run?” She gives me a lopsided smile. “Between eight and fifteen kilometers.”
I work out the conversion. “Between five and ten miles.”
Her eyes widen. “Jacob. You were a bespoke furniture maker—”
“I am a bespoke furniture maker.”
“You used the metric system every day.”
I hop off the treadmill and lift a pair of dumbbells, curling them slowly from the elbow, one at a time. “Not if I could help it. Metric is cold.”
“Cold like the vacuum of space where everything is measured properly by international scientists using the metric system?” she asks, half laughing, totally appalled.
I glance up, catch her watching me in the mirror, and begin using exceptionally good form. “Try telling a fairy tale using kilometers. You’ll bore yourself to death.”
“Speaking of death,” she says, her strides lithe, “do you ask your doctors to prescribe vital medications by the pennyweight?”
I look down, hiding a grin.
“You’ve lived in northern Europe almost twenty years,” she says, hitting some keys and turning her speed down to a brisk walk. Lightly sweating, she tips her chin, taking a swallow of water.
She belongs to someone else, but try telling my hands that. Try telling my eyes. She only has to walk into a room, and attraction sparks along my nervous system. To what end? Alma went to Harvard, and I went to trade school. I shuttered my business, and I’m giving up my anonymity to step into the monarchy. I’d be a fool to throw my heart after them, too.
But Alma stretches, rolling her neck and shoulders, and my mind becomes like the smooth surface of an egg.
She halts her machine. “If you haven’t learned to think in metric, you’re doing it on purpose.”
I rack my weights. “I can’t help it that the metric side of a measuring tape looks like a government oversight committee.”
“And the other side is—?”
“A mysterious rollercoaster of mythic potency and manly valor.”
Alma laughs and throws me a towel. I trap it against my chest, hand to my heart.
I scrub it over my skin and tug on my shirt, reaching the door before she does. She walks through, careful not to brush against me. “Sorry for throwing things,” she murmurs.
When she walks up the dim hallway, I watch her, dragging a hand around the back of my neck. “Anytime.”
Sleep doesn’t come. In the morning, I talk with my father, a stilted conversation with too many dead ends. I text my mother.
When I jog to the drawing room, I throw myself into Alma’s routine, glad to get back to the lessons—to churn through the days until I’m gone and she’s behind me.
At midday, we’re facing off on opposite sides of the circular table while Caroline and Karl confer over lesson plans and Mr. Tumwater works some fabric pieces with long white stitches. All of them are pointedly out of the line of fire.
“You have to do it,” Alma insists.
“I don’t have to do anything,” I counter, arms braced against the table.
“You’re going to look silly if you don’t.”
“Do I look silly now?”
Her lips clamp tightly, and she gives me a look that would have a lesser man calling for the scissors. “Caroline,” she says, shaking with how much she wants to scream, “show us the kings and prince consorts of Europe.”
Caroline leaps into action and fills the screen with more than a dozen men in ordered rows. They resemble high school shop teachers, lined up like this, posing for the school yearbook. Some are tall. Some are taller. Many have clean-shaven faces and close-cropped hair. Some attempted to camouflage the way their chins drift into their necks by growing a sharp line of facial hair, giving their faces depth and topographical interest.
Some of the monarchs are in military uniforms. Some of them are in the kind of casual clothes you can afford to buy when nothing casual is expected of you. No one is headed out to dig up the septic tank. None of them look like an overgrown bear.
“What do you see in the physical appearance of these men, Jacob?”
“Inbreeding,” I snap.
“Jacob.” She grinds my name through gritted teeth. “Why are you being so obstinate?”
“Let me have my hair, Alma.”
“Sir,” Karl picks his way forward, glancing between us, fingertips tented. “Her Royal Highness knows the enormous effort it will take to turn you into the kind of crown prince Vorburg can be proud of.” The glance he gives me is one of misgiving. My suit is still the same one he’s been coaxing back to life each night. He must doubt we’ve made any progress. “If your hair distracts from your ability to inhabit your role, it must be sacrificed.”
“Shedding every aspect of what makes you interesting is no way to go through life, Karl.”
The little clock on the mantel chimes the hour, and Caroline takes my aide by the elbow, gesturing for the tailor to follow. “Time for lunch. We’ll leave you to your candid discussion.”
Alma nods but doesn’t take her eyes off me.
“Look,” I say, rapping the screen with the back of a knuckle. “Bald, bald, bald, bald. Do you know what they would give to have this hair?” I tug one of the locks forward, holding it between my fingertips.
In a moment of weakness, I allowed Alma to work my hair loose. She got me into a chair and raked her fingers from my temples to the nape of my neck before my self-protective instincts were roused and I started fighting back.
Her eyes flick to the ends of my hair, and her teeth tug gently at her lower lip.
“A fortune.” I clear my throat. “They’d give a fortune.” I give her a coaxing, diplomatic smile. “I’m my own man, Alma. You wouldn’t want to erase my shadows and textures.”
“A monarchy has no interest in your shadows and textures.” She joins me at the screen, touching each photo with a different set of priorities. “A monarchy needs you to be tidy, unexceptional, neutral, clean, conservative, professional, businesslike.”
She missed one. I touch the corner of a photo. “This one is God’s literal messenger to a fallen world. Do you want me to be that too?”
“Jacob.” Her eyes close briefly and her long lashes brush the tops of her cheeks. She looks tired. Where is her fiancé to drag her away from babysitting a stubborn prince? “We are not glib about the pope.”
“Alma,” I say, closing the distance between us, feeling the air shiver. “In the life before this one, I worried about workplace safety, bidding for contracts, and making payroll. I’m the only royal here with the experience of starting my own business, therefore,” I hit her with irrefutable logic, “ my hair is businesslike.”
She looks up, and I feel a tremor race through my veins. In making my point, I’ve gotten too close. Chol nia , if I were Pietor walking into this room, I’d punch my teeth in.
Her hand starts for my hair, and my stomach tightens.
Her fingers curl into her palm, and she backs away. “This isn’t finished.”