Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Archie
Entering the Princess of Wales Conservatory is like being plunged into the rainforest’s armpit.
One moment, I’m hobbling through the cold February evening, trying to navigate icy paths on crutches, and the next, I’m enveloped in humid warmth that makes my shirt cling to my back and my hair do things I specifically styled it not to.
Wonderful. I’m going to spend this evening looking like a damp poodle.
But I have a bigger problem than my appearance.
I’m nervous.
Leo is walking close beside me, jaw tight, shoulders rigid, that little furrow between his eyebrows that appears when he’s overthinking something.
It appears he’s nervous too.
Why is he nervous? He’s not the one whose life and choices are under scrutiny. Why does Elizabeth’s opinion matter to him?
Leo’s hand finds the small of my back, guiding me around a cluster of tourists taking selfies with a dragon made entirely of dried lotus pods.
“You okay?” he murmurs, low enough that Elizabeth can’t hear.
No. I’m confused and sweaty and inexplicably invested in whether my godmother approves of my fake boyfriend.
“Fine,” I say brightly.
Leo gives me a look that suggests he knows I’m lying.
He’s getting too good at reading me. That’s becoming a problem.
“You’ve got a leaf in your hair,” he says.
“I’ve only been here ten minutes, and the conservatory is already claiming me as one of its own. I’m not sure what that says about me.”
He reaches over and picks it out. His fingers brush my temple. It’s a two-second gesture that I feel for considerably longer than two seconds.
I struggle to get my breathing back to even.
We wind our way through the path of orchids. They’re lit from below like they’re auditioning for a dramatic role, and the effect is admittedly spectacular. It’s beautiful, strange, and completely surreal.
Not unlike my current emotional state.
“The humidity in the wet tropics zone is maintained at approximately eighty percent,” Elizabeth explains to Leo. “Orchids are remarkably sensitive to environmental conditions. Rather like relationships, I find.”
It’s the third pointed comment she’s made tonight. Leo’s smile becomes even more fixed.
I should find this funny. Watching Leo squirm under Elizabeth’s scrutiny is supposed to be funny, another way of making him pay for the maple-syrup incident.
Instead, I’m fighting the urge to step between them and defend him.
To tell Elizabeth that Leo is kind and thoughtful, and yes, he’s a bit uptight, but he also wears a unicorn onesie without much complaint, asks in-depth questions about my dogs’ personalities, and goes out of his way to make things easier for me.
Which makes no sense. This is a fake relationship. Elizabeth’s opinion of Leo shouldn’t matter. Whether she approves of him, whether she sees what I see in him, whether she—
Wait. What I see in him?
I shove that thought aside and focus on the orchids.
Elizabeth pauses in front of a display of white star-shaped orchids with impossibly long spurs trailing beneath them.
“Ah, Angraecum sesquipedale,” she says, and then turns to me with an expectant look. “Archie, darling, remind me of the significance?”
And there it is. I should have seen this coming.
Elizabeth has known me since I was a child asking uncomfortable questions at dinner parties. She gave me Pridgeon’s four-volume Genera Orchidacearum for my twelfth birthday because she knew I’d actually read it.
She’s not going to let me play dumb tonight.
I feel Leo’s attention sharpen beside me.
“It’s, ah, Darwin’s orchid,” I say, trying to keep my voice light. Like this is just trivia I picked up somewhere. “He predicted a pollinator with a tongue long enough to reach the nectar at the bottom of the spur. People thought he was mad.”
“And?” Elizabeth prompts.
Dammit.
“And…about twenty-five years after his death, they discovered the Morgan’s sphinx moth, which had a twenty-centimeter proboscis. Exactly as he predicted.”
Leo’s openly staring at me now.
“It’s one of the most elegant examples of coevolution,” Elizabeth adds, looking satisfied. “The orchid and the moth, each shaping the other across millennia. Archie wrote me a rather brilliant essay on orchid pollination strategies when he was twelve.”
Shit.
I feel the familiar tension, the one that comes from being caught between two versions of myself.
There’s the Archibald Elizabeth knows.
And there’s the Archie Leo knows. The cheerful guy who throws children’s parties, walks dogs, and definitely doesn’t have opinions about the mathematics of pollinator specificity.
I can’t be both at once. Or rather, I’ve learned not to be. Because being both at once is how you overwhelm people. So you’ve got to pick the version that fits the room and commit to it.
But tonight, I guess I’m going to have to try to be some kind of combination.
“I was a strange child,” I say quickly. “Very into biology. It was a phase.”
“You had a phase where you wrote essays about evolutionary biology?” Leo’s voice is carefully neutral.
“Everyone needs a hobby.”
“Most twelve-year-olds choose sports. Or video games.”
“I think I was just fascinated by the way orchids manipulate things to get what they want,” I say.
Leo’s forehead crumples into a frown. “How do they do that?”
I try to work out how to say it simply so I don’t raise his suspicions more.
“Some orchids trick pollinators into thinking they’re mates. They mimic female insects with their shape, scent, everything. The male tries to copulate with the flower and ends up covered in pollen instead.”
“So it’s sexual deception.” Leo’s eyes don’t leave mine.
“Yes. Orchids are nature’s con artists. And some orchids don’t actually offer any reward at all, no nectar, nothing. They’re just…faking it.”
“So they’re pretending to be something they’re not to get what they need?” Leo asks.
Fuck.
I swallow hard. “That’s one way to put it.”
“If Archie’s read about it, he’s an expert,” Elizabeth says. “It’s one of the things that made him such a rewarding child to be a godmother to. Surely he mentioned his photographic memory to you?”
Leo’s expression flickers. There’s surprise, then something sharper. I can practically see him rifling back through every conversation we’ve ever had, re-examining each one with this new piece of information.
“Photographic memory,” he repeats slowly. “No. He didn’t mention that.”
His gaze finds mine, and he tilts his head. “You remember everything you’ve read?”
I swallow. “More or less. ‘Photographic’ isn’t the right term though. It’s actually called eidetic memory. I don’t remember every detail of every page. But the gist of things, the important bits, those tend to lodge in my brain and refuse to leave. Like tenants with a really good lease.”
Elizabeth’s eyebrows fly up. “How long have you two been together?”
“Three months,” we say in unison.
At least we got that right.
“And you’re living together now, yet you’ve never told Leo about your memory?”
“It just hasn’t come up in conversation,” I say.
“What exactly do you two talk about?”
“Oh, you know,” I say quickly. “Normal couple things. The weather. What to have for dinner. Whether pineapple belongs on pizza.”
“It doesn’t,” Leo says automatically.
“It absolutely does, and that is a fundamental incompatibility we’re working through.”
Elizabeth doesn’t smile. Her eyes have narrowed slightly as her gaze flicks between us.
This is bad.
Fuck. Maybe I should try the angle that we haven’t been able to keep our hands off each other, so we haven’t had time for deep intellectual conversations about my unusual cognitive abilities.
But I’m aware that nothing about Leo’s and my body language screams “having amazing sex constantly with no time left over to chat about other things.”
We’re not leaning into each other or stealing touches or radiating the particular energy of people who’ve recently discovered the joy of each other’s bodies.
This will have to change.
We trail after Elizabeth through a tunnel of cascading purple orchids, past a waterfall feature that adds yet more moisture to the already soupy air.
We end up in a chamber filled with specimens so brightly colored they almost look artificial.
Elizabeth points out rare hybrids and discusses propagation techniques.
Leo makes appropriate noises of interest.
When Elizabeth pauses to examine a peach orchid, I catch her watching us in the reflection of the glass.
Shit.
We are failing this test spectacularly.
I shuffle closer to Leo. Unfortunately, crutches aren’t exactly the greatest accessory for romance.
“I’m just going to nip to the restroom,” Elizabeth says.
Elizabeth wanders in the direction of the restroom sign, her heels clicking against the stone floor.
As soon as she’s out of earshot, I turn to Leo.
“You should have told her you knew about my memory,” I say.
“I don’t believe it was in the briefing discussion,” Leo says archly.
“I told you to go with the flow.”
“I’m sorry, my acting skills weren’t up to hiding my surprise over that particular revelation.” He continues to watch me with that same intense dark gaze.
I flush under his scrutiny.
“What?” I demand to know.
“I already knew you’re a whole lot smarter than you pretend to be. I’m just trying to figure out why you try to hide that part of yourself,” Leo says.
I roll my eyes. “You can unravel the mystery later. We’ve got a bigger problem now. I’m fairly certain Elizabeth is now suspicious of us.”
“You can’t really blame her.”
“I guess not.”
Leo’s collar is damp from the humidity, exposing the hollow at the base of his throat. I stare at it for longer than is advisable before I snap back to the problem at hand.
“You’re going to have to kiss me,” I say.
Leo’s eyes widen. “What? I thought we agreed to keep this PG-13.”