Spare Me

Chapter 9

H aving dinner with Maddy was a revelation for Alex. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had challenged him like she had. She wasn’t reverent, she didn’t try to suck up to him, and she was clearly not attempting to say only what he wanted to hear. He hadn’t spent much time with many Americans, so he wasn’t sure if it was her country’s famed directness or just who Maddy was as a person, but he found himself fascinated by it.

In the days after their evening together, Alex kept finding himself replaying portions of their conversation in his head. The things she had said. The things she pointedly hadn’t said. The way her eyes rolled back in her head when she’d first tasted her burger… He made valiant efforts towards keeping his mind firmly on the sidewalk and out of the gutter. She was beautiful, there was no denying that. But truth be told, he knew a lot of beautiful women, and none of them captivated him the way Madeleine Cartwright did.

He’d rarely been tempted to Google new acquaintances—although, to be fair, most of the people he socialized with had known him since one of them had been in nappies—but several times he’d had to stop himself from opening a new browser window on his phone and typing in her name. The knowledge that Eric had her full dossier in his office floated in and out of the recesses of his brain at least once a day, and he almost had to physically shake himself to remind him of his commitment to himself not to look. He had meant what he said to Maddy: he wanted to get to know her the way any normal person did, not by reading about her in the press or in a security file. He, of all people, knew firsthand what it was like when someone entered a situation thinking they knew a person based on what they’d read about them, and he never wanted to do that to anybody else. But he’d be lying if he said that he wasn’t extremely tempted.

He found himself wondering what had transpired that would make her story so easy to find. The way she skirted the topic wasn’t an attempt at any kind of modesty, real or feigned. It was true avoidance. He flashed back to the night of the Armistice Day concert. Of noticing someone exiting the Royal Box out of the corner of his eye and realizing it had been her. He wasn’t sure what had made him follow her, but it had been instinctual. Something had just told him he needed to. And then he’d found her in the hallway, fighting back tears. Even though they still hadn’t known each other well, in that moment he’d had an almost visceral urge to pull her into his arms and make it all better. To erase whatever was causing her pain. Something told him the two puzzling moments were connected. And he was fairly certain he wasn’t going to like the reason.

He’d been ready to ask Maddy to get together again almost as soon as she’d walked out of their first dinner, but he also intuited that if he pushed too hard she would bolt, so he made himself wait a few days before he texted her again.

Hey, do you want to do something this weekend? Hang out or something?

The Hot American

How does one “hang out” when one is the prince of England?

Well, you could come over and watch a movie? I know it’s kind of boring, but staying here is the easiest way to not be seen.

The Hot American

That works for me.

You should know that I don’t do war films and despite my utter distaste for society’s obsession with the gender binary, my taste in movies skews decidedly towards what most people would consider “girly.”

Alex laughed to himself before setting about finding the perfect response and settling on a gif of Kristin Wiig shimmying down the aisle of a plane in Bridesmaids and sending it to her

The Hot American

He knows how to use a gif, folks! Who would have thought?!

I contain multitudes

The Hot American

I can see that you d o

Alex typed out his standard slate of instructions for someone visiting him at his apartment on the grounds of Kensington Palace for the first time and agreed on Saturday afternoon for their movie date.

Not date, Alex reminded himself. Definitely not a date .

The Hot American

I feel like hanging out with you requires a scavenger hunt. Or at the very least, very strong reading comprehension skills.

So what I’m hearing is that you think I’m a treasure?

The Hot American

You might need to get your hearing checked.

Nobody other than his brother had ever been this sassy with Alex, and he couldn’t deny that he loved it. This whole “hanging out platonically” thing was proving to be a serious challenge. And yet Saturday afternoon couldn’t come soon enough.

When he finally heard Maddy’s soft knock on his front door Saturday afternoon, Alex had to pretend that he hadn’t been pacing the entryway waiting for her to arrive. He waited a beat, took a breath, and walked toward the door, grabbing his corgi puppy, Bertie, on the way.

He opened the door and smiled at Maddy, cradling Bertie in one arm as he held the door open with the other. “Hi,” he said, “Sorry, I hope you’re okay with dogs. ”

“Of course!” Maddy cooed, holding out a hand to let Bertie sniff, his stubby legs flailing as he tried to escape Alex to smother her with puppyish affection. “We never had dogs when I was a kid because we moved too often, but I always kind of wanted one.” She turned her attention to the small bundle of brown and white energy. “Hi, buddy!” Smiling up at Alex, she asked, “What’s his name?”

“Bertie,” Alex said, closing the door behind her.

“What a good boy, Bertie!” she said in a tone of voice that people only used with dogs and Alex generally found annoying (and insulting to the dogs). He somehow found it entirely charming when Maddy did it.

“Did you have any trouble finding us?” He put Bertie down, silently begging the little menace to be polite for once in his short life.

“Well, there was no X marking the spot the way you said there would be,” she said with a cheeky smile, “but your instructions were very clear otherwise, so I did manage to find my way.”

“Good. Can I take your coat?”

She shrugged out of her jacket, and he hung it on the coat rack in the entryway as she stepped out of her shoes. She was wearing jeans and a black sweater that looked very soft. Unlike the other times he’d seen her, it didn’t look like she was wearing makeup, and her hair was in what he was pretty sure he was safely allowed to call “a messy bun.” In short, she looked comfortable and refreshingly casual.

“I have to admit,” she said, taking in the tiled foyer of his apartment, “that you calling this an ‘apartment’ feels a little misleading.”

He flushed. “Yeah, the term is a bit outdated.” His “apartment” was really a row house of sorts, one of several reserved for various members of the extended family. He had a kitchen that he barely knew how to use and a home gym on the ground floor, and then an office, his sitting room, his own bedroom, and a guest room on the second floor. Compared to other royal residences, it truly was modest, but he could also easily see how, to a normal citizen, calling it an apartment was almost farcical.

“And you, like, don’t have a butler or anything?”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but no. I have a housekeeper who comes in to clean and bring in meals a few days a week, but with it just being me and Bertie, I don’t really need more than that.”

“How positively sensible,” she said wryly. There was a slightly awkward pause before Maddy said, “So where’s the movie theater?”

Alex laughed. “Let me give you a tour,” he said, leading her towards the steps to the second floor. “Although I’m afraid you may be disappointed in the lack of cinema.”

“Oh yes, of course, it’s a ‘cinema’ here,” she said with light mocking in her voice. “Although really, that’s such a classier name for it than ‘movie theater.’ I guess y’all do get some things right sometimes.”

“‘Y’all’? Are you Southern?”

“I’m from all over,” she said with a sigh as they reached the top of the stairs and he led her into his sitting room. “My parents live in Kansas now, but we spent time all over when I was a kid: North Carolina, Germany, Arizona, Alaska… we’ve hit most of the major US Army bases. But my dad’s from Texas originally, and really, if you think about it, ‘y’all’ is an incredibly useful word. Most other languages have a word that means ‘you guys.’ For some reason because ours is so dialectical it just gets made fun of.”

“I suppose you’re right,” he said. “I never thought about that before.” Not for the first time Alex found himself impressed by how intelligent and incisive Maddy was.

“So this is the sitting room,” he said, feeling a bit uncertain in a way that was alien to him. He wondered what she saw when she looked around his space: the dark brick fireplace on the wall next to the door; a flatscreen TV mounted above it; the window seats along the right wall, piled with pillows; the bookshelves against the far wall; dark green rugs; a brown leather couch, and a matching overstuffed armchair.

“Nice,” she said, smiling and tucking herself into the corner of the sofa. Bertie immediately leaped up next to her and settled down. Alex saw he’d have to fight for this woman if he didn’t want to lose her to his dog.

She stroked Bertie’s ears absentmindedly as she looked around. “This seems cozy,” she said.

“It works for us,” he said, uncertain of how to respond. It wasn’t like he could take credit for the way his apartment looked. Before his return from New Zealand, someone from his father’s staff had called about how he wanted his space furnished, and when he’d arrived, it had been like this. He’d added a few framed family photos and some art from his travels, but otherwise, it could have been a living room in a catalog.

“Can I get you a drink?” he asked, changing the subject. “Beer? Wine? Water? Tea?”

“Water would be great,” she said, smiling up at him.

“I’ll be right back,” he said.

He descended to the kitchen on the ground floor and grabbed a few bottles of flat water along with some cans of flavored sparkling water. It occurred to him that they didn’t have any popcorn to have with a movie, but opening his pantry he found a few bags of different flavored crisps and brought them along as he returned to the second floor.

Maddy was examining the books on his shelf when he returned. “See anything you like?” he asked as he put the snacks and drinks on the coffee table.

“I’m so nosy about people’s bookshelves,” she said, walking back to retake her place on the sofa. “I always feel like you can tell a lot about people from what they read.” She examined the selection of beverages he’d brought up and selected a lemon-flavored sparkling water.

“And what can you tell about me from my books?”

“You like dude books,” she said directly.

He laughed. “I suppose I do,” he allowed. “In my defense, some of those are mine, and then a lot of them are things that the decorators brought over from some other library so that those shelves wouldn’t look empty.”

“Of course, as one does,” she said with a sarcastic nod.

He laughed and picked up the remote before flopping onto the opposite end of his sofa. “So we’ve established that war movies are bad, girl movies are good.”

“I mean, movies don’t have genders, but yes, correct.”

“Okay,” he said, clicking into the first streaming service on his television without looking. When the first sound he heard was a quiet moan his eyes flew to the screen in horror when he realized he’d unwittingly clicked into an app that featured high-quality pornography. “Oh fuck!” he said, slapping frantically at the remote to get the image off the screen.

“Indeed,” Maddy said. She was blushing furiously, but there were also tears of mirth in her eyes. “That’s not exactly what I meant when I said I liked ‘girly movies,’ Alex.”

“Maddy, I’m so sorry, I can explain?—”

“Explain what?” she said matter-of-factly. “You watch porn, I read smutty novels. We all have to get our yayas out some way or another.”

“So you read smutty novels?” he asked, distracted from his humiliation by her revelation.

“Focus, Windsor!”

“Right, so not that,” he said, refocusing his full attention on the screen so that when he pushed the button again he was positive he was going into a normal movies app .

After several moments of debate peppered with banter about what to watch, they settled on When Harry Met Sally, a movie he’d seen a million times, which was convenient, because it meant if he got distracted watching Maddy watch the movie, it wouldn’t matter. At that moment, Bertie looked at him with a face that said, You are completely screwed . The timing was so uncanny it almost seemed like the dog could read his mind. Which was obviously impossible.

After the opening scene of the old people talking about their romances, Maddy reached forward and examined the packets of crisps he’d brought up. “I’ll definitely give you this: your chip flavors are so much better than ours.” She picked the smoked paprika flavor and opened it, tossing a few into her mouth. “ Why don’t they have these in the States?” she asked around the mouthful of crisps. “It’s so unfair!”

Alex laughed and took the proffered bag, helping himself to a few. “What can I say?” he answered cheekily. “You can’t top the original?” She gave him a sassy look and snatched the crisps back from him, refocusing on the movie.

Several minutes later as Harry and Sally were embarking on their road trip from Chicago to New York, Alex groaned internally as Harry began a monologue about how men and women couldn’t be friends because someone always wanted sex. He sensed, rather than saw, Maddy fidget uncomfortably, and he wracked his brain for something witty to say to diffuse the awkward moment. Because the truth was that he did want to have sex with Maddy. Badly. In a way he hadn’t wanted a woman in a long time. He’d slept with a few women since he’d been back from New Zealand, but it had been a purely physical act. And he’d realized each time that the purely physical sexual encounters that he’d grown used to engaging in weren’t satisfying him the way they used to. He wanted Maddy in a way that transcended the physical. But, he had to remind himself sternly, that was explicitly not what she wanted. Even if Harry was right. And so he forced himself to think about anodyne things—mentally reviewing his schedule for next week, planning out when and where he would make time to take Bertie on longer walks, how many socks were left in his drawers—until he could return his focus to the movie.

It worked, too, until the scene where Harry and Sally were at Katz’s Deli and Harry boldly proclaimed that he’d know if a woman had ever faked an orgasm. Alex glanced at Maddy out of the corner of his eye and saw a smirk on her face. “What?” he asked, nudging her with his toe.

“Hm?” she looked at him.

“What’s that look on your face?”

“I mean…” She flushed. “Statistically, if you’ve been with more than a few women, someone’s faked it with you. She’s right about that math.”

“Oh, is she?” he asked, shifting so he was facing her.

“Oh, come on, you know she is.”

“No, I don’t,” he said, taking on an affronted tone. “The women I’ve been with are all very well satisfied, thank you very much.”

“You know you sound just like him, right?” She nodded towards the screen where Billy Crystal’s Harry was looking increasingly uncomfortable as Meg Ryan’s Sally was now giving the performance of a lifetime, faking an orgasm in the middle of the crowded deli.

He fumbled for a smart comeback and, not finding one, turned the tables towards her. “So you’ve done that?”

“What? Had a loud fake orgasm in the middle of lunch? No, of course not.” He gave her a look that she looked like she wanted to ignore. After a long pause, she reluctantly answered, “Yes. I have.”

He found himself resisting a totally bizarre urge to growl. “That’s criminal.”

“To fake it? ”

“Well, I mean, that part’s kind of dishonest. But a man who knows what he’s doing doesn’t have this problem.”

“Oh, and you’re the prince of orgasms in addition to being the prince of England?”

“I mean…”

She rolled her eyes dramatically. “Oh my god, Alex.”

“What?”

“Did it ever occur to you that women probably want you to like them and, as such, might”—she paused, as if searching for a word—“exaggerate to make you feel good about yourself?”

He blinked. He genuinely hadn’t ever considered that. He didn’t think the women he’d been with would have spontaneously heaped quite as much praise on him as they did after their encounters if he wasn’t actually good at pleasing them. But now he wondered.

“Mm-hmm.” Maddy hummed as the woman in the booth next to Harry and Sally asked for “what she’s having.” She shifted, seeming uncomfortable, and tried to refocus on the movie, but Alex couldn’t let the topic drop that easily.

“Look, Maddy, I’m willing to allow that maybe it’s happened to me. But in a real relationship, there’s no room for that. You deserve to be with someone who you feel comfortable being honest with. Who knows you well enough—knows your body well enough—to know what to do with it.”

Her cheeks flushed and she wouldn’t look at him.

“Let’s not talk about it,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. He could almost see her withdrawing into a shell, like a scared snail.

He desperately wanted to push. To find out who the guy was who had disappointed her, who hadn’t taken the time to understand how to make her feel genuine pleasure. But he could tell he wasn’t going to get much further, and he didn’t want to risk scaring her away completely. So he dropped it. But he didn’t stop thinking about it. Not while they finished the movie, not while they chatted about inane topics while eating Indian takeout, not when he walked her to the door and watched her head back towards the gate. He knew it probably wasn’t a good idea to let himself think about it, but he did. He thought about how she’d been unsatisfied and how he wanted to be the one to make it right.