Her Royal Highness (Royals #2)(2)

Her lips taste like my cherry-vanilla lip balm, and in that moment, there’s only Jude and her mouth and the way she tucks my hair behind my ears as she kisses me.

When we pull apart, she’s smiling at me, cheeks pink, our legs tangled on the sleeping bags. “I’m not going because it’s too expensive,” I tell her. “Like I said.”

“They’d give you a scholarship,” she counters. “You’re, like, the smartest person in our school.”

“That’s not saying much.”

My high school isn’t terrible or anything, but it’s massive, and sometimes my classes feel more like an exercise in crowd control than anything else. That’s part of why I started looking at fancy schools far away.

That and my dad taking me to see the movie Brave when I was ten. And the fact that geology, my favorite subject, was practically invented in Scotland. And the way I felt when I’d looked up pictures of all those massive, rocky hills surrounded by green, like something out of a fairy tale. There was this one place called Applecross that I—

Okay, no. No more thinking about that. I’ve made up my mind to stay because even though I got in, running off to Scotland is insane, right? And not a thing people do. I’ll be perfectly happy finishing out my senior year at Pecos with Jude and our other besties, Darcy and Lee. There are tons of good colleges here in Texas that I can get into, and some fancy Scottish boarding school won’t count for more than my killer ACT scores and awesome GPA. It’ll be fine.

But Jude is still watching me with a funny look on her face, three little wrinkles popping up over her nose.

“I’m serious, though, Millie,” she says. “If this is about me or us . . .”

She sighs, her breath warm on my face and smelling like that lemon-mint gum she always has on her.

“It’s not,” I tell her again, pulling a thread from my plaid sleeping bag. “And we’re not really an us, anyway. I mean, we are in that I’m a person, and you’re a person, and together, that makes two people, which means the common grammatical definition of ‘us’ technically fits, but—”

Her hand clamps over my mouth, and she laughs. “No nervous-talky Millie,” she says, and I nod behind her palm with a muffled, “Sorry.” There’s this fun thing that happens sometimes when I get nervous where words just come out, but not in the right order, exactly, and half the time, not the words I want to be saying, but there they are anyway, a flood of words between me and Jude, yet again.

But when she drops her hand, those wrinkles are back. “We are an us,” she says, reaching out to twine her fingers with mine. “Maybe nobody knows we are, but to me, I feel . . . us-ish.”

Cheeks hot, I squeeze her fingers back. “The us-iest.”

Jude reaches over to fiddle with the ends of my hair again. “The most us I’ve ever felt with anyone,” she says.

“More us-y than with Mason?”

The words are out before I even have time to think about them, really, and I immediately wish I could call them back. Mason is Jude’s ex, the boy she’d dated since freshman year, and they broke up last spring. Right before it all started with me and Jude. Since that first kiss, sitting on the floor of her room last month, we haven’t mentioned Mason. It’s been easy, since he’s away at soccer camp or something for part of the summer, but sometimes I wonder how it’ll be when he comes back. I’ve always liked Mason even if I am head over heels for his girlfriend, but there’s no doubt things have been easier with me and Jude without him here.

Jude flops onto her back, studying the ceiling of the tent. “Weren’t we kind of an us even when Mason was around?”

She rolls back onto her side to face me, and I feel my cheeks go hot again, because yeah, we were. There wasn’t any of this kissing or other fun stuff, but she was definitely my favorite person to be around.

“Maybe,” I acknowledge, and she grins before draping an arm over my waist.

Jude kisses me again, and thoughts about Mason, Scotland, and fancy schools with unicorn crests vanish in the warm summer air.





CHAPTER 2





“Mason is back.”

I’m sitting in Darcy’s game room at her house, slouched on the floor with my back against the couch, an Xbox controller in my hands.

On the giant TV in front of me, I watch a dragon grab my avatar, Lady Lucinda, by the head, shaking her so hard that the body goes flying offscreen.

Great.

Sighing, I rest the controller on my stomach as the screen goes white. “That was my last life,” I mutter, reaching for the can of Sprite Zero beside me. Darcy nudges my foot with hers, her toenails a bright purple.

“Millie, did you hear me?”

On my other side, Lee sits up, taking the controller from me and restarting the game. “She heard you, Darce. She doesn’t care.”

“I do care,” I insist, “because I like Mason, and it’s nice that he’s back. I just don’t think it has anything to do with me.”

Crossing her legs, Darcy sits up straighter as she looks at me over the tops of her glasses. They’re new, the acid-green frames bright around her dark eyes. “Millie,” she says, and I roll my shoulders, uncomfortable.

“They’re done,” I remind her as I sit up, too. “Over. And me and Jude are—”