Majesty (American Royals, #2)(108)

“I don’t know.” Nina pulled a pillow into her lap and hugged it. “I need some time to figure things out.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam breathed, meaning it. Even if she’d thought the Ethan thing was weird at first, even if she hadn’t fully understood, all she’d ever wanted was for her friend to be happy. It felt especially unfair that Nina should feel such anguished confusion today, when Sam’s relationship with Marshall was finally, blissfully clear.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she ventured.

“It’s a long story. I’m not sure I’m ready to tell it yet.”

There was an edge to Nina’s voice that kept Sam from pressing further. She just nodded, reaching a hand beneath her bracelet—the one from the Crown Jewels collection, which she’d forgotten to take off after this morning—and sliding it up and down her forearm. The diamonds felt deliciously cool against her skin.

“I want to forgive him,” Nina added, so quietly that it was almost a whisper. “I’m just…I’m scared of being hurt again. I wish I was as brave as you are.”

“I’m not that brave.”

“You’re the bravest person I know!”

“It’s easy to seem that way when you don’t care what people think of you. That isn’t courage; it’s just recklessness,” Sam said quietly. “I of all people know the difference.”

Nina glanced over. “But you do care what people think of you, Sam. You just pretend not to.”

Sam sighed. She’d learned her lesson about pretending. “Maybe it’s inevitable that we’re going to be hurt, when we let other people in. Maybe we can’t care deeply for someone without being hurt by them, too,” she said softly. Certainly she and Marshall had caused each other pain, alongside all the joy. The same with Beatrice and Teddy.

What was that saying, grief is the price we pay for love?

Nina nodded slowly. She seemed pensive, all her attention curled inward. “It’s just…it’s easier to believe in things, believe in people, when you read about them in books. They’re so much safer when they’re fictional. The real-life ones…I’m still not sure how to handle them.”

Sam let her head fall all the way back onto her friend’s mattress, lacing her hands tranquilly over her stomach. Next to her she felt Nina doing the same thing.

They both looked out the window at the blue square of sky dotted with fluffy wisps of cloud.

“Remember when we used to go cloud-watching?” Nina asked.

Sam nodded, the hairsprayed coils of her hair crunching a bit at the motion. She and Nina used to sprawl out in the tree house in the orchard and name the shapes they saw drifting overhead—birds, stars, smiling faces that broke apart and re-formed on the current of the wind.

Nina shifted so that she was lying on her side. “I always pretended they were ships, like pirate ships far up in the sky. I liked to imagine that someday I would find my way onto one, and let it sweep me off into some epic story.”

“Really?”

“Over the last year, I feel like I have lived through a story. I dated my best friend’s brother—who is a prince—and then his best friend!” Nina sighed. “When I daydreamed about getting swept up in a story, it was always my story. But that’s not how it played out.”

Sam kept staring up at the sky, where the clouds—which, come to think of it, did look remarkably like ships—sailed serenely onward. Her chest ached at the realization that Nina still felt this way. Like a supporting character in someone else’s narrative.

Nina was far too bright, too fiercely self-assured, to play the role of a damsel waiting around for anyone. Nina should be the heroine of her own story.

Hadn’t Sam felt something similar? For years she’d struggled with her own identity, because she’d always defined herself in relation to someone else—to whatever boy she was hooking up with, or to her brother, or most of all in relation to Beatrice. When, the entire time, she’d needed to figure out who she was, herself.

She sat up abruptly, seized by an idea.

“Nina—will you come on a royal tour with me?”

Her friend pushed up to a sitting position, tugging a hand through her hair. “A royal tour?”

“Now that the wedding is postponed, Beatrice asked me to do this summer’s royal tour on her behalf. Just think,” Sam pleaded. “You said you needed time to figure things out! What better way to sort through it all than road-tripping with your best friend?”

“But…what are you going to do the whole time?”

“Talk to people.”

It sounded so simple, yet it wasn’t. There were so many people out there—in the world, yes, but also right here in this country—people who all wanted different things. Some thrived on uncertainty; some craved stability. Some lived on dreams and some were relentlessly practical. Some wanted the government to take charge of everything; others wanted the government to leave them alone.

Beatrice’s job—and now Sam’s, too—was to understand them all. Despite all those clashing desires and viewpoints and opinions, she had to find a way to work on behalf of all of them.

The prospect sparked a strange feeling in her, as if her bones were stretching and reshaping themselves; or maybe the world was stretching, tugging her outward like a rubber band.