Nick let me trail off.
“I’ve never told anyone this, actually,” I said. “But in eighth grade, Lacey cheated at algebra. Math was her one weakness, and I was pretty good at it. She spent the entire night before the test freaked out that she was going to fail, or worse, get a lower grade than I did for the first time ever. And then halfway through the test, I noticed her copying mine. Of course our grades came back identical, with all the same mistakes, but she told the teacher I’d copied her.”
Nick’s blue eyes got wide.
“Yeah. Pretty ballsy,” I said. “But I knew she wasn’t being malicious. She just didn’t know how to handle the role reversal when she wasn’t doing better than I was.”
“So what did you do?”
“I took the fall,” I said. “Told them I was afraid of being branded the stupid twin. They felt sorry for me, I got a month of detention, and after that, I threw a couple of tests so it’d look like I was making steady improvement.”
“That’s very stand-up of you,” Nick said, pouring me more coffee.
“It was also cowardly of me,” I said. “She was so grateful, she did all my chores for the month that I was grounded, and loaned me her favorite shirt, which…in Lacey currency, she might as well have given me gold bars.” I smiled at the memory. “It stresses her out when things don’t come easily, and I’ve always hated seeing her like that. But I probably didn’t need to be that laid-back. The cheating thing was the first time I volunteered myself into the sacrificial role, and now it’s almost like I’m stuck there.”
“Is that why you came all the way to Oxford, do you think?” Nick asked.
“I’m not sure I ever thought of it that way,” I said. “Maybe. I love being a twin, but people always want to define you in relation to each other, and I guess we slip into that trap, too.”
“I certainly know that feeling,” Nick said, tapping his crossword wryly.
“Not to get all philosophical on you before breakfast,” I teased.
“Yes, I prefer my philosophy with a side of toast, but we can’t have everything.”
A light breeze ruffled Nick’s crossword pages. He clamped a foot down on them and cocked his head contemplatively.
“I’m sorry it’s taken this long for us to have an actual conversation,” he said.
“It’s all good. We’re talking now. Even if it was mostly me yapping about my sister.”
“I feel like I have to be so careful all the time,” he said. “I have a non-hilarious conversation just once, and then the next day the papers write that I’m ‘Nick the Prick,’ because I wasn’t grinning like a madman. But if I’m having too much fun, I’m a drunken lout.”
Nick’s bitter tone, it turns out, was because both of these had already happened.
“It gets exhausting. I forget how to be sometimes when I’m not on,” Nick continued. “That’s why I like coming out here at dawn. I have insomnia but I can’t roam the halls like some medieval ghost when my room starts to feel constricting. I have to get out.”
“Well. You never have to be on with me. I promise,” I said, kicking out my legs and lying down on the blanket. “You can do your crosswords and drink your heathen coffee and chill. You’re not my sovereign.”
“Yes, your ancestors saw to that.” He grinned, stretching out next to me, folding his arms under his head. Then he jerked upward.
“Notre Dame,” he said. He felt around for the crossword and glanced at it. “Yes, ‘decrepit’ means it’s an anagram of ‘and remote,’ and you get Notre Dame, in France.”
“I’m taking credit for that,” I said. “All this philosophizing unlocked your potential.”
He scrawled the answer into the boxes in pen. “Nonsense. I’m just extremely clever.”
“Not clever enough to do those in pencil,” I said, tapping a portion of the page where several answers were angrily scribbled out.
“I have confidence in me,” he said.
I blinked. “Is that a Sound of Music quote?”
“Er, what? Maybe. I don’t know. Yes,” he admitted. “They show it here every year on Christmas. But we watch in secret because Gran thinks Christmas Day should be reserved for prayer and reflection. She was steaming mad one year when she caught us, but Freddie got us off the hook by arguing any movie with nuns in it counts as a religious experience.”
I laughed. “I like him already.”
“Everyone does,” Nick said. “You’ll meet him soon enough.”
Our eyes met. After a beat, I nodded. It was a casual statement, couching an assumption of friendship and permanence. It was also a subtle expression of trust. Nick likes to tell me that’s the moment he knew, but he’s as revisionist as The Bexicon. He didn’t feel a lightning bolt as we sat on the cold ground passing around a Thermos, and neither did I. What I did feel was welcome. Sitting there, thousands of miles from my usual life, I’d been scooped into his.
Chapter Four
Nick’s serious blue eyes stared deeply into mine. “Does it hurt? Do you want to stop?”
He was worried about my comfort, even in the heat of the moment.
“I’m great,” I panted, desperately trying not to stare directly up the Royal Nostrils. “Just another Sunday.”