Chapter 6 – Don't Say a Word
The next morning, I read the headlines before I went to work, so I would be prepared for the shitstorm that was certain to be coming my way.
Sure enough, Jamie and I were all over the front pages of every tabloid and even some of the straight news outlets. Loved-up Prince Jamie takes girlfriend public… Meet Jamie's mystery woman… Jamie's girl revealed at football match… Is Jamie ready to commit after all?
They still didn't know my name, mercifully, although one newspaper identified me in a group shot from the Embassy reception and speculated correctly that I was American.
When I walked into the Embassy that morning, I could feel the stares. No one even had to say anything.
My supervisor Frank was sitting on my desk. He didn't even say anything. He was just sitting there, arms folded, staring at me.
"Okay, fine, let me have it," I said, dropping my briefcase next to my desk and tossing my jacket over the back of my chair.
"What were you thinking." It was a statement, not a question.
Feigning ignorance was not going to help me. "My private life has nothing to do with my ability to do my job. I happen to be going out with a guy I really like."
"Your private life is not private when you're dating a member of the royal family and you're all over the press. Banks, this is all kinds of problematic."
"I checked the guidelines last night, there's no rule against it."
He tossed his hands in the air, quickly growing exasperated. "That's because no one thought anyone would be stupid enough to do something like this!"
"I can't believe you're coming after me for this."
"And I can't believe that someone as professional and as careful as you would do something that would jeopardize the work of this Department—would jeopardize your job!"
There was no way in hell I was going to let him know, but he had a point. I should have at least given him a heads up that this was coming his way. Frank and I got along, and I knew he trusted me more than anyone else in the unit. I had just betrayed an awful lot of that trust.
"This is not my fault, this is not anyone's fault. I am in a relationship with someone I happen to like very much. Beyond that, it is no one else's business."
He stood up and crossed his arms again, preparing to leave. "That's not true and you know it. Your face is on the front page of every tabloid in the country."
"Sam Stevens knew about this a while ago, and she was fine with it, but it wasn't a big deal until today."
"Because until today, the tabloids didn't have clear photos of your face, and of you cuddling and making out with him. That's why."
I collapsed into my chair and turned on my computer. "Okay, I give up. He's my boyfriend. What are we supposed to do? Sneak around, never showing our faces in public? I am done justifying this situation to you. I've said my piece, you've said yours, and we aren't going to get anywhere by re-hashing the same points, so unless you have anything useful to say, as far as I'm concerned, this conversation is over."
"Fine. But you are on a very short leash here, Banks. And I want your disclosure paperwork on my desk by lunch." He walked away.
Not ten minutes later, my desk phone rang. It was the Ambassador's secretary, saying that the Ambassador wanted to see me in his office immediately. Great. That's just terrific.
I told her I would be there in three minutes and hung up the phone. I whacked my head against my cubicle wall once to get the blood flowing, and stood up. The Ambassador's office was four floors above mine. I took the stairs.
The Ambassador's secretary greeted me and told me that he would be ready for me in a few moments.
The Ambassador's office door opened, and he came out. "Miss Banks, please come in." He said, gesturing to the open door.
"Thank you, Mr Ambassador."
"Amy, please hold all my calls." He said to his secretary.
She nodded.
I went into his office. He followed and closed the door behind us.
"Have a seat."
I did, primly.
"Now Miss Banks, I'm sure you know why I've called you in here today for this little chat." He took off his reading glasses and turned them around a few times in his hand. It was a perfectly innocent gesture, but felt incredibly ominous.
"Yes sir, I think I have a pretty good idea." Having just been thoroughly chastised by my immediate supervisor, getting the same lecture from one of America's top diplomats was not something I was looking forward to.
"Unless my staff are harboring criminals or sleeping with people who are actively harming the interests or the image of the United States of America, I consider peoples' private lives their private lives. As long as your ability to represent your country and promote its interests isn't compromised, I don't care who or what is keeping you warm at night. But here's where we run into a little trouble. You are really good at your job. You could have your pick of ambassadorships in fifteen years if you stick with this—hell, you could probably be Secretary of State someday if you really want it. I want you to start seriously thinking about the hole you're going to leave us to have to fill when you resign to become a princess."
I started. That was a lot to take in so quickly. "Sir, I believe that's a little premature." Seriously? We're starting in on the marriage talk already? I've been on three dates with the guy, and we've known each other less than a month. What century is this? It was ridiculous, and I had to work very hard not to roll my eyes.
He leaned back. His chair creaked. "Is it? I grilled my fifteen-year-old tabloid-reading niece about you. She seems to know more about you than I do. Apparently every major tabloid in this country considers you either his future wife or future damaged goods. It's just a matter of how long he'll wait to either propose or break up with you. Now I'm sure you're smart enough to see the public relations dilemma this causes us. The British public nearly had a conniption when the heir to the throne married a girl born without a title who went to Cambridge. Can you imagine what they're going to make of you?"
I had no idea where this was going, so I took a guess. "Sir, is this a roundabout way of asking me to resign?"
He sighed. He was a nice, fairly easy-going guy, known for his good humor, but I could tell that this placed him in an uncomfortable position. He's one of the youngest American ambassadors—only in his mid-forties—and has more in common with the average mid-level Embassy staffer like myself than the typical stuffy career bureaucrat.
"You have only been with this office for a year. In that one year, you have made quite an impression. You need to seriously think about your future. Your boyfriend's proposal will be more than a proposal— it will be a job offer. And you need to think about what you'll be leaving behind when he puts a ring on it. Even if you don't get married and you break up, you will be known to the public not for your own impressive accomplishments but because you had a fling with a prince. Your ability to do your job effectively could become seriously compromised. Regardless of the direction this relationship takes, you need to think about your legacy. That's all I'm saying."
I walked back to my desk feeling absolutely numb. One date in public at a sporting event with my boyfriend of less than a month, and my boss is telling me my career is headed off a cliff. This is terrific.
And how was I supposed to concentrate on doing my job after that conversation?
I did that totally cliché thing women do when they feel overwhelmed: I went and hid in the bathroom for fifteen minutes. I didn't actually shed any tears, but I came pretty close.
I was beginning to understand how much this relationship would actually mean. Granted, it was still early, but ironically, the pressure wasn't coming from the tabloids (yet) or the public, but from the people closest to me.
I felt alone. I felt isolated. I felt abandoned. My bosses have written me off as careless and petty, a future liability. My best friend on the other side of the Atlantic was probably breaking up a middle school gang fight right now, and I didn't want to bother her. My mother would— OH. SHIT. My mother.
I looked at my watch. It was 9:03. Maryland is five hours behind the U.K. She probably wouldn't be up yet, unless she was just getting off the night shift. Either way, right now was probably not a good time to call.
I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, trying to figure out what conclusions people (mostly tabloid writers) would draw from my appearance. Red hair— the feisty stereotype is going to come up again. Pale skin and brown eyes, both pretty ordinary. I'm relatively tall— five feet, eight inches— but not super-model tall, and while I'm young and in really good shape thanks to my morning run and taking the stairs everywhere, I have hips and I'm fairly busty—I'm an athletic hourglass. A few shots from an unflattering angle, and I'll be labeled as chubby. It's not that I mind people saying things like that about me, I just wish that there was a way that they could focus on who I am rather than what I look like.
My wardrobe consists mainly of conservative, potentially slightly preppy mix and match business casual from J. Crew and the Gap, with some British brands I've picked up in the last year mixed in. I may not have the most awe-inspiring closet the world has ever seen, but I don't want to. That's not who I am. I don't dress for attention, I dress for my job. I'm not one of those girls stalking through Soho or Camden wearing a ridiculous outfit designed to get her a "style on the street" feature in a fashion magazine.
Oh man. I really needed a vacation. I was getting too far into my own head, thinking way too hard, and taking things way too seriously. I'd only been photographed by the paparazzi once. They still didn't know my name, although some reporters had drawn the connection to the Embassy reception, which meant it was only a matter of time until that information got out.
I took a deep breath and went back to my desk. Despite my best efforts at concentration, I was fielding personal phone calls for the rest of the day. My mother called while I was at lunch. She said my Aunt Linda had e-mailed her a tabloid article. There was some minor yelling, of the I-feel-like-I've-been-kept-out-of-your-life variety, followed by my valiant attempt to pacify her, which was moderately successful.
I made the mistake of checking my personal e-mail account during lunch. There was a message from my cousin Paige that could only be described as shrieky. It was apparently Paige who sent the tabloid article to my Aunt Linda, who sent it to my mother.
Paige and I are practically sisters. We're both only children, and the only two cousins from that side of the family. Our mothers are sisters, and have always been very close. Despite all the traveling that growing up with my parents required, we managed to spend many Christmases and usually a week in the summer together.
Paige is three years younger than me—twenty-one—and is pre-law at Georgetown. She has a fine legal mind, but also a fine taste for gossip. She's actually a lot like Sam, but more sardonic.
She, of course, begged for all the details of my relationship with Jamie. As much as I love Paige and as much as I wanted to fill her in on everything, I was just so sick of talking about my relationship for the day.
Not long after I returned from lunch, Jamie's private secretary, Freddie, called. He told me that Clarence House was getting a lot of pressure from the media to confirm details about me, and that the usual response of having no comment about Jamie's private life wasn't going to work for much longer. Tabloid people were going to start digging, and once they did, it would not be pretty, and I would lose whatever measure of control I still had at that point.
Great. Now not only was I being pushed away from those closest to me because my relationship makes me a liability, but my identity was about to be confirmed to the public. I could feel the vultures circling above me, waiting to dive at me and pick every last bit of meat from the bone and leave me out in the desert, a skeleton, picked clean and abandoned to be bleached by the sun.
I hated Jamie. I didn't hate him as a person, but I hated what my connection to him was doing to me and to my life. A few weeks ago, I was free to do as I pleased. But then he came along and kissed me in public and everything changed.
Even I had to admit that maybe that was a bit melodramatic. But I was reaching the point of no return. Did I like Jamie enough to surrender any remaining chance I had at a normal life?
I told Freddie that I didn't want anyone leaking anything about me yet. I wanted at least one more night of anonymity if at all possible, and I wanted to talk to Jamie about it. Freddie sighed and said he would try to keep fending off the tabloids as long as he could, but he warned me quite severely that while a statement confirming my name and a few details was out of the question—the royal family does not confirm relationships unless or until engagements are announced—a well-placed leak was likely to occur sometime within the next week. I couldn't expect to be publically seen with Jamie again without personal details being dug up and published. I reluctantly agreed.
"Eleanor," he said, right when I thought he was going to hang up, "don't lead him on if you don't think you can stay with him. He's more vulnerable than he wants you to know."
I had to admit I was taken aback by Freddie's advice. He seemed more like the type to suffer in silence, so he must have felt it was truly necessary to warn me, and of course he was right.
"Is there any chance Princess Alice has a free hour or two this week? I'd like to talk to her if she has time to meet with me."
Freddie sighed, and said he would look into it and call me back. I thanked him, and got back to work. Even though I had only met Alice once, for a few hours, I really liked her, and I felt like she liked me too. I felt I could talk to her.
It was about two hours later that Freddie called me back. He said that Alice would love to see me, and she had some time free on Thursday, and could meet me for lunch if I liked. I agreed, and Freddie gave me the name of a café where I should meet her.
Understandably, knowing that I would have someone to talk to about my concerns made me feel a lot less anxious. I was able to get through the next few days relatively easily, with the help of an encouraging phone call from Jamie the night before my lunch with his sister.
"She thinks you're terrific," he told me.
"Well, who wouldn't?" I teased.
"No one," he retorted with a chuckle. "I miss you." He said after a pause.
"I miss you too," I replied softly.
"I really wish I could get some time off soon, but I can't."
Our conversation got pretty darn sappy. I almost didn't recognize my voice as my own—the lovey-dovey things I found myself saying were so completely uncharacteristic. The logical if somewhat cynical part of me was still telling me to flee, but I didn't listen—I couldn't. I really liked Jamie, and I really liked the way I felt when I was with him or I talked to him. Despite the incredible differences in our backgrounds, I felt surprisingly at ease with him. The problem was that so many other people were watching and offering their own opinions.
Jamie had grown up in public, the son of a mother the public adored and a father they loathed. Despite his many missteps, he was incredibly popular. He was young and handsome and charismatic and lived a lifestyle people either envied or decried as the worst example of unearned privilege, but whether they loved or hated the monarchy, they were all following his every move. And that meant that soon they would be following my every move.
There were entire blogs dedicated to tracking him in stalker-like detail, and blogs dedicated to documenting every outfit worn by his sister-in-law, with close-ups of her shoes, her earrings, her manicure, her eye makeup, details on her clothes—where she got them, how much they cost, where you could find cheaper similar styles. Yes, dressing is an act of diplomacy, but following it in this much detail should be a condition in the next DSM. Royalty fanatics were bad enough before the internet, but the obsessions have only gotten worse since. Royalty is a reality show that pre-dates TV.
I took an extra hour of personal leave time in addition to my regular lunch hour on Thursday to meet with Alice.
I arrived at the café in Mayfair at quarter past twelve, and was shown to a table where Alice was holding court. She's the kind of woman everyone is afraid of because she seems incredibly warm and funny, but you're sure there must be a crack somewhere in that veneer of warmth and humor, and you never know when and where you'll find it. She isn't afraid to place firm kicks where she needs to. You don't want to get on her bad side, because everyone who knows her loves her so much and is so loyal to her that you will be blacklisted for life.
She stood up to greet me, and pulled me into a warm hug. "It's so lovely to see you again so soon, Ellie. Please." She gestured for me to sit down and beckoned a waiter, who was happy to oblige. I noticed that Alice already had a drink, and it looked like gin and tonic. Brave woman.
"Anything to drink, miss?" the waiter asked me.
"I'll have a cranberry juice, please."
Alice scoffed. "Just cranberry juice? Oh, Ellie, have a little more fun."
"I'd better not, I have to go back to work after this."
"So do I. That's why I'm drinking." She lifted her glass merrily and took a large swig.
The waiter scurried away and I picked up my menu.
"So," Alice said, inspecting me, "Freddie said you were a bit skittish with all the press coverage lately."
I sighed. "Yes, I am, but I really don't know what I can do about it."
"Nothing. There is absolutely nothing any of us can do about it. My life, whether I like it or not, is public, and so is Jamie's. If you intend to be part of his life, you have to accept that. The key is to become someone else in public, let them see what they want to see, and once the doors are closed, you can be someone else entirely in private, and if you surround yourself with the right people, no one else ever has to know."
"Isn't that hypocritical?" I asked as the waiter returned to take our order—Cajun chicken baguette for me, although having lived in Louisiana, I didn't have particularly high hopes for the English interpretation of Cajun, and a grilled salmon salad for Alice.
"It's not hypocritical at all," she said as soon as the waiter was gone. "For example, there is something about me that only my mother, God rest her soul, and Jamie and maybe three incredibly close friends know about me. It's not an easy secret to keep, particularly from my father and my elder brother, but there is no way I can tell anyone else for a long time. I know I sound like I'm describing some over-dramatic Shakespeare plot, but please know that I'm perfectly serious." I could tell that she was.
"That's what I mean. There's so much pressure to be perfect and to fit this mold, but at the same time appearing so natural and genuine and at ease, and how do you do that? How can you be yourself in front of all those people while keeping a secret that heavy?"
"You learn to… oh what is it? You learn to compartmentalize. I hate adding –ize to the ends of nouns to make them into verbs, but that's a discussion for another day."
"So which compartment am I in?" I asked.
She didn't answer immediately, because the waiter returned to deliver our food. We thanked him, and he scurried away.
"You are an interesting case. You are definitely in Jamie's private life, although I don't think you or he realize how close he has let you get to him. For me, you are somewhere between public and private, although coming closer and closer to private. I like you, Ellie, and my brother doesn't yet realize how hard he has fallen, because he's so guarded. That gives you an incredible amount of power. Use it well."
If I said I wasn't incredibly surprised by how confident she seemed of my power over Jamie because of the strength of his feelings for me, I would be lying. I was shocked. How could she be so sure that he was so sure? Had he actually told her anything, or was she just going on what she had seen and what she knew of her brother's character?
"I saw the way he looked at you and the way he treated you at the Spurs match." She said, leaning back in her chair and not looking directly at me, but at some distant point somewhere behind me. "He trusts so few people, and the number he truly respects is even smaller. I have never seen him interact with anyone the way he is with you."
That was what scared me. Suddenly I had this incredible power that I didn't want and had no idea how to use. I felt pressure from everyone to be someone I wasn't. The public wanted a sleek, fashionable, charming, personable, not to mention British and posh-but-not-too-posh girlfriend for Jamie. Someone who could seamlessly fit into his life, but with a common touch. His family wanted him to settle down with a minimum of fuss and controversy so attention could be paid to Prince Richard, who was the actual heir, not Jamie.
But what did Jamie want? I wish I knew. Everyone around us wanted to know the details of our relationship. Everyone wanted the inside story. But what was the inside story? Here I was at lunch with his sister, and she was telling me about the depths of Jamie's tortured psyche—traits he apparently didn't even recognize in himself, and that I certainly hadn't seen yet in the month we'd known each other.
I felt manipulated. Is this what it's like to be in the royal inner circle? To have people constantly telling you other people's deepest secrets? To spend all your time building what might be trust, but could just as easily be the foundations for blackmail?
I like control. I like clarity. I like consistency. I'm okay with spontaneity as long as I know I should be feeling spontaneous. Yes, it may seem boring to those who live for excitement, but at my core I may be a boring person, and I accepted that in college when I carved out the role of "sober mama" to my hard-partying roommates. I'm responsible and competent, but competence is boring to the tabloids.
I returned to my office with a lot to think about, and knowing that I needed to talk to Jamie. Not just a pep-talk, but a long, hard talk about whether he and I could actually be a couple, because self-doubt was creeping into my psyche, and I wasn't sure I was the right actress for this role.
It was Friday evening, and I was wearing jeans and a cowl neck sweater. Jamie was coming over for the evening, and I was cooking dinner, followed by a very important date with my DVD player. He had never seen a Marx brothers movie. This was completely unacceptable. We would begin his education with "A Night At The Opera."
He knocked on the door just after 5:30. Rigby barked a few times, but I cooed at him, and he relaxed. I opened the door, and there he was. He looked so spectacular and so ordinary at the same time, and how he manages to do that, I still don't understand.
I moved aside to let him in, and he took a few steps into my living room. He had a backpack slung over his left shoulder, which I regarded with a raised eyebrow.
"That's a bit presumptuous."
He shrugged wordlessly, dropping the bag by the front door. He reached out for me, and wrapped his arms tightly around me.
"I missed you," he whispered into my hair.
"I missed you, too," I whispered into his neck.
He pulled away from me slightly, and leaned in to kiss me. His lips met mine gently and almost cautiously.
"Are you alright?" he asked.
"Yes, I'm fine." I replied.
"You just seem a little distant. Is there something you want to talk about?"
"No, I'm really okay. Come'ere."
I placed my hand on the back of his neck and pulled his head down to me and kissed him. It started off innocent enough, but it wasn't long before his hands slid down my body and ended up on my hips, holding me tight against him.
We fell backwards onto the couch—or, rather, I fell backwards and he fell forwards, landing on top of me. My arms were already around his neck, and I pulled him even closer to me. His weight was pressing down on me, but I didn't feel uncomfortable or trapped or anything like that— the pressure felt good.
He was so real. You see famous people in magazines and on TV and popping up all over the bloody internet, and while you know they're actual people with lives and feelings, they just seem like characters. They seem separated somehow.
This was so surreal. A few weeks ago, I'd been an anonymous, single, somewhat dour diplomat. But here I was, under the third in line to the throne. It was so simple, but so strange. I felt like my world had changed in the blink of an eye. Of the three and a half billion women on earth, why me? He could be with just about any woman he wanted to be with, so why was he here with me?
I pulled away long enough to offer a suggestion. "We might be more comfortable upstairs in, you know, my actual bed. This couch is kind of narrow."
"Yeah, you're right. Lead the way."
I wriggled out from under him and stood up, grabbing his hands and pulling him towards the stairs. And yes, as I climbed the stairs while holding both of his hands behind my back with lower torso at his face level, I may have definitely wiggled my hips a little more than usual.
Halfway up the stairs, I stopped and turned around to face him. I was a two steps higher than him, and being taller than him was a new sensation. I rested my hands on his shoulders and leaned down and kissed him. He wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me to him—he pulled me so close and so tight that he lifted me right off the stair. I gasped and wrapped my legs around his waist, and he carried me up the remaining stairs, which was not an easy feat, given the perils of balance and gravity on the stairs and the fact that we were still very much preoccupied with kissing each other.
"Where to now?" He asked at the top of the stairs.
"Keep going—second door on the left." I replied, my lips against his neck.
He pushed open the door to my bedroom and walked in, and over to my bed. He fell forward, dropping me on my back on the bed, landing on top of me.
"Close the door," I said, "I don't want the dog wandering in here."
He smiled, and quickly went and closed the door, scampering back.
He pushed down the cowl neck of my sweater by an inch or two, and leaned in and kissed my neck. I reached up and began to unbutton his shirt, and he began to slide my sweater up my torso, running his finger tips along my skin as he did it, which caused me to shiver as goose bumps rose on my skin.
It felt like hours, but at the same time, it was over far too quickly. It wasn't perfect—there were a few awkward collisions and a few false starts—but it was glorious. I tried to absorb every tiny detail. His hair, for once, looking legitimately messy, not sexy bedhead messy as usual. His soft lips against my neck. The weight of his body on mine. Our intertwined fingers, palms pressing against each other.
When we were done, we just lay there. We were a big pile of arms and legs and my hair was all over the place and the sheets were tangled around us, and we just lay there together, barely even saying a word. We just were. For a while, I even convinced myself that time didn't exist, and we could stay there with each other until we wanted to move, which would probably be never.
It just felt so right to be lying there with Jamie's arms around me, feeling his chest rise and fall as he breathed, his hand gently, absentmindedly playing with my hair. I dozed off for a while, only to be awoken by Jamie kissing my neck and jawline, softly saying my name.
"Hello there." He said, smiling at me.
I grunted attractively and rolled over so I was facing him. He pushed my hair back from my face. There was something new in his expression that did something strange to my heartbeat. All these damn bonding hormones were getting slightly out of hand. He was looking down at me with that damned slightly crooked smile of his that was so freaking cute and charming, but there was something in his eyes I'd never seen before—I don't want to flatter myself by saying adoration, but there was a tenderness and intimacy in the way he was looking at me, and I hoped that the way I was looking at him was giving him the same feelings he was giving me.
"How are you? Everything alright?"
Aw, someone wanted a performance review. I reached out and placed my hand on his chest.
"Are you kidding?" I asked him.
"I hope not," he replied.
"I am fantastic." I said.
He sighed in obvious relief, and kissed me. "I am so glad to hear that. I mean, you seemed to be enjoying yourself plenty, but it's always good to get confirmation."
"And how are you?" I asked.
He smiled at me. "I have never been better in my life."
I felt a blush rising in my pale cheeks, and hid my face in his neck. He squeezed his arms a little tighter around me. "Oh come now, no need to be shy, it's only me."
"I know, I'm just still getting used to… this. A prince in my bed."
He rolled his eyes. "Oh for heaven's sake. Can't the angst wait for at least a little while longer?"
"Who said it was angst?" I retorted.
He chuckled, and we fell into a comfortable silence. We were getting to that point that we felt secure enough with each other that we didn't feel it was necessary to be saying something groundbreakingly intelligent and insightful every second of the time we felt together. We were still in the honeymoon phase, don't get me wrong, and spending time with him was still a novelty that made me nervous, but it didn't terrify me like it had. What a difference a week makes.
However, as we lay there, we realized it was still the early evening, and as time crept closer to night, we realized that we wanted dinner, and that I needed to feed and walk Rigby.
Reluctantly, we hauled ourselves out of bed and got dressed, and went downstairs. I originally had had ambitions of cooking something fancy, but I realized that if I could save time by merely re-heating leftovers from last night, and spend that extra time in bed with my boyfriend, I didn't think either of us would mind.
I pulled some roast chicken out of the fridge, along with some rice and a salad. Boom. Dinner done.
I grabbed Rigby's food bowl, and got his food out and mixed it for him. He's surprisingly picky about his food. The wet and dry have to be mixed just so, and he has to have some kind of "people food" from the fridge, or he'll just sit there looking at the food in the bowl, and then looking at me as if to say "how could you forget, you neglectful human?"
Tonight, though, I got it right, and he ate as if he hadn't tasted food in a week. Meaning, just like every other meal I'd seen him eat in the year since I had adopted him.
When he was done eating, he came over to me and looked up at me with expectation.
"Ready for your walk, Rigs?" I asked him, petting him on the head and grabbing his leash from the hook by the door, as well as a few plastic bags. He wagged his tail, and let his tongue hang out. "I should warn you, Rigs, that this isn't going to be the longest walk ever."
"I'm taking the dog out," I said to Jamie, who was reading a copy of The New Yorker he had found on my coffee table.
"Ooh, may I come with you?"
I was skeptical. "And be seen with me in public?"
"Yes."
"Possibly in front of paparazzi."
"There aren't going to be paparazzi around here, especially at this time of day. And how long will this walk be? Ten minutes? Fifteen? We'll be fine."
I grabbed an old Red Sox cap off of the hook by the door and tossed it to him.
"Here. With that, you'll be less recognizable."
He grinned, and put the cap on. I snapped Rigby's leash on to his collar, grabbed my keys, and we set out.
As soon as I had locked my front door behind us and steered us towards Hyde Park, Jamie took my hand, and we walked hand in hand toward the Park. I wasn't even as nervous about paparazzi as I was about regular people with regular camera phones and a lack of respect for regular boundaries.
The walk didn't last long. We walked the few blocks to the Park, and maybe a few hundred feet along the edge of the Park, and then turned around and came home. We weren't set upon by hordes of cameras, but I did think I saw a few people do that thing they do when they see famous people but aren't sure if they should approach them. I was also pretty sure there were some camera phone pictures taken. Oh well.
Gone are the days of people nudging each other and whispering, "hey, is that…?" No, these days the internet cult of "pics or it didn't happen" means that any idiot with an iPhone and a Twitter account feels like it's their obligation to snap blurry photos of a couple taking a walk in the park and plaster them all over the internet.
If this relationship was going to last, I was going to have to get used to being watched all the time.
We returned to my house and threw the leftovers in the microwave. As I was getting plates and glasses out of the cabinet, Jamie came up behind me and wordlessly wrapped his arms around me from behind. I froze, and I almost melted. Yes, I know that that makes absolutely no sense. What I was feeling made even less sense. I leaned back against him, my eyes shutting. I could have him hold me forever. It was way, way too early in the relationship for the L word to be crossing my mind, but as we stood there in my kitchen, Jamie's arms around me, I couldn't get that word out of my mind as it came bubbling up.
"You know," I said softly.
"Mmm-hmm…" He replied, gently kissing my neck.
"Freddie has been pestering me all week about a leak confirming my identity. What do you think?"
"I think I really fancy you and I want you to feel comfortable with the direction this relationship is taking, that's what I think. If you want to stay officially anonymous, that's your right, but sometimes it's better to get ahead of the media and give them something to keep them occupied so they don't go digging."
"Alright." I said. "I'll call Freddie on Monday and tell him he can leak my name. But for tonight, it's just you and me."
We ate dinner sitting in a pile on the couch, our legs all tangled up together, nearly spitting our food out as more and more people crammed into the brothers' cabin.
"That woman really looks like my great-granny," Jamie said at one point.
"Somehow I don't think she would be caught dead with Groucho Marx's head landing in her lap."
"You're probably right, but she was always a surprising lady." He sighed. "She died only a year before Mum."
Jamie was at one end of the couch, and I was at the other, with our legs in a big tangle in between. It wasn't a very big couch, so he was able to have one of his arms wrapped around my leg, his hand resting on my inner thigh. It was an incredibly intimate gesture and moment, and I felt way more comfortable sitting on my couch with a prince's hand on my inner thigh than I ever thought I would.
When the movie was over, Jamie hoisted himself up and over, and came down on top of me.
"Shall we move this party upstairs?" He asked me.
"That has to be the stupidest sounding thing I have ever heard you say," I responded. "But yes, I would very much like to continue this upstairs. In fact, I will race you. Last one naked in the bed has to do everything the other says."
"I'm game!" he said, and stood up and ran for the stairs, unbuttoning his shirt as he went.
"Hey! You got a head start! No fair!"
I jumped up off the couch, just as Jamie pretended to trip over the first stair of the staircase, or, at least he claims he pretended to trip.
I took that window of opportunity and ducked past him, running up the stairs, pulling off my sweater as I ran. I unbuttoned my jeans at the top of the stairs and kicked them off as I ran down the hall to my bedroom, nearly tripping myself, with Jamie in hot pursuit. I dove into the bed while un-hooking my bra, and tossed my underwear on the floor.
"I win!" I exclaimed as Jamie appeared at the bedroom door. "Now get in here!"
"Yes, but I have to obey you, don't I?" He asked.
"Yes you do." I grabbed his hands. "And I say that we pick up exactly where we left off."
"And where was that?" he asked as he fell into my bed next to me.