“I love you.”

He’d said it. Said the words. Simone held her breath and counted to fifteen, before spewing that breath all over Cauley. She didn’t even try to contain her laughter.

“Oh, Caul, please. Oh!” She had to close her eyes to block the vision of his reddening face. “Oh, no, you did not just say that.”

Shaking with the effort to stay her response, she turned her back to him and pressed one hand to her middle, the other to her forehead. Over stifled giggles, she heard the sounds of his cigarette case and the silver lighter, then the spongy crackle of the paper igniting with his first draw.

“Okay, okay.” She sucked in a breath. “Okay. Stopping… stopping. Stopping.”

She turned back to Caulfield, who now wouldn’t look at her.

“Caul, I’m sorry. Really I am. Really. But… really, Caul?”

He fiddled with his lighter, running the pads of his fingers over the raised crest, then thumbing it open and closed, before taking another long drag.

“What do you want me to say?” she asked.

Caulfield cupped his hand over his elbow, supporting his arm, and turned to the window. He took another puff off his Dunhill.

“I mean, I know what you want me to say. I mean, I think I know.”

She exhaled and raised her eyes to the ceiling, wishing it had the answers. In her experience, it never did.

“I do,” she said. “I do know. What you want me to say. But Baby? Caul?”

Simone stepped around the coffee table, stopping only when she saw his eyes flick to the left, away from her. She pretended to take in the view of the rowhouses across the street, same as he was.

“Come on, Cauley. Your parents? And Mims? And school? All of that? I mean what we have, it’s… it’s great, it is, you know that. You know I know that. But how? I mean, I’m not… I mean, what would they say?”

He flipped the hair out of his eyes. She loved his hair, medium-length black with a few overdyed bits of orange. It was a scene style she’d never be able to get her hair to do, ever. Simone edged a bit closer, but Caulfield said nothing, just puffed away.

“You don’t care what they say. I know. I do. But I care. I mean, I don’t care what they think about me. I care what they think about you. And I’m not saying… I mean, I want us. I do. But Caul?”

He was halfway down on his smoke. She had three, maybe four more minutes at the outside, before he stubbed it out and picked up his peacoat and his scarf and left. Simone smirked. That scarf had come from Gieves & Hawkes and was worth more than everything in her entire closet. He’d settled it carefully around her neck one night at the cinema—she’d been cold—and days later, Mims had congratulated her on Caulfield’s exquisite taste in gifts. The quoted price tag was expensive, all right, but she hadn’t let it faze her too much. Then she remembered she had to convert the sum from pounds to dollars. It had taken her minutes to get the numbers right in her head. Horrified, she’d returned the scarf straightaway, hanging it up on his coat rack where she figured he kept it.

And afterwards, she’d told herself it didn’t matter if he had expensive clothes, because she and Caulfield spent most of their time naked anyway.

“Caul, look. It’s not you, it’s me. I know that. I do.” She tried a placating tone.

Even if she wanted to go with him, and stay with him, she didn’t have the right clothes or the right jewelry, and especially not the right shoes. That one, no one had had to tell her: she’d figured it out all on her own over winterhols. Cauley had invited the lot of them back to Severn Hall and she’d been fine with the ancient old house, charmed even, until the first night at supper.

They didn’t have footmen in Tangier, Virginia.

She honestly hadn’t known who he was until then. Until then, he’d just been one of the gang, one of the lads. They both had a passion for the cinema, except she called it the movies, and more and more, they’d found themselves together, skipping class to go to one art house or another, until one afternoon, he slipped her hand into his during their second viewing of Les enfants du paradis.

In that moment, they’d become more than just friends.

It wasn’t until hours later, after the sun had set outside the windows of her tiny flat and after their first and second times together—her first and second times ever—that they’d even begun telling each other the rudiments of their lives before. They lay twined around each other, him stroking the small of her back and her playing with strands of his hair, and neither one of them moving much, because any movement made the pooled wetness beneath them cold and disagreeable. If they didn’t move, everything stayed warm, and agreeable.

She was on scholarship. He was just there because it kept the old man in line. Her only family was an older step-sister who had never gone to college and had two of her own, each with a different father, to worry about. His father only cared about gardening and spent all his time working in the out of doors. His mother stayed with friends, mostly, in town. His older sister, Miriam, she’d already met, but had thought the two of them were just close friends. She hadn’t even recognized the resemblance till after he’d told her.

Months later had come the trip to Severn Hall and all of the truth. That first night at dinner, on her way down the many flights of stairs, Mims had hissed at her from above to come back up. Mims had pulled her into a room, and clucking to herself in her clipped accent throughout, had Simone out of her vintage buffalo-check buckle-pants and into some stockings with a seam up the back and a short, full black skirt puffy with layer upon layer of soft tulle. Her thrift-shop angora sweater was deemed acceptable only when Mims stretched it with both hands, to show off her shoulders. It would never bounce back. Her trademark kohl eyeliner was wiped off, then redone with a lighter touch, at which point Simone had officially had enough. She had reached back for her boots, an Army-Navy Surplus bargain, but Mims batted them away, insisting she put on a pair of real heels. Louboutins, she’d said, knowingly.

Simone had felt ridiculous even before she tried to walk in them.

She felt ridiculous trying not to break her neck going down the stairs, she’d felt ridiculous when a man she’d never seen before shouted out her name as she wobbled into the dining room (a dining room bigger than her high-school cafeteria back in Tangier), she’d felt ridiculous to be seated at such a large table, and ridiculous when she’d wondered if Cauley or his father, the gardener she’d met earlier, were going to get in trouble for allowing a party with his friends while the owners of this house were away.

And the ridiculousness of all that was nothing compared to the humiliating realization that aside from her, everyone in that room had known, the entire time, that Cauley was Caulfield George Harding-Weston, Viscount Severn.

They didn’t have Viscounts in Tangier, either. Or dressing for dinner. They didn’t even have a bank. You had to take the ferry over to Onancock for that. Or Reedville.

“Cauley, please. If I say that to you, does it change anything? Because you know, you do. You know how it is for me.”

She looked over to him, then back out the window, trying to see what he was seeing, trying to see inside his head.

“It’s never been this way for me with anyone else, you know that, don’t you? Do you?”

Simone stepped to the window, close enough to see her breath condense into fog upon it. She wanted to inscribe a heart there with her fingertip.

Of course it hadn’t been that way with anyone else.

Tangier was so small there were only eight others in her graduating class, and two of them were related to each other. Familiarity bred, well, familiarity, and none of the boys in Tangier excited her near as much as the hunky Ryan Golds or Kyle Andersons she could watch on DVD whenever she’d wanted.

She’d let Shane Crockett kiss her one time after a game, to test her theory. Comparatively speaking, she’d decided she wasn’t missing much.

Simone’s scores had gotten her a scholarship to the College of William and Mary. She’d been assigned to Spotswood, the worst of the dorms, and so had hung out a lot in Dupont, where at least there was air conditioning. All her hanging about had given the wrong signal to a dyke named Annemarie, and so for about 45 seconds, Simone had been a lesbian.

She hated to be rude, but she couldn’t go through with it.

She’d been a lot more careful after that, with students of both genders. And then she’d been accepted to the Modern and Medieval Languages program at Cambridge.

And then, she’d met Cauley. And only because their last names were alphabetical, she reminded herself. Walton. Weston. He was beautiful and smart and funny, with girls lining up just to be near him, though to be fair, even before they were together, she’d never seen him pay any of them any mind.

“Baby? Caul? It’s perfect just the way it is. Don’t you think? I do, don’t you?”

Of course it was a cliché (she’d watched enough DVDs and read enough books to know), but that fall, she’d found herself counting the minutes until she could see him again, watch him again. She’d chosen Italian because of the way it sounded and Russian for the challenge of a new alphabet, and he’d chosen the same, but for different reasons. He already spoke Italian fluently, and Russian was as late in the day as you could go, unless you wanted to take Portuguese. So twice a day, every day, she took her seat in front of him, wondering if he appreciated curves on a woman.

And every time she heard him say some ridiculously constructed sentence in Italian, she had to close her eyes and remember to breathe.

It wasn’t like that for her with anyone else, because she’d been wet and ready for him from the moment she’d first heard him speak.

Simone lowered herself to the papasan chair next to the window and dropped her head into her hands.

“You’re not saying anything.” She looked up, wishing he’d bring the flat grey of his irises down to her. “You’re not. I mean, you don’t need to. Because… because you’ve already said it all. Right?”

She laughed weakly and ran her fingers through her hair, then stood, and waited while Cauley bent to ash into a can of Diet Coke. She hoped it was the empty one, and not the one she’d been working on when he’d arrived. Unlike home, here, Diet Cokes cost a fortune.

“Look, Caul, I just… I just don’t know what those words mean. Do you? Do you know? Because…”

Because on a small island, population 604, there wasn’t a lot of happy-ever-after. Point of fact, there wasn’t any. Simone couldn’t name a pair who’d been happy or stayed happy, unless you counted Amy Milford and Del Canton, who’d been married to others for more than fifteen years but had been seeing each other on and off since the night of Amy’s sister’s wedding.

And she’d been happy, so happy, with Caulfield—as long as she ignored who he was.

It was the only way she knew how to manage it.

To think of it in other terms: naïve girl from a podunk town comes to England to study and meets Prince Charming, who promptly falls in love with her despite her background and her bearing? The only thing keeping that scenario from being a cliché was that it only ever happened in the movies. It never, ever actually happened in real life.

She’d been standing to his side, waiting for him to finish his smoke, because even though she didn’t want him to leave without her, she wanted him to hug her one last time before he did.

He leaned down to crush the butt of the Dunhill into the aluminum of the can, then drop it tenderly through the opening. Then he turned fully to face her, close enough that she could feel her hair move when he exhaled. Simone tilted her head up to his, seeking his calm, his touch.

Caulfield leaned down to clasp her hand, then, with his other hand, swept the hair away from her eyes and tucked it back behind her ear. He smiled, wistfully, then dipped his lips to meet hers.

“You can’t kiss this away, Cauley… Baby… ohhhh.”

She spoke around his kisses, but only because part of her knew it was up to her to resist.

His mouth was perfect. His lips were full, almost as full as hers. He slipped the tip of his tongue, pointed, just between her lips, and she took him in gently, leading him deeper. His hand pulled hers around his back, under the hem of his shirt, so her fingertips touched smooth, warm skin. His hands, now freed, went around her, one up to the back of her neck and the other down to cup her rounded ass, squeezing and pulling and lifting, pressing himself into her, until she was panting softly with him.

“What happens if I say it, Caul? Does it stay just like today? Or different??”

He focused his kisses on the sensitive points of her neck, just below her ear and at the hollow of her throat.

“Better. Ohh, it gets better. I see. I do.”

She fought the urge to wrap one long leg around him. He lifted his head even with hers, so that their eyes were level. She’d never seen eyes like his before. She’d never known eyes could be grey.

They’d spoken about the future, conceptually, at least. It had been early on, one of those movie afternoons where they’d ended up in her bed. She’d told him her observation, that love and coupledom couldn’t coexist. His perspective was that money always trumped love. And then he’d volunteered that love, for him, was permanent. Binding. That he’d never been in love, but if he were, it would be irreversible. Forever.

She’d teased him at this, telling him she was the girl and even she didn’t believe that stuff.

And he’d turned to her. He’d raised himself on one elbow and looked down at her, until the unmistakable message in his eyes forced her to admit the truth, if only to herself.

She’d had to look away. She’d never believed in that kind of love. But, with Caulfield looking at her like that, she’d wanted to.

Now he stared at her, just watching. Waiting. Knowing, and waiting for her to know, too.

“You know this would change everything, don’t you? Everything. I know you do. Even I do.”

The corner of his mouth twitched, and he nodded, once. Simone closed her eyes. She parted her lips to speak, sighing, and Caulfield squeezed her sharply. Her eyelids flipped open, and he exhaled through his nose, nodding so slightly she might have imagined it.

“I know, Cauley. I do. I know.”

Simone met his gaze and let herself fall, for the first and very last time.