Which makes no sense. This is a fake relationship. Elizabeth’s opinion of Leo shouldn’t matter. Whether she approves of him, whether she sees what I see in him, whether she?—
Wait. WhatIsee in him?
I shove that thought aside and focus on the orchids.
Elizabeth pauses in front of a display of white star-shaped orchids with impossibly long spurs trailing beneath them.
“Ah, Angraecum sesquipedale,” she says, and then turns to me with an expectant look. “Archie, darling, remind me of the significance?”
And there it is. I should have seen this coming.
Elizabeth has known me since I was a child asking uncomfortable questions at dinner parties. She gave me Pridgeon’s four-volumeGenera Orchidacearumfor my twelfth birthday because she knew I’d actually read it.
She’s not going to let me play dumb tonight.
I feel Leo’s attention sharpen beside me.
“It’s, ah, Darwin’s orchid,” I say, trying to keep my voice light. Like this is just trivia I picked up somewhere. “He predicted a pollinator with a tongue long enough to reach the nectar at the bottom of the spur. People thought he was mad.”
“And?” Elizabeth prompts.
Dammit.
“And…about twenty-five years after his death, they discovered the Morgan’s sphinx moth, which had a twenty-centimeter proboscis. Exactly as he predicted.”
Leo’s openly staring at me now.
“It’s one of the most elegant examples of coevolution,” Elizabeth adds, looking satisfied. “The orchid and the moth, each shaping the other across millennia. Archie wrote me arather brilliant essay on orchid pollination strategies when he was twelve.”
Shit.
I feel the familiar tension, the one that comes from being caught between two versions of myself.
There’s the Archibald Elizabeth knows.
And there’s the Archie Leo knows. The cheerful guy who throws children’s parties, walks dogs, and definitely doesn’t have opinions about the mathematics of pollinator specificity.
I can’t be both at once. Or rather, I’ve learned not to be. Because being both at once is how you overwhelm people. So you’ve got to pick the version that fits the room and commit to it.
But tonight, I guess I’m going to have to try to be some kind of combination.
“I was a strange child,” I say quickly. “Very into biology. It was a phase.”
“You had a phase where you wrote essays about evolutionary biology?” Leo’s voice is carefully neutral.
“Everyone needs a hobby.”
“Most twelve-year-olds choose sports. Or video games.”
“I think I was just fascinated by the way orchids manipulate things to get what they want,” I say.
Leo’s forehead crumples into a frown. “How do they do that?”
I try to work out how to say it simply so I don’t raise his suspicions more.
“Some orchids trick pollinators into thinking they’re mates. They mimic female insects with their shape, scent, everything. The male tries to copulate with the flower and ends up covered in pollen instead.”
“So it’s sexual deception.” Leo’s eyes don’t leave mine.
