I stand there, disoriented, and not just because he carts around a grungy backpack rather than a sleek leather briefcase. His voice isn’t the crisp English accent I expected. It’s earthy and coarse and all too familiar.
CHAPTER TEN
“You’reAmerican?” I ask, falling clumsily into the seat beside him as the bus lurches forward.
It sounds like an accusation, and it is. Of all the scenarios I dreamed up, never once did I entertain the idea that my English prince might turn out to be an American imposter.
I’m praying I might’ve misheard him, might’ve wrongly detected the accent. As if to balance out my oversized eyes, my ears are extra small, and I’m far more perceptive with sight than with sound.
But my vision starts to betray me too.
Alexander smiles again—a big, flappy thing that feels offensively friendly. His mouth stretches so wide that his gums show through. It’s so different from the subtle and sophisticated mannerisms I’d imagined. The longer I look at Alexander, the more things are visibly off.
His features aren’t nearly as refined as they’d appeared to be from afar. His nose, though well shaped in profile form, is wideand sprawling from the front, and his hair isn’t coiffed after all. He simply has a cowlick he hasn’t outgrown. His skin is pastier than I’d thought—sand-colored rather than olive—and spidery blue veins show through around his temples. The clean-cut look I’d adored strikes me as too boyish close up, and I doubt he could grow a beard even if he wanted to. He’s probably at least a couple years younger than I am, and smaller framed than I’d thought too—still decently tall but in a gangly sort of way. More honey toned than brown, his wide-set eyes lack that deep, broody resonance I’d loved so much.
I want to look away so the scene will cease to crumble, but it’s impossible to stop staring.
“Guilty as charged,” Alexander says. Only it’s becoming all too clear that he’s not Alexander at all. Not in voice or demeanor or name or anything else. “You’re American too?”
I nod, too overcome by the letdown to formulate actual words. But then I persevere onward, determined to at least get the answers I came here for. “Have we met before?” I ask.
I want him to be the one to say it. To admit that he recognizes me. That he’s been staring at me through the window, imagining our life together too.
He seems to be racking his brain, wiggling his mouth from side to side in a goofy posture of contemplation. There’s a pronounced dimple in his cleft chin that adds a look of softness to his whole face. “Hmm, don’t think so?” he says. “Have we?”
The worst part is that I get the unshakable sense he’s being genuine. There’s none of the intimacy I felt through the window. None of the chemistry that hints at all the history we have together.
Could he have just been absentmindedly looking outside all those mornings, and I was so desperate for someone to see me thatI convinced myself he did? Why did I ever think it was a good idea to get on this bus? How could I have ever actually believed all that nonsense about him and us?
It’s my fault, but I’m in no mood to carry the blame, so I push the brunt of it onto him. Why would he give such misleading signals? And why is he even in London at all? Why couldn’t he have stayed back in America and cleared a space for an actual Englishman to sweep me off my feet?
It’s one big faff, as Jules would say. I want to whine and pout and curl back under my duvet in bed. I wish I could dial back time and cradle the innocent crush against my chest and keep it there forever without ever subjecting it to the cruelty of Real Life.
“Yeah, guess we haven’t met,” I falter, feeling like I’m stuck in a bad dream. It’s too mundane of an interaction to qualify as a nightmare, and somehow that makes it more difficult to bear. The normalcy of it all.
From a purely objective perspective, his looks are still above average, but combined with his laid back, overly affable mannerisms, his attractiveness score has plummeted.
Giving me his full attention, he closes his magazine, and the cover sends another jolt of displeasure my way. It is not, in fact,The Economist, but rather a comic book, featuring cartoon foxes in capes and goggles.
“Ah yup,” he says, following my gaze to the dreadful magazine. “I’m kind of a nerd. More than ‘kind of,’ actually.” He lets out an easy laugh. It’s light and breezy, without any of the gravitas I’d yearned for. “I’m a teacher, and this is what all the seven-year-old British kids are reading, so I’m trying to be quasi-relevant.”
I have the deflated sensation of sinking even farther down into my seat. It’s almost like I’m having an out-of-body experience, looking down from above, watching my painstakingly preened self physically shrink on the spot. The man who once melted me in the most romantic of ways is now making me dissolve into a polluted pool of disillusion.
He’s a school teacher who likes comics? Could he be any farther from a well-heeled political figure who spends his commute reading up on world events?
The juxtaposition slaps me, and I can almost hear a cold voice cackling up in the clouds as Cupid’s adversaries rejoice in my misery.
“How ’bout you?” he asks. “Where’re you from, and what’re you up to in London?”
His accent reminds me of my family. I’m not sure if it’s just that I haven’t spoken to another American for a little while, so all the dialects sound the same, or if he’s from the Midwest too. To be honest, I’m not at all curious to find out. I’m too busy feeling sorry for myself and sorry about how this whole fiasco is unfolding.
“Moved here for work,” I answer curtly. “Was in Boston and New York before this, and a bunch of other places.”
“Ah, so you’re used to city life?” he says, not seeming to pick up on my icy tone, or perhaps just bulldozing through, convinced he can crack my shell. “I moved from small-town Michigan, so it’s been a bit of a shock.”
I wait for the punch line. It doesn’t come. This is it, the final blow. My aristocrat from Oxford is actually a school teacher from Michigan.
It would be a small consolation to find some amusement in all this, but I simply don’t have the stomach for it. Still, I can’t just sit here and not say anything. It was basically instilled in me from the cradle that you can’t run into someone else from Michigan and not make the connection.
