Page 29 of Royal Crush

Gripping him by the trembling ankles, and with the help of his impossibly strong arms, we managed to get his body horizontal on the cushions. I let my legs drape along his sides and pulled his feet into my lap, then used the strongest grip I had to work at his muscles.

They were like stone. Trembling and small and almost impossible to manipulate. It was like everything was worked into a compact charley horse, and my fingers barely sank into his skin. But as I worked up and down, my forearms and hands burning with the effort, the trembling began to slow.

And eventually, after what felt like forever, his legs began to unclench. His feet, which had been pointed sharply down,relaxed. In his socks, I could see the tops of his feet to his toes were swollen, and I wondered if that was a side effect of his injury. The rest of his legs were so thin.

“Ask,” he grunted. “I can see it on your face.”

I sighed. I was still rubbing because he hadn’t asked me to stop, and frankly, I didn’t want to. There was something inherently soothing about holding him like this, but I had no idea why. “Does it hurt?”

“Yes. It’s not the kind of pain you’d understand though. I have absolutely no sensation below my injury line.”

“Do you feel hungry?”

He laughed a little and rolled his eyes. “Yeah. I feel hungry.”

“Can you feel when you need to piss?

At that, his cheeks went very ruddy pink. “No. We went through a lot of toddler-level pants-pissing days before it was decided I would have a permanent catheter. But if there’s a blockage and nothing’s coming out, my body has a super-fun way of letting me know my bladder is too full.”

I stared at him, afraid to ask for the answer because he was open right now, and I didn’t want to ruin that.

“My blood pressure goes haywire, my heart goes crazy, and I pass out.”

“Fuck.”

He laughed again, though not as intensely. “Good word for it. It’s all pretty fucked.”

The last four words startled me. I hadn’t been expecting him to say that, but I tried to hide it.

“What?” he pressed. Apparently, my poker face was total trash when it came to this man.

“I’m not used to you saying that any of this sucks.”

“That’s because I never say it where people can hear me. But just wait until you know me for longer. You’ll know exactly how I feel about a lot of things.” He grunted as he pressed his handsinto the sofa cushion and pulled away from me. He took one leg at a time, bending them at the knee so he could sit up higher. They flopped to the sides, heavy and motionless, and a small part of me wanted to know what it felt like.

The bigger part of me didn’t.

“Look,” Camillo said from behind a sigh, “itdoessuck. Most of us who have spine injuries don’t talk about that part out loud. At least, not with people who haven’t been there. Our reality is most people’s worst nightmares. I’ve literally had people tell me that they’d rather kill themselves than be in my shoes.”

“Christ,” I blurted.

His smile was a little bitter, but not entirely. “Most of the time, when people like us are portrayed on a TV show or a movie or a book—whatever—it’s tragic. It’s some angry, sad sack of shit lamenting how horrible his life is. Every now and again, you get some story where a quirky, doesn’t-know-she’s-pretty girl comes along and turns his world upside down. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes the guy dies anyway because why the fuck would you want to see one of us have a happy life, right?”

I grimaced because I knew it was true. But in my research, I knew that a good percentage of people living with spinal injuries had spouses and families and jobs and hobbies. A lot like Camillo.

Well, maybe not like Camillo. I’d never met anyone like him before, but that was for other reasons.

“In the past, princes who were hurt the way I was get shuffled off to some asylum or…I don’t know…a private island to live their life in secret so the rest of the country can forget that it can happen to us too. My parents didn’t make all the right choices when it came to me, but letting me live my life the way I want was the best gift they could give me after the accident.”

“They seem like good people.”

“I love them,” he said. It was weird to hear someone talk about the king and queen like they were average humans, but I supposed if you compared DNA, they were just people. “They’d spent so much time focusing on my brother that when I got hurt, they didn’t know what to do with me. They’d prepared themselves for some rebel, you know? An angry teen who wanted to make waves because he wasn’t getting enough attention.”

“Were you ever that?”

Camillo’s lips twitched. “That might have been why I was reckless when kissing a boy that day. But, ah…I hadn’t planned on being a total rebel. I wanted to travel and take photos in nature and maybe write a little. I think they could have handled that. But instead, they had to learn how to handle the first openly gay member of the royal family who was also the first disabled one in…two centuries, I think? Maybe three?”

I ran my fingers through my hair as I tried to recall my history lessons, but I wasn’t sure we’d ever studied anything like that.

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