Page 4 of The Good Duke
Taken too soon, she’d been stolen by a sore throat that had become an unrelenting fever, and now he’d lose Persephone, and there’d only be his father.
But parents—they were not friends. Not in the same way. The connection a parent shared with a child was forged by blood. But Persephone? She’dchosenhim. She’d been the only person to choosehimas a friend and confidante. Life for a bullied fellow was bleak; he couldn’t fathom the desolateness of a world without her.
Sweat popped up on his entire body.
“They don’t mean it,” she said simply, recalling his attention back from the swift spiral of panic he’d found himself trapped in.
Perplexed, Simon stared dumbly at her.
“The terrible things our fathers are saying,” Persephone explicated. “They’re just angry because I saw your penis.”
There’d been many times throughout the course of Simon’s life when he’d felt the all-too-cruel sting of humiliation.
At age eight, a pair of bullies in the parish had given him chase. When they inevitably caught Simon, they’d shoved him onto his arse in the middle of a muddy puddle and then forced him to march through the village. All the while, they’d spread the lie that Simon had shite his trousers.
But this? Hearing Persephone talk about his—
“Why do you look so distressed, Simon?” Persephone asked. With her sketch pad in hand, she gestured back and forth between them. “You and I aren’t prim.”
The long-running jest between him and her—that play on Simon’s future title—now fell flat.
Because this of all times, with their friendship about to be severed, was hardly a time for quips.
Frowning, Persephone sat up straighter. “I don’t like you like this.”
“And how am I?” he asked between gritted teeth.
“Uptight and aloof and short.” Persephone slapped her book closed and set it down hard on the bench. “We have doneeverythingtogether.”
He slammed his hat down so hard it promptly tumbled onto the floor, forgotten. “We have not done every—”
“We took our first steps together, discovered the Great Bard together.” Persephone ticked each item off with a finger. “We learned to ice skate, throw snowballs. We shared our first kiss, and both agreed it wasdisgusting.”
She’dthought so. Enough so that all these years later, she still emphasized that latter word.He, on the other hand, had concurred but silently marveled at the feel and taste of a girl’s mouth. That secret would someday follow Simon deep into his grave.
“Furthermore, we’ve both been naked in front of one another before,countlesstimes, Simon.”
“Surely you’re not likening what happenedtodayto when we were babes in the nursery, stripping out of our garments and cutting them up into different shapes?” he asked disbelievingly.
“A penis is a penis is a penis.”
“Shhh,” he whispered, slapping a finger against his mouth. He glanced over at the door, more than half-expecting both of their fathers to storm the hall and bring their fight out to Simon and Persephone. “Stop saying…thatword.”
“Should we give it a different name so onlyweknow what we’re speaking about?”
“No,” he bit out that single syllable. “We should decidedly n—”
“Gerald,” she said.
Simon glanced about for the man named Gerald, except he knew all the people she knew, and none of them bore the name Gerald. “Who?”
Persephone leaned up, cupped a palm around her mouth, and whispered, “If they intend to censor our speech, we shall find a way around it.”
Oh, for the love of all things holy.
And wonder of wonders, his prayers continued to go unheeded.
“Gerald is and will always be Gerald, Simon. Regardless of how old he is, he’s the same, and so you needn’t feel…embarrassed by me seeing y—” Persephone stumbled and then swiftly corrected herself. “Gerald.” She paused. “Not that helooksthe same.”
