I was glad we were headed to England so I could experience Edgar at home and at work, whatever the work of being a crown prince might consist of. I had no concept of what I might be in for, but I wasn’t dating just some bright, great-looking, promising new guy. It was more like having incredible sex with English history, and a key player in the English economy, and a controversial chapter in any book on queer representation, where Edgar’s mainstream status would be compared with the profiles of scrappier, embattled heroes. Which brought up the most critical and thought-provoking question of all: who would play me in the movie version, and in the sex scene on the royal jet, would there be frontal male nudity, and would I have approval of a body double?

I couldn’t wrap my brain around any of this, so I shut my eyes, put my hand on Edgar’s chest and fell gratefully asleep. We were awakened by the clunk of landing gear in operation and James tapping forcefully at the door, saying, without lowering his voice, “Stop groping one another, you repellent little sex rodents. We’re in England. There are laws.”

CHAPTER 17

And you’ve really never been to London?” Edgar asked as we were being driven from the airport and I’d rolled down my window to take in everything, like a basset hound tasting the breeze with his ears flapping.

“Not since I was seven years old, with my family. My parents wanted to make sure I appreciated everything, but all I remember is a blur of statues and brown buildings, and thinking the money was fake because it wasn’t American.”

Now I was devouring one landmark after another, the war memorials and department stores and curving rows of limestone townhouses; being a child of the Jersey suburbs, I was searching for Harry Potter getting swarmed by wraithlike Dementors, Julia Roberts dropping by a postcard-quaint Notting Hill, and any of the James Bonds zipping across London Bridge in an Aston Martin. I could hear my mom recounting the history of Hugh Grant’s hair and my dad treating the entire city as an illustrated lesson plan: “Did you know that Big Ben was silenced during the Blitz so the chimes wouldn’t attract Nazi warplanes?” Abby, of course, would be clutching a guidebook annotated in glittery hot pink magic marker with locations of bakeries, theaters, museums and the homes of Kate Winslet, Adele and Robert Pattinson, along with wherever Orlando Bloom went for a daily run.

I couldn’t decide if being with Edgar made me less of a tourist, or as if I was visiting Disney World with Walt himself, or if I’d become one of those fifteenth-century sheltered French or Austrian princesses being shipped overseas to make a politically expedient marriage.