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“But first, I need to protect Luke. He’s my best friend and Arabella fucked up tonight.” Rory swirls his glass, gazing deeply at the pale liquid. “I’ve been put in a difficult position, having to support him on a personal level without endorsing the choices his family has made. The rest of the world can’t help me navigate that. They see a prince or they see a fraud. But no one more than me seesLuke.”
Danny raises his pint to Rory’s. “To Luke,” he says quietly.
“To freedom,” Rory adds.
I pause, wondering what to toast. Something powerful, something true. But the words slip from my lips before the thought’s even half-formed in my head, and I find myself clinking my glass to theirs and declaring, “To us.”
Rory smiles at me. “Aren’t you a sentimental little saint when you’re drunk?”
“I’m not drunk,” I declare adamantly, trying to replay these words in my head and wondering if I actually just saidI’m dot nunk. Whatever I said, Rory laughs lightly, and it’s such a pretty, charming sound that all I want to do is make him laugh and laugh again.
As he takes another sip, his gaze slides back to the window. Through the blur of condensation, students in cocktail dresses and evening suits congregate outside. Rory releases a long-suffering sigh and, in a voice tinged with dejection, says, “I think our party’s about to be crashed.”
