Page 71 of Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay

“Um,” said Bridget. “Your hair is long again.”

“Thanks,” said Arthur. “No, that was good actually. It’s taken forever.”

“Arthur had weird cards,” Gwen whispered behind his back, as he leaned forward to pick up a cup of tea.

“I can hear you,” he snapped. “They weren’t weird cards. Three of Swords. Grief and hurt, apparently, in all its lovely forms. My mother died. My father was… bilge. What’s new.”

“And then he got The World,” said Gwen. “Which is apparently bad, for some reason.”

“She said it means completion. A full circle. A full circle ofwhat? I don’t want to go back to where I started. I’m trying to move on. I don’t want circles. Fie, circles!”

“Maybe it was about your hair,” Bridget offered, wondering if this would work a second time.

“Shut up, Leclair. I wanted something good. The day is ruined.”

“Stop being a bastard,” said Gwen. “You’ve been moping for days.”

“I’ve been riding around on a horse following your brother all over the place for nearly amonth. I’m allowed!”

“You wanted to be a knight.”

“Oh, great, takehisside.”

“I’m not taking anyone’sside,” Gwen said, with such volume that some nearby guards looked over, then pretended they hadn’t. “Has it ever occurred to you that it might be quite difficult for me to be in the middle of all this? I have my own problems, Arthur! I don’t need to be constantly dealing with both youandhim, because you’re both too foolish to—”

“Whoa,” Bridget said quickly. “Hey. Come on.”

Gwen twisted to look at her, incandescent. “But he’s being—”

“What?” Arthur hissed. “I’m beingwhat?”

“You— You’re—”

“I know,” Bridget said. “But let’s take a walk.”

She took Gwen by the arm, gently pulling her away and across the camp, only stopping to nudge Sidney and tilt her head in Arthur’s direction.

When she and Gwen were alone, standing by one of the lone trees scattered across the hillside, Bridget said, “You were right, but he looked like he might be about to cry.”

“Ugh.” Gwen leaned against the tree and immediately began to strip bark from it as viciously as she’d once attacked her own fingernails. She looked thinner than she had when they set out from Camelot, last vestiges of softness worn away.

She’d been doing too much. Helping to run the country, this tour, dealing with her own grief, supporting GabrielandArthur, and… whatever was going on with Bridget. That wasn’t what Bridget wanted to be—another problem, a burden. A spinning plate. She wanted to be relief. Lightness. Unburdening.

“Hey,” she said. “When this is over, why don’t you come to Drakesease?”

Gwen had visited once, back in April. Bridget’s parents hadn’t known the precise nature of their relationship, but she suspected they had long guessed her general inclinations, and decided to say nothing about it. The summer Bridget had spent pursuing, courting, and then sulking over a neighboring lord’s daughter—Freya, blond, funny, and sharp-tongued, married too young to a man she’d barely met—probably hadn’t gone unnoticed.

Her father had been too quiet, verging on silent, but had listened intently to everything Gwen said at the dinner table while she daintily devoured fish grilled on a bed of jasmine rice and fragrant lemongrass soup. After Gwen complimented Bridget’s mother on her necklace, she’d taken it off and immediately given it to her, leading to lots of embarrassing refusals and insisting—but on the whole, it had gone rather well, as long as they all ignored the strangeness of the Princess of England visiting the household of a minor lord alone and on an apparent whim.

The next day they’d ridden down to Brighthelmstone disguised by heavy cloaks to eat sugary doucets and drink spiced cider at the market, Bridget kissing the sweetness from Gwen’s lips when nobody was watching, and then continued farther down the coast. Gwen had already been stressed, and Bridget thought the sea might do her some good.

It had. In the small, coved beach Bridget had visited withher father as a child, peppered with rocks as tall as people but empty of any other human company, Gwen had stripped down to her chemise, tied the skirt up out of the way, and gone to paddle in the sea.

“It’s so cold,” she’d said, frowning down at her own pale feet, and then a crab had scuttled too close for comfort, making her slip and gasp—so Bridget had picked her up and carried her back to dry land, Gwen protesting and laughing the entire way.

“Funny. He doesn’t know he just scuttled over a princess,” Bridget said as she eased Gwen down onto the shore, and Gwen snorted, wringing seawater from the hem of her slip.

“Why should he care? He might be king of the crabs, for all we know.”