The Frog Prince (19 page)

“Excuse me, excuse me,” I say, inching sideways past the hostess and a horde of servers bunched into the cramped vestibule.

Roman sees me as soon as I gain the sidewalk. He says something in what sounds like German and snaps his phone closed.

“Is everything okay?” I say.

“Everything’s fine,” he says, his smile not quite erasing the worried look in his eyes.

“Patrick and Mary say you’ve been acting weird all day. Who’re you talking to?”

“My mother,” he says.

“Is she okay?”

He barks a short laugh. “In a manner of speaking.”

I cross my arms, already missing the heat of the fireplace down below. “I thought you wanted to go off the grid this week, keep our cell phones off so we could enjoy the vacation?”

He breathes in deeply and exhales a gust of white as his breath hits the cold air. “You’re right, I’m sorry,” he says, grinning sheepishly. “I let myself get caught up in one of my mother’s dramas.” He pushes a button on his phone and holds it down. A few seconds later the lights on it go off. He hands it to me. “Here, you hold it for me. It’ll keep me honest.”

I take the phone, still bewildered as he grabs my free hand and pulls me back into the restaurant. The six or so assembled employees suddenly remember somewhere important they’re supposed to be and scatter.

Roman stops at the hostess stand. “Go back downstairs,” he says in my ear. “I’m going to talk to the manager, see if they can get their staff under control.”

I nod and walk towards the stairs.

“
Sprechen Sie Deutsches?
” I hear him say in a low voice to the hostess. I round the wall of the staircase and move out of earshot.

I’ll give him this: whatever he said seems to have worked. Not only do we not see any staff other than our server for the rest of the night, we don’t see
anyone
else. Once the diners already seated in the lower vault leave they’re not replaced. By the time we’ve worked our way through a second bottle of wine, we’re the only ones in the entire room.

“This is kind of nice,” says Patrick, his voice muffled as he chews another lingonberry Swedish meatball. Out of all the dishes, we agree that the meatballs are the night’s real hit, and have told our server to just keep ‘em coming.

“Being nobody apparently has its privileges,” says Roman with a wry smile.

“Hey,
I’m
nobody, and they never clear out a restaurant for me.”

“What about that one time you told them you had a bomb?” says Mary.

“Yeah, I guess there was that.”

I chortle happily. The wine and fire have warmed me right up.

Roman leans back in his chair, stretching his arms out behind him. One of them lands over my shoulders. “We should get going,” he says, squeezing my arm.

“What’s wrong with being fashionably late?” I mumble as Mary gathers up her purse and bag from underneath the table. I reluctantly follow suit.

“It’s just a couple of blocks,” says Roman. “Besides, you’d be the first to complain if we missed any of the dancing.”

“Yeah, but that’s because I have to keep moving to stay warm.”

We leave the restaurant without any more commotion. Roman is calmer now, and I make a mental note to ask him later what has his mother’s panties in such a bunch. Giving me his cell phone was the best thing he’s done all week.

The venue is another eighteenth century renovated gingerbread house, the walls of the first two floors being knocked out completely to create one large, high-ceiling ballroom. Even from the expansive lobby I can feel the humidity that lies beyond the row of doors into the ballroom, a result of sweaty dancers and windows that were painted shut centuries before. Industrial-sized fans have been set all week in front of open fire exits in an effort to pull in the cold winter air, and prevent the dancers from spontaneously combusting.

“Hey, guys!”

I turn around to see Shea waving to us from the ballroom doors, her partner, Doug, following behind her with a rolling metal clothing rack full of shirts, pants, and jackets. A bag of shoes hangs from one of the hangers.

Rolling a week’s worth of clothing through the door of a ballroom like a supermodel prepping for the catwalk was exactly the type of spectacle that used to amuse me. No more. My own bag has three outfits–including bras and panties–and three pairs of shoes. After three or four high-speed dances, you’re soaked with sweat from your scalp to the soles of your feet. Either you stand around all night feeling like you’ve taken a shower with your clothes on and just let the body odor bacteria consume you, or you make peace with enough costume changes to make a diva blush.

The six of us move through a hand-shaking/hug rotation.

“You guys staying all night?” says Doug, grinding one of his knuckles into one of his red-rimmed eyes. His towhead blonde hair is sticking out from his head in all directions, like he just rolled out of bed. It’s more likely that his head hasn’t seen a bed in days.

That’s because Doug isn’t kidding when he says “all night.” All week I’ve watched as die-hard dancers attend workshops all day, break for dinner, then dance until two a.m. For those with a masochistic streak there have been “after parties” until dawn every day. Wash, rinse, repeat. I lasted exactly twenty-four hours before I was nearly hallucinating from fatigue and lack of sleep. The fact that it was always as black as pitch outside didn’t exactly help.

Roman glances at me. “Uh, we’re definitely staying ‘til midnight. Our train leaves tomorrow morning early so we may have to skip the after party.”

“That’s right!” says Shea brightly. “Going to meet the queen.” Seeing Roman’s scowl she rolls her eyes. “I know, I know: ‘She’s not the queen of anything.’”

“Well she’s not.”

“My mother was the Churned Butter Queen of Cow Pie County,” says Patrick. “You guys could always go visit her.” He grins. “She’s got a crown and everything.”

“You two should have been at dinner with us,” says Mary. “Roman got stalked by a mob of Swedish peasants.”

Roman pulls me to the door of the ballroom. “Are we here to dance or what?”

As if in response, the crowd inside the ballroom breaks into thunderous applause as the band ends a song.

“I have to re-tape my shoes,” I say as I walk through the door he’s opened for us.

We follow him to an empty table where we dump our bags. I reach into my bag and pull out the ugliest pair of shoes I’ve ever spent sixty dollars on. There are two more pairs at the bottom of the bag just like them. Fortunately, almost all the girls in the hall are wearing similar shoes or ones even more repulsive. Turns out that cushioned, low-heeled, fabric shoes your granny gardens in are just the ticket for cutting a rug.

I sit down and flip them over onto my lap. “You have the tape?” I say to Mary. A roll of silver spins through the air. I pull off a long strip of duct tape and run it lengthwise from the heel of the shoe to the toe, tearing off the overlap. Taping the bottom of your shoes turns the dance floor into an ice-skating arena, allowing one to spin and slide and do other hair-raising stunts that could cause great bodily harm. At my level of skill I mostly rely on Roman to be in the right place at the right time and catch me before I hit the floor.

Out of the corner of my eye I see Roman’s foot tapping to the beat. “I’m hurrying!” I say, ripping the last piece of excess tape off the shoe and sticking it to the table top. I throw some moleskin over the dime-sized blisters on the big toe of my right foot and pull on my ugly shoes. “Okay, let’s go.”

I follow Roman as he makes his way through the spinning limbs and whirling bodies to the far side of the dance floor. He holds me close to his side and moves back and forth to the beat. Just before he pushes me out to start a Lindy basic I see a few of the local Swedish dancers staring at us, long enough for it to feel rude.

I recognize Roman’s moves and know that in about five seconds he’s going to pull me down into a crouch so I can do a jump—the only aerial I’ve learned. I brace myself, and forget about everything else.

Chapter Seventeen

“
Bei mir bist du schoen
,” Roman murmurs, holding me close and touching his forehead to mine while we sway back and forth. We’ve both had a little too much champagne since the stroke of midnight but this only works in our favor. It dampens my compulsion to blurt out random comments, and makes him less worried about public displays of affection.

“What does that mean anyway?” I say.

“ ‘To me you are beautiful,’” says Roman.

“I bet you say that to all the girls.”

Technically we’re blues dancing, but I’ve abandoned the whole part about tilting my pelvis back, and am suggestively pressing my body against his leg.

“Yeah, but only when you’re out of earshot,” he murmurs, smiling.

After a few minutes we give up on doing any textbook blues moves and just start making out in the middle of the floor, throwing in some heavy petting now and then. We’re crushed shoulder to shoulder with other couples, so we momentarily escape notice.

“We should get a room,” I say as he moves down to kiss my neck. A sparkle of confetti falls from his hair and flutters to the floor.

“We
have
a room,” he says, his breath tickling my skin and sending a shiver up my spine.

I forget the point I was trying to make. Sighing heavily, I decide to just let him have his way with me.

Roman hears the commotion before I do, pulling away from me to look up. I follow his line of sight across the ballroom. A dozen or more burly men with closely-cropped hair, wearing nearly identical suits, push their way through the crowd, speaking loudly in what sounds like German. A smartly-dressed trio–two men and one woman–follow in the wake of the guards, the latter still hollering at the dancers.

“
Entschuldigen Sie mich! Entschuldigen Sie mich!”

Close behind them is a crowd…no, a swarm…no, a
mob
of men and women waving microphones in their hands and microphones on poles, blinding the crowd with camera flashes and TV lights.

Roman’s hands squeeze my arms, tighter and tighter, and the look on his face is indescribable, like he’s just seen the most horrible car accident, but can’t turn away.

“What’s going on?” I say.

The dancers near us part like the Red Sea, leaving the two of us standing there against the encroaching multitude of people and lights.

“Leigh, get out of here,” says Roman, pushing me away from him hard enough that I stumble and nearly fall over backwards. He takes frantic steps away from me, widening the distance between us.

“What’s going on?” I yell, frightened now.

“Get out of here!” he shouts at me, still backing away.

I look around me and realize I can’t go anywhere even if I wanted to. The ballroom is a chaotic press of bodies–muscular suited men with earpieces and scurrying dancers and screaming reporters–one group trying to get out, the other circling around Roman like sharks in a feeding frenzy.

“Roman!” I scream. Then I realize that I am one of a hundred voices calling his name, my voice lost like a pebble in a rock slide.

The commotion around me is terrifying, and my only thought is to get back to him through the horde. I throw my body into the crowd, working my way through the crush of people until I’ve reached the open space created by guards separating him from the reporters. Roman is rooted to the spot, staring straight ahead like a catatonic.

A beefy guard grabs me around the waist and pulls me backwards, breaking Roman’s trance. Suddenly he’s pointing at the man, a string of unintelligible words coming out of his mouth, harsh and angry.

“
Berühren Sie sie nicht! Erhalten Sie au shier heraus!
”

The guard releases my waist, grabbing me by the elbow instead and roughly pulling me away.

“What are you doing?” I yell, struggling uselessly against his grip. “Let go of me!”

Some of the reporters turn to look at me, but none are interested enough to follow suit with their cameras. Those are still trained directly on Roman. Questions are shouted at him in French, German, Italian. The only ones I understand are the ones in English.

“Roman, were you aware of the parliamentary vote?”

“Will there be a formal coronation?”

“When will you move to Austria?”

“Do you have a royal residence in mind?”

“Will you give up your American citizenship, Roman?”

The guard pulls me into the lobby of the dance hall and releases me without a word. I immediately turn back to the ballroom door. He touches my elbow and shakes his head.

“My bag is in there!” I say. Not to mention my passport, my cell phone, the hotel key, and all my money and credit cards.

“We will get it for you,” he says curtly. He steps away to an alcove by the stairs and speaks into his headset as if he knows where my bag is already. And he must, because twenty seconds later another guard emerges from the ballroom and thrusts it at me. The two of them then move briskly across the lobby, shutting the doors going into the ballroom one by one as the stream of revelers pouring out slows to a trickle.

I cross my arms tightly against my chest and peek back into the ballroom through a crack between the doors, trying to see Roman. He is standing next to the two men and one woman, all of them surrounded by guards and reporters. The fashionable trio appears to belong to neither the guard nor the reporter category. One of the men touches Roman’s arm and says something in his ear.

Suddenly the crowd shifts simultaneously, like a school of fish, as Roman and his well-dressed handlers move towards the exit, the guards pushing microphones and TV cameras out of their path.

I step back towards the stairs as two of the lobby doors bursts open. Roman immediately sees me, but holds up his hand and shakes his head, cautioning me to stay away. He leans over to speak to the dark-haired woman in his new entourage. He doesn’t point, but I know he’s telling her about me because she nods and breaks away from the throng as the guards bustle Roman out the door and into a waiting limousine, the press following close behind.