It was raining when I arrived back at the palace. I went on foot. I could have had the driver take me, but I didn't want to explain to him that I’d completely failed at my job, which wasn't nearly the most upsetting thing to me at the moment. I was mad at Beau for abandoning me. I was mad at myself for falling for Beau. I was mad at the world I grew up in for putting me in a shell and telling me who I was all this time. I was mad at myself for letting them.

I was supposed to be tough. I was a marine. No matter how tough things got, I was followed orders. The orders dictated to me by society. You are straight. You're supposed to fall in love with a woman. You're not supposed to show your tears. You're a man, you're not supposed to get emotionally attached to anybody.

That's not who I was. It's who I was supposed to be.

Did this whole thing mean I was gay? Or bisexual? Or still straight? Nobody was going to tell me what to be. I had to be myself. I didn't want to be with a woman right now. Or a man. I just wanted to be by myself. And, at the same time, I didn't want to feel alone.

In a sense, I liked it better when the world told me what to want. It was less confusing. Now I had a mess of emotions floating around in my head and no way to quench them. I didn't know what I wanted and was even less clear on how to get it.

When I walked inside the palace, it was quiet. It seemed everybody was asleep, with the exception of Prince Frederick, sitting in one of the lobby chairs with a pad and pencil, intensely focused on a bowl of fruit he was sketching.

"Good evening. Kurt, is it?" he asked.

"Kurt Thomas," I said.

"How's your evening going?"

I shrugged.

"That good, huh?"

"Yeah," I said. "How's yours?"

"It's going well. I suffer from insomnia. It used to really bother me, but now I treat it as an opportunity. Whenever I can't sleep, I pull out my sketchpad and find something to draw. It focuses my mind and relaxes me."

He turned the pad towards me. The drawing wasn't half bad.

"It's not done yet," he said. "They're never done. Eventually I just get tired and go to sleep. You're welcome to join me if you'd like."

Part of me didn't, but the other part of me wanted to be polite and refused to be alone. I took a seat.

"How are you liking it here?" Frederick asked.

"It's very nice," I said. It was true. The palace was beautiful. I didn't think I fully appreciated how amazing it was to be living here. I guess I was so focused on doing the job that I hadn’t thought of the perks. "I was living in an apartment before this. Two bedrooms. One and a half bathrooms."

"How do you have half a bathroom?"

I shook my head. "It's got a toilet, but no shower."

"Ah, a water closet."

"Something like that, except it also has a sink. Where I was living, the most luxurious thing I could hope for was a washer-dryer in the unit. This place is unbelievable. It's like a fantasy."

"It's easy for us to get jaded," Frederick said. "There are certain amenities we're not allowed to have. Cable, for instance. There aren't any TVs in the palace."

"No TVs?"

"Look around you. Imagine how ugly a big black box would be on the wall here. No TVs. There's a theater if we want to watch something, but the projector predates video, so if we want to watch something, we need the 35mm film reel."

"No Wi-Fi either," I said.

"Yeah, no internet with the exception of a few rooms that have been wired for it, mainly to keep us informed about what's going on in the rest of the world. The walls are too thick to send a signal and the wireless stations would be an eyesore. Besides, nobody would really use it, so what's the point?"

"That must be why Beau is always trying to get out of here. There's nothing to do."

He smiled. "Beau is complicated. He doesn't like being trapped. One of my earliest memories from when he was a baby, I couldn't have been more than four or five, is of him escaping from his crib. He used to do that all the time. My parents never figured out how he was able to do it, either. He only ever escaped when nobody was looking."

I laughed. It sounded like Beau. Some people never change.

"It's with people, too," Frederick said. "You may have noticed, he doesn't have many close friends. Or, any really."

"There was one guy he seemed close to," I pretended I didn't know his name. I knew his name, Vince. I knew his name because I hated him and couldn't get the image out of my head of the two of them, naked and passionately embracing. That's what was going on right now as I watched Frederick draw a bowl of fruit.

"He has 'friends'," he said, giving the word a hard emphasis as he focused on the grapes, spilling over the edge of the bowl. "But he doesn't have friends. Nobody knows him. Everybody thinks they do because they see him in the tabloids, but it's all a façade. He doesn't like being out at the clubs. He usually doesn't spend more than twenty or thirty minutes there. It's a means to an end for him."

"Then why does he go?"

Frederick was so focused on his sketching, I wasn't sure he heard me at first. "You're asking me to psychoanalyze my brother."

"Not exactly."

"If I had to guess," Frederick said, "I'd say he wants the connection. But every time he has a meaningful connection, he runs. There are places he won't go to out of fear of running into certain people."

"But what about Vince?" Crap, I said the name.

Frederick laughed. "Vince? Which one is he?"

"Scrawny guy. Stupid hair. Ugly face."

He laughed some more. "I think I know the guy. Beau doesn't care about Vince. That's why Beau likes him so much. Beau only runs away from people he actually cares about. With Vince, he gets an empty connection without the commitment. I think Beau fears his feelings will trap him. Keep him in his crib. And so, the first opportunity he gets, he tries to escape."

I thought on that for a second. Beau was pushing me away. I thought he was pushing me away because he didn't care about me. It sounded like he pushed me away because he cared too much.

"He's going to run when he feels trapped. We probably should have told you that earlier. If you don't want him to run, don't present yourself as his bodyguard. You're his buddy. That's what we should have told you to do."

He was right. I got too clingy with Beau. I was being controlling. And that's why Beau felt like he had to get away from me.

A servant scurried into the room. "Mr. Thomas," he said.

I stood at attention. "Yes?"

"Your presence is requested in the Queen's quarters immediately."

"Then let's go," he led me there.