When I wake up to a window view of rolling expanses of green land, and hallways of oak trees, I know London's far behind us. The thought's an oddly gleeful one.

The road's just wide enough for the car to travel down, certainly not big enough for two, and it makes me wonder how people live and get about here. But good God it's gorgeous. It's the countryside from the storybooks, with its winding roads and rolling hills and not much else but peace of mind. I sit up and rub my eyes when dots of yellow start to sprout, and as the car rolls past each field, they become increasingly speckled with daffodils. Or maybe they're tulips?

Eric chuckles and rolls down my window when I stretch, purr and poise my hands on the sill to get a proper look,

"Good kip, my love?"

"Mhm. How long did I sleep?" I say, looking about for any sign of where we are.

Last I remember we were on the A40, with me belting Ke$ha in his ear and him trying to pretend he hated it.

"'Bout an hour."

I can feel his eyes on me, like he wants to say more.

"What?" I smile, pouting when he doesn't smile back.

"Evie..." He says, turning his eyes back to the twisting road with a slight groan. "Okay - when we get to the house... you might find that I might be a little... weird from time to time."

"Weird?"

"A-a little pretentious, maybe. Arsehole-ish? Um..."

"A prick?" I finish, laughing with a quizzical eyebrow raised.

He laughs, too, blushing before he answers,
"Yes, yes, a bit of a prick. The kind of people my parents like to have down here are ... fairly pricky themselves..."

I can't fathom the idea of my Eric as anything but the Eric before me – endearing, charming – no matter who he's around.

"Pricky how?" I ask.

He shrugs, but I can tell he's reluctant to say exactly what he means,

"You know, um, a bit arrogant; concerned with stupid things that don't really matter like chateau trips and nobles' facelifts and– ." His embarrassment is clear in his slowly rouging cheeks and murmuring. He must be so different from them all, with his 2-bedroom London flat and baby blue VW Beetle.

The Eric I know is the antithesis of arrogance or superficiality – the thought of him talking about foreign holiday arrangements and facelifts shouldn't make me giggle... but it does.

"I just... don't want there to be so much the Honourable Eric Macklin bullshit," he's laughing about it too now, "that you don't get any time with...me."

His eyes are on the road, but he darts them in my direction, without turning his head, to gage my reaction. If I've learned anything about him in the time that we've been together, it's that the more naked the truth is, the more antsy he is when he tells it.

"We should have a codeword!" I suggest, rubbing his knuckles, white from gripping their steering wheel.

"A codeword?" He inquires, taking my hand and lacing his fingers with mine.

"Mhm, like something nonchalant that means hey I'm still me, and I love you."

He taps his tongue on the top of his mouth, making a tick-tock sound whilst he thinks, and although he doesn't say a word when he comes up with it, his cheeky grin says enough.

"What?" I smile. This time he's smiling back. "Eric, what is it?"

"Beware, it is very, very cheesy." He looks at me for a response, but he knows I've got nothing to say and I'm on the edge of my seat.

"Eric, come on!"

"Okay, okay! ... Thursday."

If I was at home right now, on the phone with him, this would be the moment where I scream into my pillow and kick my legs about in the air and scream noiselessly before composing myself and responding. Right now, though? In front of him, on the way to meet his family? All that excitement and emotion makes for one blissful high that I can't express in any way but by saying,

"I adore you." Cue my grin. "Thursday, then."

"Thursday." He smiles.

I turn my attention back to the fields of gold before my cheeks break from smiling so hard, and ask playfully,

"So... these pricky people... should I be worried?"

"Worried about what, my love?"

"I don't know. About not being 'high society' enough for them, or whatever." I'm kidding about, but looking down now, I'm a little less comfortable in a band tee and jeans than I was when I left the house. I'm not utterly unpresentable, but if Eric has to transform, does that mean I do, too?

"Evie, no!" He laughs so immediately and sympathetically that momentarily all my worries fade on the spot. "No, anyone there of any real importance will auto-matically adore you as much as I do." He seals it with a kiss on my hand, like a promise, and I sigh an exhale of relief, at ease for the moment.

"The proper pricks care about stupid things like who your parents are and your alma mater, but nobody likes them anyway, and they're quite aware."

"Oh."

I'm not sure I'd get on with the 'proper pricks'. My father owns a pub. My mother writes for a television show. My alma mater...

"I don't think I'm going to university." I say, paying more attention to the flecks of gold in the fields than my little declaration.

"No?"

"Nope."

"I thought you applied to a few places, no?"

"Yeah – Wesminster, LSE, KCL, and," I squint, trying to remember the last one, "SOAS."

"But you don't want to go?" His tone is nonchalant, non-accusing, and, unlike Dad with his crackly voice down the phone line, he's sincere. I feel it.

When I showed him my applications back in October, he'd helped me perfect a couple lines. I'd be lying to say that it didn't feel wonderful to think about all the things I'm good at, and have conversations about things that matter, and have him stare at me, in awe and wonder of the things I'd say. You're so wonderfully clever, my Evie...

I imagine university would feel something like those days, although perhaps less blush-inducing.

"Wanting to go is one thing – getting in is another." I quip, but I know he's not falling for it any more than I am, from the way he looks over at me.

"I just..." I sigh, contemplating my words, "I like how things are right now."

I mean it. Everything, as it stands, is perfect; with Erys, Mum, August, Walt - or not Walt anymore, I guess - and, of course, my Eric. The one who makes every day my favourite part.

I think about university, and everything that could come of it, but I see Eric and I see more. I feel alive, intelligent – adult. But I mean, he's not the only factor. Is he?

Oh, God. He hasn't said anything. I hope he doesn't think he's the only factor.

I sit up in my seat, clearing my throat, hoping to dissipate the silence before it becomes an awkward one,

"How close are we?"

"We..." he's dragging out the syllable, and with the feeling of the car turning around a bend, my little butterflies become hyperactive, "are here."

The car tires crunch along as we drive into a cream-pebbled space and the sound settles once the car stops under a wide-armed oak tree, in front of what seems to me a never-ending spread of evenly mowed, lush green grass and topiary.

"Wait, where's the house?" I ask, looking down to unfasten my seatbelt.

Eric chuckles, and gives me the impression that I have no clue what I'm in for.

"Right there, my love." He points through the windscreen at a stately stone house, right in the centre of the grass; the cream pebble way leads, with minimal turns or deviations, to the house, opening up into a large rectangle around the building. It stands alone, isolated on an island of the small, pale stones, encircled only by a sea of sheared green expanse and trimmed hedges, save for the large, lustrous cars parked neatly behind it.

"Eric... Eric, I thought you said it was a cottage." From here, I count 7 windows on the top floor, and 7 on the bottom, all on a white stone exterior. It's less of a cottage, and more like a ...palace.

He sighs, but doesn't answer, and when he squeezes my thigh, his hand stays there as we start up the pearl pebble-paved path to the palace.

————-　♡　————-

I can't figure it out. How can someone have a place as beautiful as this – with million-dollar portraits on the walls, marble fountains in the gardens and crystal chandeliers dangling from the ceilings just because – and not say a word about it, living quietly in a 2-bedroom on a hill in Central London? If my family owned a place like this, I don't know if I'd ever leave – let alone pretend it didn't exist.

From what Eric tells me, his family have places like this all over the world. Morocco, Austria, Bali... God, I hope to see them with him one day.

Some tiny troubling voice in me pipes up when he tells me about everywhere his family have been, and all the things they have: if he's seen and done so much, what would he want with a girl who's hardly left Aldwych and barely seen an inch of the world?

I'm sat on the terrace atop the house, and I from here I can see the rippling silver lake, dappled with small sail boats, and from up here it's easy to bat those kinds of thoughts away. Eric knows me, sees me, and I'm still here. We're here, together. That's the logical way of looking at it.

In all my thinking and fence-sitting between the logical and the likely, I zone out – Babe says I do that a lot when I'm worried. The ring of a cooing sound from doves overhead brings me back, and once I've blinked a couple times to ground myself, my peripheral catches a small lady in a plain, black collared dress with a broom in hand, staring right at me.

When I look over and smile, a little awkwardly, she returns the smile, except hers is wide and certain. She nods to the soft sea and approaching sunset,

"It's beautiful, right? I never get tired of it."

I shield my eyes from the sun with a tilted hand, and the light's starting to glare, but she's right – I nod. It's so very beautiful. When I look over at her again, she's perched her chin on the top of her broom, gazing at the view in earnest.

"I'm Evangeline." I say, with a light hand on my chest, hoping to come across as sincerely as she did. She points to a nametag that I can't make out from where I'm sitting,

"Ana." Ana's rather beautiful herself. Her brows are thin with age, but when she smiles, her cheeks are like golden apples and her face is young.

"Making friends?" Eric's warm voice is in my ear when he grabs hold of my waist. "Ana, this is..." His voice trails off, but I feel him nod behind me.

Ana's gasp is quiet, but I hear it, and her thin peach lips stretch into a pleased smile. She nods quickly, before returning inside, as if to leave us time to ourselves. I've got some idea of who Ana is, but before I can really ask, or tease him until he tells me what he told her about me, Eric pulls me against him, so close that when he speaks I feel the vibrations of his voice against my back,

"Sorry, my love, I ran into a moocher of a cousin in the quarters that I didn't know would be here."

"Oh!" A 'moocher' doesn't sound like the best start, but I was wondering where all the ...life was when I was wondering the echoey halls. "S'okay. Where is... everyone else?"

"Hmm, people usually start to arrive on the Tuesday, mid-morning... You're not nervous, are you?" He teases.

"Not with you." I say, and it's cheesy but true.

Ana makes a reappearance with a bowl of bright crimson cherries, then with her little smile and nod she's gone as fast as she came, and it gets quiet fast on this island of pebble and stone, but if every day here feels like this – like eating cherries and chucking pips at Eric and taking afternoon naps in the spring sun – I think I'll rather like it here.

───･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

Note 1: I'm not sure if it's universal, but the title of Honourable in the UK, is used for high-ranking officials or, in Eric's case, the children of nobility or members of Parliament.

Note 2: 1K READS I AM GOING TO SCREAM AND/OR PASS OUT, POSSIBLY AT THE SAME TIME. The attention whore in me is beyond chuffed - thank you all so much for reading! I hope you're enjoying the story, and that you'll enjoy what's to come 😊 Keep voting and commenting and all that good stuff; I love hearing what you all think of everything that happens 😊