It was pretty odd being back at the university.  By midday the place was abuzz with the news of the prince’s mysterious girlfriend and some people were enthusiastically talking about the prospect of a royal wedding.

“You kind of have to feel sorry for the girl,” Sehun said as they ate lunch.  “She’s never going to have privacy for the rest of her life.”

“If they find out who she is,” Baekhyun pointed out.

Sehun waved his hand.  “Do you think people are just going to forget about it?  Everybody wants to know who she is.”

General sentiment about the dating news was mixed.  Yeonhee saw and heard a lot of jealousy from the other young women on campus, and a fair number of people seemed annoyed that the prince was “wasting his time” on something trivial when there were problems with the country that needed tending to.  Even the republicans, when she saw Sowon, thought for the most part that while the prince was the prince and the country was suffering the way it was, he ought to be focussing on trying to keep it together and run it well rather than gallivanting off with a girlfriend.

By the end of the day, the only person she was really comfortable around was Jongin, and perhaps Kyungsoo since he just kept quiet.  Jongin had seen her briefly in the corridors and invited her round to his to have a little time to just talk freely and relax, since he was the only one who really knew what was going on, but Kyungsoo also invited himself round, so Yeonhee wasn’t really able to say anything.

It didn’t particularly matter, because she had absolutely no idea what to say in the first place, but it was comforting to know that there was somebody who knew.  They ended up playing a few rounds of Cards Against Humanity before Yeonhee withdrew to go to bed.

The prince sounded very tired when he rang, but it was good to hear his voice.  He’d apparently been mobbed by the press everywhere he’d gone that day, which he’d been expecting, but which he still didn’t like.  Yeonhee told him to go to bed when he started yawning, and he mumbled back something about seeing if he could arrange for her to visit on Sunday.  She got the impression that he needed time to be able to kick his feet back and do something he wanted to relax, and so she agreed.  She would have done so anyway.

“You need to get used to calling me by my name,” he said around another yawn after correcting her use of your highness for the fourth time.

“Sorry,” she said.  “Habit.”

He hummed softly.  “I know.”

“Your—”  She bit her lip.  It really was habit.  “Yixing?” she said.  It felt so odd.

“Mm?”

“Back at the hospital, Min told me off for not addressing you.  He said it was disrespectful and that it made you uncomfortable.”

She heard the prince exhaling.

“Yeah,” he admitted.  “It’s a bit awkward too, since everybody who doesn’t address me with anything is usually doing so out of a position of feeling awkward and not knowing what to do, and that makes me feel awkward.  And like they’re trying to ignore me.  I mean, especially if my attention is elsewhere and they’re trying to talk to me.  It’s also a bit. . . it feels like people are trying to ignore me or presume a level of comfort with me that neither of us have if they don’t address me by anything at all.  And both of those make me really uncomfortable.”

Yeonhee had only briefly considered how awkward being addressed or not addressed must feel from his point of view, but it really did sound like it was awkward for him, and it probably happened more often than people would think.

“Min said you would find it too uncomfortable to correct me if I was doing it wrong.”

“It’s a total conversation killer to ask somebody to call you your highness.”  He yawned again.  “It looks really pretentious, too.  I sometimes do it if I’m talking to somebody I feel the need to get away from, but it creates a really bad impression and I come off like a snob.”

“Is this another royal catch twenty-two?” Yeonhee joked.  “You might think somebody is worth getting to know, but it’s awkward enough the first time to meet to get them to address you properly and the longer it goes on for, the harder it is to correct?  But if you don’t like them, you correct them and then they never speak to you again?”

“Pretty much.”

Yeonhee chuckled.

“Yeonhee, can you paint me something?”

“If I get the time.  What do you want me to paint?”

“Anything that will look good to decorate the walls of Dad’s ward.”  He sighed.  “I’m going to visit on Saturday and the doctors say there’s no sign of improvement.”

He sounded disconsolate.

“Would you like me to come with you?” Yeonhee offered, momentarily forgetting that they weren’t supposed to be meeting together anywhere public.

“There are still reporters trying to discover which ward he’s in.  It’s probably best you don’t, but thank you.”  He yawned again.

“Your— Yixing, you should sleep,” Yeonhee told him.  “You don’t get nearly enough of it.”

“I still have work to do,” he protested.

“You won’t be able to do it effectively in this condition—”

“That’s what coffee’s for.”

“Sleep.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Things hadn’t really died down the next day, but theories were now beginning to circulate about who the girl in the photos was.  Yeonhee tried not to look too conspicuously uncomfortable as Mihae and two other girls discussed it during the lecture on Friday morning. 

“It looks like she has a mole just below her left ear,” said the girl on Mihae’s left.  “I don’t think it’s just the pixel quality – you can see it on some of the journalists’ photos too.”

“People are saying the height suggests Xu Mei,” said the other girl.  “You know, the daughter of the Earl?  Apparently he’s been pushing for a marriage for some time.  They’re a similar sort of age.”

“Would Mei classify as an ordinary civilian, though?” Mihae wondered.  “She’s quite well known.”

“Maybe he just didn’t want the general public to know they were dating?”

One of Mihae’s friends leant around her.  “What do you think, Yeonhee?  Does your chapter have any extra information?”

Yeonhee tried not to show her discomfort.  “We’re concerned with whether or not royalty should exist, not the prince’s dating life, so no, we don’t have any more information.”

“Do you think he should be dating?” asked Mihae’s other friend.

“I don’t see why he shouldn’t.”  Yeonhee sighed, turning to the next page of the lecture sheet and trying to concentrate as the lecturer moved on to a new slide.

“What about Xu Mei, though?  She’s aristocracy.”

“If we followed every aristocrat in the country, we’d never get anything meaningful done.  There are a couple of hundred aristocratic families and we can’t protest all of them.”

“Jia actually has a mole in the right place, though,” Chanyeol pointed out over lunch, causing Yeonhee to surreptitiously rearrange her hair to hide the mole.  She caught Jongin sending her an amused glance.

“She’s too tall,” Baekhyun repeated.  “I’m telling you right now, there is no way Jin Jia is small enough to bury her face in the prince’s shoulder like that without having to bend very awkwardly at the knees, and there are shots showing that she isn’t.”

Sehun plonked his tray down between Baekhyun and Mihae.  “Still talking about the prince’s girlfriend?”

“Who do you think it is?” Baekhyun asked immediately as Mihae sat up a little straighter and started cutting up her food into smaller pieces.

“I don’t know,” Sehun said.  “The official palace statement said the two have only been together for a short time so far and that they’re concerned for the privacy of the girl in question so don’t want to say anymore.  My impression is that they’re trying to stop the public from prying, even though we all know that’s never going to happen.  There are only two reasons for that, though: one is that the prince was telling the truth and she genuinely is a civilian, and the second is that the palace doesn’t approve of the relationship or doesn’t think it’s going to last and doesn’t want there to be a massive media fall out when they break up.”

“Which do you think it is?” Mihae asked.

“Honestly?”  Sehun shovelled some vegetables into his mouth.  “Both.”

Yeonhee gulped.

“Why’s that?” Chanyeol asked.

“Well, nobody’s even caught wind of the prince spending time out and about with a girl before,” Sehun pointed out.  “And they were also in a very public area that’s known to be well frequented during Valentine’s day, which suggests a certain amount of naivety in the way they’re going about things.  I mean, he’s a public figure, why on earth would he take his girlfriend somewhere so public on that kind of day when he knows what the media is like, unless either he’s clueless, which suggests they haven’t been dating long, or she’s really pushy, in which case the palace is bound to disapprove, and she’s also an idiot who’s probably more enamoured by his status than by him?”  He reached for his beansprout soup.  “You’d probably get that in the girl whether she’s civilian or aristocracy, to be completely honest, but all of the aristocratic girls of eligible age are at least semi-public figures, and unless he knew there was going to be backlash because he’s dating somebody with a reputation like Wang Xiaodan, I doubt he would have gone to such pains to hide her face from the photographers.”  He slurped up some of the soup.  “It was going to be a scandal anyway and he must know people are going to try to dig, so if it’s somebody known to the public with a reasonable reputation, it’s much better just to let that fly.  So that means it’s either somebody who is not a public figure, or it’s somebody with a terrible reputation, and both are reasons for the palace to disapprove, especially the latter.”

“Do you think it is Wang Xiaodan?” Jongin butted in innocently.

“No, thank God.  Her body is built a completely different way.  She’s also a massive attention wh*re and we’d probably all know about it by now if it was her.  I’d place all my money on it being a civilian, but I’m just puzzled as to how he met her.”

Everybody else sat there watching him.

“On a side note,” he said, “can anybody else imagine the horror that would be Princess Xiaodan?  We’d be guaranteed a republic by the end of spring.”

Minhee dropped by on Saturday and took Yeonhee out to Tempe, which she really, really needed because she was getting so paranoid and jumpy just being around her friends.  Her sister noticed that something was a bit off, and so Yeonhee used the opportunity to complain about Taehyung not leaving her alone and to talk about the gifts that kept being left outside her room.  That morning, it had been a ticket to a comedy show the next weekend, and Yeonhee didn’t know what to do about it.

“So, for Taehyung,” Minhee said, “I think you