The first time she met him, the cowgirl was standing on a rotted dock by a gas station that sold neon beer signs and stale coffee. She wasn’t supposed to be there, wasn’t supposed to be off her ranch—daddy always said city folks were trouble—but she’d been running low on reasons to stay put. He wasn’t supposed to be there either. Princes don’t hang around places like this. But here he was, brooding in a leather jacket that didn’t quite fit, smoking a cigarette like he didn’t care that the world was falling apart, or maybe because he did.

“You’re blocking the sun,” she said, tipping her hat back to get a better look. He was tall, too clean to belong here. Like a crow perched on a scarecrow.

“Good thing you look better in the shade,” he shot back, not even turning his head.

She spat into the lake. It was murky, the kind of water that swallowed things. Secrets. Shoes. Women. “You a poet or just an asshole?”

“Both.”

It wasn’t like a spark ignited between them or whatever cheesy thing you see in movies. No, it was more like the slow burn of an old cigarette left in the ashtray—smoldering, acrid, leaving behind a bitterness no amount of gum could chew away.

He was hiding. Not from her, but from everything else. She knew that look—had seen it in the mirror every morning since her mom left a Post-it on the fridge that said, _Sorry, can’t do this anymore_.

They kept running into each other after that. It didn’t make sense—his world of crystal chandeliers and hers of dirt roads and oil stains—but somehow, the universe kept throwing them together like dice in a losing game.

“You ever get tired of pretending?” she asked one night, her boots dangling off the tailgate of his stupidly expensive truck. He was leaning against the bed, staring up at a sky that didn’t look like it belonged to either of them.

“Pretending what?”

“That you don’t care. About this. About…anything.”

He lit another cigarette, his hands shaking just enough for her to notice. “You ever get tired of pretending you’re not scared shitless of staying where you are?”

That shut her up. Not because he was wrong, but because he was so goddamn right it made her chest ache.

She thought about him when she was alone in the fields, the kind of loneliness that clings to your ribs like tar. He thought about her when the palace halls echoed too loud, when his mother called him a disgrace for the third time that week, when the weight of expectations pressed so hard he thought his lungs might collapse.

Their love wasn’t tender. It wasn’t sweet. It was raw, jagged, like a song played too loud on a busted radio. They fought over everything—how she hated his polished life, how he couldn’t stand her rough edges. But there were moments, too, where the world slipped away, and it was just them. Her hands in his hair. His lips on her collarbone. Breathing in sync, for once.

She told him about the time her brother got drunk and wrecked the tractor. He told her about the first time he realized his father only loved him as an idea, not as a person.

“Do you think we’re broken?” she asked one night, her voice so soft he almost didn’t hear it.

“We were born broken,” he said, and for the first time, she thought maybe he wasn’t lying.

It didn’t end well. It couldn’t. She was too stubborn to leave her land, even if it killed her. He was too trapped to leave his crown, even if it wasn’t his. But for a while, they made the impossible work.

And maybe that’s what love is—two people, trying to hold onto something that was never meant to last.

When she thought of him years later, it wasn’t the fights or the goodbyes that stuck. It was the way he’d looked at her that first night on the dock, like she was the only real thing in a world built on lies.

And maybe, for him, she had been.