Dateless

by Emily Evans

  “They’re here somewhere. Sometimes, they’re good at discretion. Other times less so.” He seemed resigned and used to it. How long had that taken? I wanted to ask, but it seemed almost a tabloid-type question: Tell us, Wythe, how the son of the Prime Minister really feels about his protection detail. I sipped my apple cider. It tasted like bitter apple juice with an alcoholic kick. I’d have preferred a mixed drink where I couldn’t taste the alcohol, but there was nothing on the menu with a drink name I recognized, and nothing that looked like it came with a paper umbrella or cherry on top. It was just fun to be able to order legally here since the drinking age was eighteen.

  Wythe drank a dark ale. A guy in a pub. Me here with him. It felt like a date. I snapped a photo of our tabletop, making sure to get my hand in the shot but not him. I showed him the picture and sent it off to a friend back in Texas. My friends weren’t getting the brush-off, just Felicity. #AtaPubwithaFriend. I held in the snicker. #HighStoolWeather. That’s what they called rainy days here.

  “Writing your sister?”

  “She’s getting the silent treatment.” I turned my phone, so he could read my message. “She’s my fraternal twin. Evil, unlike your siblings. Caroline’s a kick. I see her around. Why haven’t I seen Zane much?”

  “Zane’s not as patient as I am when it comes to all this.” He gestured around the bar.

  Like he was patient. “Beer and pubs?”

  Wythe wore a small frown. “Guards and expectations. They get old. Beer and pubs? Zane likes those.” He seemed less angry.

  I had to ask him if he meant what he’d said. “Speaking of… are you really not going to any more charity events? Not even one?” I peeled at the corner of the label on my bottle, tearing off the stem to the apple. All I needed was one more point. My tone was casual, but my heart thumped hard as I waited for his reply.

  He tilted his head. “I might.”

  “If?”

  “For the right incentive.”

  He didn’t mean a kiss. He was still too upset with me. “Such as my helping you with this class?” Which I’d already agreed to do.

  Wythe waved that off. “Your grade is the reward.”

  “We don’t seem to be getting graded.”

  “We’ll get a grade at the end.”

  “In the U.S., we get regular graded tests and papers. You know where you stand. As far as the internship goes, I was forced to take this internship. Lots of family pressure. I couldn’t get out of it. But you’re trapped on a whole other level by your mom’s success. Freud would have something to say about that.” I gestured to the entry with my glass. “Your family challenges put mine in perspective.” I put my glass down and threw my arms back. “I’m free.” I may have extended the “e” a bit long, because he chuckled. Which was good. I poured the last of the cider into my glass and went back to toying with the bottle. “You’re going to be an engineer, so how’d you end up in a lit class?”

  “I told my parents I’d delay moving out this summer and take a class so they wouldn’t give me grief about moving out in the autumn.” He scowled. “Peppa was sorting the class, hounding me for a response, I told her I didn’t give a…” He paused without cursing. “To sign me up for anything.”

  I finished for him. “She put you in her own class.” It made total sense to me. I might have done the same thing given the opportunity.

  Wythe nodded. “I committed to taking a class. So, I’ll finish it.” His drink had mellowed him. “What would you be asking me if we’d just met for the first time?”

  I tilted my head, mirroring his motion. “Well. In Texas, we’d be at a party. Your beer would be in a red plastic cup, that at some point you’d squeeze too hard, so it would spill. Or I would spill mine. It would give the whole place a beer smell. Not unlike this bar. Also, there’d be fewer soccer jerseys than here, and more t-shirts. And some guy would be walking around carrying a bag of wine. You’d slap the bag if you wanted some.”

  He leaned forward. “Yes?”

  “Yep.” I made myself sound super-enthused about ‘slap the bag.’ Though wine wasn’t my favorite drink. I preferred this cider.

  He leaned back and laughed, sounding free, and looking younger, and so attractive. If I had seen him across a party… Whew. I would’ve been the first over to meet him. Not that I would’ve been obvious about it. I’d have gotten near and given him the look and watched to see if it worked. If it hadn’t, I’d have had to pull out other tricks. I clicked my glass to his bottle. “‘Bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew.’ Dickens.”

  He arched a brow. “Dickens? Really?”

  “Dickens. Really. A great quote. But not my favorite.” I winked at him.

  He arched both eyebrows. “Is it, ‘More, please?’”

  I grinned. “Yeah, that’s good.” I waved my empty bottle. “More, please.”

  He brought me another drink.

  I took a sip, apple with a kick. This one was somehow even better. “No, we’re off Dickens.” I toyed with a paper coaster that advertised a German beer. “So many great drinking quotes.”

  “Give me one then.”

  “‘I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.’”

  He tapped my glass and took a long pull from his drink. “I must say, living literature is much better than reading it.”

  I was in turns defensive of literature and in love with his phrase. I chose to go with the love. “Living literature. Love it. Some version of that would make a good ‘ultimate’ guess for class.”

  “Maybe.” He grinned. “Not familiar with the ‘no good’ quote. Courtroom book?”

  I snickered. “Harry Potter.”

  “I’m a fan.”

  “I’d hope so. Harry Potter is a national treasure. Which leads me to a question for you.” I was eager for this one, and I leaned in.

  Wythe kicked his feet out. “Okay.”

  “Why don’t we go see the Harry Potter play?” A couple of ciders in, and I was asking him out. Yep. Heat flushed my cheeks, well, heat and the warm room, but I didn’t take the offer back.

  He blinked and sat up straighter. His eyes searched mine. “I’ll go if it’s off the record. Not for a point. Just you and me.”

  I loved that. A smile curled my lips. An inappropriate smile, given that fraternization wasn’t allowed. I didn’t care. He’d just turned my proposition officially into a date. An unspoken date, an unsaid date, but a date, nonetheless. This way, if questioned, I could say I hadn’t dated him. If the interrogator went into kissing… Well, then, I’d have to plead the fifth. Did they have the fifth amendment here? Or was it all guilty first and self-incrimination and ship her off to the Colonies? I didn’t know, and I wasn’t keen to find out. But I was eager to go out with him. Me. Him. Him and me. London theatre. The dark. “Okay.”

  His eyes grew heated. I wanted to pursue that.

  Ping. Both our phones went off. Email from the lit professor. “Clue: super American steak.” The clues were coming faster.

  “This one’s all you,” Wythe said, his voice teasing and challenging. “What’s an American steak?”

  I thought about the first clue, that flash of red. “Super. Super. Superman, Supersize. Superduper.” I sounded slightly tipsy. I’d order a water next.

  “Okay, super, and what’s an American steak?”

  “I don’t know… T-bone, sirloin, chopped beef.”

  He ran through probabilities with those. I closed my eyes and thought of England. Red, white, and blue on both their flags. Steak. Steak. Steak. I had nothing.

  “What are you doing?” Wythe sounded challenged, like I was the puzzle.

  “I’m closing my eyes and thinking of steak.” And I made myself do it. Dinner, Angus beef, Nolan Ryan beef, Kobe beef. Those were choices at home. They even had steak in the school cafeteria. A chopped beef patty with brown gravy and a single spongy mushroom floating in the sauce every week. There was something there. “On the school lunch menu, we had Salisbury s
teak. It was disgusting.”

  “That’s what you think of English food?” He shook his head. “We don’t have that.”

  I Googled it. “It’s named after a New York doctor… but… York. Back to the King Richard reference. I bet it’s right.”

  Wythe tapped his fingers on the table. “We do not have Salisbury steak, but we do have a Salisbury. Salisbury has a cathedral, and it’s known for its connection to Richard III.”

  We spit out random theories, each growing wilder and bigger as we finished our drinks.

  I dropped my forehead to the table and wanted to pound it. “Salisbury…”

  “Salisbury Plain has Stonehenge,” he said, sounding even more into this.

  He was so right. “Yes! What’s England without Stonehenge? How far is it?” I pulled up my phone’s map app. “We can Google it.”

  “We have a car. Want to go there in the morning?”

  That moment was fantastical. We were in sync, and in this crazy country we could drive to Stonehenge. How amazing was that? I looked into his eyes. “Yes.”

  There was a pause in the night, and then the music changed to one of those songs everyone knew. As if they’d been trained, the pub crowd started singing, including Wythe. It was such a European guy thing to do I just stared at him. He smiled at me, and it was so tempting to keep him smiling that I found myself singing, too.

  It was a great night at the pub.

  ***

  The day was gorgeous, and Wythe shrugged out of his jacket on the way to the car. He wore a gray t-shirt over a long-sleeve t-shirt. English weather required layers. I wore a cream t-shirt under a rust-colored jacket. We both wore jeans and hiking shoes. We were headed to the countryside.

  Wythe wasn’t as easygoing this morning as he had been after a glass of ale. His armor was back up. I didn’t want any awkward silences, so I Googled facts on the drive and read more about the Neolithic period and the eighty-three stones than I’d ever wanted to know. It wasn’t until Wythe Googled super and Stonehenge that we got our answer. In 2015, they discovered a new hidden circle of stones surrounding the existing monument. They called it Superhenge.

  “I still don’t get how ‘red’ fits in,” I said.

  “It’s enough. We’ll type it and send it off to the professor.” Wythe sounded eager to get our outing over with.

  That bummed me. I held up my hand to slow him down. “What’s this have to do with lit?”

  He shrugged. “We’ll figure a connection out later.”

  At least he’d said “we.”

  Moving together, we trudged up the gravel path, looking for the answer. Rolling hills surrounded us, and the air was chillier here outside of London. Ten minutes in, invigorated by all the clean air, I thought to take a shot at the real question hovering over us. Can we be friends again? Something more? I looked at him.

  He faced straight ahead. No more little looks at me. Not angry. Just not interested or happy with me. He was right there. But not there. Not really.

  I missed him. “Since this place is all supernatural…”

  “Is it?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Can we play time travel? Pretend, just for today, that the whole PR thing hadn’t happened?”

  Chapter 17

  He stiffened, and his footsteps sounded heavier on the crunchy path. I could see the big fat disappointing “no” coming my way. I wanted to offer to give up on the internship and its point system. But it would be like letting Felicity win and I couldn’t do that. He mattered though, and that left me conflicted. I was only clear about today. I wanted it. “Not forever, just today. Let’s have a solid truce until we get back to Westminster and the real world.”

  Wythe looked down at me, his wild blue eyes flashing. What I’d said clearly appealed to him. He gave a sharp nod. Relief and pleasure lit into me, showing me how much his response meant to me. We reached the ropes that encircled the rings, and I grinned big, using the stones as the excuse for my smile. “This place is crazy amazing. When I came with my family, it was packed. We had to stand in line for twenty minutes at the visitor center for ice cream.”

  “Give it a minute,” Wythe said. “I’m sure a tourbus or two holding sixty people each will be by soon. But for now, what we have here is an opportunity.” Wythe grabbed the nearest rope. Breaking the cardinal rule of ropes, he lifted it.

  What? A weird rush went through me. “We can’t go under the ropes. They’ll deport me or something.” I looked around, sure an immigration agent was about to pop up from behind a stone. No one came running. Random groups of tourists and locals with dogs wandered around the path and out in the fields, but no one went closer to the stones. Everyone obeyed the ropes.

  “Oh, but we can.” He sounded teasing and confident.

  “We can’t.”

  Wythe looked entitled. “We’re not going to damage the rocks.”

  “The ropes are here for a reason. To protect this archeological site from people like us.”

  “The ropes are here to protect the site from people who’d chip off pieces of the stones for a souvenir. That’s not us.”

  “We have something similar in Texas. You can’t pick the bluebonnet flowers.”

  “Flowers regrow.”

  “A national treasure is a national treasure.”

  “It’s a flower, and Texas isn’t a nation.”

  “It was once. We had an embassy in central London.”

  Wythe ignored my words. He wiggled the rope and arched his eyebrow at me in invitation. I couldn’t resist that. I slipped under, feeling an illicit thrill. We crossed the grass to the interior stones, with our heads up high as if we belonged there. We were standing where no one was supposed to be standing. Like ancient druids. “I like it. But what are we doing in here?” I grabbed his hand. In for a penny, in for a pound.

  He led me farther in, behind a big rock. “For this.” He pressed me against the stone, leaned down, and kissed me. Soft. Warm. His kiss was everything that was right with the world. My lips tingled and parted. He kissed me lightly, and then firmly, with conviction, as if this was the only place he wanted to be. I pressed against him, and he pressed me back. The rough stone behind me and the cool air contrasted with the heat we were generating. It made the feelings more intense. Or maybe it was the arguing. Or maybe there was some mystical force at work. But I felt like a lit cinnamon candle. I tightened my arms around his neck.

  He ran his hands down my back and up again, sharing more supernatural kisses with me. It was unlike anything I’d ever felt and like everything I’d ever wanted. What had been wrong with kisses before? None had had this feeling of joining, this connection. I shivered.

  He murmured something I didn’t understand. His mouth moved to my neck, sending sparks there.

  “Oi.” A guy in a Stonehenge slicker jerked his thumb toward the path. “You two.”

  The interruption was awful, jolting me out of something amazing. I made a frustrated growl, but a ladylike one.

  Wythe pulled back and grinned at me. A crooked grin, a wicked grin. I loved it, and it made the frustration okay. Because we shared it. We left the inner ring, hands interlaced, and stepped back onto the crunchy path. There was no other correction from the park guard. He was satisfied that we’d listened, and he’d moved on down the crunchy path. Stonehenge. It was just stones and a hill. But there was something magical there. Something about seeing a structure I’d seen my whole life, being there in person… Being there with Wythe was amazing.

  I wanted him to feel wonderful, too. I wanted to give him something. Solve this puzzle for him. “Is there a Sci-Fi book featuring Stonehenge? Have you read any books set in the rings? Or, what’s old and epic like the rings? Old. Old English. Beowulf maybe?”

  He looked blank.

  I waved my free hand as I thought aloud. “Old. England’s old epic poem.”

  He shrugged, and then he shook his head. “Nah. This is prehistoric, not old English.”

  “Celts. Romans.” I released
him and searched online for more random info about the monument. “Chaucer. Mallory. Tenneson.”

  He shook his head. “I think we should be more literal. Quotes about Stonehenge maybe?”

  I Googled one. “‘The immemorial gray pillars may serve to remind you of the enormous background of time.’ Henry James, an American. I rather like that.”

  “But he’s American.”

  I searched further. “American who attained British citizenship. That’s qualification enough. Let’s go with him.” We took a selfie with Stonehenge in the distance. I sent it in along with the quote. “This shows we were actually here.” I didn’t think Wythe believed I’d upload the photo onto a blog, not anymore, but I was being cautious, which was why I explained the picture. We wandered back along the dirt road, which felt like a very English dirt road compared to my American pastures. Something about the temperature or the quality of the sun and air. I pointed down the stretch. “My favorite quote is by J.R.R. Tolkien. Born in South Africa, but an English writer, professor.”

  “Don’t make me yawn.”

  I nudged him with my shoulder. “‘Not all those who wander are lost.’”

  Wythe nodded. “I like that. Origin?”

  “The Lord of the Rings.”

  He Googled it. “‘All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.’” He swiped his fingers across the screen. “‘Still ’round the corner there may wait, a new road or a secret gate.’ Tolkien.” He grinned, looking carefree. “I won’t be reading it.” He dropped his arm over my shoulders. “I’ll send those in, too, though. Maybe we’ll get a bonus.” He pulled me in for a selfie, getting the curve of the road behind us. When he snapped the picture, I turned into his chest for a moment, resting my forehead against the gray cotton of his shirt, feeling my hair whip around us in the breeze. I reached up a hand and touched the black cord he wore at his neck. He looked so relaxed today. Just a guy. Not like the PM’s son. Just a guy. Here with me. I knew what was behind my interest in these pictures, and it was more than to add value to a class project. To make us real to a digital-age professor. It was to have pictures of us. For me.