by Cara McKenna
But if she knew nothing else to be true, she knew she was never watering her own desires down again. Never settling.
Maybe this affair would ruin her forever. But at least she’d never wake up a jettisoned passenger again, a discarded tourist on somebody else’s grand voyage. This was but the first step on her own path, and she’d take on whatever came next with the same presence and passion and spontaneity as she had this unexpected romance.
He’d taught her how to love at a hundred miles an hour.
Now he’d teach her how to crash.
Chapter Eight
They saw each other before she left, but it was never quite the same. That night at the bar...like a bookend to when they’d first met. When she’d just landed, laying eyes on him had been a spark—a crackling, rousing attraction made of nothing but curiosity and mystery and what-ifs. This time she saw all that same beauty, but she knew beyond the shadow of a doubt what this man meant to her. No breathless questions about what they might find together, only the haunting knowledge of exactly how much she was about to lose.
It was all Jamie’s fault, this shift. She could feel it. Connor had spooked her with his wishful pillow talk, but of course he hadn’t meant to. And he’d not jabbed that sore spot again in their final days together. He went back to how they’d been before that faux pas, teasing and flirtatious and fond, but Jamie just couldn’t find it in herself to join him. Not fully. The incident had made it all too real. Some part of her that she resented kept that window closed—a hard, invisible barrier that kept him from truly touching her, no matter how fully they bared their bodies to one another the night before she flew home. They were together in the sex, but once the sweat cooled, so had Jamie. She felt her feelings curling in on themselves, protecting her. Keeping her from floating ever higher on this connection, knowing it would only make the fall all the more devastating.
Finally though, the wall came down—briefly, at the airport.
Connor walked her in, lugging her suitcase, waiting until she was ticketed and ready to join the security queue before saying lightly, “This is goodbye, then.”
She nodded. She thanked him for the twentieth time for the ride, and for his promise to gas up Donna’s car before dropping it off. She tried like hell not to cry, but that hot sting arrived when he took her hand and her face blazed as though she’d been slapped.
“Sorry,” she said, forcing a smile. “I promised myself I wasn’t going to do this.”
He wiped at the tear that streaked her left cheek, then the right. “I’ll take it as compliment.”
“I’m going to miss you,” she said evenly, mustering composure. “Way more than I ever imagined I might miss somebody after knowing them for so little time.”
“Me, too. I hope I showed you a good time while you were here.”
“In every way possible. I’m sorry...”
“Stop.”
“No, I am. I’m sorry about these last couple days. I know I’ve been different. I didn’t want to be.”
“Because of what I said.”
“No, no...because of how I feel. Which is more than I’d bargained for, I guess.”
“I won’t pretend I didn’t mean it, deep down. That I would’ve loved a chance to see if this could’ve been something. Something for keeps.”
“Me, too. That’s why it freaked me out, I think. Like it was bad enough I felt that way. But hearing that you felt the same was too much. Too close to this being...huge, maybe. Huge enough to make me put everything on hold again. And that just can’t happen.”
“I know. We both owe it to ourselves to get our lives on track.”
“Maybe someday though,” she said softly, looking down at their linked hands. “Who knows, right?”
“Right.” He spread her fingers and squeezed each one in turn. “Keep in touch online, yeah?”
She nodded. A temporary balm, until maybe someday she checked his profile on some site or other and found his status changed. Saw pictures of him grinning, cheek to cheek with some girl.... Shit, why was she even thinking about this now? So much for living in the present.
She forced another smile. “Come find me in Boston someday. Save up your pennies. Let me be the tour guide one summer.” She looked up to find him smiling back.
He’d never looked so handsome, and it rooted her back in the now. Too bad the now was also the end.
“Sounds like a date,” he said.
Only they didn’t set one, and by the time she was buckled into seat 28F, she worried it was all just sweet nothings to cap off an impossible affair. Kind intentions. Wishful thinking.
As the plane lifted off, she brought her face to the window, trying to make sense of the miniature landscape. Trying to guess, Is that Cork Harbour? Was that the farmland where she’d stayed, maybe? Was that tiny dot the Crossroads? Were those dusty capillaries the lanes she’d traversed on bicycle and motorbike and stick-shift sedan?
She felt a panic rising, scared maybe that with distance, she’d question her own memories this way by the time she landed. Question everything she’d felt for a man who might seem like nothing more than a pleasurable dream in a few months’ time.
* * *
Fall arrived in a blink—cold and brisk, no drawn-out Indian summer this year. By the second week of October, the oaks in Boston Common were gilded and acorns rolled underfoot along the park’s paved arteries. Jamie dodged them, hurrying in the dying evening light. Cold wind found her legs through her tights. She’d underdressed for her shift, rushing now to get her blood pumping.
Maple leaves were slick as banana peels on the worn old brick sidewalk leading to the restaurant, but she made it without a spill, just barely on time.
She hung up her jacket in the break room and smoothed her requisite black top under her skirt’s band. It was a nice restaurant, known for its steak and seafood, catering to well-heeled tourists and carousing businessmen. The waitresses made great tips, but Jamie was bartending. She liked it that way—on weeknights she could get a bit of homework done during the lulls. Though it was Friday, so she probably wouldn’t slow down until closing.
Kate’s message buzzed just as Jamie was tying her bar apron around her hips and greeting the passing waitresses.
When are you on till? 12?
Jamie texted in the affirmative.
Cool. I’m recording our show and waiting up. Bring cheesecake?
Poor Kate. She’d fallen hard for a guy at the end of the summer and just been dumped. Jamie could relate. Connor hadn’t dumped her, but she’d sure as hell gotten attached to him. They texted maybe twice a week. Just silly stuff—pics of funny signs they came across, strange things overheard at bars or on public transportation that they knew would amuse the other. Once Connor snapped a close-up of a flat motorbike tire and texted, Guess who’s got a long walk home? Never anything too earnest, but every once in a while, one of them would reach out...as if to make sure they weren’t forgotten, perhaps? That was how it felt to Jamie. But she never looked for Connor online. It still hurt, missing him, four months later. It was bad enough, the frequency with which she scrolled through her pictures of him. If she got too friendly—or nosy—and found out he’d moved on...? Then she’d feel like a fool, as well as being brokenhearted.
He’s probably already moved on, she reminded herself. He was six weeks into his new life, at a new school, in a new city, surrounded by new faces. New girls. Much as it sucked, Jamie was in his rearview. Lumped into his past, along with his wasted youth and his old apartment, his old jobs. She really ought to be thinking about her own future, beyond the mere completion of her assignments.
She checked the dessert specials menu, propped on the shiny, currently empty bar. She texted Kate back. No cheesecake tonight. Chocolate torte? Will bring two slices, if there’s any left.
And though she’d pretend she was indulging in honor of Kate’s broken heart, it was her own that just wouldn’t seem to heal.
Work picked up as the dinner crowd ar
rived, and the other bartender, Alyssa, materialized just in time to help Jamie mix half a million martinis for a group of hyperactive finance guys, the kind of business bros who fancied themselves party animals and favored catchphrases like “Work hard, play hard!” and “Vegas, baby!” They tipped great, though, provided Jamie smiled a lot, so on the whole it was worth the headache. Though nothing like the headaches they’d all be waking up with at roughly noon tomorrow.
A banquet table opened up across the restaurant and the bros departed, but business stayed brisk. Jamie swapped the odd text with Kate when she had the chance, looking forward to heading home and to sleeping in tomorrow.
Around ten, a misplaced couple arrived—clearly tourists. And to Jamie’s great delight and nostalgia, the wife asked Alyssa for a sea breeze.
“Can I?” Jamie asked, butting in. “I never get to mix those. They’re my specialty.”
“Better you than me,” Alyssa said, looking grateful to tackle another pair’s order for two merlots.
“This makes me misty for the Jersey Shore in July,” Jamie told the patrons with a smile. The middle-aged couple was a nice change of pace from the wannabe Mad Men who usually came in. Jamie listened as they waxed enthusiastically about the musical they’d caught in the theater district, and she snapped a photo of the cocktail once she’d garnished it. After the couple left, she impulsively pulled up Connor’s number and texted the photo to him. Memmm’ries...
She was just beginning to feel foolish for sending it when his reply came.
Be still my sobriety.
I didn’t wake you up, did I? she asked.
She felt his answer buzz at her hip, but couldn’t check it—a trio of tailored women had appeared, laden with fancy boutique bags, fresh off Newbury Street.
God help her, the ten minutes she waited before she could check Connor’s reply felt like half a day.
Perfectly awake, he’d written. If a bit jet-lagged.
She frowned at that, perplexed, but there was no time to reply—two waitresses swung by with drink orders, one for a party of eight. Jamie and Alyssa went to work.
Jamie called dibs on the four dark-and-stormys, getting the highballs assembled before her on the bar. She was uncapping a bottle of ginger beer when a new patron sidled up to stand between two free stools, but she had no time to greet him with anything more than a “Be with you in one minute,” and the quickest glance at his face.
The quickest glance, and yet her entire world froze in that split second.
This man before her—a man she knew, and yet didn’t. The most intimate and familiar of strangers, with his Bombay Sapphire eyes and that beat-up old leather bomber.
His smile was tight—cagey and nervous. “Take your time.”
And all she could do was blink, fingers still wrapped around the bottle’s neck, poised to twist. Connor nodded to it. “Don’t let me keep you.”
Blindsided, she fixed the drinks, then poured a scotch and water to complete the order. She stared at the man standing before her.
“Guinness, please.”
“Holy shit,” she blurted, lost for something poetic. Or even dignified.
Everything about him was so...real. Right. So exactly how she’d remembered. His height, his smile, his scent, that accent. The way his nearness made her feel. She hadn’t dreamed or conflated any of it. It was all standing right in front of her.
The nervous smile came apart, his brows drawn tight and pensive. “Jamie?”
She hadn’t said a thing in at least half a minute. The bar rematerialized around her, sound coming back in a deafening rush.
“Connor,” she managed. “What on earth are you doing at my work?”
“You turned up at mine unannounced once.” That smile glimmered again, but it was still unsure. Jet-lagged. He’d come all this way...to see her? Well, duh. But still, she couldn’t wrap her brain around it. Couldn’t make it real, despite him being close enough to touch—
She touched him. Just his wrist. Just to make sure. His skin was dry and warm, and all at once, everything came back. Every kiss and caress, every sweet word and dark moan. She drew her fingers back.
His gaze dropped to the dark pearl and crystals framed by the vee of her top. “I remember that necklace.”
She could barely make sense of his words. “Why are... Why?”
“I’m here for you,” he said quietly—or what passed for quiet given the bar’s volume.
“To see me, or...?” To visit? To try to convince her to move to Ireland? What?
He didn’t answer. He asked a question of his own, one that told her nothing. “When are you off?”
“Twelve.”
“Why don’t you pour me that Guinness, then, and I’ll nurse it until we can talk properly?”
Too dumbstruck to argue, she did. And Connor produced a paperback from his jacket pocket and commenced to read, leaving Jamie to go about the task of staggering zombielike through the rest of her shift.
Midnight arrived roughly five months later. Connor caught her eye after two hours and two stouts, and very few words traded between them. “Ready?”
The bar was clean and prepped for the next day, all the last-call orders filled, the registers cashed out. “I’ll be right back.” She shrugged into her coat in the break room and grabbed her purse from its cubby, heart pounding. God, she was a mess. All bleary from the shock and the bar’s dim overhead lights, probably smelling of a hundred different cocktails. And shit, Kate’s cake.
She popped her head into the kitchen and found herself in luck—three slices left. She scrawled an IOU as one of the kitchen crew snapped them into a carryout box for her.
She set the box on the bar and told Connor, “Give me a minute. I have to text my roommate.”
Something weird’s happened. Have cake, but may be a little late. And you may want to put on a bra—I won’t be alone.
Kate’s understandably confused reply went ignored as Jamie turned her full attention to Connor.
“So. Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Jet-lagged, you said?” And she laughed. Kind of hysterical, kind of ridiculous, but it felt good.
“Landed at five, your time. Got a bit lost on the subway, dumped my bags off at the flat I’m staying at, looked up the restaurant. Got lost again.”
“Flat?”
“Just some place I found on the web—hundred dollars a week to crash in some lad’s room who’s away for the semester.”
“Right. And...and why?”
Connor looked around the bar, empty now. “Let’s take a walk.”
She nodded dumbly and buttoned her jacket. Connor took the carryout box.
They walked two blocks to the edge of the Common, and Jamie led them to the crosswalk by the garage entrance, then into the Public Garden. Less rowdy than the Common after midnight, as though all the barren rosebushes demanded civility. Without a word spoken, they reached the edge of the duck pond. Connor took her hand, his skin impossibly warm in the cold night air.
“You should be wearing gloves.”
“I know...it’s not usually this cold this early in the fall.” She barely registered what she was saying, so lost was she in his hand. “Why are you here?”
“It’s good to see you, too,” he teased.
“Please, just tell me. I’m dying inside, not knowing.”
He nodded. “I came to see you.”
“Why?”
His laugh was soft and flustered. “Because I missed you.”
Fuck, she was messing this all up, wasn’t she? But hoping seemed so reckless...
“I missed you, too,” she whispered. “More than I wanted you to know, frankly. More than I wanted to admit to myself.”
“You’re happy to see me, then?”
Christ, she wasn’t acting like it, was she? She took a deep breath and met his eyes. “I can barely believe this is actually happening, so...I don’t know. I’m fucking terrified, actually.” There. It felt good to admit the truth. “
You’re here, and I don’t know why, or when you’ll be gone again, and I can’t stand how much I miss you, even after four months. I knew you ten days. I should be over you by now. But I’m not. At all. Now you’re here and we’re going to have to say goodbye again, and I...I don’t know.”
“I’m here to stay, if you want me.”
She stared at that handsome face in the streetlight, at the five o’clock shadow—and then some—on his jaw. He’d come across the ocean for her, somehow.
“Here to stay? How?”
“I haven’t got all the particulars worked out,” he said. “It’ll involve a work visa or maybe a school transfer, next year. A lot of paperwork and waiting. But I’ve got enough money to live off for three months or so, until I get kicked out on an expired holiday visa.”
She searched his face for a joke, a tease. But there was none. He was dead serious about figuring out how to make this work. And all she had to do was say the word.
“What about your education?” she asked. “You’re just dropping out, midsemester?”
“I never started. I deferred.”
“What?”
“I knew by July this was what had to happen. I’ve done nothing but work since we said goodbye, to pay for this mad trip.”
“But all your plans...”
“I’ve delayed my education for less worthy causes before. To wait a little longer for you?” He shrugged, smiled softly. “Best decision of my life. If you’ll let me make it.”
This was too much...too wonderful and too scary and too shocking. And she’d never been in this position before, to feel so flattered it was scary. The men in her life had always made her come to them. Follow. Tag along. The cost of loving them.
But this man made you his destination. He gave up his plans to ask for the chance to maybe be a part of yours.
Holy fuck.
“That’s a lot of pressure,” she said quietly, addressing his shoes. If she looked in his eyes, her very last scrap of rational thought would blow away in the autumn breeze.
“I’m not asking to move in, or for you to promise to love me until the end of time. No one could make that promise to someone they spent ten days with—no matter how amazing those ten days were. I’m not asking for a quickie green-card marriage,” he added with a smile before growing serious again. “I’m just asking your permission to pursue this. Us. For as long as it’s meant to be. Don’t worry about the money—that was my gamble to take. Give me three months. When my holiday visa’s up, then we’ll talk about what might come next...and even if it doesn’t work out, that won’t hurt as badly as if I’d never found the knackers to come here and see what might be.”