by Kara Isaac
Movement sounded behind him. “Did you find it?” His father had gone on the hunt for a bigger brush.
“Jackson Gregory scrubbing a tractor. Can’t say I ever imagined that.”
His hand froze. All of him stuck in his awkward half-crouched position.
It couldn’t be. Not here. But it was. He would have known that voice anywhere. It was the same one that still saturated his thoughts and showed up in his dreams.
Finally managing to force his legs to move upward, he turned.
Allie stood there, the sun bouncing off her loose hair and shooting it through with copper threads. Blue T-shirt, black shorts, and flip-flops. Behind her he snatched a glimpse of his father retreating to the barn.
He tried to catch a breath. His mouth opened, but nothing came out.
“Nice tractor.”
“We just got it. It’s a Massey Ferguson MF 8690. A red one.” His last sentence had him flushing the same color.
She laughed. It was the best sound he’d heard since, well, the last time he heard it. Jackson walked toward her, his rain boots sloshing through the puddle surrounding the tractor. “Hi.”
Her smile almost turned him into a puddle. “Hi.”
“Hi.” It was more of a croak than a word. He looked down, saw he was still holding the hose, its stream splashing down around his feet. He gestured at the water spraying across the ground. “Just let me go turn this off.”
“Sure.”
Jackson retreated back to where the spigot stood, unable to stop himself from checking over his shoulder to make sure she was really there. That she wasn’t a mirage conjured up as a result of too many days staring at stalks of corn.
Turning the tap off, he dropped the hose on the ground and walked back to where she was standing. Her hands were in front of her, fingers twisting around themselves.
Allie. In Pennington. Here. His mind was misfiring trying to process it all. He shoved his hands in his pockets. He had no idea what to do with them. No idea what to do with the impulse to wrap his arms around her and bury his face in her hair to see if it smelled like he remembered.
He stopped a few feet in front of Allie and drank in her green eyes, the smattering of freckles across her pert nose, the way her bottom lip was now tucked under her top teeth. “What are you doing here?” His words came out hard.
She flinched as if she’d been hit with stones. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come.” She stepped back.
He jolted. “No. No. Sorry. I just . . . I don’t think I’ve been more surprised by anything in my whole life.” One of his hands was out of his pocket, reaching for her. He settled for grazing her arm. “Want to sit?” He gestured toward an old picnic table they occasionally used for lunch.
“Sure.”
They walked toward the table, feet in perfect rhythm.
She sat down on the bench seat; he sat beside her, unable to maintain distance. The wood creaked and sagged beneath them. Jackson curled his finger around the boards, the roughness grounding him.
His chest felt like it was going to crack open with all the words fighting to burst out. I’m sorry. I miss you every second of every day. I love you.
Neither of them spoke for a few seconds, just sat and looked out across the vista of green fields and blue skies. God, help. Jackson managed to string the two words together in his mind. He’d had a plan. A crazy far-fetched plan of how he would know if God meant for them to have another chance. It was all in motion. It did not include Allie showing up here before he knew what the answer was.
“I’m not married.” Her voice was small, tentative.
“I know.” He looked sideways to see her mouth form an O. “Louis told me.”
She managed a wry smile. “Is there anything he doesn’t know?”
“Apparently not.” His heart thundered in his chest. He leaned forward, clasping his hands to stop them from doing what they were determined to do. Hold her hand. Run his fingers through her hair. Cup her chin.
“I have an interview at Oxford on Friday.”
“That’s great. Congratulations.”
She smiled, her face lighting up. “Thanks. I’m excited. Super nervous, but excited.”
“So you might be going to England?”
“Maybe.” She shrugged. “Hopefully. Who knows? It’s just to cover for someone on maternity leave for the next academic year. Nothing permanent.” Though she tried to feign nonchalance, he could feel the heady hope emanating off her.
“So what brings you to Pennington, Dr. Shire?” A whisper of wind picked up and blew a strand of hair across Allie’s face. It took everything he had not to tuck it behind her ear.
Allie tilted her body so she could look right at him. “I needed to thank you.” She pursed her rosy lips.
Jackson forced his eyes away from them. Look at anything but her lips. Not that the deep green eyes he could fall into like a cold pond on a summer’s day were much better.
Allie ran a finger across the small space of wood separating them. “When I met you I was so tired. Everything with Derek, my job, my family . . . I was just doing whatever it took to survive each day. You reminded me what it was like to really live again—to feel. You reminded me that you fight for what you love. I fell in love with Tolkien again because you forced me to remember why I’ve loved him so much and for so long. I know we left things badly and there’s nothing I can ever say to make up for that. But you changed me. You helped me understand that God doesn’t want me to live a life that’s defined by my mistakes. And I’m so grateful for that.”
At some point during her words their fingers had become intertwined. They both looked at them for a second and then back up at the same instant. Their gazes locked, the electricity arching between them strong enough to power Vegas.
The desire to drop down to one knee, right there, in the dusty farmyard and propose with a blade of grass, a piece of string, anything, was almost overwhelming. Except a stronger force kept him pinned right where he was.
Allie didn’t belong here. He was certain about that. Neither did he. He didn’t know where he belonged, but she belonged at Oxford. He knew she would get the job with the same certainty he knew they were in for a bumper harvest.
Something flickered in Allie’s eyes. “Can I ask a question?”
“Sure.”
“Your mom, she already knew who I was.”
He smiled. His mom had managed to wrangle bits and pieces of the story out of him over the last month. “She does. She loves you.”
“Why?” Another gust of wind. She grabbed her flyaway hair with her right hand and held it off her face.
“You changed me too. You got me back here. You helped me realize there are more important things in life than making money or climbing the corporate ladder.”
“Like what?”
“Like faith. Like family.” He turned and held her gaze. “Like love.”
Her eyes widened. “Jack—”
He put a finger against her lip, allowing it to linger. He bit back a groan, but a ragged sigh escaped instead. “Allie, I am totally crazy about you. I miss you every second of every day. I was so hurt and I came here to lick my wounds and spend time with my family. I needed to recalibrate who I was and who I want to be. I would love nothing more than to sit here right now and say all the words that bubble up every time I’m around you.” His thumb roamed across her bottom lip and he leaned back slightly before he gave into the desire to kiss her senseless. “But I can’t. It wouldn’t be fair. You have this great opportunity at Oxford. I’m a farmhand trying to figure out what God wants him to do with his life. I can’t—I won’t—say things because they feel right when I can’t make them right.”
She swallowed, tears pooling in her eyes.
He closed his eyes for a second and tried to gather himself. When he opened them, a couple of tears wer
e trailing down her cheeks. He wiped them away with his thumbs. One left a streak of dirt in its wake. “You are brilliant, and funny, and feisty, and beautiful, and I hope with everything in me that I’m the man for you. But if I am, I know it’s not right now. And if I’m not, I need to set you free to go and find him, because you deserve every single moment of joy that he can give you.”
“I don’t want anyone else. I want you.” Her soft words almost undid him. Winding his fingers through hers, he lifted her hand up and pressed a kiss into her skin as he held her gaze.
“I want you too. It j—”
“Stop talking, Jackson.” Before he could even process what was happening she’d grabbed his T-shirt between both hands and tugged him down. Allie leaned into him, kissing him like her survival depended on it. He closed his eyes and kissed her back. Poured everything into the kiss that he couldn’t say with words. Her hands framed his face as his fingers wove through her hair, down her back, pulling her closer. By the time it ended they were both breathing like they had just sprinted a mile.
Allie let go of his T-shirt, smoothing it across his chest, and slid back along the bench a few inches.
Jackson tried to get his heart rate under control. He curled his hands back under the bench before he could pull her back to him to fill the gaping void she’d just left.
She stood up. “Okay. I’m going to go. Because if I don’t leave now, I’m never going to.”
If she stayed for one second longer, there was no way he was going to let her.
Allie walked across the yard, toward the fence, heading for a red car beyond it.
He stood up, followed after her, mind scrambling for something to say.
The car beeped and Allie opened the door. She turned, just as he was opening his mouth and spoke first. “Don’t say it. Don’t you dare say good-bye.”
Thirty-Four
Four months later
ALLIE SQUARED HER SHOULDERS AT the door to the Gulbenkian lecture hall. God, please help me. She’d repeated the same desperate prayer before every single lecture in the last two weeks. She forced her feet to move beyond the threshold and pasted on her lecturer’s face. Getting her dream job hadn’t magically erased all her fears, but every day things got a little easier.
It was a first-year undergraduate English-literature class: Introduction to Tolkien. She could have taught this in her sleep. Given that it was nine in the morning on a Friday, half her class of mostly eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds probably still were.
Not only could she have taught this class with two arms tied behind her back, but much to her surprise, once she got over the hump of her fear and started talking, she loved it. She’d told Jackson he’d reignited the passion for Tolkien she thought was gone forever, but until she’d started teaching again she hadn’t realized how true it was.
Just thinking his name brought the familiar ache of never-to-be-fulfilled yearning. Still. After four months. She longed for the day when it didn’t. Even better yet, for the time when she made it a week without the first thought when she opened her eyes in the morning being the hope that today would be the day he’d walk back into her life. So far her best run was four days. Once she’d even made it all the way to lunch before it found her. He was right. They both had to move on. Though there was one thing she did know: she would never ever regret that kiss.
Opening the classroom door, she walked in with her papers tucked tightly against her chest and the USB holding the morning’s presentation in her hand.
Love and Tolkien. She planned to skip over the obvious couples in her lecture. Aragorn and Arwen. Celeborn and Galadriel. She would spend most of her time homing in on the true love that weaved its way through the stories. Brotherly love. Sacrificial love. A love where the desire for justice conquered fear. A love for light and life that took on the powers of darkness.
Placing her papers on the desk, she plugged the USB into the university’s system and pulled up the slides. Then, closing her eyes for a second, she took a deep breath and turned to face the room.
Almost two hundred pairs of eyes stared back at her. A wave of colors and faces, genders, and hairstyles. Fancy that. Most of them had managed to drag themselves out of bed after all.
Picking up the microphone, she leaned back against the desk and felt her lecturer persona settle over her.
She could do this. She was good at this. “Good morning, everyone. When we left off on Tuesday, we were discussing the important role of symbolism in Tolkien’s work. Hopefully, this was continued in your tutorials this week. Today we’re going to turn our attention to one of these overarching themes. Love.” She heard her voice falter at the four-letter word.
How long was it going to take before she could say the l-word without the face of a certain American flashing up in her mind? Or before she was able to reconcile herself to the fact that she was never going to know if that was what they’d had?
* * *
Jackson sat awestruck. He’d gotten here early to claim a seat toward the back of the lecture hall, even paid a fee under an assumed name to attend the class, just in case there was someone checking such things. He watched as students started wandering in, wave after wave, until the room was almost full.
Clearly, even undergraduates took things seriously in England. When he’d been in college, you did everything you could to avoid signing up for lectures on a Friday. And if you had to attend one, you only showed up if you absolutely had to.
It was clear after the first five minutes why that wasn’t the case here. Allie was amazing. Poised, confident, holding the microphone as she leaned back against the desk and chatted away like she was having a conversation at a dinner party and not speaking to hundreds of people.
He drank her in. She had cut her hair. It now sat in a sleek bob just above her shoulders. She was wearing some kind of dress-and-jacket combo that managed to be both professional and crazy sexy, which was helped by the high heels that gave her an extra four inches. He could sit here and watch her all day.
She kept talking, her words rolling over him. She never referred to any notes. The only time she even looked at the screen was to move on to the next slide. Most of the people around him held pens, but their pages were empty, so captivated were they by her seamless weaving of material from the books with movie references and personal anecdotes about her work with the movies and as a tour guide.
His insides twisted, his hands slick. This had seemed like a terrible idea when it first came to him. The day his acceptance letter had arrived. The moment he realized there was a chance God might have managed to do the impossible and create crossing paths for them. Cambridge and Oxford. Both of them in England. Only a couple of hours apart by train.
It was a rash, crazy idea. He’d shoved it away, thinking there couldn’t be a worse thing to do to her, but it kept coming back, the small voice prodding him.
It had grown into an insistent drill sergeant the moment he’d clicked on the Oxford English faculty page to see her picture smiling back at him.
He looked around the room at all the entranced upturned faces. Not a single student was sleeping, or even surreptitiously texting, that he could see.
He couldn’t believe he was going to do this. Here. Today. It was insanity.
But then, more miraculous things had happened. Like his mom’s cancer treatment being so successful that specialists had used words like unprecedented while trying to hide their surprise as all her markers defied the most optimistic of predictions.
Or like Cambridge being the only school, out of twenty-something, to accept his application to their MBA program. His very late application, at that.
He blew a breath out and focused back on Allie. Her smile. The way her hands gestured as she told a story about something that had happened during filming. The way the sound of her voice slid down his spine like maple syrup on pancakes.
See
ing her now made him marvel at how he’d survived months without her. He was even more determined that it wasn’t going to continue for one more day. If she said yes.
This was always going to be a bit risky, given what had happened before. And that was when he’d thought he’d be dealing with a small class of maybe fifty students.
He swallowed, his mouth like sandpaper. It had been forty minutes, which meant she had to be wrapping up soon.
Why couldn’t he just lie low? Go and find her in a café or something like a normal guy? Spend days wandering around the English department, if need be, until they ran into each other.
But he’d prayed. And this was what kept coming back. Lord help him—He was the only one who could.
She was finishing up, segueing perfectly to the final bullet point on the slide. She looked up and across the room. “Any questions?” No one else would have noticed the sudden stiffening of her posture or the trepidation that flickered across her face for a split second.
Two hands went up. Two easy questions dealt with in a couple of minutes. “Anyone else?”
Silence. He was frozen.
“Okay, well, first essays are—”
“I have a question.” It took a moment for him to realize it was his voice booming out, causing people to look around to see where it came from.
Allie looked in his direction but didn’t see him. “Sure. Go ahead.” Again, a slight tremor in her voice.
This was either going to be a story they’d be telling their grandchildren or an epic disaster. There was no middle ground.
Dear God, please let me have heard You right.
He got to his feet.
* * *
Allie had finally let herself relax, congratulating herself on another lecture down. She’d even enjoyed most of this one—the upturned faces of all the students, most of them actually looking engaged and interested in the material.