He bent his face down toward mine. Things were so different in close range.
“No, Kika, I hadn’t meant that. Rather, I meant stay with me tonight—we’ll go to a pub or just walk around the city all night. It needn’t matter. I only meant I wanted to be with you.” He ran his fingers over his scalp, through his windswept hair.
“Not that I wouldn’t want to do the other thing. Christ, I’m gagging to be alone with you,” he added, “but tonight, just being around you is enough. You’re not leaving. Not yet, anyway,” he said firmly. “And I’m sure we’ll think of something to sort it. But we mustn’t give up and go home just yet.”
I nodded to appease him, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up about finding a way to stay here.
“So you’re game for a bit of a walk, then?” he asked me, snaking both hands around my hips and pulling me toward him like we were about to dance. A current of lust sped through me again, but this time I didn’t back away from it.
62
I WAS ALL deep sighs and wistful eyes that night. The clock moved faster than it should have as we walked south, down toward the River Thames. Midnight came and went with the chiming from Gothic bell towers.
I thought: It’s officially Friday, officially my last day in London.
We followed the river east, past the sparkly bridges all lit up in the night like lacy spiderwebs catching moonlight. We walked through silent, aristocratic neighborhoods fitted with quaint churchyards where long-dead souls rested. Aston told me about what it was like to grow up around here, and I told him long tales of my travels. We covered miles.
We talked as we ambled along the river on the embankment promenade, the asphalt pathway glistening before us.
Strings of bistro lights, like pearls on a chain, illuminated our way through the misty night, the fog diffusing the glow. A busker played a violin somewhere nearby. I wondered whom he played for, and I thought: It’s just for me, one last love letter from the city of London to me. Why were cities always at their prettiest right when you were about to leave them?
“I wouldn’t want to spend my last night in London doing anything but this,” I told Aston, feeling sentimental.
He slipped his hand in mine. The pads of his fingers were callused from tugging at nylon guitar strings. He rubbed them along the outside of my hand, and I found the act unusually sensual. I couldn’t help but wonder how those fingertips would feel stroking the sensitive skin behind my kneecap or the curve of my hip. But would we ever get to that?
We stopped to watch the River Thames, dark as ink and throwing back the city’s reflection in shimmering whorls. We didn’t know what time it was besides very late or very early—depending on how you wanted to see it. London was a foreign film set that night, photogenic and filled with dark magic. Just as I suspected when I first arrived, the city was now mine, filled with my ghosts and my memories. And tonight I would be making my final one, leaving my last impression.
“Hey, don’t be so hopeless.” Aston flexed his hand against mine. We stopped under one of the fussily decorated lampposts, and the light made him look heartbreakingly attractive. “This doesn’t have to be your last night, remember?”
I plumped my lips together in admission. “But it is, Aston.” There was no use pretending that we’d come up with a way to keep me here.
“But why?” he asked, pained. “You won’t even try and strategize with me.”
It was true. Each time he brought up an idea to keep me here, I poked a hole in it.
“I’m a traveler.” I shrugged. “It’s part of what I do. I leave. I’m hardwired this way,” I said in resignation.
Travelers come and go, and if I learned anything from what happened with Lochlon, it was that I should leave without looking back. Make clean breaks. Just go.
“You don’t have to always leave, you know. You don’t have to leave to prove anything,” he told me, facing away from the river now.
As he stepped away from the beam of lamplight, the darkness swallowed him up. “Who are you trying to prove or defend your life to, anyway?”
“To everyone!” I said, surprised by the way my voice slashed through the night.
“Who’s everyone? Everyone believes in you, Kika. Why don’t you see that?” Aston flexed his fingers into a fist and then released them.
The violinist stopped playing, and now I could hear the water of the Thames gulping at the wall below.
“Not society. Not the world. Not . . . not Lochlon,” I stuttered, without risking turning away from the view.
Aston kicked his lean frame off the chest-high wall. “Oh, so that’s what this is about?”
“No. It’s not. It’s not that at all,” I said absolutely. “It’s that he used to be just like me. His priority was to travel, and now he’s the opposite of me. He just gave up. I cannot and will not just give up the desire to build a meaningful life around travel.”
Aston was quiet, and I thought the worst. I should have never brought up Lochlon. Silence passed between us.
But a fight is good right now, I reasoned with cheap abandon. A fight would make it easier, less emotionally costly to leave him tomorrow. I knew these kinds of thoughts made me a coward, but I let myself think them, anyway.
But instead of obliging me with hostility, Aston spoke with kind consideration: “I think I understand.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You’re scared it could happen to you if you stay too long in one place. You’re trying to prove it to yourself, too, aren’t you?”
I rubbed my hands together. The fact was, I didn’t know how to answer that.
“Kika, I know you’re worried about being hurt again because of what happened between you and Lochlon. But don’t let your identity as a globe-trotter act as an excuse to give up on this and leave. Don’t lean on your wanderlust as a cover-up for being scared.”
“I’m not scared!” I turned around now, away from the showy river. I tucked my hands into my armpits. “I just don’t see what we can do.” I felt like I was butting up against the same wall again and again like a mouse in a maze. “But I’m not scared. Why would I be scared?” I tittered tensely, the words fizzing and manic in my mouth.
Aston spoke delicately, and with a small shrug, he answered, “About us. About what we could be.”
I meant to tell him: “That’s ridiculous.”
I meant to tell him: “This has nothing to do with what happened between Lochlon and me—I’m over it.”
But instead my mouth asked: “But what if it doesn’t work out?”
It slid out in a rickety, high pitch. I didn’t recognize the voice as my own. Do I really feel this way? Am I really scared?
I was. I secretly knew that the most spineless part of me believed that if I traveled far enough from here and moved fast enough, then the regret of leaving might never catch up to me.
But Aston had to go and call me out on it. And now I was forced to admit it to myself, because I was supposed to be traveling toward the life I wanted, not away from the life I was too scared to want.
Aston shrugged with one shoulder. “If it doesn’t work out, then it doesn’t work out. And we can say we tried, didn’t we? But being a traveler means being open to things as well. I mean, well, doesn’t it? Isn’t that why you came here? You tell me.”
I thought about what he said. And damn it, he was right.
“Okay.” I nodded with my whole body. “You are absolutely right. What should we do?” I asked it hopefully; this time I’d contribute. This time I’d try.
“Well, first we can get coffee,” he said mirroring my determination. “Come on. We can’t think without a good dose of caffeine, can we, now? I know a coffee shop that’s open all hours.”
He took a few steps forward, away from the path, away from the river, and away from where I stood alone. Could I really do this?
When he
saw that I wasn’t following him, he turned around.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m scared, too, but this could be really good, I think.”
I looked down at my boots. If I really was the girl I claimed to be, I would at least try. And because I didn’t want to let that girl down, that girl who I was at my finest hours, I extended my hand and clasped his palm to mine. My mouth curved in an unself-conscious smile. “You may need caffeine to think, but I need sugar. Let’s go.”
63
“I WANT TO show you something,” Aston said with his hand on my lower back as we zigzagged the leafy streets, past the Seven Dials sundial pillar. The roads were empty and wet. A spring shower had begun pitter-pattering through the canopy of new leaves above our heads lit up by orange streetlamps. “You’re not in a hurry for that coffee, are you?”
“I’ve got all night for you.” I tilted my face toward the English rain. And please let me have tomorrow, too, I thought.
“Good.” Aston turned down a small cobblestone side street. When he noticed that I was a few paces behind him, he stopped and took my hand. His face was flushed. “Come along,” he said. “I think you’ll like this.”
It occurred to me then: Aston and I weren’t from different worlds at all. He may not identify as a traveler, but he sure could act like one.
We trotted down a lane so narrow that if I spread my arms I would have been able to touch the bricks on both sides. He stopped at an arched wooden door and took out a set of rattling keys.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked.
He pressed his finger to his lips. Just then, it started to pour. I stopped talking and let his mysterious energy overtake me as the icy rain pelted my cheeks.
The old door swung open. Taking my hand again, Aston tugged me inside. He closed the door behind us, shushing out the pouring rain and pitching us into blackness. A gasp slipped out.
“Don’t move,” he told me, holding my shoulders as if to show me he knew exactly where I was. “I’ll get the lights and turn on some heat for you.”
“Where are we?” I whispered.
But he didn’t answer and instead left me standing there alone. My eyes adjusted to the dark, and I began to get a sense of the room’s geography. Opposite from where I stood it was lighter: There must be windows over there. It felt like a low-ceilinged, narrow space—but cozy. It smelled of wood and paper and age, not unlike a library.
Just then, an antique desk lamp flicked on with a metallic bounce. From overhead came a slight buzzing as a cluster of candle-faint Edison bulbs turned on. Even though it was very dim, I squinted my eyes in response to the new light.
I mapped my surroundings: Rows of vinyl records lined the shelves. Polished wood guitars and posters advertising gigs long passed decorated the walls. I looked up and saw a tin ceiling, the bare bulbs dropping down like fishing lines. I was right—opposite me stood a wall of loft windows: little glass rectangles that were covered by curtains, but beyond them was the street and the pattering of rain. We were in a record store.
I swiveled myself toward Aston. He took out a lacquered black vinyl record from its paper slip and blew on it.
“How do you have keys to this place?”
He ignored me for a moment and cradled the record into a record player. The needle scratched and squeaked before the warm analog notes took form.
I ran my hand over the dusty sleeves of black LPs, timeworn or dressed in flimsy cellophane. The moaning of wild, wild horses pushed through the snug, warm atmosphere. And I thought, You’re right. Even wild horses couldn’t drag me away from all this tonight.
Aston took a guitar off the wall and sat on a wooden stool, tuning it up in twanging plucks. His tendons rippled and swelled under the thin skin of his hand as he caught the strings and made them quiver.
“That’s beautiful,” I mumbled as he joined in with the drowsy, moody melody.
He looked up at me and smiled like he just remembered I was there.
I sank down on the Oriental rug and sat cross-legged in front of him. “Are we supposed to be here?” I asked.
Aston shook his finger over a fret. The note answered me.
“’Course we can be here. I own the place.” His fingers moved with ease and traditional grace. “Used to come here skiving off studies, so when I found it was for sale a few years ago, I couldn’t let it be turned into a Body Shop.”
I lay back on the carpet, spread out like a snow angel, and let the music cover me like fresh snowfall. The smoky lights, secondhand records, woozy heat, and vibrating strings—they made me feel like things were happening, real, important things. I actually felt myself living life at that moment.
The song concluded and looped white noise, but Aston kept strumming, transitioning into another song, equally melancholic, equally beautiful. The music he created felt intimate, like a lover whispering in your ear.
Aston hummed a bluesy melody above me, his pitch as smooth as lived-in bedsheets. But then, he stopped playing his guitar.
With my eyes closed, I lifted an eyebrow, not wanting to break the enchantment. Something inside me went quiet in peaceful contentment.
Sitting up, I found him watching me. I looked down, playing with the carpet between my fingers. My mind whooshed when I realized what I was about to do.
Nearing the turntable, I found a cherished album close by. And soon, a sad, dusty cello in a minor key meshed with a heartrending acoustic guitar and a ghostly female vocalist.
“That’s an original.” Aston watched me over the curve of his guitar. There was a smile in his cadence when he spoke to me. The cello hushed, and the lamplight cast otherworldly velvety shadows over the towers of old records, arranged like a cityscape around us.
I walked over to him and took the guitar out of his hands, leaning it against the wall. He let me take it.
Feeling sure of myself, of my body, of my movements, of my intentions, I positioned myself in front of Aston. The needle skipped a groove on the record but continued undeterred a moment later.
“Kika,” he said in a low, smoky voice that came from the depths of his throat. “We don’t have to.”
I held still for a moment, and I knew that if I wanted to stop now, he would let me. But I straddled myself down onto his lap and kissed him.
“I want to,” I told him, breaking off the kiss.
Instead of speaking again, I guided his hands to where I wanted them. I made a faraway noise when his warm palms first skimmed over my bare skin, lost in the sheer, simple stupor of being touched. The music made me braver, but I couldn’t recall a time I wanted anything more.
64
IN THE FIRST small hours of morning, the rain stopped and we left the record shop and went to Soho, our fingers coiled together the whole time. We sat in an Italian-style coffeehouse filled with people too preoccupied to go home or with no homes to go to. Shoulder-to-shoulder they rested—all-hours cab drivers with nicotine eyes and electric-blue-haired teenagers returning from neon nightclubs.
On the other side of the filmy window, the early morning threatened to arrive, while oblivious parades of drunken partygoers passed by with far less on their minds than us.
A television played a soccer match in machine-gun-fast Italian. Aston flipped through a morning paper left in our booth. I thought of what had just happened back at the shop, about that pulling feeling in my heart when he tucked me against his chest afterward, when we were just bare skin on bare skin. I could have slept there all night, with my ear against his thrumming heartbeat.
“What has you smiling, Kika?” he asked, eyeing me over his paper.
I didn’t realize I was smiling.
“Go on. Tell me.” He folded the newspaper in half, hiding a sleepy yawn behind it.
“You,” I admitted. “And me. We’ll think of something,” I said finally.
“Of course we will,” he
said. “I thought, say nothing manifests, perhaps we could, I don’t know, go on one of your trips together. Scout some handicrafts and whatnot—if you have to leave the UK, I mean.”
“But I thought you said that you don’t like to travel?”
“Well, I think I may like to travel with you.” Thankfully, he curled his gaze downward before I was forced to jump over the table and drag him back to the record store.
“Just an idea, anyway. I’m quite sure we’ll find a solution.” He shrugged and gathered up the newspaper again. As he started reading, I stole a bite of his pastry even though I already finished two of my own. (I regret nothing.)
He would never be more handsome to me than he was right then—at 4:30 A.M. on a Friday morning; the smell of strong espresso thickening the air; the neon lights splashing through the windows, coating his cornfield-blond hair and making him look like someone poets wrote sonnets about.
We talked adamantly then, each of us moving from option to option: I could maybe come back and get a job under the table; Aston would get visa information from his company’s lawyers; or we would look into au pair agencies.
We talked and talked and talked, both of us certain we’d figure something out as the night trudged toward unavoidable daybreak.
But time had its way with us that day, and we wouldn’t come up with a fleshed-out solution. We needed more time, and as much as it hurt to admit it, we had been outwitted.
So hand in hand we watched the sun break like an egg over the Thames that morning, staining the dawn with orange and melancholy.
Bloodshot veins made Aston’s eyes even bluer, and his ridged jawline had cultivated a plain of powdery golden stubble as fine as May pollen.
This is some strange version of what it’d be like waking up beside him, I imagined privately, my stomach leaping at the thought. If only there were more of these drowsy early mornings to come. But for now, this dawn was all we had.
65
WE PAUSED IN front of our respective houses. Before going inside, I promised Aston that I’d stop by his house when I was done packing so that I could say good-bye to him—officially, but temporarily, until we could find a better solution than this. Good-bye for now, which was always my line, wasn’t it?
Girls Who Travel Page 23