by Lake, C. J.
“Oh, Andy,” he rasped, gripping her to him. “We’ll get through everything,” he said again.
“You promise?” she whispered into the warm, muscled wall of his chest.
“I promise, baby,” he murmured against her hair, “I promise.”
For countless moments, they were both so lost in their own world, their own space, that they almost didn’t hear the final boarding call for their flight. “Oh, my gosh!” Andy said suddenly, pulling back. “Tragan, that’s us!”
“Shit, there’s the line,” he agreed, noticing a cluster of people filing toward the departure gate. Taking Andy’s hand, he grinned at her. “Let’s hurry.”
Chapter Forty-three
“Matthew!”
Matt ducked his head into his dad’s office. “Yeah?”
“What the hell is this crap?” Matt’s father, Joe, demanded, holding his work phone up in the air.
“Uh…what?” Matt said cautiously.
“I just got a message from Tray telling me that he’s quitting. What the hell? Did you know about this?” Uncomfortably, Matt admitted that he did. “Just like that? He’s quitting?!”
“It was a last minute situation, Dad. Literally, last minute.”
“Yeah, I got that from the message. Still. Are you telling me one of my best guys for the past four years is just picking up and quitting on me? For a ‘personal situation’?” Joe barked, citing the words in Tragan’s message with aggravation. Though he wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, Matt stepped into his dad’s office and explained the whole thing to him--including the gist of Andy’s condition and why she had to leave. “So he’s going with her?” Matt’s dad asked, looking annoyed. Yet, his tone had lost some of its initial edge.
“It’s serious with them,” Matt added. “Tragan screwed up with her big-time. But he says she’s the one.”
“Well shit,” his dad grumbled, before setting his phone on the desk and rubbing a hand over his jaw. “Young people making young people’s mistakes,” Joe muttered with a shake of his head. He seemed to be thinking aloud more than trying to elicit a response from his son.
“Sorry, Dad,” Matt offered generically. Calmer now, Joe didn’t bother arguing the logic of Tragan’s actions. Though he did ask why Tragan hadn’t explained all this in person. With a shrug, Matt did his best to apologize for his friend. “He didn’t have time to come in person to tell you. It was a big mess, and her flight was leaving right away. As for explaining about Andy in his message…I have to assume he was just trying to respect her privacy. You know, maybe he didn’t want to get into her whole condition.” Pensively, Joe nodded, as Matt went on, “But obviously you should know what’s going on, Dad. And you know Tray wouldn’t leave you hanging unless it was a serious situation.”
“Well, how sick is she?” Joe asked curiously, now with a pinched brow of fatherly concern. In the back of his mind, Matt wondered if he would develop that natural paternal sense toward people, too, when he became a dad someday.
“She seems fine now, but that’s the thing. What she’s got can flare up any time. The doctor she’s going to be working with in London has apparently made a whole study of her symptoms and has some theories about what’s going on. Tray wants to be with her,” Matt finished simply.
Still rubbing his jaw thoughtfully, Joe nodded. “All right.”
“You’re not mad then?”
With a rumbling noise in his throat, he dismissed the question. “Look, shit happens. We’ll just have Thompkins take over the remodel in Southie. And Parker can jump on the Waltham job.”
On Matt’s way out, he paused in the doorway and glanced back at his dad. “Hey, just curious. Any chance you’d take Tray on again when he comes back?”
“Hell, yeah,” Joe said.
“Really?”
“Of course. Like I said, he was one of my best guys. Screw pride; this is business. But the question isn’t when Tragan comes back--it’s if.”
~
Once seated on the plane, Tragan and Andy kissed sweetly and lovingly at first--but it didn’t take long for passion to rise between them. Soon they broke apart, knowing they were only moments away from making out. Not a good look on a crowded plane. Andy squeezed Tragan’s arm as he reached over to snap her seatbelt in place, and then clicked his own. “I can’t believe you’re really here,” she said softly. “That you want to come with me.”
“It’ll be great, babe,” Tragan replied, and kissed her once more. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she said, touching a hand to his cheek. “But what about what I said before? You know, your job? The apartment?”
With a carefree shrug, Tragan said, “I quit.”
“Just like that?” she said, surprised.
“Yep.”
“What will you do then?”
“I’ll find another job, whatever. I’ll figure it out. Nothing’s more important than being with you. And as far as our apartment goes, I paid out the rest of the lease. Gave Matt the keys; he’ll look in on it for us and pick up the mail. It’s usually garbage mail anyway. But when the renewal comes, we can decide what you want to do. If you want to hold on to our apartment, or find another place.”
“Oh, but I love our apartment,” she said wistfully, thinking of the reading room he’d made for her, the kitchen where she’d spent so much time and where Tragan had tested all her culinary creations. Thinking of the sofa where they’d played Super Mario Bros. and fallen asleep half on top of each other.
“Don’t worry about any of that for now,” Tragan said, cutting into her reverie. “For now, let’s just focus on getting you set up in London and giving this university study a shot. The future is a wild card for us right now. Oh--but speaking of the future…” He reached into his jacket pocket. “Matt got Chinese food last night, so I saved these for us.” He pulled out a handful of fortune cookies, still in the wrapping. “You pick.”
Smiling, Andy felt a surge of joy. It had everything to do with how much she loved this man. “Mmm…let me think,” she said, considering her options before she selected one of the five cookies in Tragan’s hand. “For some reason, that one is calling me.”
After she grabbed hers, Tragan said, “Okay, I’ll take this one.” Carelessly, he deposited the remaining cookies in the empty drink holder.
“You open yours first,” Andy said.
“All right, let’s see here…” As usual, he tore the wrapper open and smashed the cookie without preamble. “‘A bowl of cherries includes the pits.’ Oh man…” he muttered, clearly less than charmed. “Here we go again. Where’s the ‘fortune’ part?” When Andy met his disdain with a giggle, Tragan gave her a wry grin. “Now you go.”
“Okay.” Her fingers hesitated after she peeled off the wrapper, holding the bare cookie in her hand. “What if it’s bad?” she blurted, surprising herself with the thought.
“Don’t say that.” Tragan brushed a lock of hair out of her face and looked meaningfully into her eyes. “You’re about to have a winning streak. I’m a gaming expert, Andy. I can feel these things.”
“Hmm, ‘gaming expert’ is what we’re calling it now?” she teased.
Grinning, Tragan waited for her to pull out the fortune. And when she did…she let out the tiniest gasp. “Oh, my gosh. Look!” Andy said.
Curious, Tragan took the slip of paper. “‘The fog will be lifted,’” he read. Then he smiled at her, knowingly, and took her hand.
Lacing her fingers in his, Andy held her breath and soon their plane ascended into the clouds.
Chapter Forty-four
Four months later
I can’t believe it’s our last night in London,” Andy said as they walked along Hudson Street, the sidewalk still splashed with rain.
“I know,” Tragan agreed, giving her hand a squeeze. “It went so fast, looking back.”
“Everything always feels like that,” Andy mused.
“How do you feel?”
“Great! I mean,
sometimes I can’t believe it’s real--that everything will be okay now.”
“Of course it will,” Tragan assured her.
Thoughtfully, Andy looked up at him. “But doesn’t this mean that I can’t go to used bookstores anymore?”
With a sympathetic shrug, Tragan said, “Well, babe, like Dr. Strand said, it’s the older bookstores that are likely to still use triglexide-1 as an insecticide. They don’t use it in the newer stores.”
As Dr. Strand had explained, modern bookstores had largely abandoned chemical pest-control treatment of their facilities--relying instead on sticky traps, pheromone traps, and climate control when it came to keeping bugs away. It was more a question of practicality than anything else. With newer stores, inventory turned over quickly, which meant that the paper and bindings of the volumes housed in the store never got a chance to age much. As opposed to the stock found in the more antique-y bookshops, which was way more vulnerable to infestation. This was simply due to the fact that book-bugs were particularly drawn to old paper and old glue in the bindings.
Apparently the vast array of insects that were attracted to old books--including booklice, silverfish, termites, beetles, and more--could be highly destructive if left unchecked. Therefore, even though triglexide-1 had fallen out of wide, mainstream use, some book collectors and used bookstore owners continued to rely on it as an effective insecticide chemical. This was how Andy had come in contact with it, and often enough to have multiple “episodes.”
Of course Strand had explained all this after isolating triglexide-1 as the common chemical trigger for many subjects in his study, including Andy--which came after extensive inquiries with his research subjects to find commonalities in lifestyle, biology, and overall health, and then time-lining disruptions in health, and tracking the severity and variations of specific symptoms. From everything Strand had concluded, Andy’s “Bronsteg Disorder” was not actually an autoimmune disease, but instead an allergic reaction to triglexide-1. It wasn’t a common allergy, but then triglexide-1 wasn’t a commonly used chemical.
Strand’s conclusions also explained why an “attack” of Bronsteg symptoms--like a drop in blood pressure, headaches, fatigue, and dizziness--would come on rather suddenly. What Strand had discovered when working with Andy and others was that the severity of an allergic reaction--including how long it would last and how debilitating it was--depended on the length of time that had elapsed since the chemical treatment had been applied to the facility in which they’d come in contact. This explained why she could be so ill as to have to come home from school during her senior year, but her attack of Bronsteg symptoms shortly before she’d moved into Tragan’s apartment had only lasted a couple of weeks and had been more minor in comparison.
“I’m so happy,” Andy admitted, leaning into Tragan, breaking into his thoughts. Happy didn’t even begin to capture his state of mind. To think that Andy would no longer have to live with this scary question mark over her head was worth more than he could ever give her. Happy, yes. Also extremely relieved for her sake, grateful to a higher power, to science, to Dr. Strand, and tonight, in particular, he felt…nervous.
“You ready to be back in Boston?” he asked as they approached a familiar orange awning, scrawled with Chinese characters.
“Definitely. And it’s sooner than we thought! Now I’ll be back just in time to start classes. Although…there are things I’ll miss about London. No more Foyles Bookshop, no more Welsh Rarebit. And no more Szechwan Panda,” she added ruefully while Tragan reached for the brass door handle.
“Yeah, where will we ever find another Chinese food place in Boston?” he quipped.
Andy shot him a look over her shoulder as he followed her inside the restaurant. “I know, but this was our special place. And it’s the only place you’ll drink tea.”
He gave a laugh at that. “Hey, I’m a coffee guy,” Tragan said unapologetically. “The Brits aren’t gonna change that.”
About forty minutes later--as they finished up their last Szechwan Panda dinner in London--the server appeared with the check and two fortune cookies. “More tea?” he said.
“No, thanks,” Tragan replied, reaching for a cookie.
Once the server left, Andy snapped her cookie up and, as always, said, “You first.”
“All right, here we go,” Tragan began, ready for the usual lackluster “fortune” that always seemed to find him. “‘Your future is always with you,’” he read.
“Hey, wait, that’s actually a good one,” Andy said encouragingly, reaching out across the table to touch his hand.
Smiling at her, Tragan turned his hand in hers and held on. “Now you.”
After breaking her cookie, Andy paused before reading her fortune. “You know I usually get pretty good ones--let’s be honest. Well, what if this one breaks my streak?”
“Stop. C’mon, read it,” Tragan said. “How bad could it be anyway?”
“Oh my God, don’t say that!” she scolded, but she was grinning. “Fine, let’s see.” Uncurling the slip of paper, she started to read, “‘Will you m--’” when her mouth froze and her eyes shot to Tragan’s, watching her across the table. His heart started beating faster and his palms began to sweat. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d felt as nervous as he did right now, waiting for her answer. “Tragan…” she whispered finally, her voice cracking, her blue eyes becoming watery.
God, what if it was too soon? Tragan worried. What if Andy wasn’t ready--what if she said no? Deep down, he knew he would be crushed.
“Yes,” she said, her beautiful mouth breaking into a smile. “Yes, I’ll marry you.” She rose from her chair at almost the same moment that he did and threw her arms around him. Hugging her tightly, Tragan lifted her feet off the floor, at the same time exhaling with relief, and feeling sheer excitement spread across his chest. Andy pulled back a few inches to look up at him and said, “Wait till I tell my parents. They’ll probably be shocked.”
“Maybe not,” Tragan admitted, then explained, “I asked for your mom’s permission when she came to visit you a few weeks ago. And I got your dad’s permission on the phone.” In both cases, Tragan had done it as a gesture of respect. Fortunately, Andy’s parents had given their blessing, so Tragan didn’t have to worry about their reaction. He also felt that they both liked him after seeing how devoted he was to their daughter.
“How could you keep all that from me?” Andy said, sounding impressed. “You really do have a good poker face!”
“That’s true,” he admitted. “Blackjack’s my game, but I kill it in poker, too.”
Ignoring his cockiness, Andy touched her palm to his chest, smiling up at him. “And I can’t believe you conspired with Szechwan Panda like this. Is nothing sacred?”
Tragan laughed at that. “To be fair, I only told them what to put in your fortune cookie. I left my fortune to chance. Or to the guy in the back that types them up--you know, whichever.”
With a laugh, Andy reached up for a kiss. He brought his hand to her face, holding her cheek as he kissed her back. She clutched his shirt and said, “I want you to keep your fortune, too, okay?”
“Of course I will.”
“To remember this moment.”
“Not just that,” Tragan said. “But because it’s true. You’re my future.”
Andy smiled, fresh tears glittering in her blue eyes. “And I’ll always be with you.”
~ End ~
Author’s Note: Bronsteg is an anagram for be strong. Andy’s condition and the resolution of it are entirely fictional.
C.J. Lake is a storyteller who is passionate about art, surfing, and skiing/snowboarding. Residing near the coast of Massachusetts, C.J. is working on a new book that will feature Tragan Barrett’s friend, Matt Winter. Readers can get in touch via email: [email protected]
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