I thought about leaving. I thought about getting up and making my excuses, calling an Uber and waving good-bye and keeping a safe distance from Ian’s sturdy, affable self until this longing—and that’s what it was, I realized as I watched his fingers curl around the neck of his beer bottle, longing, a physical ache in my chest—had passed.
Instead I waited for him to sit down beside me, and I swung my feet into his lap.
Ian looked at me for a long moment. Then he set the beer bottle down. He reached forward and peeled my wet socks off, pressing one careful thumb against my chilly instep; I shivered. “Your feet feel like a cadaver’s,” he informed me, smirking a little.
“Rude,” I said, but I was smiling. He squeezed my toes once before sliding the wool socks on with a surprising gentleness, pulling them all the way up over the bottoms of my jeans.
“Better?” he asked, and I swallowed.
“Much.”
Ian nodded. Outside it was snowing again, tiny flakes visible in the yellow glow cast by the streetlights outside his building. It felt like we were bears hunkering down for the winter, as if the world couldn’t get us up here.
Ian looked down at his grip on my ankles, then back up again; the moment that passed between us was so heavy I felt like I could reach out and hold it in my two shaking hands. He smelled like off-brand boy soap from the drugstore. I wanted to wrap him around me like a coat.
“Ooookay,” I said, suddenly breathless, sitting back on the futon. “I—huh. Okay.”
Ian let go of me abruptly, like he was worried he’d read me wrong. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”
“No no no.” I paused for a moment, trying to steady myself. “I know I told you I wanted to be friends,” I said. “And I really like that you were so cool about it.”
“Well, I’m cool,” Ian joked, gesturing down at his work shirt and flannel-lined khakis. “I mean, clearly.”
“No, I mean it,” I said. “You can always tell when a guy is trying to make something that isn’t supposed to be a date into a date, or when they’re secretly annoyed that it isn’t a date, and you just—you’ve never been like that.”
Ian tilted his head to the side, lips twisting. “I’m trying to figure out if that’s emasculating or not.”
“Can you just take the compliment?” I asked, more shrilly than I meant to.
“Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “Yes.”
“Look,” I said, leaning my head back against the futon, curling my knees up in front of me. “Here’s the deal. Without sounding super dramatic or like I’m in a Lifetime movie or like I’m being really vague on purpose, there’s stuff about myself that I don’t necessarily . . . like to talk about. Stuff you don’t know about me.”
Ian nodded. “Without being super vague on purpose,” he echoed pointedly.
“I’m serious!” Deep down I knew this was silly, that by virtue of being so mysterious I was probably turning my past into a bigger deal than it needed to be. But what was I supposed to tell him? I spent the bulk of my high school career playing the hypotenuse of a ridiculous love triangle that you can read all about in my author mom’s international bestseller? “I’m not trying to be an asshole, I just—”
“Do you have a boyfriend?” Ian interrupted.
I huffed a bit, surprised and—absurdly—a tiny bit offended. “No.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No.” I smiled.
“Are you a Republican?”
That one made me laugh. “No,” I said, kicking lightly at his thigh with one socked foot. “I’m not a Republican.”
Ian shrugged. “Then whatever it is, I don’t care.”
“Easy for you to say now, maybe.” I shook my head.
“You’re wrong.” Ian leaned forward. “Here’s what I do know about you,” he said, ticking the list off on his fingers. “You make me laugh. You’re smart and cool and kind and driven.” He smiled. “And you are, like. The prettiest girl I’ve ever seen.”
I rolled my eyes, quietly pleased. “Well,” I said finally, mirroring him, leaning in a little closer. “I don’t know about that.”
“I do,” Ian said calmly, then cupped the back of my skull in one hand and kissed me. He tasted like beer and like popcorn and like hope. And maybe this was how it happened, I thought to myself, eyes closed and heart creaking open. Maybe this was how I started over for real.
The next morning I went and cut all my hair off, then called my mom and got permission to swipe her credit card for a dye job to match. She was worried about me, though both of us had tacitly agreed not to talk about why beyond her careful, general probes into my emotions and a book about grief that she’d sent to my dorm. “Sure,” she said cautiously; she was in Chicago on a book tour, the hotel TV chattering away in the background. “Whatever makes you happy.”
Once I was finished at the salon I met Ian at a coffee shop not far from campus; he stood up from the table when he saw me, an expression on his face like I was a rare, delicate thing. “I like it,” he said, reaching up and tugging on the ends, then blushing a little. “You look like you.”
“I feel like me,” I told him, though I wasn’t entirely sure if that was true or not, and tipped my face up for a kiss.
Now, five months later and halfway across the globe, I reach for his hands and lace our fingers together, noting with a surge of affection that his are sweaty, too, his palms hot and damp. “Well, you big weirdo,” I say, standing on my tiptoes to kiss him, “now that we’ve got that all settled, you wanna go look at some more horrifying weapons?” We’ve lost our Tower tour group, the guide having led them off in a shuffling, murmuring cluster, no doubt to gamely exclaim over an antique stretching rack for the efficient tearing of one limb from another or a ruby-encrusted dagger that belonged to Thomas Cromwell. “We’re probably missing out on a live disembowelment right now.”
But Ian shakes his head. “I feel like I’ve kind of learned enough about medieval interrogation tactics for one day,” he confesses. “You wanna get out of here and find some food?”
I nod, the relief sharp and unexpected. It’s claustrophobic in here all of a sudden—those ancient stone walls getting closer, history pressing in from all sides. The soles of my feet itch with the instinct to run. For a moment I’m not sure which I’m more afraid of: Henry VIII’s wide and varied collection of bone-breaking apparatuses, or holding Ian’s heart in my two clumsy hands. Still, I remind myself it’s normal: of course those complicated old feelings would come roiling up now, my past tapping me naggingly on the shoulder. The last person I loved, after all, was—
“Yeah,” I say before I can think it, scanning the room for the nearest escape. “Let’s go.”
Outside we find a crowded pub to have lunch in, sitting side by side at the bar over heavy plates of fried fish and mushy green peas. Afternoon sunlight streams in through stained-glass windows, the slightly dank smell of beer and old wood dense in the air. The restaurant is teeming with smartly dressed office workers and clusters of chattering girlfriends on their lunch breaks, a pack of noisy English bros in quarter-zip sweaters laughing over something on one of their phones. “Is it rude to ask for ketchup?” I ask quietly, leaning toward Ian and nodding at my heaping pile of thickly cut fries. “Like, is ketchup even a thing in England?”
Ian frowns. “I think vinegar is the thing here, actually.”
“I was worried you were going to say that.” I twist the cap off the bottle of malt vinegar on the bar and sprinkle a few drops over my fries anyway, then hand it to Ian, who does the same before taking a big gulp of his Guinness. “When in London, right?” I tease, lifting a fry in salute.
Ian grins back, dimple popping in his right cheek. I like that he’s the kind of person who knows stuff like this: local customs and the right way to act in unfamiliar places, who to tip and how to navigate the Underground and what to order in a fancy restaurant. His family traveled a lot for his mom’s job when he was a kid, he tol
d me once, so he comes by it honestly, but he also reads more than anyone I know. At any given moment he’s got at least three books on the go: a giant hardcover next to his bed, plus a paperback tucked into his schoolbag and something on his phone for unexpected emergencies. “Did you bring that ’cause you’re worried I’m gonna get boring?” I teased once, spying a dog-eared copy of Wonder Boys peeking out from the back pocket of his corduroys on the way to dinner not long after we started dating. “Is that why you’ve always got backup entertainment available?”
I was only joking around, but Ian shook his head seriously. “Not at all,” he promised. “But at some point you’re gonna get up and pee, right?”
Now he nods at the bartender for the bill and sits back on his stool. “So what’s next on the agenda?” he asks, gesturing at my phone, which I’ve set beside my plate for safekeeping.
I eye him over my pint of cider. “What makes you so sure I’ve got the next thing decided?”
Ian laughs out loud. “I mean, I’ve met you before, to start with.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I wrinkle my nose. The truth is I’ve planned every day of this trip down to the minute, complete with color-coded lists and preloaded Oyster cards for the train and an app on my phone to remind me what we’re supposed to be doing and when, plus the best way to get there and what to look at once we arrive. It’s really just a more concentrated version of the schedule I started keeping at school last fall, a training regimen for a brand-new me, but I can understand how it might be slightly overwhelming to the uninitiated.
Still, if I’ve learned anything over the last year it’s the importance of a concrete plan, a comprehensive guide for moving through the world with as few false starts as possible. A system, I have found, can stave off chaos. A system, I have found, prevents mistakes.
I pick up my phone and scroll through today’s itinerary, tapping the tiny checkboxes next to Tower of London and pub lunch. “Westminster Abbey,” I report after a moment, flicking to the next screen to double-check our route on the Underground. “So nothing as traumatic as this morning, hopefully.”
“What, the prison?” Ian asks, swiping a leftover fry off my plate. “Or me saying I love you?”
“What?” My head snaps up. “I wasn’t traumatized!”
Ian looks at me like, nice try, buddy. “When I first said it?” he asks gently. “You were something.”
I shake my head, trying to reel my guilty, embarrassed self back in. “I was surprised,” I tell him finally. “That’s all.” Then, reaching out and taking his bearded face between my two hands: “Hey. I am really, really happy to be here with you, do you know that?”
Ian smiles back, his hazel eyes warm and friendly, and I know he’s willing to let me off the hook. “I mean, you should be,” he says, the grin turning just the slightest bit wicked and his faint Boston accent getting a touch more pronounced. He turns his face to plant a kiss against my palm. “I’m really fucking fun.”
Ian pays the bill and we amble out into the late summer sunshine, weaving through the crowd on the bustling sidewalk and down into the Underground station. “This is so much nicer than Boston,” I comment as we sit down to wait on a bench in front of an ad for a fancy British department store. The T back at home is notoriously unreliable, rattling along aboveground tracks that are perpetually freezing over in the winter. “Why do you think—”
I break off all at once at the sight of a familiar set of shoulders across the platform; my whole body goes wary and watchful and still. For one sharp second it’s like all the air has gone out of this tube station, whooshing down into the dark mouth of the tunnel and leaving me gasping for oxygen like a hooked, terrified fish. Standing on the other side of the tracks, his beat-up backpack slung over one narrow shoulder, is—
Gabe.
I blink. I’m hallucinating, I must be, jet lag or exhaustion or some kind of weird transatlantic madness. To conjure my ex-boyfriend on the other side of the world—an hour after my new boyfriend tells me he loves me? The cold reality is I haven’t seen Gabe since our breakup last summer at home in Star Lake. We haven’t even talked, for God’s sake. And he made it clear that was exactly how he wanted it.
I force a deep, steadying breath, straightening my spine before squinting across the tracks one more time. The stranger looks like Gabe, that much is undeniable. The shaggy hair is gone, trademark curls cut close to his head, but the khaki shorts and the scruffy sneakers are achingly familiar. This guy even kind of stands like Gabe.
He’s also, I realize with no small amount of horror as he turns around and faces my direction, wearing a hoodie with the Donnelly’s Pizza logo on the front.
His dark eyes widen as our gazes lock across the train tracks, my heart like a house on fire and a mechanical jolt rattling deep inside my bones. I want to scream his name across the station. I want to ask him why he ever let me think we were okay. Instead I stand frozen and helpless as a million different emotions flicker like old home movies across his face: Shock. Confusion.
Heartbreak.
The train thunders into the station with a roar and a rumble, the doors sliding open on the opposite side and the crush of people obscuring any view I might have of him through the thick, smudgy windows. When it screeches off a scant moment later, he’s gone.
Again.
I don’t know how long I stand there before I realize Ian is looking at me—before I realize Ian is even still standing here, brow furrowed. “You okay?” he asks.
I nod, coming back to myself like a swimmer resurfacing from deep underwater, breathless and improperly depressurized. “Um,” I say, reaching for his hand and pulling him closer, stepping safely into the circle of his strong, sturdy arms. “Yeah, absolutely. Sorry. I’m great.”
Ian keeps looking. “You sure? You’re, like, ghost white.”
“Thanks a lot,” I say, managing a skim-milk smile, scooping my hair up off my sweaty neck. Suddenly the idea of spending the afternoon shuffling through a dimly lit church with a million other tourists makes me bone-crushingly weary. I want to sit down on the floor of the station and never get up.
“Um,” I say finally, my throat thick with something that is certainly—certainly—not tears. “I think maybe I’m just more jet-lagged than I thought.” It’s not a lie, exactly: last night I lay awake until it was nearly light out, watching the sun creep up outside the window of our rental apartment. “Or maybe it was that cider? I don’t know.” I shake my head. “Anyway, do you want to maybe skip the abbey and crash for a couple hours instead?”
Ian raises his eyebrows in exaggerated surprise. “You want to abandon the itinerary?” he teases. Then, off something in my expression: “Sure,” he says, more quietly this time. “Of course.”
It starts to drizzle as we’re heading back to the apartment, fat drops landing on the sidewalk and the metallic smell of rain on concrete saturating the air. I cross my arms, glancing up at the dark clouds creeping over the city and trying not to take them as an omen.
“It’s a vacation, remember?” Ian reminds me gently, taking my hand and squeezing. “Not the invasion of Normandy.”
“No, I know.” I nod, unsure how to explain to him why the idea of winging it, even a little, unsettles me so disproportionately much. From the beginning, I’ve been purposely vague about everything—and everyone—I left back in Star Lake; after all, “everybody in my charming, picturesque hometown thinks I’m a dumb, messy slut” doesn’t exactly make for sexy new-relationship banter—but it’s not like uptightness for uptightness’s sake is a particularly attractive quality, either. “Of course.”
“Here,” he continues, shrugging out of his hoodie as it starts to rain harder, his T-shirt riding up so I can see the pale, broad planes of his lower back. “Take this.”
I smile. “I’m prepared,” I say, pulling a travel umbrella out of my purse and waggling it in his direction, “but thank you. That’s very courtly.”
Ian shrugs. “It’s England, right?”
/> I bump his shoulder with mine, pleased. He’s taller than me, though not dramatically so: mostly he’s just solid and durable-looking, the kind of person you could imagine chopping wood or paddling a canoe down a river, although every time I say anything remotely like that Ian reminds me he’s from Worcester. “Oh, is that why?” I tease. “You’re getting into the costume drama of it all?”
“Totally,” he replies immediately. “I packed pantaloons. They’re in my bag back at the rental.”
“Dork,” I accuse, but I’m laughing. As we turn the corner toward our rental apartment, the slow, chilly drizzle tapers off.
We’re staying in an Airbnb in Shoreditch, a studio with a tiny kitchenette and a kind of purposeful hipster griminess that would horrify my mom. The floors are lacquered concrete layered with frayed kilim rugs, bright and threadbare; there are vintage army blankets on the bed. On the walls are unframed concert posters for the Rolling Stones and David Bowie, weighted down at the bottoms with binder clips to keep them from curling in the humid air.
I toe off my sandals and collapse backward onto the bed, barely resisting the urge to curl myself into a tiny ball on the starchy white sheets while Ian fills two glasses of water at the sink. “You okay?” he asks, handing one over as he stretches out onto the mattress beside me.
Well, I think I saw my ex-boyfriend on the subway, I imagine telling him; I cheated on him with his brother, who was also my ex, and I thought we’d kind of worked it out, but then when I got to Boston I realized I was—
9 Days and 9 Nights Page 2