He turned over once more, but as he did, he stretched a little too much. He kicked the trunk he’d placed at the end of the brick bench. It fell to the ground with an immense clatter, and he swore as pain shot up his foot.
He exhaled slowly, gritting his teeth. He could still hear Amelia moving in her own room. The street was quiet now. How long had it been since she’d arrived? Wasn’t she going to sleep?
Then he heard the creak of wood scraping against wood. A moment later, a light tap sounded on his door.
“Grayson?”
Grayson took a deep breath. Of course. Of course she would come over once she heard him.
“Grayson, I know you’re awake. I just heard you say ‘damn.’”
“Damn,” he muttered, this time more quietly. Then he spoke loudly enough for her to hear: “One moment.”
He picked through the fallen remains of his luggage, feeling in the dark until he found candles and matches. He lit one and opened the door to her.
In the guttering candlelight, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He swallowed.
“I don’t know a lick about Chinese propriety,” he told her, “but how do you think the district magistrate’s son will feel about your visiting a man in the middle of the night?”
A strange expression crossed her face—confusion first, then surprise, then…amusement?
Surely not.
“Oh,” she said. “Of all the things that happened tonight, that’s what you remember?” She seemed barely able to contain her mirth.
He folded his arms.
She swept into the room and closed the door behind her. “If the magistrate’s son objects to my talking to you, then he’ll likely have a conniption about the fact that I’m the vice president of telegraphic encoding for your company. Alas. The two of us are doomed before ever we started.” She dusted off her hands. “And isn’t that convenient? It will save me all the trouble of rejecting him.”
Some absolutely petty thing inside Grayson made him want to laugh. “Ah. Is that so?”
“Grayson.” She shook her head at him. “I adore my work. I’m not giving it—or you—up.”
“But you found where you were from—”
She took a step toward him and set a finger against his lips. “I’m not an urn that’s been returned to its rightful owner. I’ve been away for eighteen years. I will not pretend that those years never happened.”
“Oh?” He wanted to reach out and bring her to him. “What do you envision?”
“I have so many thoughts.” She gave him a tired smile. “And my brain is so completely finished with words. It has been doing words all afternoon in so many languages.”
He couldn’t help but smile at that. “So you came over to my room in the dead of night in order to do more of them?”
“Yes.” She looked at him gravely. “I did. And if you were sitting here in the dark thinking about the magistrate’s son, I clearly needed to do so.”
He sighed and made the mistake of looking down from her eyes. She had exchanged her brown traveling gown for a robe, one that seemed more suitable for the moments before bed than a visit to the room of… What precisely were they? Friends? Acquaintances? Lovers?
He should have said something in response. He could not make himself do so. She seemed so…bright was the wrong word. She seemed happy. God, he wanted that for her. He wanted it for himself.
“I had to come here,” she said. “I had to say thank you.”
“It’s nothing.”
She made a little derisive noise. “You took weeks from your schedule for me.”
“If it hadn’t been for you, I would have been aboard the Victory, heading to Myriad. Boring stuff.”
She took hold of his hands. “Grayson. You told me why you were doing it. That you wouldn’t let my relationship with my mother languish if you had the power to change it.”
He exhaled.
“You told me your mother resented your survival. And you gave me this, Grayson.”
“There’s no point poking at the bruise,” he said softly. “What good will it do?”
“Gray.”
“It’s all under my control. I can’t blame my family for how they feel, but I have a plan. My brothers and I came up with the idea of the line across the Pacific. I have…” He exhaled. He’d never told anyone this before. “Journals.” He shrugged. “Logs. All these things with their thoughts in them. I’ve been making a journal of the transpacific line. They’re a part of it. Once the line across the Pacific is finished, I’ll be able to…”
He trailed off. Said aloud, his plan seemed flimsier and less solid than it had felt in the privacy of his own mind.
“Grayson.”
“Once it’s done,” he said, “once I’ve built what we planned as an inescapable part of the world, I’ll be able to show everyone that…”
There was a reason Grayson didn’t talk of these things aloud. In his heart, the emotions lined up, one right after the other. He’d complete this impossible quest. It had stretched across the world. Something that hard, so tied to his brothers—surely it had to be enough. It had to be. It was all he had.
Out loud, his words made no sense. He could sense the arguments, the questions, the ways his plan could be picked to pieces with whys and hows. But the alternative to this was surrendering hope entirely. He had come so far. He had to hold on, no matter how nonsensical it felt.
“Talking won’t help,” he told her instead.
She swallowed. “Are you at least happy?”
Happy. He could remember what happiness felt like. He had to because he performed it so well. His body knew what it was to smile, to laugh. Sometimes he could even fool himself into forgetting the weight he bore. He’d been holding on to it for so long that the anchor crushing his heart felt familiar.
“No,” he said softly. “I do not think I am.”
Those words slipped into the night, burning a hole in the silence. She took his hands. Her fingers were cold in his.
He could feel the corner of his lip quirk up in something that felt too cynical to be a smile. “I’m accustomed to it by now. Don’t let it eclipse your joy. Not when you are my solace.”
She wrapped her arms around him. He could feel her shoulders shuddering, could feel the gasp of her breath against his chest. Her heart beat against his, out of synchrony with his.
“Ah Meng,” he said softly, running a hand through her hair. “Don’t feel sorry for me. Look what I’m about to accomplish.”
She pulled away. The shadows cast by candlelight deepened her scowl into something stormy.
“You,” she said, “are such a buffoon.” And before he could make sense of that, she kissed him.
The first touch of her lips felt as fierce as her frown—mouth on his, unrelenting, fingertips clenched against his forearms. She opened her mouth to him and their tongues met with a searing intensity born out of months of wanting. He tasted a hint of soda and salt, then just her. Just Amelia.
The intensity between them shifted, like a windstorm turning into driving rain. He wanted to be washed away. Their bodies pressed together. The thin fabric of her robe meant that he could feel her thighs against his leg, feel how little it would take to join more than just their mouths.