“Go away, so you can come back and do it right,” she murmured, and made a face at the words. The rain was still pattering down, cooling the air enough to breathe comfortably. It was just before dawn, she thought, but the air was still warm enough that moisture condensed on the cool skin of her face; small beads of water formed and slid tickling down her neck one by one, dampening the cotton T-shirt she slept in.
She’d wanted to put the events of last November well behind them; make a clean break. Then, when enough time had passed, perhaps they could come to each other again. Not as supporting players in the drama of her parents’ life, but this time as the actors in a play of their own choosing.
No, if anything was to happen between her and Roger Wakefield, it would definitely be by choice. It looked as though she was going to get the chance to choose now, and the prospect gave her a small, excited flutter in the pit of her stomach.
She wiped a hand over her face, slicking off the rain-wet, wiping it casually through her hair to tame the floating strands. If she wasn’t going to sleep, she might as well work.
She left the window open, careless of the rain puddling on the floor. She felt too restless to be sealed in, chilled by artificial air.
Clicking on the lamp on the desk, she pulled out her calculus book and opened it. One small and unexpected bonus of her change of study was her belated discovery of the soothing effects of mathematics.
When she had come back to Boston, alone, and back to school, engineering had seemed a much safer choice than history; solid, fact-bound, reassuringly immutable. Above all, controllable. She picked up a pencil, sharpened it slowly, enjoying the preparation, then bent her head and read the first problem.
Slowly, as it always did, the calm inexorable logic of the figures built its web inside her head, trapping all the random thoughts, wrapping the distracting emotions up in silken threads like so many flies. Round the central axis of the problem, logic spun her web, orderly and beautiful as an orb-weaver’s jeweled confection. Only the one small thought stayed free of its strands, hovering in her mind like a bright, tiny butterfly.
I’m glad you said yes, he’d said. So was she.
* * *
July 1969
“Does he talk like the Beatles? Oh, I’ll just die if he sounds like John Lennon! You know how he says, ‘It’s me grandfather?’ That just knocks me out!”
“He doesn’t sound anything like John Lennon, for God’s sake!” Brianna hissed. She peered cautiously around a concrete pillar, but the International Arrivals gate was still empty. “Can’t you tell the difference between a Liverpudlian and a Scot?”
“No,” her friend Gayle said blithely, fluffing out her blond hair. “All Englishmen sound the same to me. I could listen to them forever!”
“He’s not an Englishman! I told you, he’s a Scot!”
Gayle gave Brianna a look, clearly suggesting that her friend was crazed.
“Scotland’s part of England; I looked on the map.”
“Scotland’s part of Great Britain, not England.”
“What’s the difference?” Gayle stuck her head out and craned around the pillar. “Why are we standing back here? He’ll never see us.”
Brianna ran a hand over her hair to smooth it. They were standing behind a pillar because she wasn’t sure she wanted him to see them. Not much help for it, though; disheveled passengers were beginning to trickle through the double doors, burdened with luggage.
She let Gayle tow her out into the main reception area, still babbling. Her friend’s tongue led a double life; though Gayle was capable of cool and reasoned discourse in class, her chief social skill was babbling on cue. That was why Bree had asked Gayle to come with her to the airport to pick up Roger; no chance of any awkward pauses in the conversation.
“Have you done it with him already?”
She jerked toward Gayle, startled.
“Have I done what?”
Gayle rolled her eyes.
“Played tiddlywinks. Honestly, Bree!”
“No. Of course not.” She felt the blood rising in her cheeks.
“Well, are you going to?”
“Gayle!”
“Well, I mean, you have your own apartment and everything, and nobody’s going to—”
At this awkward moment, Roger Wakefield appeared. He wore a white shirt and scruffy jeans, and Brianna must have stiffened at the sight of him. Gayle’s head whipped round to see where Brianna was looking.
“Ooh,” she said in delight. “Is that him? He looks like a pirate!”
He did, and Brianna felt the bottom of her stomach drop another inch or two. Roger was what her mother called a Black Celt, with clear olive skin and black hair, and “eyes put in with a sooty thumb”—thick black lashes round eyes you expected to be blue but that were instead a surprising deep green. With his hair worn long enough to brush his collar, disheveled and beard-stubbled, he looked not only rakish but mildly dangerous.
Alarm tingled up her spine at the sight of him, and she wiped sweating palms on the sides of her embroidered jeans. She shouldn’t have let him come.
Then he saw her, and his face lit like a candle. In spite of herself, she felt a huge, idiotic smile break out on her own face in answer, and without stopping to think of misgivings, she ran across the room, dodging stray children and luggage carts.
He met her halfway and swept her almost off her feet, hugging her hard enough to crack her ribs. He kissed her, stopped, and kissed her again, the stubble of his beard scraping her face. He smelled of soap and sweat and he tasted like Scotch whisky and she didn’t want him to stop.
Then he did and let go, both of them half breathless.
“A-hem,” said a loud voice near Brianna’s elbow. She swung away from Roger, revealing Gayle, who smiled angelically up at him under blond bangs, and waved like a child going bye-bye.
“Hell-ooo,” she said. “You must be Roger, because if you’re not, Roger’s sure in for a shock when he shows up, isn’t he?”
She looked him up and down with obvious approval.
“All that, and you play the guitar, too?”
Brianna hadn’t even noticed the case he had dropped. He stooped and picked it up, swinging it over his shoulder.
“Well, that’s my bread and butter, this trip,” he said, with a smile at Gayle, who clutched a hand to her heart in simulated ecstasy.
“Ooh, say that again!” she begged.
“Say what?” Roger looked puzzled.
“Bread and butter,” Brianna told him, hoisting one of his bags onto her shoulder. “She wants to hear you roll the r’s again. Gayle has a thing about British accents. Oh—that’s Gayle.” She gestured at her friend in resignation.
“Yes, I gathered. Er…” He cleared his throat, fixed Gayle with a piercing stare, and dropped his voice an octave. “Arround the rrruggged rrrock, the rrragged rrrascals rran. That do you for a bit?”
“Would you stop that?” Brianna looked crossly at her friend, who had swooned dramatically into one of the plastic seats. “Ignore her,” she advised Roger, turning toward the door. With a cautious glance at Gayle, he took her advice, and picking up a large box tied with string, followed her into the concourse.