Chapter Twenty
Harriet
One Nolan in a room is distracting. Two feel like a personal attack.
My attention is torn between the Nolan sitting at the kitchen table with a steaming bowl of soup and the Nolan leaning up against a cabinet with his arms crossed over his chest, watching his younger self with a fierce frown on his face.
He seems to be handling this trip better than the last, and I wonder how much of that is because we seem to be the only ones here.
Me, Nolan, and past Nolan.
“This is the strangest day of my life,” I murmur.
Nolan snorts on the other side of the room. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“You doing okay?” I hedge.
He nods, an absent, faraway look on his face as he stares at the single lit candle in the window, the flame dancing in the thick, warped glass.
“Aye, I’m grand.” He looks back at the man quietly eating soup at the table, a book open at his elbow. He scratches under his ear. “I’m not … panicked … like last time.”
“Good.” I knit my fingers together and try to study the room, but my eyes keep tripping back to the man slouched at the table. Nolan sits exactly the same way, like his body can’t help but take up space. Though this version of him certainly has more interesting wardrobe choices.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Nolan rumbles from across the room.
“I’m not looking at you. I’m looking at him.”
Nolan snorts. “Semantics, Harriet.” He shifts closer and traces a lazy, meandering path down my spine with his palm. “Why are you staring at him like that?”
Because his threadbare white shirt is unbuttoned to the middle of his chest, two thick suspender straps hanging around his waist. He looks like a period drama on steroids. My thoughts are nowhere decent, that’s for sure.
“Shirt,” I say under my breath. “Suspenders,” I add.
A devious smile edges at his mouth, awareness making his eyes bright.
“Ah,” he says.
How he manages to imbue a single syllable with so much smug knowing, I’ll never understand. I reach under his arm and pinch his side.
“Shut up.”
“I don’t think I will.” He laughs, tugging me close so I can’t pinch him again. “You’re affected, Harriet.”
“Of course, I am.” I relax against him, my arm slung low around his waist. Past Nolan flips another page in his book, breaking off a piece of his bread. “It’s you.”
Outside the small window, waves crash against the rocks. A bird calls from some distance away. A church bell echoes out over the water.
And Nolan sits by himself at a wooden table with just one chair, only a book for company.
My heart aches in recognition. How many mornings have I sat at my kitchen table, staring out at the water outside the window, watching the boats pass by and hoping for something different? Filling the empty space in front of me with a distraction so I don’t have to feel the ache of my loneliness?
“My mam used to light a candle in the window every Christmas Eve,” Nolan says next to me.
He’s gazing at the window again. “She said it would help guide lost sailors home for the holiday. That it was good luck.” His mouth flattens into a line, his easy strokes against my back stuttering and then smoothing out again.
“Sometimes when I was out on my boat, I thought I could see the flicker of it from the harbor. I’d forgotten about that. ”
“It’s a nice tradition.”
“There’s so much I’ve forgotten,” he says, his voice tight. “That day on the beach. I didn’t realize how much until … until I felt it again. My father’s laugh. The candle. This place. My home.”
I press my cheek against his arm. “Tell me about them?”
“I’m not sure I remember.”
“Try.”
He releases a shaky breath and I feel the brush of his chin against the top of my head. Dull pressure, like he’s pressed a kiss somewhere in my hair.
“My mother’s name … her name was Caoimhe,” he says, stilted.
“She liked to sing while she cooked and she … knit. She’d knit misshapen sweaters for my da that he’d wear proudly out on our boat, even though …
even though the other fishermen would take the piss out of him for it.
” He pauses, thinking. Remembering. “My da used to kiss me on the head when I left the house, even when I was grown. He thought I spent too much time out on the water.”
“Did you?”
Nolan shrugs. “Probably. It never felt right to leave. There was the work, yes, but there was something else, too. I always felt a pull. Like there was something I was meant to find.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know,” he muses, voice light. “I died before I could find it.”
“That’s a shame.”
He snorts a laugh. “For a number of reasons, yes.”
I watch the man at the table, so like Nolan but different, too.
Younger. Softer. Not yet hardened by time and disappointment.
“It’s easier,” he says slowly, his voice low and rough. “With you here.”
Something soft and warm and glowing lights up inside me. If I had magic, I bet it would feel like this.
“What is?” I ask.
“Remembering,” he says. “Everything.” He turns to me, eyes crinkling at the corners. One of his dimples appears briefly, and I reach up to trace my finger over it. His face softens, and he turns his head to press a kiss against the palm of my hand.
The man at the table continues with a few shaky bars of another Christmas carol and my heart somersaults in my chest.
You’re not alone, I want to tell him. I’m right here with you.
“You have a nice voice,” I say instead. It’s rough and broken-in like that book he has open on the table, the spine worn and the pages faded. It’s imperfect in the way real things always are. I love it. “How can I convince you to sing to me?”
“You can’t.” He peers at me, consideration in the little line that appears between his eyebrows. “You’re being very agreeable right now.”
“Am I?”
“Mm-hmm.” His fingers drift up my back again. “Maybe I should kiss you more often.”
“I like to think I’m always agreeable.” My cheeks burn hot. “But maybe.”
Kiss me as much as you can, I beg in my head. Kiss me until I can’t possibly forget you.
He says Christmas Eve is his deadline, that I’ll forget him as soon as his magic pulls him away. But I can’t lock my feelings for him away. Not anymore.
So I’m going to try something new. I’m going to live in the moment without fear of what comes next, enjoy whatever time we have together and appreciate it for what it is. I won’t white-knuckle grip my expectations.
Nolan dips his head, expectant.
“You can’t kiss me now.” I laugh. “You’re supposed to be focusing.” His nose drifts along my cheek. “I am focused.”
“On the memory, Nolan.”
He grunts, then straightens. “Fine. What am I supposed to be looking for?”
“I’m not entirely sure. You said you were looking for something out on the water, didn’t you?” I wave my hand at the scene in front of us. “What does unfinished business look like?”
“I haven’t the faintest.”
My mouth twists. This memory isn’t exactly awash with inspiration.
He’s eating soup by himself at a table while reading a book.
The furniture is simple. There are no knickknacks on the counter that I can see.
Just a half-eaten apple and a collection of bronze coins.
A crumpled-up piece of paper and a pencil.
Unless he has unfinished business with a produce stand, I really don’t know what we’re doing here.
“Maybe it’s the book.” I shift closer and tilt my head to get a better look at the title.
“Maybe it’s the spoon,” Nolan grumbles behind me.
I roll my eyes as I bend over past Nolan, my hand planted next to his on the table.
His presence is dulled here in the past. I can’t smell the salt on his skin.
I can’t feel the warmth of him. He turns a page and reads the first line under his breath before taking another bite of soup. I smile at the top of his head.
“Stop that,” Nolan says at my shoulder.
“Stop what?”
“Making eyes at me.”
I snicker. “I’m not making eyes.” I turn my back to the man at the table and examine the walls instead.
They’re just as bare as the furniture. A haphazard shelf stacked with books and a windowsill with a single candle.
Fishing supplies, discarded on a small table by the front door.
A hat. Some sort of biscuit wrapped in a handkerchief.
His boots stacked in the corner. His coat on a peg. A dented compass with a broken chain.
“There,” I say, pointing at the compass. “What’s that?” Nolan snorts. “The compass?”
I nod.
“That thing never worked right. It couldn’t find its way. The arrow always spun around and around, unwilling to land on a single spot, never mind actually find north.” He pauses. “My dad must have got it for cheap from one of the lads at the bar. Probably a wager gone wrong.”
Damn.
I move toward the crowded bookshelf. Maybe there’s something there, wedged between the stacked volumes. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of organization as far as I can tell, but—
“Harriet,” Nolan snaps, his voice losing its playful lilt.
“I’m not making eyes!” I repeat. For someone who has lived several lifetimes, he sure can be insecure. “And if I was,” I add under my breath, trailing my fingers across the spines of the books. “I’m just looking at you.”
He ignores me. “Harriet,” he says again, voice strained. “Come here.”
I turn to look at him. His fists are clenched at his sides, sparks shooting from between his knuckles and dancing over the backs of his hands.
They wrap around his strained muscles, coiling up until his arms are wrapped in thin, glittering ropes.
His eyes darken, the lines of his body tense.
He’s vibrating, almost. Barely holding on.
His eyes close for two long seconds, then open again. Something gold blazes inside of them.
“Come to me,” he says. “Right now, please.”
I cross the small room to his side and he immediately reaches for me, pulling me into his chest. He holds me there, the sparks from his hands sizzling up my spine. It doesn’t burn, but it’s uncomfortable.
“My magic is pulling. We’re going.”
“Right now? But we’ve barely—”
“It’s not willingly, Harriet. Hold on to me.”