Chapter Nineteen #2
Blood rushed to Landon’s cheeks. He’d been thinking the same thing as he’d studied the way the room’s shadows accentuated the angles of her cheeks—lines that he’d traced so many times with the back of his thumb before pulling her close. “What do you mean?”
“This city used to be completely walled in,” she said.
“You could leave for a price, but most of the people who lived here couldn’t afford it.
This corner was literally the edge of their world.
Old places like this have such a heaviness.
When you’re light as a feather all day, sometimes it’s nice to feel grounded. ”
Her gray eyes shone, and Landon wanted, desperately, to reach for her hand.
He wanted to tell her she was beautiful—so beautiful—a hundred times, without breathing, and make up for every day he hadn’t had the capacity to say it in their final months, weeks, and days together.
Instead, he said, “You’re kind of like a walking encyclopedia. ”
Her face dropped, a strange mix of sheepish and defensive.
There were echoes, there, of the woman he’d once known, the woman who was almost always two things at once.
“I don’t have any of my own stories to tell.
Not yet, anyway. I have to find them.” She furrowed her brows at Landon over the flickering candle. “Don’t you ever feel that way?”
A bit of Landon came out where there should have been only Jamie. “No,” he said. “I don’t.” Her brows furrowed further, and he tried his best to recover by reframing. “You really don’t think you have stories to tell?”
Rose laughed, so easily slipping back into the breezy, carefree pull of the pill. “You can’t tell a good story if you only know the beginning.”
Arguing over semantics was, unfortunately, one of Landon’s favorite things. “People who haven’t taken the pill don’t know how it all ends, either.”
“Yeah, but they have some idea, don’t they?” she pressed. “They’ve got a lifetime of experience. They can make patterns, find meaning. We’re not there yet. We just are.”
She was describing herself like a child, he realized, with too few data points to establish an identity.
He remembered how long the days used to feel, when he was young, the years near interminable.
He wondered whether Rose felt time in that way, too.
If she did, he knew enough to know that she would find the endlessness as thrilling as she did everything else.
“Well, what about you and Graham?” Landon asked, aware he absolutely shouldn’t. “You two don’t seem like you’re just at the beginning.”
“Don’t we?” she asked.
The waiter mercifully interrupted them before Landon could put his other foot in his mouth. “You two know what you want?”
“Two burgers, medium-rare, sauce on the side, fries piping hot,” Rose said, flashing the waiter a smile so incandescent Landon felt a pang of jealousy.
It was so distracting Landon’s brain had to catch up to the fact that she’d ordered for him.
Landon would have ordered something he’d never tried before.
“Something to drink?”
“Whisky,” she said. “Two flights of whisky, dealer’s choice. Whisky you think is good enough to make a person fall in love.” She winked at Landon.
“Two burgers and two rows of whisky,” the waiter said, nodding. He left before Landon could ask whether his burger could be done medium-well.
“‘Piping hot,’” Landon repeated. “Does that work for you?”
“So far, yes,” Rose said. “Ask me again in a few years, when I can tell you whether it’s a pattern.”
Ask me again in a few years. Was she flirting? It was as flirtatious a statement as he could imagine saying to anyone. “That assumes you win me over to the city,” he said. Flirting with Rose was effortless. It was the not flirting he struggled with.
“I will.” Rose trailed a finger along the rim of her water glass in a move so unexpectedly seductive, Landon nearly fell out of his chair.
“I suspect I already have.” The candle flickered again and, for just a moment, for the first time since they’d re-met, he was sitting across the table from a stranger.
A bold, reckless, wild stranger at the end of the world, who had ordered his meal and read his mind.
“Besides,” she continued, “I like spending time with you.”
He would not lie to her. “I like spending time with you, too.”
“And you trust me,” she said, her eyes sparkling like the star sapphire he’d once placed on her ring finger with trembling hands.
“Sure,” he said, trying to reel back in what he had already given away.
The waiter came back and set their flights in front of them. “Lightest to smokiest,” he said. “Start here. It gets peatier as you go. That last one’s a real campfire. And if you’re not in love by the Highland Park”—he pointed to the glass in the middle—“the next dram is on the house.”
Landon shook his head. “Does this happen wherever you go?” he asked, taking the first sip.
It tasted like whisky. He tried the next one, which also tasted like whisky.
He wasn’t sure he had what it took to differentiate between the waiter’s selections, and worried Rose would think less of him.
“People just fall all over themselves to make you happy?”
“Again, I can’t give you that answer with any certainty. Add that to your ‘in a few years’ list. What’s that phrase everybody uses? ‘Circle back.’”
“I’ll start the list tonight.” Landon took a sip of the third and started to feel a bit lightheaded.
“You’re busy tonight,” Rose said, sipping from her first dram. “Though I will give you one get-out-of-jail-free card if you can convince me that you really, truly, cannot handle ghosts.”
Landon really, truly, could not handle even the idea of ghosts. “No problem,” he said, smiling.
“Good, because I’m not sure I could have returned these.” Rose slid two tickets across the table.
“City of the Dead Tours,” Landon read.
“It’s honestly kind of tacky, and I know I run the risk of quite literally scaring you off, but I also don’t think you can say you tried to fall in love with Edinburgh if you don’t take at least one of these tours.”
He flipped the ticket over in his hands, the bold black skull on both the front and the back turning his stomach. “You’re in charge here,” he said.
Rose clapped her hands with delight. “It’s the perfect night for it: cold, wet, foggy.
We couldn’t have asked for better weather.
” Landon took a sip from the fourth dram.
It was smokier than the last, he could tell at least that much.
The couple to their right, who Landon had noticed when they first walked in, had begun to raise their voices at each other.
Rose leaned toward him. “If you can’t be happy in a place like this, one wonders where you can be.
” Landon thought it was a callous thing to say.
He’d been unhappy in far more idyllic places. But Jamie knew what she meant.
“I’m happy here,” he said, the whisky calming the nerves she’d just activated.
“I am really, really happy.” While the history in the walls made Rose feel heavier, Landon felt one hundred pounds lighter.
In the glow of those candles, feet from the edge, he was just a man sitting across the table from a woman.
He was happy. So he did something very out of character. He just let himself be.
The warmth of the World’s End clung to Landon on the short walk from the end of the Royal Mile to the tourists’ haven just in front of the castle.
Or maybe it was the five drams of whisky he’d sipped from.
He’d lied and told Rose that he’d fallen in love with the Highland Park to keep the bartender at bay, but the truth was he was no closer to developing a love affair with the stuff than he had been the first time he’d taken a shot of Johnnie Walker, back in college.
Rose walked beside him, wrapped in an elegant wool peacoat, breath mingling with the fog.
At the street corner she turned toward St. Giles’ Cathedral, the candles in the windows dancing in her hair.
She looked so natural in this new place.
Landon wished he had the old film camera she’d bought him for Christmas the year after their wedding, when gifts were still novelties rather than the checklist of needs they soon became.
Camera in hand, he would have asked her to pause for a moment, to look through the windows of the cathedral and think of a secret she had never told anyone.
Then, he would have tried to click the shutter at just the right moment to capture something true.
“It’s up here,” Rose said, pointing ahead.
“Oh good,” Landon said, a rolling shiver starting at the small of his back and creeping up his spine. “You know, I may have been a touch more enthusiastic than I actually feel about this.”
Rose giggled. “Oh, I know.”
“You know?”
“I’m getting pretty good at reading your face.”
She was watching him, learning the subtle changes in his expressions that made him him. It nearly took him to the ground. “You’re studying me?”
“It’s only fair, given the way we first met.”
“Touché.”
Rose stopped in front of an enormous tree in front of the cathedral and pulled the tickets from her coat. A woman with searing eyes reached out a hand for them. “We’ll be on our way in a minute or so,” she said, raising a lantern from which a wax candle glowed. “Your names?”
Rose laid a hand on her chest. “I’m Rose.”