Chapter Twenty-Two
“Where is it?” Edie looked down the tracks at Grantham station, bouncing on her toes, enraged.
“It’ll come,” Killian said. “You’ve got some padding in the itinerary, so you’ll make the plane.”
“I’m a bit worried about that, to be honest.” Tam looked at his phone. “We’re cutting it close.”
“We should’ve dashed for the earlier train.” Morag was craning her head to look down the tracks, too. “Avoided this drama.” Agatha picked up and patted her hand.
“Well, friends, I just got word.” Bert held up her phone as she walked up to the group from her position at the other end of the platform, which she’d claimed had superior cell service. “It’ll be twenty-five minutes still.”
Everyone groaned. Edie bit the inside of her cheek so she wouldn’t scream.
She pulled out her own phone. Twenty-five minutes was impossible.
What had she been doing for the last two weeks?
She read the last text Cosima had sent her for the one hundred thousandth time, making herself take in the gravity of what was happening to Cosima’s whole life.
There was no question that Edie should’ve followed her the moment she left.
She should have gone with her when she left.
Instead of understanding what Cosima was trying to tell her by showing her the inn’s garden, she’d decided to dive headfirst into what she was determined to ensure was the last great wallow of her life.
She was glad she’d called her mom.
“Maybe someone should drive me to Heathrow.”
“Oh, you’d never make it,” Bert said cheerfully. “The traffic.”
Edie bit the inside of her cheek again, and then she heard a train. Thank god.
Morag shook her head. Agatha adjusted her cap. “That’s the one up from London. On the other side of the tracks.”
The group watched the train slow to a stop opposite them, its engines hissing.
Edie got out her phone and texted Cosima again.
The bubble settled on “delivered.” She thought about the last two hours of activity that Morag had mobilized.
The driver Agatha had arranged for her at LAX, and the Hollywood friend Tam had called, an actor who’d taught workshops at the community theater years ago, who had agreed to escort Edie to the Castle—or to wherever Cosima was.
Killian had driven her here. Bert had pulled some kind of strings with the stationmaster to get an express ticket to London when the train was already oversold. Morag had purchased Edie’s plane tickets.
“This flight isn’t the end-all,” Morag said. “She’ll still be there tomorrow.”
Edie shook her head. “If you had known you could have what you have now if you’d only gone to Wales at any time in the last fifty years?”
Morag looked at Agatha. “I would have climbed into the luggage compartment of the next train out.”
The London-to-Grantham train started to pull away, belching diesel exhaust over the tracks, and Edie watched it pick up speed with the pressure of what felt like years of impatience pushing against every bone of her body.
She knew what she wanted. She understood what she could do. And Cosima believed that she, Edie Ashlynn Whitelock, was singular. The one for her.
Now that Edie had all of the pieces to make her legacy, she wanted it to start.
She felt like she hadn’t kissed Cosima in a thousand years.
She hadn’t shown Cosima even a fraction of the ways she could love her.
She wanted to tell her that she was having new mantles, sills, and corbels made for the lounge.
Pink marble, in homage to Phoebe. She wanted to show her the replacement shepherdess she’d ordered on eBay.
She wanted Cosima.
The train sped down the tracks, and Edie looked across to the other side of the platform, defeated, watching the passengers make their way over the track bridge to the car park, going home.
A family with a set of double strollers moved down the platform, revealing a woman who had just picked up her bag. A tall woman.
A tall woman with messy, curly hair in a big bun, and tweed slacks with red-bottomed heels and a silky pink shirt.
Edie’s heart flew.
“Cosima!” she shouted with everything she’d ever learned about projection in the stands of a Packers game. “Cosima Frank!”
Her group turned to look, and then they were yelling Cosima’s name, and Cosima looked up and saw Edie.
The biggest, most beautiful smile lit up her face—at the exact same moment the Grantham-to-London train barreled into the station, on time after all, hiding the other platform, and Edie’s beloved, from view.
“Jesus HC on the mount!” Edie shouted. “Come on!”
“Go over the bridge to the other side!” Tam shouted. “Go!”
Edie shoved her bag at Tam and ran, dodging and weaving between a full crowd’s worth of Grantham passengers jockeying to board the express to London, then stomping up the stairs around the people coming down from the train Cosima had been on.
She made it to the part of the pedestrian bridge suspended over the tracks, and there she was, right in the middle.
Her princess.
“Cosima!” Edie tripped over her Converse and practically fell into Cosima’s arms. She smelled deep-vanilla hair wash. Edie buried her face into her neck, inhaling, kissing, and grinning.
“Oh my god, Edie. Were you about to get on a train?” Cosima pulled back, her glorious eyebrows very stern. “I was coming! I told you to stay put! Why were you going to take a train?”
“To go to Los Angeles!”
“What for?”
Edie bent backward to emphasize her full-body eye roll. “To be with you! To support you! Because I love you!”
“I know that you love me, but I was always coming back to you. I said so. Did you know that I love you?”
“Yes.” Edie narrowed her eyes at Cosima. “Of course I do.”
“For how long, Edie, have you known that?” Cosima crossed her arms. “You have not heard even a single word from me for two weeks.”
“One week and six days since your text that your mother’s company was burning down. So not really two whole weeks to get worried or wallow or anything like that.”
“Hmpf.” Cosima raised an eyebrow. “And I thought I was coming here to grovel. To apologize for how much you must have worried and wallowed. How much faith you might have lost, given the tender newness of our relationship. But nothing like that went on. Turns out, according to you, you’re brimming over with confidence. ”
Edie’s heart leapt. “We’re in a relationship?”
Cosima fisted Edie’s jacket lapels and yanked her toward her. “Yes, of course we’re in a relationship!”
The pedestrian bridge had emptied, and the train to London let out a hydraulic brake noise and began to slowly move away from the station beneath them.
Edie noticed a teeny-tiny tendril of desire growing to test Cosima.
A little. With full knowledge she would pass Edie’s tests, but also would have to take them.
“But you live in Los Angeles. And I live here.”
“Oh.” Cosima bit down on her excited grin to keep up their pretense of an argument. “So you live here now, do you? In England. That is very far from Los Angeles. A whole ocean and a continent away.”
“That’s what I’m saying. I don’t really do long-distance relationships.” Edie ran her hands up the arms of Cosima’s silky pink blouse. To help her. She wasn’t dressed for England. It was breezy. She had to be cold.
“Tell me about your other long-distance relationships.” Cosima kissed Edie’s temple.
“I can’t, because, like I said, I don’t do them.
” Edie went up on her tiptoes and got her hand around Cosima’s nape.
She kissed her, and their mouths were soft already, their tongues rubbing together slowly.
Edie could’ve actually died from it. She could feel herself dying from it.
Her pulse was externalizing into her wrists and the insides of her elbows, between her legs, and it was too loud with the train pulling away to hear it, but she could feel Cosima’s moan.
“What are we going to do?” Cosima bit Edie’s bottom lip.
“You tell me. You’re the one who came here to grovel.”
“I only have one idea.” Cosima’s hands found their way into both of Edie’s back jeans pockets. It was a tight fit, but she managed to get in a good squeeze.
“Does your idea involve a guest book and a medieval numbering system? Because, if so, I refuse to wait fifty years for you.” The wind was whipping long, curly pieces of hair from Cosima’s bun into her face. Her eyes were the same color as the gray-blue Lincolnshire sky.
“My idea is that we go to Gregory Place right this minute, I fuck you with a pink strap-on, and then I never, ever leave.” Cosima gave Edie an imperious look to see where that landed.
It landed where Cosima meant for it to land. Edie had to squeeze her thighs together to survive the impact, then take Cosima’s hand to drag her off the pedestrian bridge.
“Fair warning,” she gasped. “So many folks are here who are going to want to involve themselves in this reunion. We’ve accidentally been taken into a family of English villagers. I didn’t see it coming, but it’s good on the whole. Not so much right this second. Follow my lead.”
They made it down to the platform filled with old people who Edie and Cosima would have to deal with for the rest of their lives, none of whom called her Frog.
Really living the dream. “Morag, give me the keys to your van. Stay at the Gregory Arms tonight. None of you are permitted to do anything more than wave at Cosima. No chitchat. No stories. Morag”—Edie held out her palm—“the keys.”
Morag huffed, and it took her long enough to extract the keys from her coat pocket that Tam managed to side-hug Cosima while Killian beamed and Bert elbowed him in the side. “Harlaxton Pride is going to be lit this year, eh?”