Chapter 39 #2
She could have. But she didn’t, and in this life, there are no do-overs, no matter how much she aches to rewind the clock.
“I’m sorry I said those things to you in the airport, James.
I’m sorry I sent you away and wasted what little time we had.
The best moments I ever had in this job were with you.
Digging with you. Road-tripping with you.
Everything else with you,” she says, her voice failing on that last part, along with her heart.
“You gave me back so many things I thought I’d lost forever.
Purpose, hope, joy. You’re one of the best, most honest, most thoughtful and true people I’ve ever met.
And I just wish…I wish that if things had to end, they would’ve ended better.
” Please, please, please, she finds herself thinking, the same way she did when she pressed her face between his shoulder blades on that terrifying horseback ride.
Please don’t let this be over. Please see what I’m offering, and want it, and take it.
Some small, flickering light in his eyes goes out, but he smiles anyway, then puts his hand to his mouth when the expression won’t hold.
“It’s all right, Ripley. I’m grateful for every moment we had.
It was more than I could ever have asked for.
And I truly believe everything will come right with the birds.
The Yellowtails and the foundation have been making good strides.
The support for you and the outcry against Will won’t hurt either. ”
He reaches into the pocket he’s been tapping and pulls out something too big and round to be his little metal box.
“I have a confession. I gave you the drawings I made for you and kept the ones I made for myself, and that seemed fair. But there was something I made for both of us.” He steps forward, catches her wrist, and places the object in her upturned palm.
The rock is smooth and surprisingly heavy in her hand, the etching barely visible in the low light. Her throat aches like she’s put the stone in her mouth and tried to swallow it. “I was looking for this.”
He puts his hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels to gaze at the starless city sky.
“I was planning to bury it in England. I liked imagining that someday, someone would unearth a stone from half a world away. If they tested it, there might be some Montana soil in the crevices. My DNA in the etchings. Possibly even yours. Perhaps whoever found it would wonder how it got there, then realize love is the only reason a piece of the earth could travel that far.”
His mouth quivers, and he looks down, taking off his glasses.
When he goes to polish them on his sorely abused shirt, the hasty repair falls apart, the broken arm clattering to the sidewalk.
He looks from the piece in his hands to the one on the concrete.
Then he picks up the arm, walks over to the trash receptacle next to the bus stop, and pitches both pieces into the bin.
“Nevertheless,” he says, wiping his damp hands on his shirt. “It felt rather poetic at the time to keep it with me, but now I see it would be better if it went home with you.”
She smooths the rock, running her fingertips over the roughness on the face and the…roughness on the back?
She turns it over. The letters are shallow and nearly illegible, but they’re there, like fossils barely grazing the surface of the matrix. She tilts the rock until the words catch the light.
LOVE KNOWS NO TIME
MY BONES WILL FIND YOURS
“It’s nothing,” James says, his body and voice tight. “Nothing you have to do anything about, anyway. It was a snapshot of who we were at that moment, is all. Christ, my darling, don’t cry. Don’t cry, Ripley, love. Bloody hell, I can’t seem to stop hurting you—”
Without seeming to move, he’s suddenly inches away. His hands clench convulsively, as if he wants to reach for her and cannot, cannot let himself.
And then he’s muttering a curse and she’s in his arms, her face pressed against his ruined shirt, and she’s ruining it some more with tears and mascara and the city rain on her face, and she’s pressing the rock into his back with her clasped hands, holding him tight.
“What if I came to Montana every summer,” he says, and it’s not a question.
“I would do anything for more time with you, Ripley. I want to say Oh, bother just to hear you laugh. I want to argue about nothing because you’re never so clever as when you argue, and I love you so terribly much when you’re clever.
I want to see your face when you make your next big discovery, and every discovery after that.
I want to marvel at your courage and feel like anything is possible for us as long as we don’t give up.
I’d set fire to everything I own for one more night to make you come and watch you sleep.
“I don’t care what the chances are for us. The chances of us ever meeting were so much smaller, and yet we found each other. Life finds a way, Ripley.”
She sob-laughs into his shirt. “You are not throwing my favorite quote in my face.”
“I am,” he says with a tender, rueful sound.
“I won’t make enough money with my art to leave my job for a while, but I set up a website, and I got my first commission already.
Can you believe someone is willing to pay me two hundred euros for character art from a dragon-shifter series?
Plus fifty extra to make it, erm, not safe for work. ”
She laughs into his chest, and with a sigh, he wraps his body more fully around hers.
“I can take a sabbatical from Oxford as soon as next fall. That’s a whole year for me to be where you are.
Although maybe we want to save that year for when we have children.
If you want children. I don’t have to have them; I only need you.
I will make it work, Ripley. I will…I will do long-distance,” he says, not quite able to suppress a shudder.
“Just—please. Please say we can love each other as much as we can for as long as we can. There’s never been anyone like you for me, and there never will be again.
I can’t let you go without trying everything. ”
Ripley grips the rock in her fist and leans harder into his body, smelling laundry detergent and lemon and vetiver and James.
This rock is a snapshot of a moment in time, like he said. That’s what life is—a series of moments, a handful of snapshots. The rock was who they were, and it could be part of who they are, and who they will be.
But they won’t be anything unless Ripley lets go of what she thought she wanted and reaches for what she needs.
“I love you too, James.”
Underneath her cheek, a little shock ripples through his chest, a fault line sending a tremor into the world as it settles into a new shape. His arms grip her tight, his fingers spreading out against her shoulder blades like feathers. Like wings.
“Ripley, I—”
“But what about Daisy?” Keeping her arms around him, she leans back so she can see his beautiful, fractured, kaleidoscope eyes.
He snorts. “Daisy told me to get my head out of my arse. There are such things as scholarships, apparently,” he says, his voice taking on the cadence of an aggrieved teenager.
“I have enough set aside for her first year. When I’m on sabbatical, I can let out my flat; that’s another year right there. She and I will find a way.”
Ripley nods thoughtfully. “I’d want to spend summers in Montana, like you said. And come with you to England sometimes in the winter.”
“But your dad.”
“Dad’s getting better every day. Shockingly, he doesn’t want a grown daughter hovering over him. He might get sick again eventually. But I don’t want to wait for the perfect time, because life’s not like that. I want all the time you can give me. Good times. Bad times. This moment. Now, James.”
He reaches for a strand of straightened hair that’s pulling back into a curl and tucks it behind her ear. “Classic Ripley,” he fake-grumbles. “Zero patience.”
In her opinion, he moves with quite insolent deliberation as he drapes her arms over his shoulders.
The way he lifts her up high and hooks her thighs around his hips is offensively leisurely.
He practically strolls over to the pretty blue door of the candy shop next to the bus stop and ducks under the scalloped pink-and-white awning.
He puts her back against the door, rattling it in its frame.
“That didn’t sound very patient,” Ripley says, a little breathlessly.
“I’ll show you patience,” he says.
He kisses her like a car isn’t honking as it drives by. He kisses her like time has no meaning. Like he wants to spend days, years, a lifetime excavating all her secrets, every one of them a treasure.
“I love you, Ripley Adams,” he says against her mouth.
“I know,” she says.
“Wait. Back up. What do you mean, you know?”
She nips his mouth and grins. “I feel it.”
“Really? Is this where you feel it?” he asks, pressing his hips against her where it definitely makes her feel something.
“No. Well, yes, but no.”
“Then where?”
She leans forward, puts the line of her jaw against his. His collarbones meet the twinned radius and ulna of each forearm, holding her up. The crests of his pelvis push into her inner thighs, strong and sure.
“In my bones, James,” she whispers, her lips at his ear. “Where else?”