Chapter Seven The Château #2
‘It was. But it was also freeing, in a way. Once I stopped hoping, I could start... not forgiving, exactly. But accepting. He was who he was. I couldn’t change that. I could only decide who I was going to be.’
‘And who did you decide to be?’
James considered this. ‘Someone who doesn’t leave.
Someone who stays. Someone who shows up, even when it’s hard, even when it would be easier to walk away.
’ He looked at her. ‘I know I seem like a bit of an idiot most of the time. And I am, in many ways. But that’s the one thing I’m sure about. I don’t leave people.’
‘You’re not an idiot, James.’ She said it quietly, without judgment, the way someone might state a fact they’d been turning over for a while. ‘You’re a man who decided it was easier to be underestimated than to be expected to achieve things. That’s not stupidity. That’s armour.’
James blinked. No one had ever said it out loud before. No one had even come close.
She didn’t say anything else. But she moved closer, resting her head on his shoulder...
‘You’re not pathetic either.’ she said eventually.
‘What?’
‘You said, that first night, that waiting for your father was pathetic. It wasn’t, it was hopeful. There’s a difference.’
‘Is there?’
‘Hope is believing things can get better. Pathetic is giving up.’ She looked up at him. ‘You didn’t give up. You just... redirected.’
‘Is that what I did?’
‘That’s what I think. You stopped hoping for someone who wasn’t going to come back and started hoping for something else. Something better.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like this.’ She gestured at the room, at the fire, at the two of them. ‘Like finding someone worth staying for.’
James’s throat felt tight. ‘And have I? Found someone worth staying for?’
She was quiet for a moment. Then: ‘I think you might have.’
It wasn’t a declaration. It wasn’t an ‘I love you.’ But it was something. A door opening, a possibility becoming real.
‘I think I might be falling in love with you,’ James said. ‘I wanted to be honest about that. Because I’m not very good at being anything else.’
She looked at him intently and he saw something flicker across her face, fear maybe, or surprise, or something he couldn’t name.
‘I know,’ she said quietly. ‘I think I might be falling too.’
‘Is that terrifying?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Terrified together is better than terrified alone.’
She laughed and kissed him, the snow outside continued to fall, ignoring them completely.
???
They spent more and more time together and there were many moments. But the big one, the moment she really knew, when it stopped being a ‘might be’ and became a certainty, happened on a random Tuesday in London.
James wouldn’t have remembered it. To him, it was just another evening, unremarkable in every way. They were at his flat and he was trying to open a bottle of wine. The corkscrew was being uncooperative.
‘Latin, yes. Wine opening no,’ he muttered, struggling with the mechanism. ‘I can decline a noun in a dead language, but I can’t... ow.’ He’d caught his finger on something and sucked it to take away the pain.
Anastasia watched him from the sofa. Watched him stick his finger in his mouth, frown at the bottle, try again with the corkscrew, his tongue poking out slightly in concentration.
And she thought: I could be happy here.
Not ‘I am happy here,’ which would have been present tense, temporary, conditional. But ‘I could be happy here’, future tense, permanent, real.
She could be happy with this ridiculous man who couldn’t open wine bottles and talked too much when he was nervous and looked at her like she was something precious and rare.
She could build a life with him. She could stop running, stop planning, stop treating every relationship as a tactical exercise.
She could just... be.
It was the most terrifying thought she’d had in years.
And also, somehow, the most wonderful.
‘Got it!’ James announced triumphantly, as the cork finally came free. He poured two glasses, brought them over, settled onto the sofa beside her. ‘What were we talking about?’
‘Nothing important.’
‘Right. Good. Nothing important is my specialty.’ He handed her a glass, raised his own. ‘To nothing important.’
‘To nothing important.’
They drank. Outside, rain began to fall against the windows. Inside, the flat was warm and quiet and felt, for reasons Anastasia couldn’t quite articulate, like home.
‘James,’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘I think I love you.’
He went very still. The glass paused halfway to his lips. His eyes, those blue, guileless eyes, found hers and held them.
‘You think?’
‘I know.’ She set down her wine. ‘I know I love you. I didn’t mean for it to happen. I’m not sure I wanted it to happen. But it happened anyway and I’m tired of pretending it didn’t.’
‘Oh,’ James said. And then, because he was James: ‘That’s... that’s quite good news, actually. Because I love you too. Quite a lot. Possibly an embarrassing amount. I’ve been trying to play it cool but I’m not very good at playing it cool, as you may have noticed...’
She kissed him before he could finish. It seemed like the most efficient way to stop him talking.
‘I noticed,’ she said, when they finally broke apart. ‘I like that you’re not cool. Cool is exhausting. Cool requires effort. You’re just... you.’
‘Is that a compliment?’
‘It’s the highest compliment I know how to give.’
He smiled, that wide, genuine smile that transformed his whole face and pulled her closer and they stayed like that for a long time, wrapped around each other on the sofa while the rain fell and the wine sat forgotten and the evening turned into something neither of them had expected but both of them, it turned out, had been waiting for.