Next Time #3
He’d said it kindly, lightly, but he couldn’t know the twinge it plucked in her heart.
It was the one thing on her list she hadn’t been able to manage: a passionate romance.
You couldn’t just book those at the local travel agency.
She’d wanted to know the pleasure of having a meaningful, deep and abiding relationship with someone.
But, once her prognosis had been delivered …
how, in good conscience, could she do that to someone, knowing what she was facing?
Just say “yes, I want you, truly, madly, deeply … and oh, by the way, I’ll probably be dead before the year is out. ”
She didn’t think so.
Four
“I – I appreciate your thoughtfulness,” Abby said, carefully, as he set her gently down on the narrow bed tucked under the eave.
“Where are we?” She looked around. He’d said the tower, but she’d looked up inside the tower – his tower – and none of this had been there.
Not the plank flooring, the feather-stuffed mattress, the rough-hewn bedstand or the— “—Oil lamp.”
He glanced at the brass fixture next to the bed. “Aye. Do you want more light? Or heat? Are you cold?”
She looked towards the narrow window openings. There was no glass and the sills along the bottom looked as crumbled and falling to ruin as they did from the outside. The air swept in and swirled about, cool and damp, as it would … inside a ruin. She looked back to him. “How … how is this possible?”
He held her gaze for what felt like the longest time, but said nothing. Instead, he stood and turned his back to her, crouching down for a moment. An instant later, there was a blazing fire. In a small fireplace. That she’d have sworn wasn’t there – couldn’t have been there – just a second ago.
“It should warm up in a moment,” was all he said, as he straightened and turned back to face her. His gaze was smooth, his expression impenetrable. No hint of the roguish grin that had been hovering before.
She should be scrambling off the bed, trying to find her way out of this – dream?
Hallucination? – she really had no idea.
Maybe when she’d fallen she had struck her head and she was now on some kind of wild mind trip, still lying, unconscious, down on the rocks.
Or maybe she really had passed over. Because none of this made any sense in the mortal, real world.
Whatever the case, whatever the explanation, she wasn’t going anywhere until she found out.
Because this was, by far, the most intriguing thing to have ever happened to her.
Certainly the most fantastical. If she didn’t count the fact that she’d come down with a systemic disorder so rare there wasn’t even a name for it as yet.
That was pretty fantastical, she supposed.
This, at least, had the potential to be fun. Besides, it wasn’t like she had anything to lose by pursuing it.
“Will you answer me?” she asked, quite calmly, she thought.
He continued to regard her, then finally said, “What did you think, this morning, when you saw me here, inside this tower.”
“That I’d finally seen the Gillean ghost,” she responded easily. As if this were the most natural conversation to be having.
“Do ye believe in such things?”
She lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “I’ve never really had cause to think about it. I’ve spent time lately, thinking about what happens after a person dies, but it never really extended to ghosts and haunting things.”
She thought she spied a hint of amusement hovering around that oh-so-perfectly formed mouth.
“What’s funny about that?” she asked, deciding she might as well go for broke.
In fact, she couldn’t recall ever feeling so …
invigorated by her own potential. Not that he’d looked at her with desire in his beautiful blue eyes, or even male appreciation, really.
But when he looked at her, as he was now, she felt like he was reaching down somewhere quite deep.
She felt like no one and nothing existed inside that moment, except for her.
It was quite heady stuff. Empowering, even. So … she went with that.
“You’re … unexpected,” he said.
“I think we can safely say we’re both a little bit of that.”
The amusement flickered into his eyes this time. “Aye.”
“So, are you going to explain what – who – you really are?”
“Ye dinnae believe I’m a ghost then?”
“You seem pretty real to me.”
“You’re American,” he said, instead. “What region? I’m no’ familiar with the accent.”
“I grew up just outside of D.C. across the river, in Virginia.”
“D.C.?”
“Washington. Our capital city.”
“Columbia,” he said, nodding.
“The District of Columbia, yes.”
His expression smoothed again, and she’d have sworn something flashed across his face. Something like sorrow. Or … pity.
“You don’t think much of Washington? Or is it all of America that you disdain?”
He looked honestly surprised. “What makes you say that?”
“Your expression just then. It was less than … appreciative.” She shifted her weight on the bed, turning to face him more directly. “That’s okay. I understand global sentiment being what it is. We’ve had some relatively … uneven representation.”
“It wasn’t that.”
She lifted a brow in question, but when he didn’t elaborate, she said, “Then, what was it?”
He hesitated, then said, “What do you think about, when you think about your future?”
She grinned then, and watched as he blinked, and his throat even worked a little.
Hunh. She wasn’t sure what to make of that, but it made her feel good.
“I think I’ll miss finding out what happens next.
I guess if I got to pick what happens after we die, my hope is that there is a heaven, and that I get to look down and watch.
Or …” she added, trailing off for a moment, then deciding, what the heck.
“Or … perhaps I’ll be like you, haunting a particular place, and seeing what happens to it over time.
Will you tell me? What it’s like, I mean? ”
“I was speaking of your future while here on earth.”
“So was I,” was all she said.
Abby wasn’t sure why she thought he should know about her circumstances other than, she supposed, this felt to her like he was some kind of angel, or archangel even, sent to shepherd her from this realm to the next.
It was as good an explanation as any. And seemed to have more going for it than the whole ghost thing.
Except he’d been seen as one, on these very grounds, for so very long …
how could he be anything else? Surely no angel needed to be sent to this desolate, remote place so often as to become some sort of folklore hero.
She sat upright and drew her knees in to her chest. A shield perhaps? She couldn’t say. Or what she thought she needed shielding from. “I’ll be discovering those answers soon enough,” she told him. “So … naturally, I think about it.”
“A rather morbid outlook for one as young as yourself.”
She smiled again. “Hardly. Just pragmatic. By nature, I’m a sunny optimist. But nature, as it turns out, had something else in store for me.”
“Meaning what, exactly?” He moved closer, but when she thought he might perch next to her on the bed, he instead pulled up a heretofore unseen footstool and crouched down on that instead.
It put his face closer to level with hers …
and sent her heart rate doubling. It wasn’t an entirely unwelcome response.
“Meaning I may be young, but I don’t have much time left,” she said.
“In fact, coming here is probably the last thing I’ll get to do.
” Her lips curved. “That’s why I was out there stumbling around the rocks.
I wanted to figure out what you were, or who you were – or weren’t – while I had the time and energy.
I was – am – enjoying the mystery and playing detective. ”
His expression faltered, just briefly, and she was rather stunned by the flash of grief she saw on his face. He didn’t even know her. Maybe he was just particularly sensitive to the plight of others.
“It’s okay,” she told him. “I’m at peace with it. I’ve had the time – plenty of time – to consider all of it. I’m focused on enjoying what time I do have, and not wasting it belabouring or whining about what I won’t.”
“You’ve quite a brave spirit,” he said, still sounding quietly stunned.
“Hardly,” she laughed. “Trust me, I wasn’t okay at first, and not at all brave.
But, at some point, you have to reconcile yourself with it.
Or, at least, I did. And I have.” She felt the overwhelming need to lean forwards, touch him, reassure him that she was truly at peace with herself, and her imminent, brief future.
She had to curl her hands into her palms to keep from doing it.
“Don’t look so sad for me,” she said, a thread of pleading in her voice.
Though why it mattered what he thought, or felt, she hadn’t a clue.
It was just, in that moment … it felt vital that she reassure him somehow. That it mattered. That he mattered.
“I’m afraid I’m far more selfish than you,” he said. “I am sad for you, as I would be for anyone in like circumstance. But I’m also sad for myself.”
“I can go, if being around me—”
“No,” he said, quite abruptly, even going so far as to reach out a hand to stop her, had she tried to make a move.
She hadn’t, and his outburst should have alarmed her. But it just strengthened that need in her, to soothe his fears. “I don’t want to go,” she told him. Her lips curved. “I haven’t solved the mystery of you, yet.”
He opened his mouth, then shut it. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Abby. Ramsay.”
His gaze flashed up at hers. “Ramsay.”
She nodded. “My ancestors are from your bonny shores.”
“You’ve been here before, then?”