An Evening at Joe's (21 page)

The guidebook recommended the collection of statuary at the Museum at Olympia, and Alexa, with her nonexistent command of Greek, braved the trip and joined the sparse crowds visiting the collection on an overcast weekday in February. The locals blended into the statuary, a collection of lifesize portrayals of Greek citizens of the second millennium B.C., standing stark and still beside their modern cousins, marble faces as expressive as those of the living. Alexa's eye was caught by two teenage girls gazing blissfully up at a male figure, an athlete, his head crowned with the laurels ofvictory, slightly bowed in modest acceptance. Alexa moved closer for a better look.

And looked up into Adam's face.

It took her so completely by surprise, the marble features so like his, that for a moment she thought she was imagining it, missing him so much that she saw him where he was not. But the aquiline nose, the expressive ears, the eyes with their distant, disengaged gaze, even the lopsided half-smile she loved so much, had all been captured in perfect likeness some three millennia before either of them was born. Well, almost perfect likeness, Alexa reflected wryly, her eyes straying below the marble waist, where the Greeks had tended to idolize a boy's attributes and Adam was... well, anything but a boy.

Adonis, indeed, she thought with a smile, stopping herself from reaching out a hand to touch the so-familiar face. She looked around for the label, found a yellowing typewritten sheet sealed under plexiglass on the wall nearby.

Not Adonis after all, it seemed, but an anonymous marathon runner, some ancient ancestor of Adam's, immortalized in stone. She pulled out her camera to snap a picture, thinking what a kick Adam would get out of this when he got back.

If he got back.

The thought came unbidden, like a kick in the stomach, and she stopped to examine it. Looking through her viewfinder at this ancient heroic image, she had suddenly seen her absent lover with new eyes. She knew by now there was more to him than met the eye. The strong body he tried to hide under baggy clothes. The rich knowledge of history he tried to disguise with an equally encyclopedic obsession with the trivia of modern pop culture. She knew he would deny that he was anything but an eternal graduate student with a hopelessly retentive memory... but she knew how much more than that he had been to her. He had rescued her, that was the only word for it—he had saved her. His tools might be different—a Walkman and a battered VW in place of an Olympic torch or a chariot—but looked at whole, he was as much a hero as his mysterious ancestor, as any Adonis or Prometheus in the place.

She now saw the suddenness and awkwardness of his departure in a new light. The set of the shoulders, the tension concealed by his wool greatcoat, the clipped emotionless tone, had hinted not at abandonment but at reluctant farewell. He
wasn't
sure if he was coming back— not because he didn't want to but because he might not be able to. Something needed doing, something he hadn't been sure he could do, something that scared him so much that he tried to prepare her for the possibility that she wouldn't see him again. .

Alexa shuddered as a cloud passed over the sun, throwing both her and the marathon runner into winter shadow. Who was he trying to save this time, and from what?
In Adam's absence, Alexa had taken to eating in her room rather than endure the constant chore of dining out alone. Juggling her daily parcels of fabulous local bread and cheeses, new film for the camera, and the English-language newspaper, Alexa dug out her key and unlocked the door.

And stopped in the doorway as she heard his voice. "Thanks for the lead, Joe, you were right about that sword. And about Rachel." He was standing by the window, looking out at the square, phone pressed to his ear. "And do me a favor... next time MacLeod's in trouble, remind me to take a sword
and
a gun."

She was barely listening to the words, beyond registering a passing astonishment at the name. Joe's friend Duncan MacLeod had never seemed like a man who would need help from anyone, much less from Adam. But it didn't matter, none of it mattered, save he was safe and whole. And
here.

She must have made a sound, because he turned in the window and saw her standing in the doorway and smiled at her somewhat sheepishly, waggled the fingers of one hand in a weak wave.

She kicked the door shut behind her, dropped her coat and packages, moved to him, took the telephone from him. "Hi Joe, bye Joe," was all she said before putting the receiver on the cradle. She was peeling off Adam's big wool coat before he even finished lowering the hand that had held the phone. She went up on tiptoe to press her mouth to his, then moved downward, along the muscle that ran from jaw to sternum, tracing a finger ahead of her tongue, and continuing down past the collarbone, unbuttoning his shirt as she went.

"Hello..." he said, surprised but by no means displeased.

"Hello yourself," she breathed back, wrapping her arms around him and pulling his shirt free of the top of his brick-colored jeans, slipping her hands up under the loosened cotton to stroke the skin along his spine. She felt him come alive against her as she explored, his breath catching when her mouth reached the tiny hollow where ribcage met abdomen.

He struggled to keep his voice light. "So you missed me?" She smiled into his chest, tickling it, and felt the half-laugh vibrate his diaphragm. She stopped her careful ministrations to look up at him seriously. "I thought about you a lot. I thought about what you've done for me."

"It's not like that, Alexa." Cupping her chin, tilting her head back, holding her gaze—
needing
her to understand. "You're not a charity project, believe me." '

"All the same." She caught a hand in one of his front beltloops, pulled him gently forward, backing toward the bed. She turned with him in her arms, urging him back onto the bed until he was lying under her, his unbuttoned shirt awry, his hands clasped on her waist as she sat across him, her flowered skirt spread over his thighs and stomach, her legs under it clasped around his hips. "Now I want to do something for you."

It took all his willpower to put his hands over hers, stopping them as they slid down his stomach. "Not because you owe me anything, Alexa."

"No." She took a wrist in each hand and pulled his hands away, to the sides, holding them there as she leaned over him, her mouth tantalizingly close to his as she whispered, "Because I want to."

And as her tiny but deft hands slipped the top button of his jeans, he was in no position to object.
The orange light of the Greek winter sunset slanting through the window woke her and she rolled over, feeling the cotton sheets slide against her naked body, to see Adam sitting at the little table, gazing at her. His eyes were intense, thoughtful... full of love and something that looked suspiciously like regret.

"What? What's wrong?"

He glanced down for a moment, and she saw what he was looking at—her most recent roll of pictures, developed yesterday, and dropped in the doorway with everything else when she saw him, wanted him took him.

"You went to the museum at Olympia."

"While you were gone. Yes." His distress was easy to read, but not the reason for it. "Did you want to go together? You hadn't mentioned it, so I thought—" She wrapped the sheet around her and got out o bed moving toward the table, wanting to bridge this sudden distance. "We could go again. I don't mind."

"No," he answered quietly, "I wasn't planning to take you there." He turned one of the photos around, held it up so it was facing her. The marathon runner. In last night's excitement she'd forgotten all about it.

Her smile returned. "Oh, that. Isn't it funny? It looks just like—" And then she stopped her smile fading again. Confronted with them both at once, Adam and the photo of the statue, she could see just how close the resemblance was, down to the little divot under his nose... and knew, suddenly, paling, that no ancestor could be that alike.
She would hate him for it. She had to. With so much love of life, and so little of it left, how could she not hate a man who had seen a hundred lifetimes and might see a hundred yet?

He had hoped to never face this day, had thought her limited time would mean he never had to explain why he didn't change, didn't age, didn't die. Looking at Alexa now, he realized what a huge mistake he had made, building their love on a lie, asking her to love Adam Pierson as though the man existed, as though he could have life, and happiness, apart from Methos.

He had never felt lonelier than at this moment, in this room, groping for the words to tell the woman he loved all the ways in which he had betrayed her.
There was a long moment of silence after he'd told her. Alexa stared at him, unspeaking, worrying her lower lip with her teeth, not even knowing she was doing it. He could only wait, in an agony of knowing what had to come next. The end. The reason he'd sworn to himself, a hundred times in the last thousand years, not to put himself in this situation.

It wasn't a question of her believing him. They'd come that far, at least—he wouldn't need to pull out a knife to prove his case. She knew the truth of it—that was clear in the tension in her shoulders, the knitting of her fingers that brought our bright white crescents along each knuckle.
It explained so much, Alexa realized. His wisdom, his caring, the way he looked at her sometimes like a fond parent marveling at an infant's tiny ears and toes. His automatic, unthinking understanding of some things—and his incredible naivete about others. He had seen life and death a hundred times over... but he had never lived what she was living, never faced death not as trial by combat but as the implacable result of a force so great there was no fighting it, no more than a drop of water could fight the current of the Colorado. What ironic God had plucked him from the stream, made of him a stone in times river, weathered and shaped by its passing, but unmoved?

It was too much. After all she'd been through in the last year. The diagnosis, the denial, the acceptance that her life was ending, that she would never have the chance to do all the things she'd read about, dreamed about, since she was a little girl. And then Adam, with his promise that she
would.
In some ways that had been the hardest to take. The deadline she was living under had been easier to accept when every day was the same—work, doctor, home; work, doctor, home. Since she'd accepted Adam's offer, and
Adam
, her life had become a thing she could hardly bear to leave.

And now this. This unbelievable cruelty. She wanted to erase it from existence, pretend he had never spoken, go back to last night, when they had been equals, brought together in mutual comfort. Now he was a stranger in Adam's body.

Why had he told her? Why not hide the photo, hurry her out of Athens, lie, do whatever it took to keep this from her? There was no comfort in knowing that Immortality existed, but not for her—that the man she loved was but the tip of the iceberg of a hundred lives lived, a hundred women loved...

...and lost.

But there was no turning back the clock on this, any more than there had been the day the doctor had told her what he'd found. He was what he was. She could send him away, with his perfect, uninjurable body and his wounded eyes, and go back to the life he'd lured her from. And try to forget this had ever happened.

Finally she spoke. "You didn't choose this, did you?"

He'd thought he'd heard everything, but he'd never expected to hear that, and his answer was immediate, torn from him without thought: "No. God, no." He tried again: "Alexa, if there was any way on earth for me to share this with you, you know I'd—"

She held up a hand. She didn't want to hear it. He didn't blame her—what good was a promise like that? He couldn't share what he was... at this moment, wouldn't wish it on his worst enemy.

"Don't say it. I know." She looked at him for a long moment, examining every fold of his clothing, the bend of an arm, the tips of his ears. He could only sit and let her do it, sure she was replaying in her mind every word he'd said to her, everything he'd done, from the moment they met.

As indeed she was. Every word, every deed, every caress. Finally she made her judgment. "Adam... if you can forgive me for dying... I can forgive you for this."

He started to protest that that wasn't her fault and stopped himself as he realized that she was a step ahead of him. They weren't to blame, either of them, for the hand they'd been dealt.

And then, incredibly, beyond hoping or believing, she was in his arms.

Adam moved swiftly down the corridor, matching stride for stride the rapid beating of his heart. As he neared the nurses' station he vaguely heard someone call out to him—"Monsieur Pierson? Wait!"— but he ignored them and hurried past, opening the door to Alexa's room. He couldn't stop until he'd seen her, until he knew—

The bed was empty.

Oh, God, he was too late, He sank back against the door post, unable to breathe.