Girls Who Travel (21 page)

45

I
SHUDDERED
AND
dropped Aston's hand. Standing there among the wreckage of my life, I felt foolish and confused.
How did this happen?

Aston directed his body around to face mine.

I stepped back from him, awkward and unsure.

“You're not hurt?” he asked.

“No, no,” I said. “I'm, I'm okay.” I felt hesitant about my words, like each one was a tiptoed step on a wobbly bridge. I rubbed my arms as if to erase Lochlon's fingerprints. “I don't know what would have happened if you hadn't been waiting up for—”

“Right,” Aston interrupted. “Don't think about that now. I told you I wouldn't go to bed without knowing you were safe, didn't I?”

I felt a warm tear melt down the hill of my cheekbone. My voice arched. “I should go.”

“Surely you're not all right to be alone?” Aston said, coming closer to me. “Kika?”

“Don't,” I said abruptly, my arm reaching out to block him in a reflexed sweep. Ashamed of this, I flicked my eyes up to meet his. He looked jolted.

I couldn't stomach it, so I ran.

“I'm sorry,” I called as I passed him. I was close enough that had he wanted to grab my arm to stop me, he could have. But he didn't. I was so grateful that he knew not to grab me just then.

I rushed through the garden gate, up the three steps to my blue door, and I slid the key in the lock with only the sound of my own breath around me. Aston stayed in the garden and didn't follow.

•   •   •

G
OD
,
WHY
DID
I just run away from him like that?
I pressed my backbone against the inside of the locked door. I smeared the tears from my face and took my time to breathe.

I slinked upstairs to my room and clicked on my lamp by the window so that Aston knew I was there. None of this was his fault; I just couldn't be around anyone right now—I hoped he understood that.

I sat looking out the window and started picking through a box of pastel macarons until my mouth was numb to the flavors and all I tasted was sugar, sugar, sugar. Then I shut off my lamp, but I still kept watch.

An hour later, Aston emerged from the garden with his head down. I stood at my window, but he didn't look up. Instead, he walked straight to his door.

I collapsed into my bed fully clothed, fully exhausted.

46

A
BUZZING
PHONE
ripped me from my feverish dreams. I buried my head under the covers, humid with sweat, and I let the throbbing ache of last night settle over me along with a repulsive sugar hangover. I reran the night's events; it was as masochistic as pressing on a fresh bruise.

I reached for my phone to put a stop to the insistent humming. It was still early, but I had a phone full of text messages from Lochlon, all liberally apologizing about last night. My head was foggy, but I was impossibly clear about one thing: Last night had nothing to do with me.

He didn't want to run away with me; he just wanted to
run away
. It killed me to realize it, but it was the truth. He cheapened what we had with a last-ditch go of asking me to run away with him just to escape his own problems.

Screw him
, I thought violently and cruelly.

There was one happy text from Elsbeth in response to last night's email. “So glad you're coming with us today. We'll be leaving for the airport at precisely 8
A.M.
No technology or no trip
.”

I tossed my phone like a Frisbee to the foot of the bed and glanced at my stuffed backpack, pleased with myself for packing it in advance. In fact, I couldn't wait to get the hell out of here. Eight
A.M.
couldn't come fast enough.

My phone buzzed again, and I groaned aloud at its bleak persistence. I was actually welcoming this no-technology holiday.

“Come onto your terrace. Please,” the text read. I spewed out a rainbow of curses.

“Please don't be there,” I begged uselessly, swallowing down my surging fury. “Please don't be there. Please don't be there,” I repeated.

I yanked the curtains out of the way and stepped out on the balcony barefoot. As if I had lowered myself into an icy lake, the cold from the tile jetted up my bare feet and surged upward until it reached my jaw, which plunged open in shock.

Like some screwed-up version of
Romeo and Juliet
, Lochlon was standing below my balcony on the street.

I shook my head at him furiously. “You have to get out of here,” I whisper-shouted as quietly as I could. “You're going to get me fired. Is that what you want?”

Lochlon dug his hands in his coat pockets and looked up at me with big eyes.

“Please, Kika, come down. It won't take but a few minutes, then I swear you'll never hear from me again.” He looked and sounded sober, but like me, he was still in the same clothes as last night.

My nerves jangled in the chilled morning air as he kept talking and gushing apologies.

I put my finger to my lips, gesturing for him to be quiet. Then I stuck my finger into the air as if to say,
Wait a minute
.

Before I could really think about it, I ducked inside, yanked on my boots, and raced downstairs to the street.

“Lochlon!” I spat when I got close enough.
Why won't he just go away?

“I am leaving for a vacation with the Darlings soon. You have to leave right now.” I was no longer afraid of him or even saddened by him. I was just straight-up livid.
How
dare
he try and mess up my life here?

Lochlon took a step back and held up both hands in defense. “Please, Kika, just give me a quarter of an hour to say what I need to say. I promise if you listen to me I'll go and leave you be forever.”

“Fine!” I started power walking away from the house with beastlike concentration. “I'll give you five minutes—that's it. Come on. You're going to wake up everyone. God, what the hell is wrong with you?”

I hated myself for giving him the chance to talk to me, but I felt like I had no other option. And in a few hours I would be unreachable—this thought was my life preserver just now.
I just have to get through five minutes of his bullshit and then I can get gone.

Without speaking, he followed me into a little French café on one of the mews beside the house. The café was mercifully empty on this early Sunday morning. I dropped down into a table by the window.

He didn't sit and instead loitered above. “Shall I get us a coffee?”

I strummed my fingernails on the tabletop. “Fine, whatever. Just hurry, will you?” Dropping my head in my hands, I heard Lochlon walk toward the counter and order two coffees. Funny, he didn't remember that I take sugar and milk in mine.

He positioned a cup in front of my elbows.

I rubbed my hands over my face in exhaustion and then peeked out from behind my fingers. He sat across from me and blew at the rim of his own coffee. I remembered how he took his: black.

I pressed my forearms into the table and assessed him frankly for a moment. His front teeth slouched in on each other like two drunks holding each other up. I never noticed that before. He pushed my coffee toward me like a peace offering, but I didn't touch it.

“Lochlon. Do you have any idea how mad I am right now?” I asked.

He looked down but didn't interrupt me.

“Your behavior was unacceptable last night.” The words sounded like something a parent might say, but I couldn't think of anything more appropriate. “You should have told me about your dad and about Bernadine before you came here. You omitted the truth and came here under false pretenses. Do you understand how unfair that is for me?”

His face looked like it had been punched.

“I cared about you, Lochlon. I wanted to be with you. I haven't been with anyone else
since
you!” I jeered maliciously, just to make him feel even guiltier. “And then, you get wasted and try to assault me—”

His head shot up. “No, Kika, I would never lay a hand on you. I—”

“Well, you did last night. You terrified me, Lochlon. I don't even know who you are.” Once again, the words were a cliché, but there was simply no other way to put it.

He ground the heels of his palms into his eye sockets.

I kept my eye on the café counter, like the girl behind it was doing something incredibly interesting. I couldn't stand to look at him. It was too raw.

“So that's what I have to say. And I have no clue what else it is that you
need
to tell me so desperately”—I crossed my legs—“but you have five minutes to do so.”

Lochlon inhaled at length. Facing the window, he looked outside like he was staring at some faraway distance in his mind. And maybe he was.

His Adam's apple dipped down his grizzled neck, and I was once again taken aback by my own lack of wanting for him. His scruffy neck used to drive me crazy. Now I felt only rage, which I suspected was masking the rotting scent of pity underneath.

“Kika, all right. Here's how it is: The reason I didn't tell you about Da or Bernie was that I was having trouble accepting my fate, see? In fairness, you'd want to refuse it, too. I'm sorry for not telling you sooner.” He cleared his throat.

“I came here thinking that maybe this was a way out, that you'd come away with me. With you, things were always, like, grand, really perfect and that. You never even gave me a hard time about my past. But deep down, I knew I couldn't run away, but just for a moment there last night, I thought I could fight it. Do you understand what I'm saying?” His eyes were wet and searching.

“Lochlon.” I sighed in exasperation. “That doesn't have to be your fate. It's not about abandoning your priorities; it's
about reestablishing them. I'm glad that you're not running away from your responsibilities, but once you tend to them, you can still live the life you want, just with some changes. Don't just give up. You can definitely still write—”

He laughed darkly, nostrils flaring like a villain. “Oh, come off it, Kika! Traveling around the world and writing—it's a bloody
dream
, a bit of fun. I've a living to earn now.”

He held his hand up as if he wanted to reach out to me, but I tipped my body backward. He closed his hand into a fist and dropped it on the table instead. He knew he wasn't allowed to touch me ever again.

“Where I'm from, people don't do those sorts of things. I have to marry her. I have to take over the farm and have a proper job, like,” he said. “I've made my bed, and now I have to—”

“Fuck Bernadine in it?” I lashed, stripping the argument of any euphemisms that he could hide behind.

He ignored my outburst. It wasn't about me anymore.

“I have to live there, and I have to die there with the rest of that lot. That's all there is to it. You can't leave. Not where I'm from, you can't.”

He spoke with a miserable, quivering vigor that showed me that he believed what he was saying—unlike last night when he was just desperate to bolt. But his resignation was uniquely devastating to me.

“If you think there's no other way to live your dream, then I feel bad for you,” I told him, hoping to rile him up.

“But there
isn't
any other way. As much as I want to run away with you and start fresh somewhere new, I can never do it—and not because you're not mental enough to come with me; because it isn't possible.”

For a passing moment, the morning sun outran the clouds and razored through the café glass, bathing Lochlon in a sepia shade of sorrowful light.

“I suppose I'm just destined to watch life on the telly. Like everyone else,” he concluded with a short nod.

I fingered the lip of my coffee mug, steamy and wet. “Not like everyone else,” I said.

He sighed in exasperation, deep and breathy like in sleep. “Will you stop going on about that traveling shite, Kika?” he said. “Life isn't like the way it is in films. One day you're going to have to get a real job as well, instead of minding well-off schoolchildren. You can't live like this forever. Your luck will run out just as mine has. I'm only telling you this so that you're not surprised—as I was.”

I was so wrong about him. I thought we were both going after the life we wanted with everything we had. I thought we both loved traveling enough to rearrange our lives to make sure it was always a part of it. Turns out I thought wrong.

“You used to be on my team. You used to be one of my kind.”

He wouldn't meet my eyes now.

“The old you could come up with a better solution than this—than just giving up.”
Coward
, I thought.
Look how quickly you gave up on everything you ever wanted.
“And Lochlon, you know I don't plan on being an au pair forever. This job is a great way to make money for Gypsies & Boxcars, and sure, it's a means to an end, but it's a
wonderful
means. I have a real plan now. I've even been saving money.” I flopped my arms into the air and let them fall limp.

When I mentioned Gypsies & Boxcars, he curled his
mouth. “It'll never work,” he said under his breath. “You could never save a cent.”

I shook my head in brazen disappointment. I wanted to say:
I expected more from you
, but instead I just stared him down, daring him to say anything more.