(Ten inches, after Elodie moved to cross her legs.)
(Five inches, after Gabriel spread the coat over them both like a blanket, requiring them to shuffle closer so it fit across their laps.)
(Half an inch, when they both placed their hands down in the intervening gap beneath the coat, where it was warm and insular like a cave. Their smallest fingers drifted across the last tiny distance, meeting in the secret dark.) They sat like that, quiet, goosebumps rising along their arms as they stared out into the slow-dripping night.
“I’m sorry,” Elodie said after a while.
“It’s fine, I didn’t want to stay in that place anyway.”
“I know. That’s why I’m sorry.” She looked at him, her eyes big and soft and full of feeling. “I should have listened to you instead of insisting that you ought to feel comfortable.”
Blindsided by this statement, Gabriel could do no more than shrug. He’d never received such an apology in all his life and didn’t know how one properly responded.Thank youseemed paltry; taking off her clothes and kissing her from brow to toes seemed possibly excessive (although enjoyable).
“The second I was upset, you helped me,” she went on. “Thank you. I wish I had been kind like that to you.”
Gabriel stared at her.Say something,he urged his brain. But the traitorous organ had transformed itself into a loveheart and was no longer aware of anything but the beautiful woman at his side.
“It’s too easy for me to get caught up in the moment,” she said, “and not think more carefully. I’m so truly sorry if I hurt you.”
“You didn’t hurt me,” Gabriel answered gruffly. Of course she hadn’t. He didn’t get hurt by things like that. He was a persnickety curmudgeon; a need for comfort was the last thing people would associate with him, therefore they never considered it. And his extended family, half of whom were academics, the other half civil servants, could have taken “Keep a Stiff Upper Lip” as their official motto. For them, comfort was something that happened only in the nursery, and generally consisted of firm pats on the back by a starchy woman in an even starchier uniform. When a child dared to become more emotional than a stern look could quell, they were packed off—to America, in the case of his cousin Devon, who’d failed to recover swiftly enough from his mother’s death—or toboarding school, as happened with Amelia, after which she returned only during the summer holidays, a guest in the family house, no longer quite belonging.
Gabriel had learned better, quicker, than Devon and Amelia, perhaps because quiet had always been his natural instinct. He protected himself from the risk of needing comfort by expressing no more than a grumpy frown, even though in trutheverythinghurt, the whole noisy, itchy, crooked world, all the fucking time.
But Elodie continued gazing at him as if she saw right through that defense to where an aching boy huddled inside, just wishing for…not a hug, exactly, but perhaps a look that was like a hug…the type of look that Elodie was giving him now, in fact.
Damn, she was going to make him cry.
“The hovel supplied us with a meal,” he said, “and so it all worked out for the best.”
“I don’t know that I’d ever equate tinned corned beef with ‘the best,’ ” Elodie remarked, sardonic but smiling gently.
Damn again, now she was going to make him laugh. Determined to control himself, Gabriel nodded tersely. And Elodie, wise woman, understanding that the topic was closed, nodded also. They looked away from each other, into the hollow night.
Silence fell again.
Altogether it was as awkward as an eighteen-year-old boy trying not to blush when a gorgeous, pale-haired girl smiled at him. Then the moon emerged from behind a cloud, gossamer-thin and wry, its light transforming the elm’s canopy into a roof of lambent gold that sparkled with raindrops like diamonds. Elodie gave one of her dreamy sighs.
“This reminds me of when George Lowbridge and I were studying the effects of thaumaturgic silver deposits on apple growth in North Yorkshire. It rained the entire time, despite being summer.”
George Lowbridge?The perpetually sniffing junior professor from Cambridge?
“Oh?” Gabriel inquired with all the cool disinterest of someone who was in fact interested to the point of near combustion but determined not to show it.
“We sheltered under a tree very similar to this.”
“Indeed?”
She laughed at some memory that made her eyes shine, and Gabriel felt several large, sharp boulders locate themselves to inside his respiratory system, in defiance of all geographic science. He knew perfectly well that Elodie had the right to sit under any tree she pleased with another man, but he also had the right toabsolutely hate the very thought of it. She washis. Granted, only in legal terms, and he wouldnever dareto state the claim aloud to her face. She was her own woman, and he believed thatimplicitly. He just also believed, deep down, where decency turned into a wild jungle, that shebelongedtohim. Indeed, he felt thisso vehemently, he could not save himself from the alarming bout of italics.
Nevertheless, he remained outwardly dispassionate as he said, “So…where might I find Professor Lowbridge these days? I’d quite like to have a little chat with him.”
“Oh, George went to Australia,” Elodie said, oblivious to his spiking emotions.
Hopefully George would get eaten along the way by crocodiles.
“That’s fine,” Gabriel said. “I can go to Australia.” On theother hand, he wouldn’t shift his gaze just slightly to the left and see the warm, teasing smile he couldfeelher directing at him. “Why is he there, of all places?”
“My uncle is doing in-depth research on the songlines—Australian natives’ method of navigation,” Elodie said, drawing up her knees, wrapping her arms around her legs as she gazed out into the whispering night. “George went to study with him.”
