I rolled my eyes, quietly pleased. “Well,” I said finally, mirroring him, leaning in a little closer. “I don’t know aboutthat.”
“I do,” Ian said calmly, then cupped the back of my skull in one hand and kissed me. He tasted like beer and like popcorn and like hope. And maybe this was how it happened, I thought to myself, eyes closed and heart creaking open. Maybe this was how I started over for real.
The next morning I went and cut all my hair off, then called my mom and got permission to swipe her credit card for a dye job to match. She was worried about me, though both of us had tacitly agreed not to talk about why beyond her careful, general probes into my emotions and a book about grief that she’d sent to my dorm. “Sure,” she said cautiously; she was in Chicago on a book tour, the hotel TV chattering away in the background. “Whatever makes you happy.”
Once I was finished at the salon I met Ian at a coffee shop not far from campus; he stood up from the table when he saw me, an expression on his face like I was a rare, delicate thing. “I like it,” he said, reaching up and tugging on the ends, then blushing a little. “You look like you.”
“I feel like me,” I told him, though I wasn’t entirely sure if that was true or not, and tipped my face up for a kiss.
Now, five months later and halfway across the globe, I reach for his hands and lace our fingers together, noting with a surge of affection that his are sweaty, too, his palms hot and damp. “Well, you big weirdo,” I say, standing on my tiptoes to kiss him, “now that we’ve got that all settled, you wannago look at some more horrifying weapons?” We’ve lost our Tower tour group, the guide having led them off in a shuffling, murmuring cluster, no doubt to gamely exclaim over an antique stretching rack for the efficient tearing of one limb from another or a ruby-encrusted dagger that belonged to Thomas Cromwell. “We’re probably missing out on a live disembowelment right now.”
But Ian shakes his head. “I feel like I’ve kind of learned enough about medieval interrogation tactics for one day,” he confesses. “You wanna get out of here and find some food?”
I nod, the relief sharp and unexpected. It’s claustrophobic in here all of a sudden—those ancient stone walls getting closer, history pressing in from all sides. The soles of my feet itch with the instinct to run. For a moment I’m not sure which I’m more afraid of: Henry VIII’s wide and varied collection of bone-breaking apparatuses, or holding Ian’s heart in my two clumsy hands. Still, I remind myself it’s normal: of course those complicated old feelings would come roiling up now, my past tapping me naggingly on the shoulder. The last person I loved, after all, was—
“Yeah,” I say before I can think it, scanning the room for the nearest escape. “Let’s go.”
Outside we find a crowded pub to have lunch in, sitting side by side at the bar over heavy plates of fried fish and mushy green peas. Afternoon sunlight streams in through stained-glass windows, the slightly dank smell of beer andold wood dense in the air. The restaurant is teeming with smartly dressed office workers and clusters of chattering girlfriends on their lunch breaks, a pack of noisy English bros in quarter-zip sweaters laughing over something on one of their phones. “Is it rude to ask for ketchup?” I ask quietly, leaning toward Ian and nodding at my heaping pile of thickly cut fries. “Like, is ketchup even a thing in England?”
Ian frowns. “I think vinegar is the thing here, actually.”
“I was worried you were going to say that.” I twist the cap off the bottle of malt vinegar on the bar and sprinkle a few drops over my fries anyway, then hand it to Ian, who does the same before taking a big gulp of his Guinness. “When in London, right?” I tease, lifting a fry in salute.
Ian grins back, dimple popping in his right cheek. I like that he’s the kind of person who knows stuff like this: local customs and the right way to act in unfamiliar places, who to tip and how to navigate the Underground and what to order in a fancy restaurant. His family traveled a lot for his mom’s job when he was a kid, he told me once, so he comes by it honestly, but he also reads more than anyone I know. At any given moment he’s got at least three books on the go: a giant hardcover next to his bed, plus a paperback tucked into his schoolbag and something on his phone for unexpected emergencies. “Did you bring that ’cause you’re worried I’m gonna get boring?” I teased once, spying a dog-eared copy ofWonder Boyspeeking out from the back pocket of his corduroys on the way to dinner not long after we started dating. “Is thatwhy you’ve always got backup entertainment available?”
I was only joking around, but Ian shook his head seriously. “Not at all,” he promised. “But at some point you’re gonna get up and pee, right?”
Now he nods at the bartender for the bill and sits back on his stool. “So what’s next on the agenda?” he asks, gesturing at my phone, which I’ve set beside my plate for safekeeping.
I eye him over my pint of cider. “What makes you so sure I’ve got the next thing decided?”
Ian laughs out loud. “I mean, I’ve met you before, to start with.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I wrinkle my nose. The truth is I’ve planned every day of this trip down to the minute, complete with color-coded lists and preloaded Oyster cards for the train and an app on my phone to remind me what we’re supposed to be doing and when, plus the best way to get there and what to look at once we arrive. It’s really just a more concentrated version of the schedule I started keeping at school last fall, a training regimen for a brand-new me, but I can understand how it might be slightly overwhelming to the uninitiated.
Still, if I’ve learned anything over the last year it’s the importance of a concrete plan, a comprehensive guide for moving through the world with as few false starts as possible. A system, I have found, can stave off chaos. A system, I have found, prevents mistakes.
I pick up my phone and scroll through today’s itinerary,tapping the tiny checkboxes next toTower of Londonandpub lunch. “Westminster Abbey,” I report after a moment, flicking to the next screen to double-check our route on the Underground. “So nothing as traumatic as this morning, hopefully.”
“What, the prison?” Ian asks, swiping a leftover fry off my plate. “Or me saying I love you?”
“What?” My head snaps up. “I wasn’t traumatized!”
Ian looks at me like,nice try, buddy. “When I first said it?” he asks gently. “You weresomething.”
I shake my head, trying to reel my guilty, embarrassed self back in. “I was surprised,” I tell him finally. “That’s all.” Then, reaching out and taking his bearded face between my two hands: “Hey. I am really, really happy to be here with you, do you know that?”
Ian smiles back, his hazel eyes warm and friendly, and I know he’s willing to let me off the hook. “I mean, you should be,” he says, the grin turning just the slightest bit wicked and his faint Boston accent getting a touch more pronounced. He turns his face to plant a kiss against my palm. “I’m really fucking fun.”
Ian pays the bill and we amble out into the late summer sunshine, weaving through the crowd on the bustling sidewalk and down into the Underground station. “This is so much nicer than Boston,” I comment as we sit down to wait on a bench in front of an ad for a fancy British department store. The T back at home is notoriously unreliable, rattlingalong aboveground tracks that are perpetually freezing over in the winter. “Why do you think—”
I break off all at once at the sight of a familiar set of shoulders across the platform; my whole body goes wary and watchful and still. For one sharp second it’s like all the air has gone out of this tube station, whooshing down into the dark mouth of the tunnel and leaving me gasping for oxygen like a hooked, terrified fish. Standing on the other side of the tracks, his beat-up backpack slung over one narrow shoulder, is—
Gabe.
I blink. I’m hallucinating, I must be, jet lag or exhaustion or some kind of weird transatlantic madness. To conjure my ex-boyfriend on the other side of the world—an hour after mynewboyfriend tells me he loves me? The cold reality is I haven’t seen Gabe since our breakup last summer at home in Star Lake. We haven’t eventalked,for God’s sake. And he made it clear that was exactly how he wanted it.
I force a deep, steadying breath, straightening my spine before squinting across the tracks one more time. The stranger looks like Gabe, that much is undeniable. The shaggy hair is gone, trademark curls cut close to his head, but the khaki shorts and the scruffy sneakers are achingly familiar. This guy even kind ofstandslike Gabe.
