Girls Who Travel (29 page)

63

“I
WANT
TO
show you something,” Aston said with his hand on my lower back as we zigzagged the leafy streets, past the Seven Dials sundial pillar. The roads were empty and wet. A spring shower had begun pitter-pattering through the canopy of new leaves above our heads lit up by orange streetlamps. “You're not in a hurry for that coffee, are you?”

“I've got all night for you.” I tilted my face toward the English rain.
And please let me have tomorrow, too
, I thought.

“Good.” Aston turned down a small cobblestone side street. When he noticed that I was a few paces behind him, he stopped and took my hand. His face was flushed. “Come along,” he said. “I think you'll like this.”

It occurred to me then: Aston and I weren't from different worlds at all. He may not identify as a traveler, but he sure could act like one.

We trotted down a lane so narrow that if I spread my arms I would have been able to touch the bricks on both sides. He stopped at an arched wooden door and took out a set of rattling keys.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked.

He pressed his finger to his lips. Just then, it started to pour. I stopped talking and let his mysterious energy overtake me as the icy rain pelted my cheeks.

The old door swung open. Taking my hand again, Aston tugged me inside. He closed the door behind us, shushing out the pouring rain and pitching us into blackness. A gasp slipped out.

“Don't move,” he told me, holding my shoulders as if to show me he knew exactly where I was. “I'll get the lights and turn on some heat for you.”

“Where are we?” I whispered.

But he didn't answer and instead left me standing there alone. My eyes adjusted to the dark, and I began to get a sense of the room's geography. Opposite from where I stood it was lighter: There must be windows over there. It felt like a low-ceilinged, narrow space—but cozy. It smelled of wood and paper and age, not unlike a library.

Just then, an antique desk lamp flicked on with a metallic bounce. From overhead came a slight buzzing as a cluster of candle-faint Edison bulbs turned on. Even though it was very dim, I squinted my eyes in response to the new light.

I mapped my surroundings: Rows of vinyl records lined the shelves. Polished wood guitars and posters advertising gigs long passed decorated the walls. I looked up and saw a tin ceiling, the bare bulbs dropping down like fishing lines. I was
right—opposite me stood a wall of loft windows: little glass rectangles that were covered by curtains, but beyond them was the street and the pattering of rain. We were in a record store.

I swiveled myself toward Aston. He took out a lacquered black vinyl record from its paper slip and blew on it.

“How do you have keys to this place?”

He ignored me for a moment and cradled the record into a record player. The needle scratched and squeaked before the warm analog notes took form.

I ran my hand over the dusty sleeves of black LPs, timeworn or dressed in flimsy cellophane. The moaning of wild, wild horses pushed through the snug, warm atmosphere. And I thought,
You're right. Even wild horses couldn't drag me away from all this tonight.

Aston took a guitar off the wall and sat on a wooden stool, tuning it up in twanging plucks. His tendons rippled and swelled under the thin skin of his hand as he caught the strings and made them quiver.

“That's beautiful,” I mumbled as he joined in with the drowsy, moody melody.

He looked up at me and smiled like he just remembered I was there.

I sank down on the Oriental rug and sat cross-legged in front of him. “Are we supposed to be here?” I asked.

Aston shook his finger over a fret. The note answered me.

“'Course we can be here. I own the place.” His fingers moved with ease and traditional grace. “Used to come here skiving off studies, so when I found it was for sale a few years ago, I couldn't let it be turned into a Body Shop.”

I lay back on the carpet, spread out like a snow angel, and
let the music cover me like fresh snowfall. The smoky lights, secondhand records, woozy heat, and vibrating strings—they made me feel like things were happening, real, important things. I actually felt myself
living
life at that moment.

The song concluded and looped white noise, but Aston kept strumming, transitioning into another song, equally melancholic, equally beautiful. The music he created felt intimate, like a lover whispering in your ear.

Aston hummed a bluesy melody above me, his pitch as smooth as lived-in bedsheets. But then, he stopped playing his guitar.

With my eyes closed, I lifted an eyebrow, not wanting to break the enchantment. Something inside me went quiet in peaceful contentment.

Sitting up, I found him watching me. I looked down, playing with the carpet between my fingers. My mind whooshed when I realized what I was about to do.

Nearing the turntable, I found a cherished album close by. And soon, a sad, dusty cello in a minor key meshed with a heartrending acoustic guitar and a ghostly female vocalist.

“That's an original.” Aston watched me over the curve of his guitar. There was a smile in his cadence when he spoke to me. The cello hushed, and the lamplight cast otherworldly velvety shadows over the towers of old records, arranged like a cityscape around us.

I walked over to him and took the guitar out of his hands, leaning it against the wall. He let me take it.

Feeling sure of myself, of my body, of my movements, of my intentions, I positioned myself in front of Aston. The
needle skipped a groove on the record but continued undeterred a moment later.

“Kika,” he said in a low, smoky voice that came from the depths of his throat. “We don't have to.”

I held still for a moment, and I knew that if I wanted to stop now, he would let me. But I straddled myself down onto his lap and kissed him.

“I want to,” I told him, breaking off the kiss.

Instead of speaking again, I guided his hands to where I wanted them. I made a faraway noise when his warm palms first skimmed over my bare skin, lost in the sheer, simple stupor of being touched. The music made me braver, but I couldn't recall a time I wanted anything more.

64

I
N
THE
FIRST
small hours of morning, the rain stopped and we left the record shop and went to Soho, our fingers coiled together the whole time. We sat in an Italian-style coffeehouse filled with people too preoccupied to go home or with no homes to go to. Shoulder-to-shoulder they rested—all-hours cab drivers with nicotine eyes and electric-blue-haired teenagers returning from neon nightclubs.

On the other side of the filmy window, the early morning threatened to arrive, while oblivious parades of drunken partygoers passed by with far less on their minds than us.

A television played a soccer match in machine-gun-fast Italian. Aston flipped through a morning paper left in our booth. I thought of what had just happened back at the shop, about that pulling feeling in my heart when he tucked me against his chest afterward, when we were just bare skin on
bare skin. I could have slept there all night, with my ear against his thrumming heartbeat.

“What has you smiling, Kika?” he asked, eyeing me over his paper.

I didn't realize I was smiling.

“Go on. Tell me.” He folded the newspaper in half, hiding a sleepy yawn behind it.

“You,” I admitted. “And me. We'll think of something,” I said finally.

“Of course we will,” he said. “I thought, say nothing manifests, perhaps we could, I don't know, go on one of your trips together. Scout some handicrafts and whatnot—if you have to leave the UK, I mean.”

“But I thought you said that you don't like to travel?”

“Well, I think I may like to travel with you.” Thankfully, he curled his gaze downward before I was forced to jump over the table and drag him back to the record store.

“Just an idea, anyway. I'm quite sure we'll find a solution.” He shrugged and gathered up the newspaper again. As he started reading, I stole a bite of his pastry even though I already finished two of my own. (I regret nothing.)

He would never be more handsome to me than he was right then—at 4:30
A.M.
on a Friday morning; the smell of strong espresso thickening the air; the neon lights splashing through the windows, coating his cornfield-blond hair and making him look like someone poets wrote sonnets about.

We talked adamantly then, each of us moving from option to option: I could maybe come back and get a job under the table; Aston would get visa information from his company's lawyers; or we would look into au pair agencies.

We talked and talked and talked, both of us certain we'd figure something out as the night trudged toward unavoidable daybreak.

But time had its way with us that day, and we wouldn't come up with a fleshed-out solution. We needed more time, and as much as it hurt to admit it, we had been outwitted.

So hand in hand we watched the sun break like an egg over the Thames that morning, staining the dawn with orange and melancholy.

Bloodshot veins made Aston's eyes even bluer, and his ridged jawline had cultivated a plain of powdery golden stubble as fine as May pollen.

This is some strange version of what it'd be like waking up beside him
, I imagined privately, my stomach leaping at the thought. If only there were more of these drowsy early mornings to come. But for now, this dawn was all we had.

65

W
E
PAUSED
IN
front of our respective houses. Before going inside, I promised Aston that I'd stop by his house when I was done packing so that I could say good-bye to him—officially, but temporarily, until we could find a better solution than this. Good-bye for now, which was always my line, wasn't it?

“Well, that's it,” I announced to myself. I tugged my backpack straps taut and marveled at how my whole existence could still be condensed into one bag. I ceremoniously held my final paycheck in both hands.

You could never save a cent
, I heard Lochlon say. But I already told Clive that we would be stopping at the bank on the way to the airport. Another deposit.
Take that
, I thought.
Just watch me rewrite my narrative even in the face of lost momentum.

All that was left for me to do now was to articulate those
overwhelming good-byes: first to Aston, and then to the girls when they got home from school this afternoon.

I wrote each girl a long letter despite Elsbeth's wishes and hid it between their bedsheets so that they'd find it before going to bed tonight. No matter what Elsbeth said, I would have my good-bye with them.

As for Aston, well, there was no letter for him because he already knew how I felt about things: We were put on pause. Walking away from it now felt like a sudden loss of electricity. We were plunged into a blackout, jumbled and unprepared.

But I was proud of our flailing: I was glad we blundered around blind and let our fluttering fingers feel for walls, grasping at anything we could. Our floundering proved that we were making the effort.

Though I was going back to New York, I was under orders to call Aston as soon as I landed. All I could do was believe that we would figure out a way for this to work. What else could I do? If I didn't believe in it, there was no point. Always, even after a hundred heartbreaks, we still want to believe, don't we? And so I'd be a believer. I'd risk it all, and I'd bet it all. Again, and again, and again.

“You never know,” Aston told me as we parted ways this morning, facing our front doors. “We still have a few hours left. In football, things change during stoppage time all the time.”

“I'm not sure I get your sporty metaphors,” I told him with a bent grin. But I couldn't help but to cross my fingers and hope he was right.

I thought of Aston's words when I heard a pounding at my door and perked up.

“Come in,” I called, begging for something—anything—
to push down the chalky lump that had been stuck in my esophagus since returning to the house.

“Elsbeth!” My breathing caught hopefully when I saw the state she was in:
Is this the last-minute miracle I'm hoping for?

Unfortunately, this didn't look like it could turn into a happy ending.

Elsbeth's hair had broken loose from her ballerina-tight bun, and her face was ghostly pale. As she entered my room, she brought with her a buzz of anxiety so insistent you could hear it.

“Are you okay?” I asked, alarmed. Elsbeth never looked so untidy. (Of course, what she calls unruly, I call Tuesday, but never mind that. For Elsbeth,
this
was highly undignified.)

But she was too winded to answer. She hurried at me, fastened her hands on my shoulders, and led me to a set of chairs.

Once she sat me down, she dumped herself down into the other chair, holding her hand to her head like some swooning Jane Austen heroine. I had the impulse to offer her some smelling salts or a thimbleful of sherry, just to complete the picture.

“Good God. I just ran here from Harrington Gardens. Sprinted, really. And here I thought I was in amazing shape. I am going to fire that personal trainer—”

“Are they all right?” I interrupted.

“What?” Elsbeth fanned herself.

“The girls—you said you went to the school.”

“Yes, they're fine. Oh, let me just start at the beginning.” Elsbeth patted her cheeks and did what my mom would call “a round of Ujjayi breathing.”

“I received a message this morning instructing me to go to my daughter's school to meet with her teacher. The message
said that it was ‘high time I found out what was going on,'” Elsbeth said, making air quotes with her fingers.

“Obviously distressed, I jetted over to Harrington Gardens just as fast as I could. I tried to find you to see if perhaps you knew what this was in regards to, but I couldn't find you anywhere this morning,” she said in one breath.

I scrunched my brow in anticipation.

“So because Gwendolyn had been having problems, I assumed the message was about her and went to see her teacher first. Of course, she made me wait for approximately an hour before she was able to sit down with me. I didn't want to alarm Gwen, so I hid like a refugee in the school hallway—the whole thing was very theatrical really.” Elsbeth looked slightly impressed with herself.

I whisked my hand in the air for her to get on with the story.

“Gwen's teacher told me how
amazing
she's doing, and really, Kika, this is all your influence. She has been getting along smashingly with the other kids and behaving herself. As you can imagine, I was just so pleased—with her and you, Kika.”

“Well, that's great to hear—” My shoulders collapsed in anticlimax.
This is what she got me all wound up about?

Elsbeth pointed her finger at my chest insistently. “But that's not all. You're not off the hook yet.”

I pepped up, despite the warning.

“Still concerned about the message, I dashed across the street to the upper-classes building—Mina's school. And that's when the
real
surprises came out.” Her mouth pursed.

I swore to myself. It must have been Mrs. Benson-Westwood who had called her. She must have gotten the school involved
after she heard about how I lectured Peaches and the rest of the junior bitches.

My back straightened, and I strategized my objection, ready for a fight. But then I remembered:
I am already fired. I'm already leaving on a jet plane; don't know when I'll be back again, and all that jazz.
And so I kept silent, feeling wildly liberated by the “fuck it” mood that was settling in.

“Mina's teacher was available to have a sit-down. Kika, only
you
would have any idea about what I learned. I cannot believe that she had been bullied for so long and no one alerted me. And you
knew
, Kika. And what you did—”

“I did do it, and I'd do it again!” I hurled myself out of my chair in a demonstration of guiltlessness. “And you know what, Elsbeth, if you were there, you'd have done the same thing. So I don't want to hear it.”

Elsbeth clasped her pearls (or where her pearls would have been had she been wearing some). “Kika!” she wheezed.

My knees told me that I made my point, and so I plummeted back into my seat, the wind having been knocked from me.

“Why, Kika, that was
just
what I was going to say!”

My mouth opened. “Um, seriously?”

Elsbeth clapped her hands together in exhilaration. “You
fixed
it as if you were her mother. And actually, Mina's teacher thought you
were
her mother. You see, she saw you at the school that day when you gallantly stuck up for Mina. She said whatever you said to those girls had a great effect on them, and since that day the teasing lessened and then ultimately tapered off completely.

“Oh, Kika, you
saved
my girls. I had no clue what was going on. I got so caught up with the social scene here and
the parents and parties and . . . and . . .” She stopped talking and looked at me questioningly.

I sat stunned. “I just did what anyone would have done.”

“No, Kika. No one can do what you do. And that is the truth. I don't want you to leave.”

I nodded sluggishly. “That's nice, but if the girls are leaving in September—”

“Kika, they're
not
leaving. The boarding school idea is a huge mistake. I was peer pressured,” she claimed with enlarged pupils.

We both smiled at the statement, the conflict evaporating into the space between us.

“But I was, Kika. All of Mr. Darling's colleagues' children go to boarding school, and the parents all harp on about how they make ‘connections that will last into their futures,'” she said in an intonation that evoked Primrose.

We both rolled our eyes at the phrase.

“But now I see that they just say that . . . that . . .
poppycock
” (of course even now Elsbeth wouldn't swear) “to make themselves feel better.”

She reeled in her tone for a moment. “Well, maybe it
is
right for them, but it's not for
me
or
my
girls.”

I leaped up and launched a full-contact hug on Elsbeth's delicate form. “Oh, thank God. I didn't want to say anything about Mina being bullied because I promised her that I wouldn't betray her trust. But I was so worried about her going to boarding school and having to deal with being the new girl again.”

Elsbeth nodded knowingly. “You know, Kika, when you protested boarding school, I couldn't handle it and fired you because deep down, I felt it was wrong, too.”

“I know you did. I could tell,” I said enthusiastically.

“I am truly sorry. Please say you'll stay?” Elsbeth prompted like she didn't already know the answer.

“Yes, I'll stay—of course I will!”

“That's my girl. Now get these bags unpacked before the girls get home—I don't want to startle them,” she said in her bossy but somehow comforting way. “And don't forget those letters you snuck in their beds.”