Girls Who Travel (30 page)

66

I
KNOW
HE
'
LL
be here
, I thought as I pushed open the garden gate without shutting it behind me. I didn't even bother knocking on his door first.
He'll be here.

Spring had come to the garden overnight. Aston stood with his back toward me. The sunshine glinted off flowers jeweled with condensation, and the pollen in the air gave the whole place a dreamlike haze.

I hurried toward him. My boots, sprinkled with cherry blossom petals, slapped the wet grass, the suctioning making a sort of kissy noise with every step.

“I knew you'd be here,” I said lightly, stopping just behind him, my boots yielding to the dewy earth. He didn't turn around, and I used the concealed moment to tell him exactly how I felt.

“It means so much to me that you're where I thought you'd
be,” I gushed with hearty emphasis, so needlessly sincere that it was cheesy as all hell, but I didn't even care. “It makes it feel so
right
.” When he still didn't turn around, I took a few more steps forward and reached out to touch his shoulder.

He wheeled around, and suddenly, I was face-to-face with those hypnotic bright blue eyes and—

“
Fuck me!
” I yapped in alarm. I was
not
face-to-face with those hypnotic bright blue eyes. I vaulted backward as I realized I was actually face-to-face with a teenage boy.

Oops. Wrong guy.
I physically recoiled in embarrassment.

The teenager gawped at me. “Fuck you?” he repeated. His tongue was suspended mid-lick over the paper of a hand-rolled cigarette, which—it now became apparent—he was rolling facing the tree to avoid the wind.

“Was it me you were talking to?” he asked again. Strangest of all was that he sounded vaguely hopeful.

“Um, no, sorry,” I protested with a red face. I took rapid steps backward. “Best be going now,” I said, hiding my face behind a curtain of hair.
What is wrong with me?

I heard cackling behind my back and peeked up apprehensively. I turned to see Aston unsuccessfully trying to hold in his laughter. The teenager used the opportunity to hightail it out of the garden.

Scrunching up my eyebrows, I stomped over to Aston. (This time I was positive it was him.)

“Well done. You always talk to underage schoolboys like that?” He broke apart in hard laughter now. “You saucy thing! I think you just sent him into early puberty.”

I whacked him on the arm. “You sat here watching me pour my heart out to the wrong guy, and you didn't even stop me?”

“Couldn't. It was too funny,” he said, rubbing his arm. “I had to let you crack on, surely.” He chuckled and stretched out his arm where I smacked him and examined his bicep. “Wasn't expecting to get hurt.”

I overlapped my arms defiantly, but it was hard to fake a bad mood right now in this sweet stupor.

“Come on now, I thought I'd at least get a ‘thank you' or maybe a little snog?”

I nodded, facing my eyes downward in an effort to conceal my grin. “So, Aston Hyde Bettencourt, who'd you get to leave Elsbeth that message?”

“My granny, would you believe? She works at the school, so she knew what was going on. She'll be delighted it worked,” he told me, enthralled.

I laughed at his enthusiasm. “You brought your poor granny into this?”

“Brought her into this? She's
been
in it. That woman knows everything. It was her idea. She can hardly wait to meet you. So you are staying now, aren't you?”

“But how did you know that Elsbeth would change her mind?” I backtracked.

“As Granny said: ‘Does that Elsbeth Darling understand what Kika did for those girls?' She saw how they changed since you moved here, as did I. There was never any laughter on this street until you arrived. She said that lately it has been like old times around here, when my parents were still alive. That's what Granny said.” He sunk his eyes in a moment of introversion.

“Plus, Miss Chantelle Benson-Westwood has very loose lips and was rather quick to note that Mina used to be a social
outcast until her sister—a Benson-Westwood—got ahold of her and ‘changed her life.' She thought she was making the winning point to convince me to take up with her. The nerve of that woman.”

I shook my head in disgust, and Aston continued.

“I must say, I was quite excited to use her own stories against her, and so I was able to find out that you were truly the one who rescued Mina, as it were.”

“You sneaky bugger!”

Aston sniggered. “Love, you haven't been in London long enough to pull off saying ‘bugger.'”

I made my face blank.

“So, what's it to be? Will you stay?” he asked, sounding boyishly hopeful.

I started casually, my hands hugged at my back. “Well, I
was
thinking it might be fun to see you play next weekend.”

“Really? Was that all you were thinking?”

“And maybe again the weekend after that.”

He deftly angled his pointer finger into the loop of my jeans like a fishhook and tugged me toward him. Then he ran his knuckles along the curve of my face. “More like it,” he said.

I threw my arms around his neck, my heart feeling that same undeniable and important pulling. I kissed him with everything I had, holding nothing back. Even while it was happening—the weight of lips on lips, color slapped high onto cheeks, and pink petals pinwheeling through the air—I saw the kiss for what it was: a beginning.

This was not the end.

There was too much left to do, too much still to see to call
this the end. My career was not yet crafted; there were marshmallows that still needed to be collected. And all my wild, wild loose ends still needed to be tied into Pinterest-perfect bows. But there was that pulling, and so I knew my direction. And all girls who travel know that it's not about arriving; it's the getting there that's the good part.

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