Always

by Sophie Lark

  “Mr. Doyle,” she said, “you were so incredibly kind to invite me here.”

  Perceiving her distress he said, “I hope it was a kindness. I know it must be hard for you to see me living here instead of your own family.”

  “No,” she said honestly, “I think no one could deserve this place more than you. It was my mother’s house and you’re more like her than...than most people would be. I’d better head back to the city though. I don’t want to miss the train.”

  “Your aunt wished she could have driven you, but you know she’s in Paris.”

  Anika nodded. Aunt Molly went every year. Anika had joined her two or three times in the past.

  “Come back as often as you like,” Mr. Doyle said. “You can just visit the horses—I won’t always make you entertain me as well.”

  “I’d like to visit you all,” Anika smiled.

  Mr. Doyle gave her a hug as she gathered her coat and bag. It was the solid, lasting hug of a friend. Anika had to blink back the tears that weighed down her lashes. Why did she cry so easily these days? It was so strange how the people to whom you would expect, by blood or long acquaintance, to form the strongest connection so often disappointed. And yet you could come upon someone else, unexpectedly, whose kindness and quality of spirit would make you forget that disappointment in an instant. It was so lucky, and it made her so glad.

  “I will come back to visit,” she promised again, squeezing Mr. Doyle’s hand.

  “Good,” he said. “Molly said she’ll bring us home some real champagne.”

  8

  That week there was one social engagement Anika couldn’t avoid: Gwen’s birthday party. Gwen was turning twenty-eight, and Hannah had invited everyone in their office, plus a lot more people, to come to a quiz night at a local pub.

  When Anika arrived, she saw that Hannah and Gwen had come early to take possession of three or four of the best tables, bedecking them with pink and silver balloons and confetti, much to the annoyance of the pub employees.

  This decorative scheme skewed more to Hannah’s preferences than to her sister’s, but Gwen good-naturedly donned the ridiculous “Birthday Girl” t-shirt and tiara Hannah provided, and drank all the horrible shots everyone kept buying for her.

  Calvin not only attended but brought a date—a remarkably cute girl from his squash league. Hannah and Gwen teased him by asking repeatedly if that was his cousin or his sister? To the girl, Joselyn, they were friendly, asking if she and Calvin would join their quiz team and help them pick a name not Star Wars-related.

  A dozen or so of Gwen’s friends from university attended, plus about half as many from her former job at the Red Cross—nurses who arrived direct from a blood drive, still wearing their scrubs, to immediately spearhead the buying and the drinking of the horrible shots.

  Anika expected James to be there, but she was surprised to see Gwen’s on-again-off-again boyfriend Blaine follow him in the door. Blaine was a dentist who worked for the military. The “on” part of their relationship generally happened when he was on leave, and the “off” part when he deployed to some far-flung corner of the globe.

  Gwen looked as startled to see Blaine as Anika had been. After a short bout of whispering between the sisters, it became clear that Hannah had invited him, and Gwen wasn’t entirely pleased about it.

  Blaine came strolling in with a huge smile and an abundant bouquet of lilies for Gwen. Gwen thanked him for the flowers but abandoned them at an empty table. It was Anika that rescued them, propping them up in a jug of ice water.

  Blaine was full of stories about a recent tour to the border of Syria.

  “We built this hospital,” he said, “really it was just a big tent, but we had all kinds of people coming through, sometimes a line out the door. You’d be amazed what people come in about, not just injuries from mines and awful stuff like that, but funny things too, like this fellow, he only had about half his teeth left in his head, but one of his molars—"

  They never found out what amusing things could befall a molar, because Blaine saw that Gwen wasn’t listening to him at all. She was trying to eavesdrop on a conversation between Hannah and James about a recent concert they both had attended.

  Anika saw Blaine frown at James, examining the handsome stranger who had entrenched himself in Gwen’s circle while he was absent.

  Anika hurried to introduce them.

  “Blain, this is James,” she said. “He’s been volunteering at the Red Line.”

  “Nice to meet you,” James said, shaking Blaine’s hand. “How long have you been back state-side?”

  “Just a couple of weeks,” Blaine said cautiously, glancing between James and the two girls. “What’s your line of work?”

  He looked like he hoped the answer would be “dog-walker” or “accountant”—something unimpressive, or at least mundane.

  “He founded Altarian!” Hannah said, scornful at Blaine’s ignorance.

  “James...Dawson?” Blaine asked weakly.

  “Guilty,” James said, with no real embarrassment.

  “Well...that’s something,” Blaine said.

  “Hey,” James joked to break the silence. “I think I pulled a filling out last week. Can I come visit you?”

  “Not unless you want to enlist,” Blaine replied with a surly expression.

  As the party progressed, it quickly became clear to the abandoned beau that both Gwen and Hannah were besotted with James, and nobody besides Calvin seemed particularly interested in Blaine.

  “So what happened with the molar?” Calvin asked, but Blaine was watching Gwen and Hannah shooting darts across the room with James. Gwen missed the board entirely, and James patted her on the shoulder in a way all too familiar for Blaine’s liking.

  “Did they give you a gun even though you’re just a dentist?” Calvin asked. Blaine ignored him completely, draining his pint of beer and stalking off to the bar for another.

  When it was time for quizzing, they divided pretty evenly along workplace lines: two teams from the school friends, one from the nurses, and then Gwen, Hannah, James, Calvin, Joselyn, and Anika at their own table. Blaine tried to join their group, but Gwen said, “Sorry, only six to a team.” He was relegated to the nurses instead.

  Joselyn suggested “Trivia Newton John” as their team name, which they all liked, but then James offered “Whiskeypedia” and that won the vote. The work friends went with “Risky Quizness” and “Les Quizerables” respectively. The nurses chose “Pinky and the Brains,” on account of Blaine’s pink shirt. He tried to laugh while also looking annoyed.

  Anika and James had participated in more than a few quiz nights in their NYU days, besides all the episodes of Jeopardy they’d watched together. She thought he must be remembering the same thing but didn’t want to look over at him.

  As the MC started firing questions at them all, Anika saw that James was just as good at coming up with the answers as he’d always been. Anika was even a little better, since she’d spent so much time reading in recent years.

  As in the old days, James was quick to answer anything related to business, technology, baseball, or 80s music. The nurses hit the buzzer on all things biology-related, and seemed suitably impressed with some of Blaine’s answers in the same arena, which cheered him up a little. One of Gwen’s old school friends seemed bizarrely versed on topics Biblical and political, while Anika’s humanities education came in handy on questions relating to literature, psychology, history, and even astronomy—which she’d taken twice as an elective.

  Hannah failed to answer much of anything outside a few pop-culture questions. She looked frustrated and started drinking some of Gwen’s shots. Gwen aced almost the entire music-history category—outside of a few questions James stole relating to Duran Duran and George Michael—so she took her shots in celebration rather than anger.

  As the game went on, Anika was swept up in the excitement, her competitive spirit rising in a way it hadn’t done in years. The smell of spilled bee
r, the moans of the teams that had whiffed questions and the cheers of those who had answered correctly—they were all highly familiar sensations that vividly brought back her college days, how happy she’d been then.

  Looking across the table at James, she didn’t see his fancy clothes and the physique he’d built through hours at the gym. Instead, she saw the same brilliant smile she had known before, the way he grimaced a little when he was thinking hard, and the way he ran his palm over his face when he got something wrong.

  Both James and Anika were film buffs, and more than once they slapped each other’ s hands on the buzzer as they tried to ring in simultaneously to answer, “Which actress was the first to win a Caesar in 2015?” and, “In what year was the original Jurassic Park film released?”

  As they both tried again to answer, “What was the name of Elvis Presley’s first film?” James’s warm hand rested for just a moment over hers and he smiled at her in a way that made Anika flushed and throbbing all the way down to her toes.

  Gwen looked curiously between the two of them, but immediately the moment passed, and James was only watching the MC again as she read out the next question.

  Anika drew her hand back. The elation she had been feeling leeched away, and she was only hot and a little miserable.

  The more time she spent around James, the more she had tried to convince herself that she was over their former connection. She hoped enough time had passed that they could just be friends. But the feeling of his hand on hers sent a pulse through her whole body. She remembered how those large, strong hands used to touch and rub every part of her with perfect skill—never too hard, or too soft, always seeming to know exactly where she was most sensitive and where to apply the exact right amount of pressure.

  She missed two easy questions and stood up quickly to refill her drink.

  “I can get it,” James said, also standing up with his own glass was three-quarters empty.

  “No thanks,” Anika said, shaking her head.

  She had to pass him to get to the bar. As she brushed by, she could smell that he still wore the same cologne, one that she had found for him originally. His scent, warm and rich and completely intoxicating, made her head swim so that she could barely walk straight.

  The smell of him, so familiar and attractive to her, brought back a hundred memories in a rush. The way he used to look at her, like she was the only person in the world. The way he used to make her laugh until her whole body ached. The way she trusted him completely, knowing that he would never hurt her, that he would do absolutely anything for her.

  God, how could she have thrown that away? Her misery was like a pit of tar, sucking her down. There was no escaping it.

  She allowed herself to think the thoughts she had shoved down inside for years:

  What if I never love anyone the way I loved James?

  What if I can never be happy again the way I was with him?

  What if no one understands me like he did?

  What if everyone I’m with, forevermore, I weigh against him, and they’re nothing but a shadow by comparison?”

  She stood at the bar, looking back toward their table. She hoped against all hopes that James would be watching her too, that she would see on his face that he was remembering some of the same things.

  But he wasn’t looking at her at all. He was sitting next to Hannah, their heads close together as Hannah showed him something on her phone.

  You have to let this go, Anika thought. He doesn’t love you anymore. It’s gone, and you can’t get it back.

  9

  The final week leading up to the Red Line Gala was so frantic that every time Anika laid her head on her pillow at night, it seemed only a moment until her alarm rung again. A thousand things had to be confirmed or reorganized and rearranged to accommodate last-minute changes.

  This would have been difficult under ordinary circumstances, but additional complications arose when Stella decided she needed to involve herself in the planning. The reason for her sudden helpfulness was obvious: Marco Moretti was coming to town at last, and his father would be bringing him to the gala to meet them all.

  Of course Stella couldn’t bear to be introduced to the object of her ambitions at an event where she played the role of a mere guest. She intended to appear to full advantage as hostess, philanthropist, and general center of attention.

  None of this would be a problem if she weren’t insisting on putting her own finishing touches on everything from the floral arrangements to the lighting to the guest list.

  “There aren’t enough celebrities coming,” she complained. “Half the people on this list are hideous old bats.”

  “I don’t care,” Anika snapped back, under far too much stress to give Stella half her usual patience. “I don’t care if they’re a hundred years old—I only care if they’re willing to donate. This is a fundraiser, remember? We’re way over budget on the gala, and we need to bring in a record number of donations to pay our overhead and meet our goals.”

  Stella made a disgusted face. She hated the word “budget,” which was somewhere on par with “counterfeit purse” and “no tables available” on her list of wretched things.

  “Your forehead gets so wrinkled when you’re mad,” Stella said. This was the ultimate insult in her mind.

  “Does it?” Anika said, with deadly calm. “Maybe I should use your Botox girl. I heard Marina Benez say that she does such good work, she could almost believe you’re only thirty like your Instagram profile claims.”

  Stella was so shocked to be slapped back by her usually placid sister that she actually kept quiet for five entire minutes. Soon, she was back to complaining about the choice of musicians, but with much less spirit.

  At that moment, Gwen, Hannah, James, and Calvin returned from whatever errands they’d been running. Only Calvin greeted Stella with enthusiasm. He would readily admit that while Stella was a bitch, she was just the kind of sexy bitch he would love to be bossed around by if she could only be convinced to notice he existed.

  Gwen and Hannah exchanged an annoyed glance when they saw Stella sitting in Hannah’s chair. Still, they greeted her politely. She was the CEO’s daughter, and spiteful enough to get them fired.

  Between James and Stella, the coldness was palpable. James obviously remembered their meeting, back when he and Anika were dating. Stella had hardly been subtle in her rudeness.

  But now she found herself in a predicament. Stella hated to relinquish a poor opinion once formed. Yet James had risen drastically in wealth and success since their last encounter. He had only been in town a few days before she’d heard of his connection to a dozen trendy people.

  An apology was out of the question. But pretending they’d never met at all didn’t serve her purposes either. Instead Stella adopted the strategy of selective amnesia.

  “James!” she cried, ignoring Hannah, Gwen, and Calvin. “So good to see you again! It’s so nice of you to help us with the gala. I saw Angela Whitmore this morning, and she told me her father is putting a piece about it in the Post. You know Angela, don’t you? She and I go way back. She said she went skiing with you once in Aspen. With Marley Perkins and Jem Black. I know them both as well, of course. We must have a hundred friends in common.”

  She laughed a high, false laugh. James nodded, but he didn’t smile back at her. Anika was relieved to see that there was still no falseness in him. He wasn’t going to play at social niceties with Stella.

  “I’d better get going,” James said. “See you all tomorrow.”

  “He’s certainly filled out,” Stella said approvingly, before he was quite out of earshot. “He used to be so skinny.”

  “Did you know him before?” Gwen asked eagerly.

  Gwen had gathered over several weeks that there was some kind of history between James and Anika, but as no one involved had been willing to elaborate, it was time to turn to a new source for information. Even if that meant talking to Stella.

  Unfortunately for
Gwen, Stella wasn’t likely to relay any tidbits not strictly complimentary to herself. For instance, she had no desire to share the fact that her sister once dated someone who had turned out to be quite a catch.

  “We’ve known each other eight years or so,” she said airily. “We know all the same people. It’s a small world at the top.”

  “How did you meet?” Gwen pressed.

  “Hmm, at a dinner, I think? He complimented my Birkin bag.”

  That was true. They had met at a dinner, one that Anika had arranged at James’s behest. She’d made reservations at a small sushi restaurant that had been her mother’s favorite. Stella cancelled that reservation and booked a table at a trendy steakhouse instead. James had ordered a side salad, not having the funds to pay for the forty-dollar-per-ounce Wagyu, and not wanting Bennet to pay for his dinner.

  Stella wrinkled her nose at his meal, saying, “Is that what programmers eat? I thought it was all pizza and twinkies.”

  James had indeed complimented her purse, which Stella had been displaying like a Price is Right model.

  “It’s a Birkin,” Stella sneered, “There’s a two-year wait-list.”

  “Really!” James said in mock admiration. “Did you stand outside the store that whole time? You must be exhausted.”

  Bennet hadn’t been any friendlier. He often forgot that he had once lived a life devoid of vampire facials and foie gras on toast. Besides that, he had a general disdain for non-creative jobs, which he thought a monkey could do—or, more likely, a machine once the whole world became automated.