by Alex Lucian
“I walked through it once the last time I was there,” I said, with the viewfinder still up to my eye, waiting for her to turn back to me. “To look, not to sample. But I can’t lie and say I wasn’t tempted by a few of the windows.”
Her eyes were fierce when they landed on me. I pressed the shutter with an audible click. I’d title that one Jealousy if it turned out half as amazing as I thought it would.
“Why’d you take a picture?” Her hands fluttered to her hair, tucking a dark, silky chunk behind her ear.
“Because you’re beautiful. When you’re nervous. When you’re jealous.”
“I’m not jealous,” she said, her eyes darting around again, never landing on me for more than a second.
“It’s okay if you are.” I took one of her hands and sandwiched it in between my own, hoping that I could help steady her before we boarded the plane for a long ten hours. “Would it help if I told you that the thought of you with other men makes me want to break things?”
She laughed softly before pulling in a huge breath and turning in her chair to face me. “A little. And yes, I’m nervous.”
“I know.” I let go of her hand, feeling a strange sense of disappointment when she brought it quickly back to her lap. “Were you able to sleep last night?”
“Some. I kept rolling over to check the time. And then I’d think, if I go to sleep right now I can get six hours of sleep,” she babbled, which made me smile again. Nervous Ruby was fucking adorable. Adorable in the way that made me want to kiss her, feel her, touch her to try and soothe those nerves. “Did you?”
I nodded. “I always get to bed early before a morning flight like this, especially when it’s this long. Jet lag is a bitch, so it’s important to get good sleep.” Talking about sleep made me think about my mom again, which caused a twinge of guilt.
“What’s that face for?” Ruby asked quietly.
Surprised at her ability to read my face so easily, I rubbed my hands along the top of my jeans. “Thinking about my mom, actually.” I winked at her. “Sorry if that kills my uncontainable sex appeal.”
Ruby smiled. “Not at all. What were you thinking about?”
“She called me yesterday, wanted me to come for dinner.” I shrugged. “But I needed sleep, and they’re up in Boston, so I’d have spent like eight hours in the car.”
When Ruby didn’t answer right away, I looked over at her, and sat up straighter when I realized how serious she looked. She licked her lips, clearly struggling with what to say.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I don’t want to overstep, and obviously I don’t know anything about your relationship with your parents.” She swallowed, holding my gaze. “Don’t take for granted that you have parents who want to see you. Some people don’t have the option to feel inconvenienced by something so simple as a car ride.”
“Ruby,” I said and then paused. What the fuck? She looked and sounded so sad, so serious when she said it. There was a story —probably a heavy one— behind her carefully worded answer. Seeing these different sides to her felt an awful lot like sensory overload. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that as badly as it sounded.”
Lame. Fucking lame. Every word sounded ineffectual and trite.
“The next time she asks,” Ruby said, still keeping her eyes trained on mine, “promise you’ll go.”
“What happened to you?” I asked before I could stop myself. The iron wall that she usually kept lodged around any personal information was briefly lifted, I could tell. The brief opening made me want to do nothing more than dig my hands in and pry it back further.
She took a small inhale through her nose before she spoke. “Just take a piece of advice from someone who’d kill to have their parents only four hours away. Okay?”
It wasn’t much, but it was something. Something that she’d volunteered, that I hadn’t had to go searching for. So I took a deep breath and vowed to be patient. I had eight days of uninterrupted time with her. I could wait her out. “Okay.”
When I didn’t press her, she risked giving me a relieved smile.
I cleared my throat when the moment snapped. “So what are you most nervous about? Is it the flight? Or what comes after?”
“All of the above?”
“And you’ve never flown before?” I asked, smiling at the way she answered with a question, like she didn’t exactly know.
“No.” She groaned, slapping a hand over her eyes. “I probably sound so provincial to you.”
“Not at all,” I told her honestly. “I’ve seen a lot of the world, and most people haven’t. You’re more normal than I am when it comes to that.”
“I don’t know about that. My life isn’t precisely normal either.” Ruby lifted her eyebrows, like she was surprised at the turn in our conversation. But I watched her blink out of it, looking at me again with interest bright in her eyes. “What’s your favorite place that you’ve ever visited?”
I stretched my arm across the back of her chair while I thought about that. “Nobody has ever asked me that before.”
“Really?”
“Really. I guess I’d have to say either Greece or Austria.”
“Why?” She leaned forward, the frank curiosity in her beautiful face making me itch to take another picture of her. By the time our eight days was up in Amsterdam, I wanted an entire memory card filled with pictures of Ruby.
“Greece is stunning, especially along the coast. The bright colors and the buildings on the cliffs make it a photographer’s wet dream. They have a very strong sense of family, so the people are warm and friendly, at least in my experience. And Austria is just,” I blew out a breath, “fucking beautiful. There’s so much history from World War II that it never ceases to fascinate me when I’m there.”
Ruby settled into her seat, which made her back press against my arm. My instinct was to curve my hand around her shoulder and bring her closer into me, but I didn’t. I don’t know why, but while we were still in New York, still on solid ground, it felt like I needed to keep the boundaries in place that we normally stuck to. We weren’t on display right now, pandering to a crowd of people who thought Ruby was a girlfriend or a lover. It was just us. And anything that happened outside the walls of a hotel room would happen because we wanted it to.
I’d have to believe that she’d want it to happen too, or I’d go fucking crazy.
“I hope I can see them someday. I just want to go … everywhere.”
“You still can.”
Ruby waited to answer until after the dry, disembodied voice of the speaker system made an announcement. “I guess.”
“Come on.” I nudged her shoulder with my hand, but returned it to the seat instead of leaving it on her. “You’re young, plenty of life left to live. And you’re about to see your first new country. Nothing to be sad about right now.”
She smiled at me, searching my eyes so intently that I wanted someone to be able to snap a picture of the two of us. What would we look like to a complete stranger? Would it even remotely mirror what I pictured in my head?
“Careful, you sound awfully optimistic right now.”
“We wouldn’t want that,” I muttered, letting the sweetness of her smile and the quiet intimacy of the moment soothe some of the dark edges inside of me.
The flight attendant at the podium for our gate called for first class to board, and when we stood up, Ruby leaned up to kiss me on the cheek.
“Thank you for letting me come with you, Elias,” she said with so much sincerity that I wanted to clutch her against me, let her wrap her arms so tightly around me that I’d struggle to breathe. Sacrificing oxygen seemed like a small sacrifice to make for her, when it was becoming so glaringly obvious that I was in deep fucking trouble with this woman.
Chapter Twenty-One
I wasn’t sure what flying coach was like, which sounded like an absurdly pompous thing to say, but the fact of the matter was that my very first flight was a transcontinental flight, with me sea
ted in first class. The seat was roomier than what I’d expected, from my vast experience of flights gleaned from watching many movies growing up.
My ass sank right into the cushion while Elias stowed our carry-on bags in the overhead bins. A flight attendant stepped beside me. “Coffee?”
I didn’t think I could do coffee, not with how jittery I already was. “Vodka and tonic,” Elias said easily, handing her our jackets when she gestured her arms out to him. “And two bottles of scotch.”
The attendant’s eyes widened as Elias straightened, and I recognized her attraction to him immediately. “My pleasure,” she said before turning away and scuttling up the aisle like it was a race to get his requests.
“I don’t need vodka.”
“Well,” he began, folding himself into the seat beside me, the window seat, “you may not need it, but you’ll want it.” He tapped on the plastic covering the window. “Once we’re thirty-five thousand feet over the Atlantic, you will want to drink.” He gave the stewardess a grateful smile as she returned, handing him two cups with ice and the bottles of liquor. “I do, and I’ve flown hundreds of times.”
I took his proffered bottle of vodka and tonic water as he set a cup with ice on my tray.
“I’m not sure how much you’ll want of both,” he said, eyeing the bottles in my hands.
I poured all of the vodka in, the words thirty-five thousand feet echoing in my head, and topped the glass with tonic before sipping it as delicately as possible. People brushed past us as they spoke with a flight attendant or placed their things in the overhead bins. The plane had boarded with first class on the left and coach on the right, so it was surprisingly quiet for the number of people who had been waiting to board.
“Are you all right?” Elias asked, leaning in and placing a hand on my back from where I kept myself sitting straight up, inches from the backrest.
Nodding, I gave him a smile that was a sum of all the courage I could muster. I took a bigger sip this time, the warmth of the alcohol burning a path down my esophagus.
“I’d distract you the normal way, if I could, but I’m afraid the first class cabin would frown upon that.”
“Distract me how?”
He rubbed a hand over his chin, thinking. “I could shove us into the bathroom, do inappropriate things to you. But you’re a loud one.” He gave me a devilish grin, one that lifted one side of his mouth.
If it wasn’t illegal, I probably would’ve taken him up on the offer. Such were my nerves at the moment. “So sex is off the table.”
“No mile-high club for us,” he said. He made an exaggerated pouty face at me which earned him a smile.
“I guess we’ll have to make up for it then,” I said.
“Absolutely.” His hand on my back rubbed gently. “I’ll have the stewardess get you a blanket, and maybe you can sleep the rest of the flight. We have a layover in Warsaw, but then we’ll be on our way to arrive in Amsterdam tomorrow around noon.”
It sounded so far, nearly twenty-four hours from now. I knew most of that was thanks to the time change as we crossed over the ocean, but I decided to take Elias’ suggestion and finished my vodka tonic before settling into my seat, with Elias showing me how it could recline.
Before I knew it, I was asleep.
The first thing I noticed after being tucked into a cab outside of the Amsterdam airport was how clean everything smelled. Living in New York City, with exhaust and the smells of a condensed city, you forgot what clean, fresh air smelled like. And that’s exactly what Amsterdam smelled like, to me.
The cab driver spoke very good English as Elias checked through the itinerary and asked him some questions. I looked out the window, taking in the different architecture. As we came closer to the heart of Amsterdam, I saw more and more graffiti art.
In my ear, Elias said, “Amsterdam, in an effort to decriminalize graffiti, has legal places for artists to paint.” We drove by a garage door with a scene from The Little Mermaid brilliantly colored. But the thing that stuck out the most amongst the architecture was the sheer number of bicyclists. Down several streets I saw more bicycles than cars.
The cab pulled up in front of a tall building and Elias handed him some local bills he’d picked up after we’d gotten through customs. I stepped out onto the sidewalk as Elias grabbed our luggage from the boot of the car and set it on the sidewalk. Our hotel was an old-looking brick building, with large, arched glass windows decorated with window boxes that spilled over with red flowers. On the road level was an attached restaurant, beautifully appointed with bright red awnings. People brushed past me on the sidewalk and I clutched my purse a little tighter. It was the one thing Elias had told me as we left the airport, that though Amsterdam was, contrary to popular belief, one of the safer big cities in Europe, pick pockets were still all over.
A bright red double decker bus passed us on the road, right before a white tram buzzed down the center of the road. It was so different from New York City that I stopped and stared, taking it all in for a moment.
“Ready?” Elias asked as he set our suitcases on the sidewalk in front of me.
After checking in, Elias led me to the elevator to go up to our room on the fifth floor. Tulips were just about everywhere in the hotel, and the staff seemed very friendly as they smiled from ear to ear at us at the check-in.
It was just after one in the afternoon, and though I’d slept on the plane, the moment I saw the white fluffy bed, my first inclination was to lie on it.
“Tired?” Elias asked as he unzipped one of his hardback camera gear cases.
I yawned and shook my head across the white comforter. “I didn’t think I was, but here I am.” I let out a sigh and closed my eyes, enjoying being completely horizontal for the first time since I’d woken up the morning before.
I felt Elias’ hands on my feet a second before I felt the sheer relief of my shoe being popped off and air hitting my insole. He did the same to my other foot and I flexed my toes, sighing.
I opened my eyes, seeing him load a soft-sided black bag with camera gear. “I have to run over to the festival,” he said when I looked over the stuff with surprise.
I sat up in the bed and ran my fingers over my hair. “Oh, okay. I can be ready in a few.”
“No,” he said, stepping to the foot of the bed and running a hand over the back of my head. The gesture felt … romantic. And with how comforting it was, I wanted to sink a little bit deeper into his touch. “Why don’t you take a nap?”
Looking up at him, I furrowed my brow. “But I can come with you. Really.”
“It’s actually just behind-the-scenes stuff today,” he explained, moving his hand down to my shoulder and rubbing his thumb into the muscle between my spine and shoulder blade. “I have to meet with a few people. The next few days will be busier, so why don’t you catch up on your rest so you’re not exhausted going into tomorrow?”
I still felt a little bit bad for being so tired after the flight, especially because Elias should be just as—if not more—tired as I was, but there he was getting ready to work. But when he leaned down and pressed his mouth to mine, I didn’t argue further.
“Okay,” I said, flopping back into the blankets when he let me go.
“I’ll be back before dinner, and we can decide what to eat then.”
Nodding, I crawled back onto the bed, so my head lay on the pillow. “See you in a bit,” I told him, giving him a grateful, sleepy smile.
But twenty minutes after he left, I was still awake. In fact, I was wider awake than I’d been when I first laid down.
I paced the room for a minute, after giving up on the television. Our room faced the street, which moved in a kind of organized chaos outside the building. Bicyclists, tour buses, cars and the tram all moved down the road perfectly synchronized.
Restless, I grabbed one of the magazines on the desk and flipped through it, taking in the different things to do in the area. I knew Elias wanted to do a few things he had in mind to
do with me while we were here, but I figured because this wasn’t his first trip to Amsterdam that he didn’t want to do any of the traditional tourist stuff.
I made my way downstairs to reception and caught the attention of a pert, blonde attendant.
Elias had told me that Americans were often perceived to be, to put it in his words, “giant assholes” as tourists, so he’d called everyone by their name so far on our journey. “It makes them people and not just someone helping you,” he explained to me, so I took a page out of his book and glanced down at the attendant’s name tag.
“Heleen, can you tell me what kind of tourist stops there are within walking distance?”
Heleen smiled, showing off a full set of bright white, straight teeth. She was pretty, probably not older than twenty-five, with blonde hair cut to her shoulders. “Ah, yes. There are many places near here. And the bus can take you places.”
I didn’t want to take a bus or a cab to visit anywhere by myself. Not having an international phone number, I would have had no way to contact Elias if I got stuck on the other side of the city. “I’m thinking something within five minutes’ walk?”
“Of course.” She smiled again and stepped around the desk, pointing down the sidewalk opposite the direction we’d arrived. “If you walk that way one block, you’ll encounter the National Monument. Very popular spot.” Her accent caused me to smile with her. She handed me a pamphlet beside the entrance, and pointed at the photo.
“Thank you, Heleen. I’ll do that.” I didn’t know what the National Monument was, but I figured it couldn’t be hard to find the white statue that was photographed on the outside of the pamphlet.
After making sure I had cash, just in case, I made my way to the National Monument, which, as I’d suspected, was easy to find. It stood in the middle of a square, a white travertine pillar that tapered at the top. In the front of the pillar at the base were four chained men, and above them was a woman holding a child, with doves flying around her. From the base of the pillar to the ground were dozens of people, sitting on the concentric rings that surrounded the monument and formed a sort of stair case to the monument.
