What Scotland Taught Me

by Molly Ringle

  His eyebrows twitched a bit, which I took to mean, All right, fine, keep explaining.

  “There are so many things I want to say,” I went on. “Way too many. Um, I wrote these.” I pulled the postcards from my pocket. “And if I take a few lines from each one, they actually make a pretty good speech.” Sorting them into a stack, I glanced again at him for encouragement.

  His lips twisted as if in curiosity. He slid his hands into his coat pockets and waited.

  “So,” I said. “This is the first one, from York. See, here’s the Minster.” I lifted the photo for him.

  He studied it, then nodded.

  “‘Dear Laurence,’” I read. “‘It feels funny to be out at night, on a park bench, in a British city, and not be with you or anyone else. If I could bring you here in a second, I would. Winning you back is the one thing I want more than anything in the world. Even counting all the chocolate Cadbury ever made.’” Too sentimental right out of the gate. I couldn’t look at him.

  I hastily flipped to the next card. “Okay, then this was Canterbury. See, here’s the cathedral. ‘Dear Laurence. This thing you’re doing to me, this silent treatment, is a complete overreaction. It’s immature. That’s right, immature. I never thought I’d call you that, but here we are. The only way to work this out is to talk to each other, and instead you ran away.’”

  I stopped, skipping some of the sentiments I’d written that night, including I wish you were here so I could HIT YOU, and other glorious instances of all caps. “I was pretty mad that night,” I mumbled.

  Head tilted aside, he answered with a cautious nod.

  Next card. “Another of Canterbury. This is, uh, some gardens. ‘Dear L. Maybe it isn’t really true what you said, that it’s my commitment you doubt. Maybe it’s your own feelings for me. That would be totally in line with what I always suspected, that I’m not good enough for you. So maybe you left because you had some serious buyer’s remorse. I just hope you’ll tell me and not string me along.’”

  I looked at him again. “Still not talking?”

  He extracted one hand from his coat and gestured for me to continue reading--No no, finish your speech first, I insist.

  “All right. Two more from Canterbury. ‘Shannon keeps telling me it’s your pride keeping you away. You said in a moment of anger that you’d stay away a while, and now you have to stick to it even if you regret it, because you’re stubborn about keeping your word. I could see you wanting to come back to Edinburgh earlier, but being too proud to do it.’”

  He bowed his head, looking shy, as if I had guessed correctly.

  “Should…should I keep reading?”

  He nodded, waving me onward with those lovely fingers.

  “Okay. Next. ‘I think you know by now I only said those screwed-up things when Tony caught us because I didn’t want to hurt him. It was a horrible way to find out your girlfriend’s leaving you. I hated how it made me look--like a nasty, cheating slut. Which I was. But I should have stood beside you and told the truth, and believe me, from now on I will. I’ve taken my punishment. Please forgive me.’”

  Though his head was still lowered, his gaze lifted to meet mine. The wind shoved locks of his hair forward to tumble around his brows. No suspicion in his face now; only solemnity and--dare I think it--love.

  If I kept gazing into those eyes I’d start blubbering, and fall to my knees to kiss the hem of his coat and beg him to take me back. And I wasn’t finished yet.

  I flipped to the next postcard. “So this one’s from Newcastle. ‘Considering we’ve been friends since kindergarten, I can’t recall a time before you were part of my life, but at least I can remember a time when I had no desire to be your girlfriend. I can go back to that if I have to, even though it would mean being no one’s girlfriend for a while. Despite all my groveling, I really am strong enough. I won’t be the stupid teenage girl who insists she’ll die if the guy doesn’t want her. I’ll hate you for a while, and love you forever, but I’ll live.’”

  Without daring to look at him after that dangerous invitation to drop me, I hurried along to the final card. “And then last night. It was written in Edinburgh, even though the postcard’s got, uh, Hadrian’s Wall on it. ‘Dear Laurence. I’m coming to Inverness tomorrow to find you. You invited me, and I hope that means, well, what I hope it means. For you I’ve quit my job, traveled alone up and down Great Britain, and, with Gil and Shelly’s help, begged the Hammer Mountain Valentines to record a cheesy love song about us. I’d never have bothered to do that for anyone in my life so far. You forgive me for being a dishonest coward, and I’ll forgive you for being a stubborn one. Deal? Love, and I do mean love, Eva.’”

  I let the stack of postcards sink to my side. “Speech concluded.”

  The wind smelled of river water. Above Laurence’s left shoulder loomed a church tower on the opposite bank.

  He gazed gravely at me. Then he stirred and stepped forward, and for a moment I thought he was going to walk right past me without a word. Instead he wrapped me in his arms and hugged me tight enough to compress the air out of me.

  Mouth near my ear, he said, “Yes, it was a cheesy song. But a really good one.”

  If you’ve ever felt tears rise in your eyes when you watched a reunion scene in a movie, with the music swelling and the scenery sparkling, then you understand why my face left wet blotches on Laurence’s coat.

  I sniffled away the tears, took a full breath of his boyish-carnations scent, and leaned back to peek at him. “I’m forgiven, then?”

  “I was immature,” he said. “And stubborn, and proud, and all that.” He pointed at my nose before I could get too smug. “With good reason, let’s note. But, yes, I accept your deal. Forgiven on my side.”

  “Mine too.”

  We sealed it with a kiss, a burst of warmth in the chilly wind. I closed my eyes, in bliss at the luxury of nestling into his arms again.

  Laurence pulled away a few inches, groping for something in his coat’s inner pocket. “We’re like two of those strange subatomic particles that act on each other from a distance,” he said, ever the lovable geek, and handed me a stack of postcards.

  “You wrote me these?” I flipped through the slideshow of Highland lochs and crumbling castles, itching to sit down and devour the writing on the back of each.

  “One a night. Just like you.”

  I was reading already. They weren’t really like mine, though. He wrote a restrained travelogue--he saw this today, went here, learned such and such. At least he was thinking of me.

  Then I noticed the Gaelic phrases at the bottom of each. “What are those?”

  “I got a Scottish Gaelic dictionary for my foreign language collection.”

  I pointed to the phrase on the earliest postcard, which, being spelled Oidhche mhath, seemed utterly unpronounceable.

  He pronounced it anyway, sounding exotic and delicious. “It means ‘Goodnight.’” Standing with his shoulder touching mine, he translated each as I flipped through them. “That one’s ‘I’m sorry.’ That’s ‘I miss you,’ assuming I got the verb and objects right. That’s ‘I dreamed about you’--again, not sure on the grammar. This one’s, uh, ‘Dearest’ or something. ‘Goodnight’ and ‘Sweet dreams’ a couple of times.”

  The last one bore a photo of Urquhart Castle on Loch Ness, or so the fine print claimed. His Gaelic phrase was Tha gaol agam ort. “And this?” I asked.

  He coughed. “Hah gheul akum orsht,” he said, or something like that, which sounded much prettier than it looks. “That’s, um, ‘I love you.’”

  The world at that moment caressed me--the smell of the river, the sound of car motors on the next bridge downstream, the low hazy sun, the northern air. I rested my cheek on his arm. We leaned against the railing. “When were you going to give these to me?”

  “Tomorrow, of course. Impatient stalker, you.”

  “Sorry. Did I interrupt your rehearsal time for presenting them?”

  “You completely did.
I had my own speech cooked up. Or most of it.”

  I lifted my face. “Tell me now.”

  Sighing, he thumped the toe of his shoe against the bridge’s planks. “I had several bullet points. For instance, you should know I can be a vulnerable and over-sensitive moron, despite how awesome and cool I seem on the outside.”

  I grinned, gazing downstream at the sun flashing on the water. “Uh-huh. Okay, go on.”

  “More to the point, you should know I haven’t done sexual kinds of things with many people at all, ever, which makes me insecure enough. So to have the incident turn that ugly, that fast--I couldn’t deal. It was like you said, how you hated the way it made you look from Tony’s perspective. I hated that same thing. He’d been my friend, but suddenly I was this slimeball. And you weren’t even standing by me. You tried to lie about it and hide it.”

  The river sparkles lost some of their shine. I cringed. “I’m sorry. I know...”

  “It’s okay. I overreacted. But, see...” He considered for a while, licking his lower lip. “I’m going so far away in the fall. It’s exciting, and I look forward to it, but I also dread it. You think I want to leave my dad all alone? Or leave you guys behind--especially you? So, for one thing, I worried how easily you’d forget me and move on to someone else.”

  “Yeah.” I shivered. “You said that already, before leaving.”

  “I know. That was harsh of me. But I also worried maybe I was being delusional, maybe both of us were. Maybe we weren’t really in love; we were only clinging to something, or someone, that reminded us of home, because we’re afraid of the future.”

  The cold wind stung, and the sunlight fell too weakly to warm anything up. “Is that what it is?”

  He turned to look at me, and his voice, after a second of silence, came out surprised. “No!” He pulled me close with both arms. “Didn’t you read my horrible Gaelic? No, listen, this is the end of my speech: I realized I was wrong. I will miss home, and my dad, and you most of all, but that isn’t the whole story. I love you. I want to be with you. This coming autumn is going to hurt like an acid burn, but we’ll get through it.”

  As my blood revived its temperature, I hugged him back. “I will transfer,” I vowed. “It may be too late to start at a school near you this fall, but I’ll start figuring out how to transfer, like, tomorrow. Then if I can start near you in the winter term, or at least the spring...”

  “We’ll have something to live for,” he finished. We stood holding each other, side by side, leaning against the railing. Occasionally a pedestrian slipped by, smiling and avoiding eye contact with the melodramatic teen couple.

  “Massachusetts?” I asked meekly.

  I felt his sigh in the swell and collapse of his chest. “Nah. Berkeley, God help me.”

  Hope and delight sent me soaring. If Berkeley came through for me too, there’d be no separation at all; we’d head to California together in September. I longed to tell him, but the idea of jinxing it--or, at least, getting his hopes up-- intimidated me too much.

  I said instead, “I’m sorry I didn’t quite consciously grasp all your screwed-up psychological issues.”

  He snorted, rubbing my back. “Oh, well. I have some kinkier ones too, which should be a lot more fun.”

  I raised my head. “Really?”

  He arched an eyebrow, watching me in a way that was suddenly sexy enough to steal my breath. “Come traveling with me and find out.”

  Chapter Fifty-Seven: Farewells

  We annoyed the lady at the River Ness Guest House with my request to move out so soon after my arrival, but Laurence’s sweetest and politest tones did the trick, and I only had to pay half the cancellation fee.

  Then we ferried my stuff to Laurence’s B&B, just a quick walk down the river, hung out the “Do Not Disturb” shingle on his door, and made up for a wasted ten days.

  Snuggling naked with him beneath a garishly plaid duvet, I asked, “Hey. Maybe I don’t want to know, but when you said you’d done some of these things before--who was she?”

  He chuckled and pushed his hair out of his eye to peer at me. “The most serious stuff? There was only one, and you don’t know her.”

  I thrust an extra pillow behind my head. “Details, mister.”

  “Remember when I went off to science camp a few summers ago?”

  “Yeah, but--oh! I do remember now. You said there was a girl.”

  “There was indeed a girl. A very hot eight weeks with this girl.”

  “You better say something nasty about her soon, or I’m going to get jealous.”

  “She was an utter bitch who broke my heart. Turns out she had a boyfriend back home, and never told me till the last few days. Treated the whole thing like, ‘Well, this was fun, thanks a bunch, going back to my sweetie now!’”

  I latched my arm over his chest. “Jeez. You did seem grumpy when you got back from camp. That would explain it.”

  “Yes. Also...” He stroked my bare back. “It made me kind of a head case on the subject of cheating. On a dirty level, it played a role in how I thought about you on this trip--‘Hey, I got another girl to do stuff with me behind her boyfriend’s back, so why not Eve?’ On the clean level, I detested myself for it, and got mad when you lied.”

  “Poor you.” I petted his sparse chest hairs--still only a couple of dozen of them, at age nineteen. Immeasurably cute. “The sordid truth all comes out.”

  “While we’re on sordid truth, go ahead, punch me with it: how often did you and Gil do this stuff?”

  “This? Only once. Ever. And I felt sick afterward. Remember that pub night? Yeah, that was the big ol’ regret reaction.”

  “Oh.” He sounded pleased, even perky. “I’d prepared myself for the idea that you two had been not-quite-shagging like rabbits.”

  “Nah. He wasn’t for me.” I grinned. “But I wouldn’t complain if you took on that accent.”

  His fingers tickled my spine. “Why do you think I picked up the Scots Gaelic dictionary?”

  We only stayed in Inverness another day, then set off for other B&B’s in more tucked-away Highland locales. Lochs, hills, and ruined castles were ours to explore, though we spent an inordinate amount of time beneath the bedspreads of our rooms.

  I emailed Amber first.

  It’s all okay. We’re happy. But still very sorry for how we treated you. Neither of us intended to be such jerks.

  She answered later that day.

  Hey, congrats. And I’ll survive. Let me know when you guys get back to Edinburgh. The pub started serving Spanish tapas for lunch and they’re actually half edible. I’ll feed you some.

  Food obviously entered the message only as a diversionary topic, but at least she was communicating with us. I let myself relax on that front, and sent a much giddier email to Shannon, who cyber-squealed her delight back to me.

  Via email, our other friends and families learned we were traveling together, and must have suspected what we were up to, but none of them were lewd enough to say so.

  Except Gil, of course.

  Woohoo! Congrats. Me and Shelly are chuffed for you. Remember a real Highlander wears nothing under his kilt, so there’s a thought for making things easier and quicker for you both!! Love Gillie.

  I read it to Laurence, who had just returned to our room with lunch--pub sandwiches in a paper bag.

  “Yeah, those odds on getting me into a kilt are still several thousand to one. Except maybe in a private setting.”

  I sauntered up to him. “That reminds me. Amber had this tale about trying to jump you in a club, and supposedly feeling how delighted you were.” Eyeing him provocatively, I splayed my fingers on the rivets of his jeans. “What was that about?”

  He led my fingers lower, and pressed them to something the right shape and firmness but not quite what I’d grown to know and lust after in the last few weeks. He reached into his pocket and drew out his cell phone. “It works itself into funny angles sometimes.”

  I burst into snickers.
“Oh, no. Let’s never tell her.”

  “I remember that night. She slammed into me so hard she left phone button imprints on my leg.”

  The first two weeks of March fluttered past in a montage of trains, buses, whisky distilleries, rain showers, impenetrable Highland accents, and lips happily sore from kissing.

  Finally we found ourselves back in Edinburgh, seated across from Amber at the pub where she and Nina worked. Teacups, biscuit wrappers, and the remains of a tapas lunch littered the table between us.

  “And the plaids,” I giggled. “You’ve seen them down here, but some of those Highland B&B’s use them everywhere. They’re awful.”

  Amber smiled. She looked great--radiant skin, a plum sweater that suited her coloring, and a new haircut whose layers tumbled and swayed around her head. “You should see Nina’s clan tartan,” she said, pouring herself more tea. “It’s white with orange, green, and royal blue. Horrendous.”

  “We took to calling any obnoxious pattern Clan MacGarish,” I said.

  “Or MacHideous,” added Laurence.

  “MacUgly,” I continued.

  “MacClash,” he countered.

  It had become an ongoing joke between us on the trip. Amber’s wise gaze took us in, her smile pinned on, and with a stab of shame I knew at once how we looked. Like a couple. A new, drunkenly happy couple, whose camaraderie excludes everyone else even when they think they’re inviting others in.

  She lowered her lashes, arranged her teacup and saucer, and folded up the empty sugar packets. Our dumb-ass chuckles faded.

  “Anyway,” said Laurence, all practicality again, “we brought you some Scotch. Little sample bottles, good stuff. It’s back in our room.”

  She regarded him, her smile dry. “Did we? Cool. Thanks.”

  I heard the echoed “we,” and from the way Laurence’s gaze flinched downward, I knew he did too.