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Don’t go there, Emerson.
So, I don’t.
I keep on walking. I stretch my fingers in the stretch I use to keep the cramps away. I let the London moon stare at me amid the old-style buildings. I wonder how many are forgeries, how many the real thing.
I wonder that about people too. About myself.
I get to the bar before I realize it. One second, I’m scanning further down the street lined with old Greystone buildings, and the next there’s a knock on the glass right beside my head.
I whirl around, and there they are. Inside the Willicker, the crew of the World Classical Tour in the flesh.
Kelvin Wyatt, the violinist, with his dreads, chocolate eyes, and a smile so bright it wakes me up a bit just looking at it. Howell looks like your favorite granny, only she’s got hot pink hair, plays the sax like a demon, and has a voice like a chainsaw. Tarla smells like a different fruit every day—today it’s lemon—and loves nothing more than a good arm wrestle. Oh, and she plays the viola like she was born with one.
And then there’s Ky. Pretty, young, and she has a way of looking at you with those endless chocolate eyes that makes any sort of harmless half-truth seem naked. Her flute playing and singing come from deep down inside her, and they resonate deep down inside you, too.
“You did come,” Kelvin says, giving me a whopping pat on the back.
“Of course he did,” says Yolan, our leader. “Emerson’s good to his word, I told you.”
“Only he almost wasn’t,” Tarla points out, waggling a lemony freckled finger at me.
They all know how I almost didn’t come on the tour at all.
I laugh good-naturedly. “I’m never going to catch a break for that, am I?”
“Nope,” Tarla says just as good-naturedly.
“We were talking about love,” Kelvin says with a wry smile as he sips his wine. “We’ve gone around the table and concluded that for most of us, our types are defined by our first love. Either we look for them endlessly or we seek out those most unlike them.”
“Interesting,” I say.
Ky looks at me like the only thing interesting is my response and what it means.
Tarla throws that bright head back and laughs and laughs. “I know a deflection when I hear it.”
“I just don’t have much to contribute,” I say neutrally.
I suddenly want a glass in my hand, two or three beers down my throat.
I’m not drunk enough to deal with this. With her.
But she’s there, all right, flashing in my head. I think we both know that’s the solution. We separate for a time while you do this contract.
The sad finality in those blue eyes, like she knew that this could ruin everything, and still, still believed in the necessity of it.
Fuck.
“Here.” Ky’s handing me a drink with a small, intimate smile. “We ordered an extra.”
I sip it and wait for the world to slacken. For her image—that dark glossy hair, those so changeable blue eyes, her pale skin—to recede out of my mind. For the tension to come out of my shoulders.
The others have ambled to the bar to get the next round. It’s just me and Ky with her round moon face and her pale skin, her dark red hair and a smile I can never seem to get a handle on.
“You know what I think?” she says. “I think we never truly get over the disappointment of it. Not really. Not if it was real love. We settle and we find another—maybe even a better. But it lingers there like a slow cancer. Like when you find out Santa isn’t real, or about global warming. You lose something primal. And I think a lot of us, we never get it back.”
She sips her wine with a twisted sort of smile, and her eyes dance. “There’s a sort of impossible magic to it. Like the world going from black and white to color all at once. Like you didn’t realize life could be like this, this good.”
She’s not looking at me, of course. Her dark eyes are deeper than ever, and I know they’re looking at him. Whoever he is. “I mean, two people with such different life experiences, at least to me, when I was a kid and then later, it seemed to me there’d be no way, no humanly possible way I’d find someone who got me, who I got. That they’d like me as much as I liked them, especially if they knew me. That was the one thing I was sure of—how could they like me if they knew me, when I didn’t?”
Her smile’s gone wistful. Her eyes still aren’t on me. “And then you meet them, of course, and all of a sudden, the world opens. Like you’d only been squinting, so you’d never seen just how much possibility there is in this world. The nice old lady at the supermarket and the way the light dances on the water every night. The song of birds and the funny chipmunks stealing wrappers from each other. It’s like fairy dust. Turns everything to gold.
