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For a little while, they didn’t speak, but it felt right to Brian. They simply sat there in each other’s company. He tried his best to focus on his surroundings more than Harper, but it wasn’t as easy as he thought. She was captivating. And as twilight set in, her hair glowed copper. He could feel a dangerous pull toward her, one that was becoming harder to fight by the second.
“Do you ever think about your last sunset?” Harper asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean…well…I can be misconstrued as sad, but I don’t mean it this way. I’m talking about the fact of how we will all experience our very last sunset one day. We often don’t watch the sunset, but one day in the future, we won’t even realize that we will have seen our last. Do you ever think about that day?”
His instinct was to be sarcastic, masking the seriousness of the topic with humour, but he refrained. “I try my best not to think of that part of the future. I am often aware of how fleeting time is, so, thinking of the end would just make things worse.”
“I think about it often and I don’t know how to stop. It frightens me.”
Brian wasn’t used to her being so vulnerable. And that was even after seeing her naked. “Perhaps it is because that is the great unknown. But I say look at it this way: when you read a book, you don’t constantly think about the ending. You just enjoy the story leading up to it. Wouldn’t you say that is a better way to spend your time breathing and blinking as you say?”
Harper laughed. “What if the story is bad at times?”
“No such thing in my book. The bad only makes the good look better. You can’t have one without the other.”
“I guess.” She paused before saying, “I guess I am also afraid that I am not enjoying my story sometimes. And I don’t want to reach the end of my book without doing so.”
It was then that Brian moved in to kiss her. She quickly kissed him back, running her hand through the stubble on the side of his face.
They kissed for what felt like a minute, and then Brian slowly pulled off. “Did you enjoy that?”
“You know the answer to that, Brian.”
“Well, then focus on those things.”
“Those things don’t happen enough.”
They shared a moment of looking into each other’s eyes before Brian said, “We should head back to the hotel.”
And that they did.
Brian helped her down from the tree and they walked back to the carriage. The sky had turned a deep blue when they climbed into it.
The wheels creaked and the horse’s hooves padded. Neither Brian nor Harper said a word to one another as they rode to the hotel. Brian held onto his mixed feelings of being content and guilty. Harper didn’t sleep on the way back. Instead, she looked out into the night sky with a gaze that only said she was thinking. And he knew what about.
For brief times, Brian was the man that she wanted him to be. But for the majority, he wasn’t. Even if he maybe wanted to be. Would that change? He wasn’t sure.
