Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [76]
She’d been trying to look glamorous and magnetic, but in the context of Kostos’s home and his wife (or girlfriend or maybe fiancée), her efforts seemed pathetic. Red dress or brown, she looked like what she was: a timid cipher. She was usually good at keeping her hopes down, but even that small gift had failed her this time.
It was the time they’d spent together in Santorini that had done it to her. She’d felt so close to him; closer than she’d even known. She’d told herself she wanted nothing more from him, but it wasn’t true.
As angry as she was at herself, she realized she had some anger left over for Kostos too.
“Can I help you?” a young woman behind a register asked her.
Lena turned her head to stare at her and remembered where she was.
“No. Thank you. Sorry,” she said with her head down. She went back outside to the cold and resumed her walking.
She thought maybe if she walked long enough she might eventually pass into Brixton, but now she had the sad feeling that there was no way to get there from here.
She remembered back almost ten years ago to her moonlit walk up the hill in Oia to meet him in their special olive grove.
“Someday,” he’d said to her in Greek. She hadn’t been able to speak Greek at all then, and it had taken her great effort to figure out what the word meant.
The word had seemed like a precious gift at the time, a keepsake or an inheritance. She’d tucked it away and treasured it accordingly, waiting for the right time to cash it in.
Waiting and waiting. That was her thing. The word gave her an excuse to wait and do little else. The word wasn’t so much a gift as a terminal virus with a long period of latency.
In her heart she thought he had meant it, but of course he hadn’t. She remembered other parts of that long-ago conversation word for word. He’d asked her if she loved somebody else and she’d said, “I don’t know if I can.” And in return he’d said, “I know I can’t.”
She had been pretending she’d more or less forgotten the whole episode, but she hadn’t. She had still been a teenager at the time, he not much older, and that gave everybody an automatic out, didn’t it?
No, it didn’t. Not in her lockbox of a heart. I know I can’t. She’d held on to that declaration as if it were a signed affidavit.
And yet it was total crap. She thought of the beautiful, scornful woman in the black dress. Oh, yes, you can, Lena thought.
People said things they didn’t mean all the time. Everybody else in the world seemed able to factor it in. But not Lena. Why did she believe the things people said? Why did she cling to them so literally? Why did she think she knew people when she clearly didn’t? Why did she imagine that the world didn’t change, when it did?
Maybe because she didn’t change. She believed what people said and she stayed the same.
I was ador’d once too.
—William Shakespeare
Naturally it started raining. Around ten o’clock that night, freezing and wet in a place called Houndsditch, Lena finally stopped. She stood under a bus shelter and took stock. Her flight did not leave for Greece until ten past ten in the morning.
She had consciously planned a lot of things, but not where she would stay the night. Why not? Perhaps that was where the unconscious planning had come in. Somewhere buried under a few layers in her mind had been the idea that the moment she saw Kostos, everything else would fall into place. It was to be the happily-ever-after part in the story that took place after the velvety red curtains closed and was never strictly specified.
Now that she was taking stock in Houndsditch, she decided to confront that too. What had she really thought? He would see her and take her in his arms? Was that really it? He would carry her to his bed and they would make love all night?
She blushed at the thought, more from shame than desire. Maybe she hadn’t quite thought that. Not even her subconscious fantasies were quite that brave.
A group of men in suits cast her long looks as they went by.