The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [129]
Jonathan came home from the lab to find Rose cooking happily over the tiny stove in his rooms, the scent of spices thick in the air. “Did you know they call zucchini something different here? Courgettes.” She lifted her head for his kiss, and smiled at the thrill his mouth still brought to hers. How many times had they kissed now? Hundreds? Thousands? Rose knew that no relationship can sustain the passion of newness, the energy coursing through a million cells at the same time at the touch of a new lover, but it brought her great satisfaction that she still anticipated his touch, did not take it for granted in the fade of comfort.
“Those wacky English people,” he said. He wound a finger around a loose tendril of hair that had curled in the steam rising from a pot on the stove and let it spring back. “Why can’t they learn to speak American?”
Rose lifted a wooden spoon, mock threatening. “How was your day? Any breakthroughs bound to win the Nobel Prize?”
“Sadly, not yet. We’ll have to keep hoping to win the lottery instead. You’re cheerful. How was your day?” He sat on the arm of a faded, heavy armchair and pulled off his shoes, wiggling his toes inside dark socks.
“Glorious,” Rose said. “I climbed Carfax Tower.”
“Quite a view, isn’t it? I told you this city was beautiful.”
“It was completely worth it. I nearly didn’t go—I thought the stairs would kill me, but I made it just fine.”
“You don’t have enough faith in yourself,” Jonathan said. He padded up behind her, slipped his arms around her waist and kissed the back of her neck. “What else did you do?”
“I crashed a tai chi class at Magdalen College. And I stole one of those little pint glasses from a pub. And I don’t feel guilty.”
Jonathan laughed and squeezed her against him. “Don’t bother. People do it all the time. I always knew there was a rebel hiding inside you.”
“I want to stay, Jonathan,” she said. She turned a burner down on the stove and then slipped out of his arms so she could face him. “I can see myself loving it here.”
He went back to the arm of the chair and perched there, his arms crossed over his chest. His face was serious, thoughtful. Like our father, he was prone to quiet consideration, and he let Rose speak.
“I feel . . . different here. Like, not myself. Freer.”
Jonathan nodded. “It might not stay that way forever. The new becomes commonplace.”
Rose wrinkled her eyebrows and thrust out her bottom lip for a moment. “I don’t think it’s like that, really. I mean, maybe it is, somewhat. But I was thinking today, maybe it all happens for a reason. Maybe the reason Cordy and Bean came home was to send me a message.”
“What do you think the message is?”
“That it was okay to leave. It’s like for years I’ve drawn this mental circle with Barnwell at the center of it. I never felt I could go beyond the edges, that someone had to be there—oh, it’s silly.”
“No, finish.”
“Like I was the thing holding the family together, and if I left it would all fall apart. And with Cordy and Bean gone, it was like my parents were mine again, like my sisters didn’t exist and I was an only child, so they needed me. But now that they’ve come back, and they handled this thing with Mom—it’s like they didn’t even need me and . . .”
“You’re free to go,” Jonathan finished for her.
“And maybe I should. Maybe all these things that have been holding me there weren’t the problem. Maybe they were a symptom of staying too long. A signal that I should have broken free years ago.”
She turned back to the stove and lifted a lid of a pot and then, satisfied, removed it from the burner and fished out a vegetable steamer, tiny perfect rounds