tugged her hands under his sweater. If it had been a warm summer night, Jordan thought, they probably would have gotten on with it, right there with the sound of the slow-moving Charles River going by outside. But it was November, freezing cold, and the honks of holiday traffic sounded nearby, and eventually they pulled apart, breathing hard.
“Um,” Garrett said, fumbling to do up his belt. “I didn’t mean to, um. Push you—”
“You didn’t,” Jordan said, even though it wasn’t what girls were supposed to say. Boys pushed, and girls scolded them. “I’m the one who pushed,” she added, though girls weren’t supposed to say that either, much less do it. But she didn’t feel guilty, sitting here doing up her brassiere in the front seat of Garrett’s Chevrolet. She wished it were warm enough to just move to the backseat and keep going, keep kissing, keep putting off the moment where she’d have to go home. She looked out at the moonlight on the Charles and pushed away a surge of dread. “I should get back now.”
“Yeah,” said Garrett, and he dropped his head for another long kiss. He took Jordan’s hand and guided it, not under his sweater this time, but to his other hand, where she could feel the hard, cool lump of his college ring. “I wish you’d wear it,” he whispered. “You know I’m serious about you.”
“Okay,” Jordan heard herself say. Because why not? It was the next step. She’d wear his college ring for the next few years, a placeholder for the step after that: the real ring that would come at some point during his senior year, after which the next step was a June wedding. His parents would be delighted. Her dad would be delighted. I was hoping so much that you’d want to take the shop over from me, he had said. You and Garrett both, maybe. A real future.
“Okay,” she said again, and it felt fine.
Chapter 20
Ian
May 1950
Vienna
On the first of May, Ian jogged down the stairs from his tiny apartment to the center office below, only to find his wife already sitting in his chair.
He stopped, still doing up the buttons on his shirt. “I locked the door.”
Nina made jimmying motions, lowering the paperback she was reading. Something lurid called Regency Buck. Ian looked at the open door, handle now dangling loose. She reads romance novels and breaks locks, he thought. Just what every man wants in a wife. “What are you doing here?” he asked, turning back his cuffs and going to work on the door. It had been a few weeks since she and Tony stormed out, and Ian hadn’t heard from either.
“Tony is sorry,” Nina said. “He wants to apologize, the things he said.”
“So why are you here and not him?”
“He says you are Achilles in your tent and he waits till you come out. I tell him he’s a stupid mudak and I will come instead, and he says Agamemnon sends Briseis and maybe that does it. I don’t know any of these people.”
“He’s off his bloody head. I’m not Achilles, he’s not Agamemnon, and you’re nobody’s prize getting sent anywhere.” Ian jiggled the door handle back into place. “If Homer gave Briseis a razor, Achilles would have died a good deal sooner.”
“Who is this Homer?”
“He didn’t write Regency Buck. Why do you read that tosh?” Ian wondered, diverted. Razors didn’t seem to go with romances.
“I come to library my first month in Manchester—need books to learn about England, practice my reading. The librarian, she says, ‘Georgette Heyer is England.’ Is not much like the England I see, but maybe is the war?” Nina tucked Regency Buck back into her jacket. “Anyway, I come because Tony is sorry.”
“We both said things I imagine we regretted.” Ian wasn’t surprised at the relief that loosened his chest. He and Tony had worked together for years, after all; had been friends as well as partners. Perhaps we still are. “I notice you aren’t offering any apologies,” Ian couldn’t help but observe.
Nina merely gave a long blink. I kill her, his wife had said of Lorelei Vogt, so matter-of-factly. She meant it, she wasn’t sorry, and he’d be damned if he apologized either for throwing her out of his office because of it.
Her eyes glinted as if she was reading his mind, and the hostility of their last encounter sparked the air for a moment. It wouldn’t take much to get it going again.