ask. Don’t you remember me? Don’t you know who I am?
“The scene on the screen ended so quickly,” she continues, quietly adding, “even the real thing ends rather quickly, to be perfectly honest.”
“Sorry to hear that,” says Julian.
“But your words I will relive over and over. Every time I hear them, I will feel what you made me feel in that theatre.”
“And what was that?”
“I don’t know if I can explain,” Mia says. “Alive? Or maybe that I wished I were Scarlett.”
Julian says nothing.
“Or maybe,” she says, “that I wished it was me.”
His eyes pour himself into her eyes.
Looking away, as if she can’t take the way he’s staring at her, Mia pulls out her pack of cigarettes and tries to light one, but her hands are trembling. “Can I ask you a question? The first time we met and you . . . you know, you . . .”
“I what?” says Julian. “What did I do?”
“Well, you know.”
“I kissed you?”
“Yes.” Her eyes shy away.
“What’s your question?”
She cocks her head. “That thing you described between Rhett and Scarlett, that wasn’t what was in your kiss.”
“No?” He shifts from foot to foot, glancing out onto the Strand. How are they going to get out of here before they burn?
Are they going to get out?
“Something else was in yours,” she says.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know how to describe it.”
“Try. Use your words, Mia.” He takes a step toward her in the small space. “What was in my kiss?”
“It was . . .” She can’t look at him. “Like it wasn’t about that. Oh, some of that was in there, too, for sure, but mostly it was other things. It wasn’t a first kiss is what I’m saying.” Mia inhales, exhales. “It wasn’t tentative and it wasn’t questioning, and it wasn’t purely amorous.”
Julian is silent.
“Are you not going to help me?”
“You’re using your words quite nicely,” he says. “Keep going.”
“But do you know what I mean?”
“Keep going.”
“It was an open kiss of a mighty and well-worn heart,” Mia says. “It wasn’t the kiss of love . . .”
“Mine wasn’t the kiss of love?”
Mia doesn’t know where to look. “What I mean is—it was how Rhett might’ve kissed Scarlett if she hadn’t been pretending that she loved dumb Ashley.”
Or dumb Finch.
“If they had stayed together for years, and he went off to war, and when he came back, their house had burned down, and she was gone, and he searched for her across the scorched South, and when he finally found her, he took her in his arms and pressed her to his lips.” Mia’s face is aglow, breathless, shimmering, as if she is imagining real love instead of Rhett’s love. “And he said to her, Scarlett, I have searched for you for a thousand years.”
“He might say, I have searched behind the sun for you, at the bottom of the earth for you,” says Julian, taking her into his arms, one arm over her shoulder, one through her waist. “He might say, my love, I found you again.”
“Yes, something like that . . .”
Bending his head, he kisses her, first softly, then openly, his arms wrapped around her coat, a papa bear embracing his mama bear.
“And there it is again,” whispers Mia.
* * *
When Mia and Julian return to Bank, they overhear the Ten Bells gang ladling out to Finch some deeply unwanted advice.
“Break it off with her, Finch. It’s inevitable.”
“I don’t want to break it off with her!”
“Do you know what the word inevitable means?” Wild says. “You can’t stop it. Don’t take it so personally.”
“Don’t take another guy making a play for my girl personally?”