Overcast skies melt cool grey light around everything within view, the red tops of the houses the only thing seeming to stand out in vibrant contrast to their dim backdrop. From his position on the balcony, fingertips tracing patterns over the metal banister, Noah pictures every person walking below with light blue eyes and constellation freckles in a smattering over cheeks. The wrinkle of her nose is something he remembers fondly, even after all these years, and he thinks of saturated skin and red pooling beneath alabaster. It’s all he’s been thinking about for some time now; too long for him to even count all of the days, the months, the years. He leans forward, and he inhales, and today is the first that he can recall in his immediate memory the scent of her perfume. Perhaps something in him knows. Perhaps everything in him knows.
Someday. Not today, but someday. I promise. They hold hands ten years ago, not the way that friends hold hands. There’s a reverence to it, sitting on that park bench on the East End, talking like strangers, staring like lovers, and touching like they’re aware of something on a level that no one else is aware of it. It’s never seemed like too far fetched a thing to him when it comes to her, some ethereal resonance tingling just over his edges, over the places she’s almost touched but never been close enough to. So he’d made a promise t her, ten years ago, and two months ago he’d decided it was time. Two months, so many years past when he should’ve, when they should’ve, but there’s still some kind of thrill in ‘better late than never’. If nothing else, there’s truth, too.
A handwritten letter addressed to Daxton Rose Bennett, penned with care, and folded gentle. Meet me. Please. If you still feel anything, meet me. There’d been a date and a location attached somewhere among the flowing lines, and hope tucked neatly into the spaces between each word. It’s not that he expects anything from her, or that it would even come as a surprise if she didn’t show up at all. It’s been a long time. It’s been so long that he aches thinking about it. Still, he can’t help but fling something desperate into the wind, something he hopes carries, he hopes brings her back because there’s no more color in his life. Because the only time he can remember seeing something clearly is the last time he looked at her face, eyes downcast, lashes fanned against her cheeks; sad, sad smiles. Sad smiles he put there. Sad smiles the ring still on his finger off-sets only slightly.
He’s never taken it off. She gave it to him for his thirtieth birthday. It seems like eons ago now, like another lifetime from now, from forty, from wanting. Wait. No. That’s wrong, isn’t it? Noah had wanted her then, too. It’d just been different. The circumstances had been different, and now he can feel it in his bones. He can feel everything, just like he can see it, too. Taking that job at Oxford, in the same place his father used to stand. Understanding that he’s ready to be the man he was supposed to be all along. Understanding that the time he wasted shouldn’t be the time he continues to waste. Understanding that a hotel room in Denmark can stretch to a house in the English countryside, and oh, he doesn’t want to be alone anymore. He doesn’t want to be alone, and he doesn’t want anyone else. Maybe he never has. Not properly.
So he stands and he hopes and the sun gets low, and that’s okay. That’s okay. He can’t see it but for the slight fading behind the clouds, the red on the buildings dimming to maroon, and the stream of human life wandering by below increasing for the end of the work day. He left her name with a key card in the lobby, and he prays to a God he does not believe in that she’ll come to claim it. Absently, he twists his ring with its indigo stone around and around on his finger.
