A Sensitive Arrangement

Chapter 16

I could feel a hand on my cheek, as if it was beckoning me, leading me out of the land of Nod. When I opened my eyes, I saw Julian's face. I barely remember the last time I had awoken to this sight, but I suddenly yearned to be able to wake up to it every morning. Truthfully, I had never really woken up to this particular vision, his face had aged quite a bit in the last seven years. It was definitely stirring emotions in me that I had never even heard of back then, let alone felt.

"Hey, I have to go in a few minutes." He whispered. I don't know why he was whispering, we were the only two in the room. But I liked it.

"You don't have to." I tried to sound convincing, but I knew it lacked conviction. I had lost this battle last night, there was no point in resurrecting it.

"I do. Just for now though." He stroked my cheek, his attempt at reassuring me. And just like everything else he had done in the last week, it made my heart soar and break at the same time.

"See you next Christmas I guess." I regretted my tone, and the eye roll that accompanied it, almost immediately. This kind of childish behavior definitely wasn't my best strategy if I was trying to convince him of my maturity.

Luckily, my juvenile antics didn't seem to deter him. "I'll text you when I land. And I'll call you soon. If you stop rolling your eyes at me, I might even video chat."

"You hate video chat."

"Trust me, if you spent as much time as I have video chatting with Asian businessmen, you would too." He joked, although I could practically see his brain wince as soon as he said it. The man was ordinarily the pinnacle of political correctness, one of the many things that had been drilled into him from a young age. That, combined with the fact that he was actually a decent human being, meant he was almost certainly mentally chastising himself at the moment.

"What's wrong with Asian businessmen?" I challenged, giving him the opportunity to correct his mistake.

"The same thing that's wrong with all businessmen. We're terribly boring." He smiled, a subtle, non-verbal show of thanks, intended only for me. No one else spoke our language. It was another thing that was just ours.

"You're not." I laughed, feeling the atmosphere lighten almost immediately.

"The only thing interesting about me is you." Why did he have to keep torturing me like this? And why did I keep eating it up?

"Weren't you the one telling me I still have to find my own identity?" I scolded him. I was getting so tired of his hot and cold behavior. I might have felt a surge of pride last night, knowing I had affected him like that. But in the morning light, I remembered he was kind of a jerk about it. Unnecessarily so. I mean, he had literally said that men were perfectly capable of self restraint less than seventy-two hours ago. And then he practically chased me out of his room so he could jerk off.

"Because you weren't born into one." His reply caught me off guard. That definitely wasn't what I was expecting.

"Wasn't I?" I was a Watson for god's sake. I know I didn't have thousands of hours of professional training and grooming like he did, but there were still plenty of expectations on me.

"You don't have to be." It nearly sounded like a plea. Like he was trying to convince me to run away and never look back.

"You keep saying that." I couldn't comprehend the depth of his thoughts at the moment. They seemed pained. I understood that he wanted me to see other people, at least for a little while, I even kind of understood the logic behind it. But this felt like so much more than that.

"Because it's true. You can be whoever you want Alice, just try to figure out who that is. That's all I'm asking." He sighed, as if he were fighting a losing battle, even though it seemed to me that he had already won.

"I can try. That's the best I can promise." I surrendered.

"That's all I could ever ask." He smiled a tired smile at me, like I had somehow worn him out and not the other way around.

"Don't go." I begged. The time for pride was over. I just needed him to know how I felt now.

"I have to. Even if it wasn't Prague, in a few weeks I'd have to get back to Boston. There's no point in prolonging the inevitable." He shook his head, deliberately looking down. I'm sure he could sense the tears forming in my eyes.

"Nineteen months?" I was still pleading, groveling for any little piece of him I could hold onto.

"At least." I'm sure he intended his words to have more strength behind them. But they were barely a whisper. If they had been spoken by anyone else, they might have sounded pitiful. But nothing Julian ever did inspired pity in me. Just empathy.

"Nineteen months." I reassured myself, and maybe him as well.

"Love you Ali Cat." He whispered, pulling me into a tight hug. It still wasn't an 'I love you'. That much was obvious. But there was something unspoken in it. Like he was waiting for the real one, until I figured out who I was. Because I was still only half-formed. A thought like that would have ordinarily offended me. But it didn't this time. It just seemed like a fact of life.

"I love you too." I didn't need nineteen months to know that. Julian seemed the furthest thing from half-formed that anyone could be.

He kissed the top of my head before getting up and walking to my door. Before leaving my room he paused. I could feel myself willing him to turn around, to come back to me. But he didn't. He had too much self control for his own good, the events of last night notwithstanding.

When he left I flopped back down in my bed, trying to fight the tears that I knew would win out in the end. If nineteen months seemed like a long time, twelve months somehow seemed even longer. I didn't want to wait another year to see him again, to feel his arms around me, to be able to smell him.

I got up and went over to my closet, grabbing his sweatshirt that now held pride of place amongst all the other clothes. I threw it on before crawling back into bed, letting my tears lull me back to sleep. I still had another five hours before I had to leave for the animal shelter, and I didn't particularly want to spend those hours conscious.