Writer's Note: For lilacmermaid. Thank you for everything you do to keep the fandom going with your prompts and challenges and your consistent support of the writers. Your efforts are very much appreciated.
Personally, I believe there's no such thing as a boring prompt, only a lack of imagination on the part of the writer. Here's my take on "Henry finds a sock in the road". I hope I did it justice. :)
the god of lost things
A sock, with alternate stripes of pale and dark blue, its leg adorned with the image of two geese, one of which wore a bow tie, kissing under a sprig of acid green mistletoe, lay in the road outside the apartment building where Henry lived near the Grounds of UVA in Charlottesville.
Henry didn't notice it. He was too busy gazing up at the endless expanse of crisp blue sky—cloudless, except for a few wisps of white that hung faintly above the horizon.
Perfect conditions for flying.
The buzz of an airplane engine soaring high above the city said that someone else agreed.
It was on days like this that Henry couldn't wait to finish his master's degree and head off to the Marines, where he'd be able to spend countless hours losing himself in that long, delirious burning blue. Not that he didn't enjoy his studies. He'd worked hard for his place at college—had even managed to earn himself a scholarship—and he was grateful for every second he got to spend there, especially when, for so much of his life, it had been expected that he would go straight from graduating high school to working at the steel mill, just like his father. But there was a freedom in flight that would never be found in academic discussions, term papers or textbooks. More than just weightlessness. A suspension of time. Of being.
The sky disappeared from sight as the red brick path that he strode along on his way to Alderman Library entered a tunnel of linden trees, the leaves of which scattered the early morning light and cast a rippling river of shade. Although it was too early for any real heat to have gathered, the promise of warmth tingled at the periphery of his senses, a haze held poised in the background, swelling, thickening, waiting until it reached a critical mass, when it would then rush in.
Normally, at this hour, there wouldn't be another soul around. It was the limbo between the workers arriving for their shifts at the various coffee shops, diners and bakeries dotted throughout the city and the customers emerging yawning and bleary-eyed in search of their first sugar rush and hit of caffeine. But today, when he stepped out from the tunnel of linden trees into the pale blush of sunlight and turned the corner onto the next street, he spotted a girl—young woman, he probably ought to say—crossing the road to the sidewalk opposite.
There was nothing special about her. With her outfit of denim pinafore dress, a white tee at least two sizes too big for her stuffed beneath, and a pair of ratty blue Chucks, she could have blended into any crowd with ease. He might not have noticed her at all, had something not fallen from the tan leather satchel she wore slung across her body and landed soundlessly on the concrete.
Oblivious to the loss, she continued to walk across to the other side of the road, squeezed sideways between the bumpers of a couple of parked cars, and strode away along the path, her head just visible as a shimmer of honey blonde above the roofs of the nose-to-tail line of vehicles.
Henry walked over to the dropped item. "Excuse me, miss," he called out as he stooped down to pick up whatever had fallen from her bag, "you dropped your…" He paused and frowned at the item in his hand. Blue cotton. Pink heel and toes. A tiny bow detail near the cuff. "…sock?"
He didn't know exactly what he had been expecting, but a sock wasn't it.
By the time he looked across to her again, she had vanished.
Maybe he ought to have left it. A sock was just a sock, after all. But she couldn't have gone far, and it felt like the right thing to do to at least try to return it to her. So, he glanced up and down the road—out of habit more than anything else, seeing as the silence that hung in the air and the earliness of the hour told him that no vehicles were coming—and then he crossed over, dodged between the same two parked cars that she had, and hurried after her.
Halfway along the road, an alleyway, lined with smooth grey cobblestones and filled with the cool air of trapped shade, snaked between two of the buildings. Henry paused at its entrance and peered down it. The girl was nearing the far end, keeping the same steady pace.
He started walking again, his own pace quickening in an effort to catch up with her. He was about to call out to her for a second time, when she slipped her hand beneath the flap of her satchel, retrieved something from inside, and a moment later, another sock dropped to the ground.
Henry froze and frowned at her, while she kept walking, the light tap of her Chucks against the cobblestones echoing up off the brick walls of the alleyway.
Was it a coincidence or was she doing it on purpose?
He picked up that sock, too. It was purple—lilac—with white polkadots. Then he followed her, making sure to keep his distance so that she wouldn't notice him; though, perhaps there was no real risk of that, seeing as she appeared to be lost in a world of her own. When they reached the Downtown Mall, where a couple of guys in the all-black uniform and waist aprons of C'ville Diner were dragging metal tables and chairs out onto the street, the legs juddering and screeching against the red bricks of the pedestrianised area, she slipped her hand into the satchel again.
A blue-and-white striped sock fell this time.
Definitely on purpose.
Driven by curiosity, a thirst to find out what she was doing, he abandoned his plans of studying at the library and instead continued to follow her. She led him all over the city, wandering back and forth along the streets, across the grass and gravel paths of the parks, between the university buildings and down tapering alleys, dropping sock after sock after sock. No two were alike, as if she had purposefully separated the pairs and only stuffed one of each into her satchel.
By midday, a sticky film of sweat clung to his skin, his jeans clammed against his calves and thighs in a way that made him regret not wearing something a little more breathable than denim, and his satchel was crammed full of thirty or so socks.
They were walking along the bottom of the white steps that led up to the north entrance of the Rotunda when the girl slipped her hand into the bag one final time, rooted around, stopped dead, and then folded back the flap and peered inside. Presumably, her sock supply had run out.
Unfazed, she let the flap fall shut and then continued walking. She returned them to Main Street and C'ville Diner, where the tables outside now teemed with customers, who were soaking up the sun as they sucked milkshakes through see-through plastic straws and laughed with one another.
The girl pressed her palm to the glass door and pushed it open. A waitress bustled over to greet her, and then showed her to one of the red leatherette booths in the front window and handed her a laminated menu. The girl gave the menu a cursory glance, like maybe she came here often and knew the options by heart but didn't want to admit it, and then she rattled off an order before the waitress had time to walk away. The waitress jotted down the order on a small notepad, barely bigger than the palm of her hand, using the stub of a pencil she kept stowed behind her ear, and then she took the menu from the girl and bustled towards the kitchen at the back of the diner.
Alone once again, the girl propped her elbow to the table, rested her chin to the heel of her palm and stared into the distance. With her faraway gaze, it felt like the world she'd been so caught up in all morning, the one that only she could see, lay in the window's reflections.
Henry loitered at the edge of the outdoor seating area, out of her line of vision—though, he wasn't sure that even if he had been in her line of vision she would have seen him. Given that he had been walking behind her all morning and he'd made sure to keep at least ten metres between them, he hadn't managed to catch a glimpse of her face before, but now he studied her.
Her features possessed a certain hardness, or maybe sharpness, that saved her from looking pretty in a plain sort of way and instead gave her an edge that he could only describe as striking—possibly dangerous, even—and it caused his heartbeat to quicken, like it would have had the gentle valley he'd thought he'd been approaching turned out to be a one hundred foot drop. Had he spotted her across the room at a party—assuming that a well-meaning friend had managed to drag her to a party—she'd be the kind of girl he'd want to talk to, as if drawn to her by some innate curiosity, but would probably be too afraid to talk to out of fear that she would eviscerate him with a single look.
If it weren't for the socks and his need to understand why she had spent the entire morning dropping them across the city, he might not have approached her now.
He pushed open the glass door of the diner, causing the bell above to jangle. A waitress, who had been leaning over the bar at the back, turned around at the sound, ready to walk over and greet him, but he waved her away before she could push herself off from the counter, and then he slid into the booth in the window, taking the seat opposite the girl. He unslung the canvas strap of his satchel from across his body, letting the bag rest against his side on the bench of the booth.
The girl turned her gaze on him, her chin still propped to her palm. The slight furrow in the middle of her brow questioned him, a silent, Do I know you?
He reached into his satchel, pulled out a fistful of socks, and dropped them onto the table.
The girl studied the jumble of socks for a couple of seconds.
Then she looked up at him again. Rather than seeming surprised or embarrassed in any way, her frown deepened to a scowl. "You weren't supposed to collect them."
"Why were you dropping them?"
"Because," the girl began, her voice straining with irritation. But then she halted. Her mouth hung open for a long second and then hinged shut, her lips pursed. Her scowl faded away, replaced by a tinge of pink that crested through her cheeks, and her gaze dipped to the table. When she spoke again, her voice was little more than a murmur. "It's part of a ritual."
"A ritual?" It was his turn to frown.
Pink flushed to crimson, and her gaze flicked up to meet his. The sharpness that lurked in her eyes was definitely more dangerous than striking.
He shrank back a little. "Hey, I'm not judging…I just…I… What kind of ritual?"
She turned her attention to the socks, and holding open her satchel at the edge of the table, she scooped the pile across the surface and into the bag. "It's an offering to the god of lost things."
The god of lost things…?
His studies had exposed him to a wide array of different beliefs, and he generally considered himself to be a pretty open-minded kind of guy, but a 'ritualistic offering to the god of lost things' sounded a little…pagan…even to him. Maybe it was his deep-rooted Catholicism.
"Okay…" he said.
The girl shot him a glance, one that said she didn't appreciate his tone, and she grabbed the last few socks and shoved them into her bag. "I read somewhere that if you perform the ritual on the anniversary of the day that you lost something, then you can recover whatever it is that you lost."
"Using socks?" He tried to keep the incredulity out of his tone, but still it crept in.
"The book said it could be anything that comes in pairs, so I suppose you could use gloves or something, but I only have one pair of them, so socks seemed easier."
"Yeah…that still doesn't explain it."
She gave a huff and looked up the ceiling for a long second.
He wasn't sure if she found it annoying that she had to explain it all to him or if she found the explanation mildly embarrassing. He kind of hoped, for her sanity's sake, that it was the latter.
"There's a sort of pull, or bond, between two things that belong in a pair," she said, and she gestured between the salt and pepper shakers that sat in the middle of the table, as if to elucidate their invisible bond. "One isn't complete without the other. If you strain that bond by separating the items, then the god of lost things can harness that energy and use it to return whatever you lost." Her scowl reappeared as she sent him a pointed look. "But the ritual won't work if someone follows you around, collecting them all up again."
He considered her explanation for a moment.
It sort of made sense, he guessed. Maybe. In an extremely non-scientific kind of way.
"What did you lose?" he said.
Before the girl could answer, the waitress who had taken her order returned to the table, her arms full of dishes. "Here you go." She slid a chipped saucer with a cup of black coffee, the surface swaying, into place in front of the girl, followed by a plate that held an omelette, flecked with herbs and swimming in a golden butter lake, and then another small plate, on top of which sat a wicker basket lined with red gingham greaseproof paper and stuffed with French fries, pale and crisp and begging for ketchup. She looked to Henry. "Can I get you anything, hon?"
The smell of butter and frying oil was enough to make saliva pool in his mouth, especially after all the energy he must have burned traipsing back and forth across the city.
He gestured to the girl's plates. "I'll have the same."
The waitress jotted down a quick note and wandered away.
"A bit presumptuous." The girl glanced up at him as she ripped the tops off of two sachets of brown sugar snatched from the plastic holder in the middle of the table and then tipped the granules into her coffee. At his puzzled look, she added, "Assuming that I'll let you have lunch with me."
"I'll sit at another table if you like."
The girl held his gaze, the look in her eyes just as sharp as before. Hours could have passed in the space of those few seconds. But she didn't tell him to leave.
"So, what did you lose?" he said.
She studied him a moment longer. Then she returned to her coffee. A teaspoon rested at the edge of the saucer, the metal scratched and cloudy. She picked it up and used it to stir in the sugar; it clinked against the inside of the cup with each turn. Then she shook off the drips and placed it down again. She raised the cup to her lips. Paused. "My parents." She took a sip.
Henry stared at her. Although he'd heard the words, it felt like there was a metre-thick wall between the area of his brain that understood the words phonetically and the area of his brain that understood the words semantically, and it was taking forever for them to pass from one to the other.
When she'd said that she'd lost something, he'd thought she meant a book or a necklace or some kind of object with sentimental value, not that her parents had died.
"I'm—" He began.
"Sorry?" She quirked an eyebrow at him. She held that look for the longest second; it almost felt like she was challenging him. Then she settled her coffee cup against the saucer with a chink, picked up her fork, and looking down at the omelette, she shook her head. "Everyone always is."
Using the edge of the fork, she cut off a piece of omelette. More butter oozed out.
"And today's…?" He started and then trailed off.
"Three years." She stabbed the piece of omelette and stuffed it into her mouth.
"You must have been…"
"Shocked, upset, devastated?" She spoke through the mouthful.
"Young," he said.
She met his gaze and stared at him while she chewed—slowly. It felt like she was analysing him in ways he couldn't even imagine. Then she looked down again, and shook her head, again. Her throat hitched as she swallowed. "My brother was younger, and he had to witness it."
They sat in silence for a long moment.
Henry watched her while she ate. He felt he ought to say he was sorry again, probably because that's what people were programmed to say when the unspeakable happened, but it seemed like she'd heard that phrase enough times already, and given that she'd spent the morning dropping socks across the city in an attempt to bring her parents back to life, he guessed it hadn't helped.
"And you really think socks—this ritual—is going to bring them back?"
The girl cut off another piece of omelette and mopped it in the butter lake. "I think I'd rather spend my day doing this than listen to my roommate moan about her love life, or lack of it."
The bell above the door jangled with the arrival of new customers. A waitress chirped her overly bright greeting, 'Hi! Welcome to C'ville Diner!' Muzak drifted in the background.
The girl swallowed her mouthful and then pulled a face like she was trying to poke a piece of food free from her lower molars using the tip of her tongue.
Most girls Henry had met tried their hardest to appear dainty while eating. Or they avoided eating in front of guys altogether.
But not her.
She stuffed another forkful in her mouth. The food muffled her words. "I s'pose one benefit of you following me around and collecting them is that now I have something to do this afternoon."
He imagined her traipsing back and forth across the city, alone, dropping all those socks again, perhaps thinking about her parents, about her loss, about the events that had led her to today.
"Would you like some company?" he said.
"Don't you have anything better do to?"
He had a paper due on Monday, marking to complete for his job as a TA, not to mention the workshops he was supposed to be preparing for.
"No," he said.
She set her fork down—the handle rested to the table, the tines to the edge of the plate—and then she picked up her coffee cup. She held it in both hands in front of her, almost level with her chin, and she studied him. It seemed like she was at least considering the offer.
"I still have half your socks in my bag," he said, as if that might be the deal-breaker.
She studied him a moment longer. Her eyes fluctuated between greenish-blue and grey.
Then her gaze dipped to the surface of her coffee. "Fine." She took a sip and then returned the cup to the saucer. "But I have to be the one to drop them, otherwise it won't work."
"Of course," he said, as though that made perfect sense. "I'm Henry, by the way."
"Elizabeth." She pushed the basket of French fries towards him and then picked up her fork.
He helped himself to a few of the fries while he waited for his own meal to arrive. The salt tingled on his tongue and made his stomach rumble in anticipation.
Apparently, she had kept count of exactly how many fries he had taken, for she plucked the same number from his basket as soon as the waitress had placed it in front of him and walked away.
oOoOo
Once they had finished eating and drained the last dregs of their coffees, Elizabeth caught a server's eye, raised her fingers and nodded to indicate that she'd like the check. But before the server had time to print off the check at the register and bring it over to the table, Elizabeth retrieved a men's bifold wallet from the left-hand pocket of her dress, the wallet's tan leather smoothed and darkened with age, fumbled free enough dollar bills to cover both her and Henry's meals plus a tip, dropped the bills in the middle of the table and then slid out from her seat in the booth.
The bell above the door was already jangling with her exit by the time Henry had realised what was happening. Half a second later, he snatched up his satchel and hurried after her.
Elizabeth stood just beyond the black fabric barriers of the outdoor seating area. With one hand raised to shield her eyes from the glare of the sun, she peered up and down the street.
Henry lifted the canvas strap of his satchel over his head and settled it across his body as he strode over to her. He came to a stop at her side. "So…which way?"
"Socks," she said.
He frowned at her. What…?
"Socks." She gestured to his bag.
"Oh."
He lifted the flap of his satchel, gathered together the remaining socks in his fist, and then transferred them to her bag, which she held open for him, waiting.
She balled one of the socks into her hand and then began walking, going left on Main Street, as if heading back towards the Academical Village, reversing their route from that morning.
Henry walked alongside her. She stared straight ahead, as if unaware of his presence, but she couldn't have minded his company—he felt pretty sure she would have let him know if she did.
He shot her a sideways glance. "Would you like to tell me about your parents?"
She kept her gaze fixed ahead of her. When she spoke, her tone was distant, detached, like a cop giving a report to a colleague. "Car crash. Not far from here. Lost control and the car flipped."
"I meant who they were, what they were like."
She turned to him with a frown, the look she gave him almost suspicious, as though no one had ever asked her that before, her parents' entire lives reduced to their demise. "Why?"
"I thought if you remembered them and talked about them, it might help."
He meant 'help her come to terms with her loss', but if she wanted to take it to mean 'help with the efficacy of the ritual', he didn't mind.
She looked ahead again. Her frown remained, a light wrinkle furrowing her brow. Several paces passed in silence. The air between them was thick, like a bubble had formed around them, its wall separating them from the rest of the world; it made the roar of car engines that soared by, the chirping of birds flittering from branch to branch in the trees that dotted the street and the echoing laughter of gaggles of students walking in the opposite direction sound more distant somehow.
For a while, it felt like maybe she wasn't going to say anything and that they would spend the rest of the afternoon dropping socks in silence. But then she spoke.
"My dad was Benjamin, my mom was Suzanne. They lived in Virginia all their lives. They met here, at UVA. He was a few years ahead of her, but they had some of the same classes."
"So you decided to follow in their footsteps?" He guessed she was a student, based on her age and her comment about a roommate.
"They used to bring me and my brother here all the time. Tell us stories. I thought that coming here would help me feel closer to them."
With his gaze fixed on the sidewalk a stride in front of them, he shook his head. "But instead of feeling their presence, you see their absence. The hole they left behind."
She turned to him. Her frown deepened—surprise this time. "You lost someone, too." It was a statement of realisation more than a question.
"My best friend. Though, he was more like a brother to me. But it was a long time ago."
"I'm—"
"Sorry?" He shot her a glance.
She stared back at him, perhaps not expecting him to challenge her just as she had challenged him.
A second later, she cracked a smile. It was small and tentative, as if her lips weren't used to the motion, the muscle memory forgotten, but it was a definite smile.
He smiled too and held her eye for a moment. Then he returned his gaze to the sidewalk ahead of them before he could trip over or walk into something. "So…you grew up near here?"
"A horse farm, about an hour's drive away."
Conversation between them came easy, a seamless flow of words that accompanied them as they wandered all over the city, Elizabeth slipping her hand into her satchel and dropping another sock from time to time. They talked mainly about her parents and her younger brother, Will, whom Henry sensed she loved fiercely, despite her calling him a pain in the ass, and about how her life had changed since the crash, but she also asked Henry questions about his life, too. The openness with which she spoke made it feel like she was grateful to have someone to talk to, like she'd been storing up all these thoughts for a long time, waiting for someone she could share them with.
Henry was grateful that that someone was him. There was something about her. Something he couldn't quite place his finger on. A certain spark. With her, he lost all sense of time, of self. The same feeling of freedom that he found in flight.
They were walking across the grass in the park, the ground dappled with the shade cast by the looming branches of an old oak tree, when Elizabeth announced, "That's all of them."
They eased to a stop, and she turned to face him.
"So, what now?" he asked.
"I go back to the place I last saw them and I wait."
From what she'd told him, that meant the horse farm where she'd grown up, which was now in the care of her Aunt Joan, who rarely visited it, as she was away on business most of the time.
In his mind, he saw Elizabeth sat alone in the empty house, the hope she'd carried with her all day giving way to desperation with the fading light.
"I can come with you, if you like."
She looked to the ground between them and shook her head; the ends of her hair swayed where they hung forward over her shoulders and lay atop the denim straps of her dress. "You don't have to. It might take a while. The book said I need to wait until midnight."
"I'd like to come," he said.
She looked up again and studied him. Her eyes narrowed, part scrutinising, part squinting as the leaves above lurched in a ruffle of the breeze and let a few rays of sunlight slip through.
In the pause, a group of guys in loose tank tops and tight shorts jogged past. Their sneakers thudded against the gravel path with a scrunch, scrunch, scrunch; they spoke to one another in loud and laboured tones between their pants for breath; and the air around them carried a sting of sweat.
Elizabeth gave a small nod. "Okay."
oOoOo
The silence that filled the farmhouse was different to the silence that Henry found walking the empty streets of Charlottesville before the rest of the city awoke. While the early morning silence held promise and hope, like the day was a rosebud waiting to unfurl, the silence in the farmhouse was oppressive and stagnant, like the infinite silence that comes with the fall of the final petal.
He wandered around the lower level of the house while he waited for the tea to brew. The floorboards creaked with each step; the sound pressed up against the silence and made it feel more prominent somehow. A book lay open on the coffee table, it pages facing down, its spine an arête, like someone had left it there while they made themselves a cup of coffee and at any moment they would be back; the seat of the armchair held a depression, as if moulded to someone's form, waiting for that same person to return; a grocery list—milk, eggs, bread, ice cream for Lizzie—was pinned to the refrigerator door using a magnet that bore the sepia-tinged photograph of a young girl.
It could have been Elizabeth's aunt who had left the house this way after one of her visits, but Henry got the sense that much of what he saw had been preserved just as it was the day of the crash, frozen in time, like Elizabeth, unable to move forward.
He fished the tea bags out of the cups using a stained teaspoon and then picked up both cups in one hand and returned to the porch, where Elizabeth had been waiting ever since they arrived. A grey woollen blanket was draped over the back of the couch. He grabbed it as he walked past.
Elizabeth perched on the top step of the front porch, her knees hugged to her chest as she peered out towards the end of the dusty track that wound its way along the edge of the paddock, towards the house. The light had long since faded from the sky, leaving it a deep and shadowy blue. The warmth that the day had held had quickly faded away too, leaving a chill that prickled in the air and plains of gooseflesh that covered Elizabeth's legs. Not that she had mentioned feeling cold.
"Here." Henry handed her the blanket, followed by one of the cups of tea.
"Thank you." She gave him a small tug of a smile, then returned to staring out into the dark.
He lowered himself onto the step beside her. The wood beneath him was worn smooth. He watched her while she watched the track, waiting for her parents to return.
"My period started that day," she said. "I didn't realise. I spent so long sitting out here, waiting for them to come home, that by the time someone came to find me, it had soaked through my skirt." She shook her head, her gaze fixed on the drive. "Sorry if that's too much information."
"I'm not squeamish," he said.
She nodded. "Growing up with sisters probably helped."
He took a sip of tea. It was still hot and it stung the tip of his tongue and his palate.
Another silence passed. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours.
"They're never coming back, are they?" she said. Then she turned and looked at him.
His lips flinched at one side, and he shook his head, just slightly. "No."
She studied him for a long moment. Then nodded.
She looked away again, back towards the end of the drive.
After a while, a tear rolled down her cheek, crawling its way towards her jawline. She swiped it away with the edge of her thumb, and then gave a shaky laugh, full of the same huskiness found in her voice. "God…I'm so stupid. You know, some small part of me actually thought it would work."
He frowned at her. "You're not stupid."
She huffed, a bitter chuckle. "So, just plain crazy, then?"
"You're grieving."
She stared down at her Chucks where they rested on the step below. "I feel crazy."
"I think that's normal."
She turned her chin to her shoulder so that she could study him again. A long pause hung between them before she asked, "Why did you come with me today?"
He shrugged one shoulder. "I find you interesting. And I didn't want you to be alone."
She continued to stare at him, like she was searching for a hidden truth, an archeologist sweeping away layer after layer of sand. Then she eased closer to him, so that her body moulded to his side, and she rested her head against his shoulder, tentatively, as if not entirely trusting he wouldn't push her away.
He paused a second, lost in the subtle tide of her warmth and the scent of her shampoo—something exotic that he wasn't sure he'd encountered before and yet tugged at his memory nonetheless. Then he wrapped his arm around her. When she sank further against him, the soft strands of her hair tickling his neck and jaw, he murmured, "Maybe you can't bring your parents back, but that doesn't mean you won't find family, love, that sense of home again."
She nodded against him.
The thud of his heart filled the pause.
Then she asked, "So, what now?"
He considered his answer before replying. "You should get some rest; if it's okay with you, I'll crash on the couch; then tomorrow, I'd like to take you out for breakfast."
She pulled back and looked up at him again. "As in a date?"
"It's kinda like what we did today, but without all the socks."
The comment was a risk, he knew that, but the small laugh she gave said that it had paid off.
He twisted to face her, his arm still wrapped around her shoulders. "It can be a date, if you like, or it can be me paying you back for lunch, nothing more. It's up to you."
She stared into his eyes. In the depths of her own eyes, something flickered, like the smallest of embers fighting for life. "I'd like it to be a date," she said.
He gave her a warm smile. "I'd like that, too."
She rested her head against his shoulder again.
The silence around them shifted. He didn't know what it held, but he wanted to find out.
oOoOo
"I'm sorry about Maureen," Henry said as he lowered himself onto the bottom step of the porch so that he sat beside Elizabeth. Even with his thick winter coat, the freezing cold stone nipped at him.
Elizabeth shook her head. "She has an opinion and she's not afraid to share it. I like that in her." Her words fogged before her, like the plumes of their breath that sailed up into the night's sky. Even with the haze of light that hung above the city, the stars were visible, tiny winks of white.
Henry passed her the present, wrapped in matt gold paper, that he clutched in one hand. It was a small miracle that he'd managed to keep it hidden from her until now; apparently, Elizabeth Adams didn't do patience when it came to Christmas presents. (Or anything else…)
She stared at the present, and then looked up at him. Her eyes shone. "What's this?"
"A gift." He tried to rein back his smile, but it broke through, a curl at the corners of his lips.
"But Christmas isn't until tomorrow," she said, although she had already slipped her thumb beneath one of the taped-down flaps.
"This is more of a 'thank you for coming here with me and thank you for being you' gift."
The tape snapped free. "I'd like to see Hallmark try and fit that on a card."
He chuckled.
She tore off the paper, letting the shreds flutter down to the snow-dusted ground at her feet.
The look of delight that lit her face when she saw what was inside was more than enough reward for him and it made his chest swell with warmth. The feeling almost distracted him from the way his stomach jittered with nerves, knowing what he had to say next.
"Socks!" She grinned down at the pale-and-dark-blue striped socks, the image of two geese, one of which wore a bow tie, kissing beneath a sprig of acid green mistletoe, printed on the legs.
The jitter in his stomach prevented him from meeting her eye, and his gaze dipped to the gap where their thighs almost touched. "I like you, Elizabeth. I really like you. And I know we've only been together a few months and it isn't something we need to talk about yet, but I want you to know that I see a future with you, and one day, I'm hoping that maybe I get to be the one to help you rebuild your family and home. And it's okay if you aren't there yet, I'm not expecting you to say anything in return, but, I guess what I'm trying to say—"
"Henry?"
He fell silent and looked at her expectantly.
"You're babbling and I love you."
He stared at her, his eyes wide. "You do?"
She nodded, and the smile that danced in her eyes said that it was true.
The warmth in his chest swelled so much that his heart felt like it might burst. He cupped her cheek, and half leaning in towards her, half drawing her towards him, he kissed her—perhaps a little too enthusiastically, for their teeth clashed.
"Ow. Henry. Teeth."
"Sorry," he mumbled against her lips, and he kissed her again, with a little more control this time. But then, midway into the kiss, it struck him that he'd forgotten to mention one important thing. He drew back once more, and with his forehead rested to hers, his hand still cupping her cheek, relishing her gentle warmth, he said, "I love you, too."
"Hmmm, I figured." Her words hummed against his lips. She threaded her fingers through his hair and pulled him back into the kiss.
When the socks fell from her lap and tumbled to the ground, neither of them noticed. But later, when Henry picked them up for her and dusted off their frosting of snow, he gazed up into the dark blue sky, with its endless expanse of stars and the red and green flash of a plane's navigation lights, and he sent up a prayer into the unknown.
Thank God for the god of lost things.