Trev, I

The singer crooned the last of the lyrics, and the piano, rounding out the song with a delicate flourish, played Bonnie and Trev off the dance floor and through the open door into the late summer night. The outside air was balmy still, but just enough cooler on Bonnie's skin to feel like a welcome caress. The flagged terrace, lit along its balusters by a few twinkling boxwood spires, was scarcely less dark than the Hall behind them, but, in compensation, below, on the edge of the night-shadowed garden, the refreshment tent blazed brightly, its partly-transparent canopy aglow with the light of a myriad Chinese lanterns. A babble of voices, sweet with the occasional laugh, wafted up to them from in and around the tent, drawing them irresistibly to the stairs and down, into the festive atmosphere.

As was her wont, Bonnie no sooner spied the gorgeous display of beautifully-crafted pastries than she was beset by horrible indecision. Trev, knowing she could starve in a patisserie for want of being able to choose, simply followed behind her filling a plate as she agonized over the selections, and when it was mounded precariously high with goodies, he took her gently by the elbow and pulled her through an exit toward a pair of wrought-iron chairs and a table standing just inside the oval of the tent's golden light. Bonnie's eyes widened as he carefully set his tower of treats in the table's center. "We'll never eat all that!"

But they did, the cookies, cakes and chocolates disappearing piece by piece as, absorbed in each other's stories of how they'd spent their time apart, they noshed absently away, barely tasting what they put in their mouths or licked from their fingertips. Trev had packed so much activity into his ten weeks, and some of it of so adventurous a nature, that Bonnie listened far more than she spoke, and, at points, almost breathlessly. There were a great many firsts: he'd judged a beauty pageant and, in the aftermath, gone on a few dates with the evening's Miss Congeniality; he'd hit the Vegas gaming tables one weekend with his cousins (and won big); he'd explored, one after another, a variety of new sports — sky-diving, rock climbing, spelunking — and, of course, he'd just returned from two solid weeks backpacking in Colorado with his old buddy, Bishop. "Remember him?"

"I do! Frank Bishop, right? I've always wondered if he felt the need to live up to his name, or if it he was just naturally blunt."

"He can be brutally honest," Trev allowed, "but I actually like that about him."

A dainty petit four, almost lost among the discarded paper doilies, was all that remained of their sweet feast. Trev inched the plate her way, but Bonnie shook her head, and motioned for him to take it. She waited until he'd popped it in his mouth before asking, mock-innocently, "Did you just not get around to whitewater kayaking up at Great Falls?"

He regarded her quizzically. "Didn't I mention?" The words came out muffled by cake. He shot her a sheepish look and took time to swallow. "I did that, must've been, first week in July. How'd you guess?"

She smiled at him wryly. "Vegas, caving, wilderness camping — they're all things you've been wanting to try for years, but held off doing on my account."

"Because you weren't enthused," he agreed. "I'll admit that factored into my choices. I figured, as long as I was going to fly solo anyway, I might as well suit myself."

"And thumb your nose at me while you were at it. No," she forged on when he would have protested, "I get it. I do. Only… was it really necessary to go risking life and limb at every opportunity?"

It was lightly said, but Trev picked up the friendly reproach and smiled ruefully. "Early on, I needed to get out of my head in the worst way, and there's nothing like a little danger to force you to focus all your attention on the here-and-now. You miss a handhold or put a foot wrong, you're asking for a whole heap of trouble. The only option you have is to keep your mind completely in the game."

"And, for as long as it lasts, you forget how deep down in the dumps you feel." She nodded. "It helped me to stay busy, too. My family — bless them! — took turns keeping me too much on the go to brood." She told him, for laughs, about Eddie's taking her on a phony stake-out, but, while he listened with a smile, it was faint and didn't light his eyes. Her own smile faded as she tried to plumb his expression, and failed. "What?"

He didn't answer at once, and then, just when she'd begun to think he wouldn't, he brought out, "It wasn't the same, what we went through."

She drew a quick breath, stung, for what else could he mean but that he'd had a far rougher time of it than she'd had, that she had no business comparing her suffering to his? It might be true — was even likely — but that he'd raise the point, knowing it must hurt her, was an unkindness all the more cutting for being unlike him. "Of course not," she said, quickly. "I'm sorry if I seemed to imply…"

He stopped her, though, with a shake of his head. "You don't understand. And you can't," he added, heavily. "Because you don't know. Not everything." He slanted a suddenly self-conscious glance toward the tent, and Bonnie, following his gaze, saw why: a man and woman, full plates and wine glasses in their hands, stood awkwardly nearby, eyeing their table with undisguised envy. "Look, we should go. But could we walk, d'you think? In the garden?"

Bonnie responded by rising without demur, the chair scraping back against the brickwork with a rasp of distressed metal. She gestured to the crumb-strewn plate and balled-up wrappers. "What about all this?"

"I'll clear it, and be right back."

The couple, wreathed in grateful smiles, hurried up even as Trev stepped away, and by the time Bonnie had accepted their thanks and allayed their entirely formal fear of having chased them off with their hovering, Trev had returned.

The garden at the foot of the Great Hall terrace had nothing of the exuberance of the rose garden off the Jeffersonian's research wing. It was laid out in the French style, rigidly geometric and restrained. A neat brick walkway bordered the central parterre on three sides, and was edged, itself, by a procession of cherry trees on its flanks and a wall, complete with a tall, wrought-iron gate, at its end. Discreet lampposts alternated with park benches the length of the walk, shedding just enough soft light to guide their steps and illuminate the closer of the low hedges, mounds of summer annuals and marble statuary that formed the parterre's intricate design.

The night air had gone, by insensible degrees, from fresh to nippy, and Bonnie, as she paced silently beside Trev, found herself wrapping her hands about her arms and thinking longingly of the cashmere stole she'd left at the coat check.

"You cold?"

She'd been chafing her skin without thinking and stopped at the question, but Trev was already shucking off his jacket and in a moment, though she protested, he was draping it over her shoulders and adjusting it to fall about her like a cloak. The heavy silk retained so much of his body heat, she went from chilled to toasty between one breath and another. "Thank you."

"Happy to oblige."

They walked on, so far, the burble of voices dimmed to a distant murmur. Though it cost her an effort, Bonnie left it to Trev to break the silence, which he did, at last, with a bitter laugh. "The irony is, you're the one person I've always been able to talk to. About anything." He shook his head. "I don't even know where to start."

"You said it wasn't the same, what we went through," she reminded him.

He nodded, as if grateful for the prompt. "What I said about needing to get out of my head? It was about putting my blues on hold for a while, sure, but there was a lot more to it than that for me. I had other thoughts, other feelings, I couldn't handle."

"Such as?"

"Anger, mostly. Disgust…"

"With me?"

"No! Never!" He sounded genuinely shocked. "Why would you even think that? I have the utmost respect for you. Admiration, even. Your honesty, courage… They put me to shame."

It was Bonnie's turn to be stunned. "What're you talking about! I'm not the one jumping out of planes and squeezing into dark, narrow passages underground!"

"No, you've got a different brand of courage, a brand I haven't been able to muster 'til just recently. I'm not a physical coward — I proved that to my satisfaction — but the kind of bravery you have? To look a hard truth in the face and not flinch?" He shook his head grimly. "I didn't have it."

Bonnie nearly told him he was giving her too much credit, but instead, sensing that he needed her to, she asked, "What 'hard truth' do you mean?"

"The truth about us. That our relationship was getting onto shaky ground, that we might even be heading for a break-up. There was nothing obviously wrong — nothing I could put my finger on, anyway — but, still, I had this nagging feeling we weren't really connecting anymore, not like we had been. Things were fine, we were getting along great as ever, but something was off. Missing. Call it the spark, the thrill — whatever you want. I don't mean to say I felt we were just going through the motions, but things had gone a little lifeless, a little flat."

"When was all this?"

"I don't know, exactly. Last winter, I guess."

"You never said anything about it to me."

"No. Like I said, I buried my head in the sand. Told myself I was imagining things, being paranoid, mistaken. Or I made allowances: we were just going through a rough patch, or it was unreasonable to expect we'd be still in the honeymoon phase after nearly a decade together. Relationships get less exciting over time. That's just how it goes. Nobody stays on cloud nine forever."

Bonnie was suddenly put in mind of what Trev had offered her the night he'd proposed: no tremendous highs, or desperate lows, he'd said. A life of common joys, unfolding peacefully down the years. A comfortable life with love aplenty, but passion? Evidently, he hadn't expected that to figure in their future.

His thoughts must have been traveling along the same lines, since he asked, "Did you ever wonder, at all, why I popped the question when I did?"

"What finally tipped the balance, do you mean? No. I assumed you just felt it was time. I seem to recall Freya'd been dropping some fairly heavy hints about the clock ticking… Hold on!" She came to an abrupt halt, forcing him to pull up and turn back to her. "You were already having your doubts, then, weren't you? And you asked me to marry you anyway?"

"Not 'anyway,' no. Because of. I was always going to propose, you know that, but there'd never been any real urgency about it. Not until that vague feeling of uneasiness set in. And, after you started working at the Jeff, it actually got worse. You were preoccupied and distant, and, though I could rationalize that away as you being stressed out by a new job, it felt like we were drifting still further apart. I even got to thinking there might be another man. You remember I asked you, straight out."

"And I said no. Which was the truth."

"I know. I was conscious, even at the time, that I was probably only suspecting you of what I was guilty of, myself."

They had recommenced walking, but now Bonnie stopped again. "You were seeing other women?"

"Of course not — I'm not that much of an ass! — but I was looking in a way I hadn't looked in years, and that rattled me. I took it as another sign that what we had was slipping away, and I went into panic mode. I needed the kind of reassurance only being engaged to you could give me, so I gambled on you saying yes."

"And then I didn't."

"True, but you didn't give me the firm 'no' of my nightmares. 'Maybe' was encouragement enough."

They came to the end of the walkway, and, rounding one corner of the parterre, stood for a moment with the massive entrance gate at their backs and, before them, shrunk with distance, the brilliantly-lit Hall in its frame of night. Beyond the wall, cars whizzed by in an unbroken stream, filling the silence with a steady whoosh.

Trev set them strolling again. "The doubts came roaring back, of course. All it took was seeing you and Baer together at the art show, and later, at the carnival. A person'd have to be blind not to see you were drawn to him, maybe even falling in love with the bastard, but, again, instead of facing my fears head on, I pulled that stupid stunt at the karaoke bar." He gave his head a rueful shake. "Not my finest hour."

"No," Bonnie agreed, "but part of the fault was mine. I shouldn't've left you hanging for three months."

"And I shouldn't've held on. Especially not after that fiasco. I've thought a lot about that day at Ashby Pond, Bonnie, about the chance I had, and blew, to redeem myself. I knew, even while we were sitting on that bench, that a real man, the kind of man I thought I was, would've found the inner strength to let you go. I failed you there, and I'm sorry. We both know if you'd had to give an answer that day, it would've been 'no,' and there was no reason to assume ten more weeks of stewing would've made any difference. The opposite, in fact. The decent thing, the loving thing to've done under the circumstances would've been not to prolong the agony. Sooner or later, one of us was going to have to endure the pain of ending our relationship, but it didn't have to be you, Bonnie. I could've been generous and taken that on myself, but I didn't. I couldn't set you free, and for the most shameful reason of all: I was terrified."

Bonnie shot Trev a startled look, half-convinced he must joking, but there was no hint of humor, self-deprecating or otherwise, on his face. "I can see how you might be anxious about being on your own again, or even afraid you won't find somebody new, but… terrified, Trev?"

"Scared out of my ever-lovin' mind. Something happened, you see. Something I didn't ask for, and certainly didn't want. I… er… fell in love."