Page 42 of Across Time

"We don't have better things to do."

He gives me a sidelong glance, a doubting one.

I struggle to explain what I mean. It’s nothing I thought about, before I began to spend time here with Marie and Henri, but as the words emerge I know they are unequivocally true. "At home you can watch TV for hours and hours, but when you leave it the time has gone and you have nothing to show for it. You don't even feel rested. You just feel tired, a little empty. And it’s not memorable at all. All the hours you spend blend together.”

“This will be memorable, at least,” he says, nodding at the sun as it begins to set. The light retracts, sinks into itself until it looks like an orange ready for picking, just over the next hill. Sitting here, with the sun almost close enough to touch, a light breeze blowing, is an experience no show or movie could possibly replicate.

"We don't do this at home either," I say quietly, unpacking the basket. “Watching the sun set, I mean.”

He glances at me. "For all your inventions, I think I'm glad I'm not from your time."

I might believe he was better off in 1938 too, if I didn’t know what lies ahead for him. "It's much safer.”

"I think you value safety far too highly," he says. "What use is it, if you have to give up the things you love in exchange?" I’m about to ask what precisely he thinks I’m giving up when he hands me a glass of wine. “Are you going to be okay with this?” he asks, nodding at the wine. “Walking back on the crutches?”

I laugh, holding the red liquid up to the dying light. "As you’ve stated, I have a hollow leg. I’ve never been drunk once in my life. And a glass back home is four times this size.”

"Perhaps that's why there's so much free love in your day."

I roll my eyes. “Rumor has it sex is enjoyable. Isn’t that reason enough?”

“Rumor has it?” he repeats. “What does that mean? I thought in your time sex ‘wasn’t a big deal’?”

I feel my cheeks heat and stare out at the vineyard to avoid his eye. "I was raised in a very religious household. Waiting for marriage...it’s just one of those things my mother was very focused on."

He leans back. "For someone raised by a woman as awful as your mother, you certainly seem to care a lot about what she thinks."

I look at the sun without really seeing it. "She’s my mother. It’s not something I can help.”

His arms cross, broad shoulders straining the fabric of his shirt. “I think I’d try, in your case,” he says, not unkindly. “I certainly wouldn’t allow her to dictate my behavior if I were you.”

“She’s not,” I argue. “Mark and I…this summer when I get back, we’re…never mind.”

The tendons in his forearms are suddenly visible. "What do you mean?"

I flush. "I mean that part of the deal with me leaving this summer so suddenly was...that."

Henri's jaw drops. "You had to agree to sleep with this man solely in order to go on a trip?"

It irks me, the way he always manages to spin Mark’s behavior into something evil. "No, of course not. You're twisting what I said. We're getting engaged once I'm back, which is as good as married, for one thing. But also it was shitty, the way I cancelled on him. So I ...promised to make it up to him."

His jaw draws tight. "A good man would not accept that offer. And a woman who knew her own value wouldn't have made it."

I roll my eyes. "I'm not giving away a kidney. It's sex. I assume I'll enjoy it as well."

"That's not how you decide to sleep with someone. You choose it when you can no longer stand not to choose it, no sooner."

It all sounds good, but I’ve never felt like that and I don’t imagine I ever will. I’ve sometimes wondered if I’m just missing some hormonal impulse I’m supposed to have, although given how I react to the sight of Henri without a shirt, it certainly seems to be making an appearance now.

“Like I said, in my time, we don’t take everything quite so seriously. You’re allowed to just enjoy what you enjoy without it having to mean something.”

He is watching me again. “You’re so busy defending the attitudes of your time, but you agree with me that it should mean something, or you’d have done it already. And if you’ve been with him for two years, it probably should have meant something by now.”

I stare at the wine in my glass, as something rises in my throat, a lump that clogs it and makes me anxious I might cry. He's wrong, of course. I'm certain of it.

I'm just not quite as certain as I was.

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