“They like you,” she explained, loving him for worrying over it.
“Oh.” His smile returned as he lifted her hand to his lips. “I like them too. Do you think they might like to go back with us?”
Her heart pounded like a drum, making her sick and queasy. He wanted to go back.
“Doyouwant to go back?” she asked in a whisper-soft voice.
His smile remained intact, but Aria had admired it too many times to know when it wasn’t genuine.
She spotted her mother approaching and smiled along with him.
“Let me get the coffee, dear,” her mother offered. “Go sit with Gray.”
“No, Mom, you go sit,” Aria insisted. “Gray will help me.”
She waited until her mother returned to the table. Rather than try to question Gray about going back and risk one of them brooding for the rest of the night, she’d just have to make certain he didn’t want to go back. She would do that by showing him how much the world had to offer in the twenty-first century. She’d start tomorrow, though. Even though it had been just two weeks since she’d seen her family, it felt as though a lifetime had passed. She didn’t want to be away from them again so soon.
“What would you say is your favorite thing about our country, so far?” asked Aria’s father.
Aria smiled at him for the millionth time since her poor eyes had found him walking toward her earlier. Her father wasn’t a slowly dying paraplegic. He looked healthy, twenty years younger. She felt her eyes begin to burn and looked at her hands so she wouldn’t start crying and they all thought she was crazy.
Then she heard Gray’s reply, and she quickly swiped her cheek.
“The intimacy of your meals,” Gray said, without thinking about it long—as if he’d already contemplated his reply. “Here, in this small homey room, at this small table, surrounded by people you love and eating food your wife cooked with her own hands, is my favorite thing. It’s what I’ve always wanted.”
“Were you raised away from your parents?” Aria’s mother asked him in a soft voice.
“Yes,” he told her. “I lost my mother as a young boy. My father soon remarried a woman who saw me as nothing but an obstacle for her own son.”
“Well,” Aria’s mother declared, “As long as you are a part of Aria’s life, we’ll always do our best to make you feel like a treasured part of our family.”
Surely, Aria thought smiling at her mother and then at Gray, he would choose this life over his previous one.
She didn’t have a chance to speak to him in private again after that. Her mother assigned him to sleep on the sofa, then ushered Aria into her bedroom.
After counting sheep…and foxes and ravens, she tossed and turned for another hour.
Finally, and as quietly as she could, she slipped out of bed and tiptoed to her door. She really had no idea why she left her room, except that she couldn’t sleep thinking about Gray with nothing to separate them but a thin door.
She wouldn’t climb onto the couch with him. She wouldn’t do anything disrespectful in her parents’ house. She just wanted to see him, maybe talk to him. She liked talking with him. His voice calmed her, his words encouraged her, his heart revealed itself to her.
When she entered the living room, he sat up on her mother’s sofa and whispered her name in the dim light.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, going to him.
“I couldn’t sleep either,” he told her, then pulled her closer when she sat next to him.
“Why couldn’t you sleep?” she asked first.
He was quiet for a moment, and she thought she heard his slow heartbeat in the silence. Then the horn of a car blared from outside and his arm came around her tighter.
“Thoughts of you kept me awake,” he admitted. “I finally found you. I don’t want to spend the rest of my days without you.”
She closed her eyes, wanting to tell him that she didn’t want to be apart from him either.
“I haven’t felt like Dartmouth was home since I can remember.”
She believed him, but still, she heard a wistful longing in his voice. Was the longing for the time before his mother left? Or for something he wished he’d received from his father?