Rose and Landon kissed. It was the beginning and end of everything.
Chapter Seven
“Oh my God, Dave!” Landon dropped his bags on the floor, surprised by his visceral reaction to seeing his seatmate. It felt so good to see someone familiar, even just the back of his head.
Oi!” Dave turned around and yelled. “That guy was next to me on the flight over!” he said to no one in particular, but loud enough he clearly thought it was for the benefit of the room.
After Poppy’s upsetting news, Landon had walked straight out of the pub, promptly remembered he needed his bags from Poppy’s locked car, and all but plugged his ears as she told him to leave the country like an old record prone to repeating, thanks to one near-invisible scratch. Then he’d walked—safe in the knowledge that in a city that catered to as many tourists as Edinburgh, he would find a cheap place to lay his head well before he was too tired to keep looking. Five minutes later, he had a private room at Kick Ass Greyfriars Hostel and was headed for a date with a frosty pint of beer when he’d spied Dave’s meticulously hairless head on a barstool next to a wall-to-wall painting of a man in a kilt walking a Scottish terrier.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Landon realized withsome embarrassment that on the plane, in his wretched state, he hadn’t asked Dave whyhehad made the trip.
Dave patted the barstool beside him. “I’m moving the wife and kids out here,” he said. “Figured I’d stay somewhere on the cheap. About to decimate my life savings and all.”
“Right,” Landon said, finding the cheery tone with which Dave said “decimate my life savings” a bit off-putting. “That’s sensible.”
“Thank God for that pill, though,” Dave said, all smiles. “My wife says this would have sent me over the edge before. My other was an Englishman through and through, apparently. Now, if she’s been watching too muchOutlanderand says she wants to take a new job in Scotland, I don’t have any fucking baggage about it. It’s just, ‘Yes, let’s go. Let’s do it.’ Whynotdo it, you know?”
“Sure.”
Dave waved at the bartender. “Best whisky you have. On the rocks, on me.”
Landon’s stomach rumbled, and he desperately wished he’d just thrown back that hamburger at the Brass Monkey. “What are the chances you know firsthand this place serves food?”
“Better than your odds against the dealer at blackjack.”
Landon had a fleeting memory he tried very hard to tamp down of an inflatable chapel with neon flashing lights. “In layman’s terms,” he said.
“I know for a fact you can at least get a heap of french fries, and fast.”
Landon waved at the waiter. “French fries,” he said. “Enough to drown a man, please.”
“And that whisky,” Dave reiterated. “This man likes his whisky.”
Before Landon could think too deeply about whether he needed another shot and a half of hard liquor, the glass was in front ofhim, ice already melting along the sides. Fries followed swiftly after in a metal tin that looked more like a bucket than a bowl.
“Can I tell you something?” asked Landon through the five french fries he’d quickly stuffed in his mouth.
“We’re seatmates,” Dave said, with more than a hint of humor. “You can tell me anything.”
Landon took a sip of the whisky and immediately regretted it. “The girl that I told you about,” Landon began.
“The reason you got in the metal tube.”
“Yeah,” Landon said. “She’s not dead.”
Dave snorted. “Well, obviously. Knew she wasn’t dead. Figured she left you. I just assumed you were headed here to win her back. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Landon was momentarily speechless. What was it in him that Dave had read so easily? “You’re not wrong.”
“And I never have been,” Dave said, puffing out his chest. “Except for three times I can remember, but we’re not close enough yet that I would give you the details.”
Landon didn’t care in the least. “Yes, well, maybe someday when we’re close enough you’ll fill me in.”
“Definitely I will.” Dave was drunk. It wouldn’t stop Landon.
“Though I guess that’s only halfway true. A version of her is gone. She took the pill.”
Dave sat back on his hands. “Should have put two and two together, I guess. And I pride myself on my puzzling. You ever do the daily crossword?”