Until We Meet Again

There is nothing I detest more than boredom. Yet, I believe it in me that some people revel in it because boredom is predictability. It is safe. And more people than not desire safety and security more than anything else in life, as much as they do not want to admit it. Like so many others, I have lived my life most entirely this way. Concerned about a reputation. A credit score. I am engaged to be married to someone I do not love at all and I work a job I don't like at all because, thus far, safety and security dictated my fortune. And thus, I am incessantly bored and so I entertain myself in whatever little ways I can. I sometimes borrow library books and don't return them. 

I became a lawyer because my father is a lawyer and his father was a lawyer before he became a judge. When you grow up in a house of lawyers, you come to know that a judgeship is a lawyer's Heaven. As much as they say, "Kid, you can be anything," we don't really have choices in some matters. Our future is often persuasively determined by our parents. I suppose I could have been a doctor. Or an accountant, or a banker, and not been completely shunned. But I wouldn't want to be a doctor because it seems that you would always have people asking you about some pain or condition, or whether you think that they have cancer or not because of an unusual lump or a discolored mole. 

And my father and his father, The Judge, as we all call him rather than grandfather because he is a stuffed shirt and seemingly always sitting in judgment of someone or some thing, would have berated me every Thanksgiving or occasion when I was forced to see them had I been a lowly accountant. They would have called me something like "the numbers boy" or "the bean-counter" no matter how successful I was and no matter how happy. Happiness is not a concern of theirs. Success is measured in gratuitous adulation and social prominence, not in happiness or peace, according to my family. It is somewhere in my family creed, worded in Olde English like so: Thou shall be grateful to be miserable for all thine days.  

So it is bad enough that I am a criminal defense attorney and didn't follow them into prosecutorial or contract law, but such was the daring extent of my variance. My ever-so subtle way to set myself apart from them and to be myself. Atticus Finch or Perry Mason, they call me. Or Ben Matlock. Or any TV or movie defense attorney you can imagine. The Judge always says, "Still representing the under privileged criminal element, are we, boy?"

"Forever and a day, Judge," I reply. "I will undoubtedly be defending the wretched masses in Hell at the trial of their own condemnation." He always got a chuckle when I responded so defiantly. It tickled a bone inside him. He enjoyed the banter because it afforded him the opportunity to win, to defeat me with some clever words of his witty retort. And he always did. He was one of those rams who like to butt horns with worthy adversaries, or else he didn't talk to you. He likes being called The Judge and I am not sure what would ever become of him had someone called him "grandfather," much less "granddad" or "grandpa" or something with any hint of affection and sentimentality. I think he would be something like a vampire in the sun. I think he would turn to dust and blow away and reshape somewhere else as something more terrible than that he was.

I have earnest disdain for The Judge because it was he who introduced me to Rebecca, my fiance. Rebecca's father is a federal appeals court judge and a colleague of his and she is well connected to all the right people. She has dinner with the governor and a senator on a regular basis, he reminded me before we ever met. She is the sort of woman you need to have the life you ought, so he put it. That was the extent of his spelunking in the cave of women's liberation.  

The Judge wanted me to become a politician someday and carry the Roth family name further, as though we were a corporation of some sort beholden to shareholders. Politically we were of similar minds, but emotionally and spiritually I don't think we could be further apart. Rebecca was an outwardly beautiful woman and any one who would see us together would say that fortune certainly favored me, but the image concealed a dark secret. She was a witch who if you were to know her would justify a thousand years of witch burning. Rebecca was a corporate lawyer and she was as cold and dark as Lake Erie. But I gave in and overlooked so much because that is what I was supposed to do and it was what I had always known - cold couples matched for a financial or social benefit.  

She told me when I proposed to her, which was the closest thing I can remember to taking cough medicine as a child, that I needed only to give her two things: orgasms and a child. If I couldn't do that, the marriage was null and void. One child. No more. And she promised as though she was reading the terms of a contract that she would be loyal, as though it were an exceptional clause, and that she would not infringe upon my agreed upon liberties if I vowed to do the same of hers. 

A few days later, she gave me an actual contract of everything she said and more - 17 pages with 34 different clauses, terms and conditions, and she made me sign and gave me a copy which she told me to file and keep for my records, if I wished. And as though it were a gesture of hot romantic fervor, I grinned mawkishly at her and tore it up, but she was not impressed by my imprudence and said, "Suit yourself, buster." Then I noticed that she was wearing a different engagement ring and when she saw the disappointment cloud in my eyes she mentioned casually that it was the one she actually wanted, so, of course, she upgraded. It amazed me that I continued to find ways to be disappointed in her, but so I was. Every single day that I was around her, she became more shallow and less lovable until she were but a pile of sticks and dead leaves. 

We spent Saturdays looking for a house. We did not live together and I enjoyed the stay of execution so the more we disagreed, the better off it was for me, though it was merely postponing the inevitable. The wedding was in January and now that it was October, my liberty was waning. I knew that when we were married, there wasn't going to be a divorce. Divorce is for degenerates, she remarked repeatedly. She believed it as well. She believed that marriage was a miserable but necessary institution and happiness was more an imposter than a tenant. And that "love" was Latin for reassurance and compatibility, nothing more. I've begun to believe she might kill me because she said there is something dignified about being a widow in such a way. It sounded as though she salivated over the word. She thoroughly frightens me to my bones, which somehow chill and rattle in her presence. 

But as for a house, she wanted something modern. I did not. I wanted a historic home. Something brick or with plantation-style Grecian pillars. But I knew that my opposition was futile for she had a way of wearing me down, even for something as slight as dinner plans or what tie I was to wear to some fancy dinner. And all the while we searched for houses I tinkered with my string, which she hated, having formed a witch's broom and Jacob's ladder, hoping to figure out the cat's cradle. But it was the only liberty I asked for in our engagement contract which was forever protected in black-and-white filed under oath and seal in some vault with dozens of old deeds and wills. No football Sundays or nights out with the guys. No beer or whiskey drinking. Just me and my string, to tinker with as I pleased. 

It was something I have done for years. And when I wasn't shaping the string to make something new, the sting was on my wrist as a bracelet. It was as though I was doing more then simply trying to make something someone has already made before. I was trying to make something no one had ever. Like a door or a window to another a world. It was an escape for me when I was nervous. When I was a child, I was a nervous child frequently plagued by the collywobbles, and I thought maybe I could make a door and go through it. To escape my reality and the perturbation of my predicament. The string eased my mind. Needless to say, Rebecca hated it. Something as simple as a piece of string, she loathed, and would happily see it burned. Or she hated my preoccupation with it. I never showed her what I made, nor was she interested. I simply made something and then stared at it for a moment or two and then undid it. It only needed to amuse me to keep it's purpose. She allowed me this eccentricity, forgave me of it, really, for I tolerated her petty cruelty and her travels with her father who raised her more as a protege than a daughter. She was the type of woman who could not sit still. But her travels gave me freedom, which I very much enjoyed. 

And in such freedom, as tonight attending a fundraising masquerade ball at The Pinkney Estate, an early 19th century home turned museum, donated to the city by someone wealthy long ago for heritage sake. Since I was a boy I rode my bike past this beautiful downtown home and felt such an inexplicable draw to it. And once in sixth grade our class took a field trip to The Pinkney House where people who dressed in period clothes showed us around. I wandered off and got lost for a moment and in a beautiful bedroom with a four-post bed and white crotched curtains and blankets, the air thick of the malodorous splendor of ancient wood, I found the string for my game lying there as though someone who passed before me had only recently dropped it or else it had been there for ages and ages for only me to notice. I snatched it up, not knowing what it was, curious of the simple loop of string and I stuffed it in my pocket so to have a souvenir because I was not afforded anything from my mother or father that day for the gift shop. They said something like, let the historical appreciation of the museum be your gift. Though they were wealthy, they were frugal. They were tight asses, one might say. It was some kind of lesson, my father said. An austerity lesson a boy could not grasp. 

So with understandable excitement, I was returning to The Pinkney House as a young lawyer, in period clothing, to socialize with other young professionals and old timers and whoever else comes to such things. I had never been to anything of the like so I knew not what to expect other than dinner and drinks and, according to the brochure, an oration by a local historian of the house itself and the family who inhabited it. His name was John Nelson Cockney and he was educated at Greenbriar, which was a university of some esteem. Mostly couples came in, but there were others who came alone so I didn't feel terribly out of place. I wandered around in the candle and lamplight and my neck stiffened with all my awe-inspired gawking. For as grand as I recalled it as a child, it had fallen into a state of decay and was in desperate need of repair. The purpose of the fundraiser was to raise enough money to fix the place up because the city would be forced to sell it if not. What money they used to put into such things as museums and parks and libraries, they were now allocating to rehab centers and drug treatment programs and social workers for a growing population of junkies.

The house, which was once immaculate, was in need of exterior paint. The white bricks were peeling. The paint on the columns was peeling and some of the framing was rotting. It was evident that some things were patched but they wouldn't last. There were a few broken windows and water damage visible on the ceilings of several rooms and the wallpaper was coming off the walls in spots. But despite it all, it was marvelous still. I wandered through much like I had when I was 11. I made my way to the bedroom where I remembered I found my string and it had changed not a bit. Even the scent was as I recalled it, a potpourri of aged wood and old plaster and I stood there enchanted for a long moment, the string dangling from my fingers when a voice awoke me from my reverie, most unfortunately, until I saw who it was. 

"You look as enchanted as I," she said so melodically it was as though she sang it without singing at all. I turned to regard her and she was beautiful. Short with long dark hair and darker eyes. Beautiful was vast understatement. She instantly trumped all known adjectives and if it wasn't so imprudent to say, I would tell you that I loved her immediately and no such woman of equal visual worth existed across all of time. I forgot instantly that I was an engaged man, cruelly and regrettably or otherwise. I simply forgot everything. Every little thing. And I stood there like I was rebooted or reborn by her presence. 

"Where did you get that string?" she inquired. 

I too had forgotten the string. And briefly how to talk. Her dark eyes pierced through me. But I roused myself awake to answer if only for the sake not to be rude. 

"I found it here. Um. Years and years ago. I was - um - 11. It was - uh - a sixth grade field trip," I admitted, stumbling on my words. 

She took pity on me with a smile and said she didn't mean to spook me but that she too had been here before and was in love with the place just as I appeared to be. And I agreed that I was, as evident by my childlike  gawking. 

"It helps with the collywobbles."

"The collywobbles?"

"Nerves. I have a nervous disorder of sorts." My hands felt clammy and I wiped them on my pants. "My name is Mitchell. Mitchell Roth." 

"I am Karissa," she smiled extending her hand to shake mine. I took her hand delicately, with great care, the sort of way I might have taken a gosling or a kitten if entrusted to me. I didn't want to let it go. The silk of her glove and warmth of the hand therein seemed to bring me to life, suddenly realizing I have never before been. But I did let go if only not to alarm her, and I stared at her wildly, understanding the moment was greater than me or any effort I could employ to describe it. She put me at ease when she asked me to join her to go downstairs. 

"Dr. Cockney is to begin his history lesson and there is the dance thereafter. I seldom have such an entertaining night afforded to me as this, so if not to sound too forward, Mr. Roth, I would like to ask you to accompany me this evening." 

"The way you talk," I marveled. 

"I dress and talk in the period," Karissa explained with a grin. "As the brochure requested." 

"You like history?"

Her face lit up with a new smile. "Indeed. I practically live it."

At Karissa's request, I accompanied her to Dr. Cockney's lecture on the heritage of The Pinkney House. The way she flowed down the stairs was something to behold. It was as though she had no feet at all. She moved with a grace and eloquence I have before never known. All throughout the lecture she kept looking at me. It was as though I've known her all my life, as cliched as that sounds. She reached over and held my hand at times and her smile and the sparkle of her eyes in the light of the chandelier mesmerized me much more so than the dry Dr. Cockney, interesting as he was talking of generations of Pinkney's and how they fared through pandemics, the Civil War and beyond. I couldn't wait for the lecture to end and for drinks, dinner and dancing. And finally when it came in the grand ballroom which was pink with carnations flowering across the wallpaper, Karissa and I melted together. Every sentimental analogy and metaphor I ever lampooned or that was ever expressed in those foul supermarket romance novels my mother adored and Hallmark movies I loathed, we lived there and then across the next few hours.

But it was inevitable that it had to end. The organizers of the fundraiser announced it was all over way too soon. While Karissa and I were talking in the garden patio we seemed to have lost track of time and missed the auction and the raffle and whatever else was happening inside in the waning hours of the party. We made love with our eyes and our words and we were like statues of some Greek lovers, turned to stone. We were very much amused in each other's company, enraptured in the moment, on the patio that was drenched in moon glow and stardust. A squeaky lady, whose costume made her look like The Liberty Bell with a face came to inform us the party was ending. She recognized me from some dinner party months before that I entirely forgot. She knew Rebecca and her family and immediately asked, "Mitchell Roth? The attorney. You are engaged to Rebecca Graves, right?" 

She realized it too late to change what she clumsily had said. She gave me a curious and slightly frightened look as she warned me the party was nearly over and if I wished to make a donation, there was an old green milk can by the door. I should have told Karissa before, but the conversation afforded me no opportunity to explain the horror of my engagement in such a way that I wouldn't have ruined the moment or altered the mood so significantly that it could not be restored. I wanted to ask her for her number or her to coffee sometime, but my bad luck reared its ugly head and the meddlesome lady who intruded damaged my surreal and ever-so-brief romance so mortally that it was not to recover. Such is how it goes. After the bell-shaped lady left I tried to explain, but Karissa smiled and said I needn't in such a way that I knew why romance had never favored me. There was always such sabotage lying in wait for me, it seemed, and more often than not, of my own doing. 

Karissa smiled and thanked me for a wonderful evening. She gave me a gracious hug and went back inside and I sat for a moment on the patio and played with my string. It was my old friend. My retreat. Maybe I could create something that would trap me here forever. And her. If ever a trap can be a romantic getaway. A spiderweb for lovers absent the deadly creator of the device. But in my fit of agitation, not even the string would help me relax. Perhaps, I consoled myself, if meant to be it would be. But how many times had I killed myself with that illogical adage? How many? All the beautiful things and women I let slip through my fingers for one reason or another, all under the guise that fate would see to it that we would be if meant to be. I've never been one to dwell. 

"Until we meet again," I said glumly to the vapors of her that reminded on the patio.  

Then in a fit of determination that was foreign to me, I put my string back on my wrist and sought to find her quickly before she left, hoping something delayed her or that she stopped to retrieve her coat or to use the lady's room. But she was not in the ballroom nor the foyer, and there were only taillights leaving the parking lot which faded miserably away. I never got her last name and a search of Karissa's on social media was the vaunted needle in a haystack. I could not find her. I thought about our conversation and if there were any clues I could go on that would help me find her, but she never said what she did for a living and we mostly spoke about poetry and poets and of each other's personal affinity for astrology and classical architecture. She was a wonderful listener. She, like me, said of herself that she was born in the wrong era, and that she never believed that she belonged. 

A miserable month later, I heard that the fundraiser didn't make enough to restore The Pinkney House and that it was going to be sold. I added the address to the list of houses for Rebecca and I to look at the following Saturday after we had sushi, though I knew she would not entertain the idea in the least of living in a historic fixer-upper. We both reserved the right to cross one house off the weekly list and it was the house she crossed off mine, though I had intentionally added some duds I thought she would hate much more so at least she would see it. I don't even know why I was entertaining the idea of looking at houses still. I suppose it was three decades of conditioning and that prospective political seat in congress. 

So I broke up with Rebecca over the sushi. I couldn't stand to look at 8 hours of houses with her. Houses that felt like hell to me. To listen to her yap with the real estate agent whose voice was that of an intolerable whine, a prepubescent child shoved through a wood-chipper. I couldn't stand the thought of her droning on about the specs of the houses. About granite countertops and parquet floors and custom oak cabinets and vaulted ceilings and Jack and Jill bathrooms. So I told her we were over. It only hurt her because she had never been dumped and when I said it gives me no pleasure to be the first, she looked as though she wanted to stab me in the eye with her fork. But I left the restaurant unscathed and took an Uber home. I don't know where she went. I frankly didn't give a damn. 

My family was going to kill me, I thought. The Judge would eviscerate me and if I wasn't the black sheep before, I certainly was now. I knew that was an inevitability I'd have to face at some time or another, but for a while I would turn off my phone and live the way I preferred to live. As though it were 1923 and I hadn't a care in the world. Karissa and talked of twenties and thirties music and we agreed it was our favorite era. I dreamed of a phonograph and old records paying, the crackling of the silence before, between and after songs, the wonderful melodies and the beautiful voices within. I went home and drank whisky and put on old records. My favorites. Ted Lewis, Cab Calloway, Al Bowlly, Tommy Dorsey, Vaughn Monroe, The Ink Spots, and Cole Porter. Early Frank Sinatra when his voice was not yet matured. When it was vulnerable and free. I played them all. Then after a sufficient amount of inspiration from the music and the whisky, I decided to pursue my hunt for Karissa. Maybe it wouldn't work between us, maybe I was only dreaming, but I had to know. 

I called The Pinkney House under the ruse that I wanted to make a donation, but since the decision was made to sell they were no longer accepting donations. I spoke to the bell-shaped lady who said she recalled me and I asked if they had a guest list because I needed to find someone I had seen there. She said they did to my surprise and offered to email it to me with no questions asked. I thought for certain that would at least give me Karissa's last name, but when I got the list there wasn't a Karissa on it. The thought occurred that perhaps Karissa was a middle name and her given name was on the guest list. Perhaps she was Lauren Karissa Wilder. Or Margaret Karissa Fox. Or Julia Karissa Lemay. But there was no Karissa listed. The thought also occurred that maybe she gave me a false name. Maybe, like me, she too was engaged and it would be quite a story to tell our grandchildren someday. 

Or maybe it was much simpler than all that. Maybe someone bought the ticket for her. Or it was gifted to her. Or she bought the ticket at the door and they didn't record the names of those people. I don't know. I just know that I had reached a most unfortunate dead end. I wasn't sorry about breaking up with Rebecca, who had since given me a chance to come to my senses, as she said of it. She could understand cold feet, she went on. Marriage is an institution. All that. But I did not relent and did not reply other than to tell her that I was gay, which would get me off the hook for a period of time. I think she had suspected me of being gay anyway, so in reality it was only confirming her suspicions. In fact, it made her all the more sure of herself and her intuitions as a woman, only it slightly damaged her ego in that she could not convert me, despite the magnitude of all her significant feminine wiles. 

I knew it was unwise to announce that I was gay, but it was an escape and similar in desperation to that of an animal chewing it's leg off caught in the jaws of a steel trap rather than being skinned and gutted and mounted to some shabby-chic upscale modern wall to stare at IKEA furniture all day. When my family found out, they would cringe for it wasn't my first time using the gay escape. I had broken off two previous serious relationships the same way when the noose tightened and it was "shit or get off the pot" as The Judge would say of any lengthy relationship. I imagine there is a list somewhere, a fake gay list and my name is on it. Gay enforcers will probably someday track me down and give me a beating for pretending to be gay. I am sure it happens all the time. 

Though I didn't really want to buy a house, I decided to go and have a look at The Pinkney House myself. I could probably pull off the loan with what I had saved for a down payment. It wouldn't leave much for fixing up, but it could be a 5-10 year project and I kind of liked the way it looked now. It wasn't perfect but in it's imperfection I felt at home. I like some water spots and uneven floors and a few doors that jam now and then and peeling lead paint. So I decided to buy the house. Maybe just to remember our night together. I enlisted the help of an agent friend of mine and he negotiated a more than fair price. I would spend my off time fixing it up and host a party every Halloween and maybe she would find her way back. I hoped that is how it was to work out, anyway. Sometimes that is all someone can do, is to hope. That is enough to keep some of us going. Those of us without motivation and ambitions, otherwise. 

I wasn't moved in very long at all when I was sitting there in the living room on a quiet evening, a Saturday, a night when other houses were filled with the noise of college football on some blaring TV which I did not have, purposefully. I was fidgeting with the string and had completed a very difficult cat's cradle when the French doors leading in to the dining room opened inexplicably on their own. I had never given any consideration to the fact that I might have mice or rats or some other unwanted tenants, but something made it's way into the shadows of the room and although I could not see it, I could feel it. I could hear it though it made not a noise at all. Though it scarcely breathed. All living things project the sound of their energy and it's filled my attentive ears. My hair stood on end and I kept otherwise still as I nervously peered around the room to no avail. The lights were dimmed and the shadows and darkness spread over the room. I do not know why I feared whatever it was. It certainly wasn't an intruder or I would have heard broken glass or footsteps, so that left only a few possibilities, those I've already named of the rodent sort, or ... 

"I don't mean to alarm you," she said softly. It in fact was an intruder. A most welcomed intruder. I recognized her voice and as she spoke, I immediately dropped the string. "But I'm afraid I have alarmed you." 

"It is good to be alarmed once in a while," I forgave her enthusiastically. Maybe I drank more than I thought, I reasoned. Maybe I had gone crazy. 

But she then came into my view as beautiful and as real as ever. "I see you bought the house. I would have made you a housewarming gift, but I am afraid I cannot bake, so perhaps my company will do?"

"Karissa. I don't understand," I returned meekly. I suppose I did understand, but I was hesitant to accept the obvious indication of her presence in such a way. Logic and reason are much harder to betray than I ever thought they would be and they are loyal to a fault. And this reality before me took me dumping every ounce of skepticism and pragmatism I had stowed in myself. This was returning to a time when I was 6 and believing that monsters lived under my bed and that aliens landed on my rooftop and Santa was always watching me. 

 

"I came with the drapes," she said coyly. "I thought maybe you wouldn't mind me saying so. Announcing myself. Or else I can return to the shadows of the room and bother you not at all. I can sequester myself to the parlor or even the attic, if you wish, but you see, I am a part of this house. What doesn't get listed in the realty paperwork. It is your home now and I do not wish to interfere with your plans or, well, in your engagement."

"I am no longer engaged."

She smiled. Her lips a perfect crescent in the moonlight of her face. Her eyes flooded with everything beautiful in the universe I had thought to exist but wasn't ever quite certain of. She was in a lovely mint green dress and I was in a t-shirt and sweatpants. Barefoot. The string dangling from my fingers no longer in the shape of the cat's cradle. No longer in the shape of anything. In the shape of that door or window that collapsed when it served it's purpose at last. 

"My name is Karissa Pinkney. I have lived here since 1822. I was never married. I was murdered before I ever met anyone and here I have been since. I am not sure what Heaven exists above us or what Hell below. I only know that whichever it is that I am to go hasn't yet sent anyone for me, so here I remain. And until I met you, Mitchell, I could not understand why. Now I do. I suppose God kept me here, all this time, just waiting for you. If I am not to be too presumptuous."

"Not presumptuous at all. Fully accurate, according to me, least my wishes," I replied in awe.

"And now I suspect that I will age naturally as you age and be given the life deprived of me long, long ago. A life that was, shall we say, interrupted."

I looked at her and couldn't move. I had never seen anyone as beautiful in my life. The title before belonged to a first grade teacher of mine, but she now burned at the stake of the memory and was a fatuous cloud of dwindling smoke and malodorous gas. Karissa redefined my concept of beauty and love and I am wholly enamoured whether she breathes or doesn't and whether blood runs through her veins or there is none at all. Whether she ages or doesn't and whether she is bound to the house or can leave it. Whatever her conditions are, they are my conditions, too. 

Some people buy a home and get termites. Or rodents. Or leaking water pipes and asbestos. Or maybe a stash of cash in the floorboards or some antique painting worth thousands tucked away in the attic. But the value of what I got was priceless. I got the perfect anachronism. She that I always wanted. 

We danced then, just as we danced every night from there forward. All throughout the house, in every room, up and down the stairs, in the wine cellar and the yard. In the moonlight, in the sunlight, in the wind and the rain and when there was seemingly nothing at all. And just as she surmised, she was unpaused, given life to live again by whatever authority there is that gives it. We fixed up the house to the way she wanted it and we hosted the grandest of parties for several holidays a year. I never had trouble explaining her, nor did she have trouble explaining herself. We were married the following year, in summer, when the magnolia trees were in full bloom and offered us their bouquets with outstretched arms. 

A short time later, Karissa found my string and asked if I was ever going to play with it anymore. 

"I don't need the string," I confessed as we lied down for bed. 

"Do you no longer suffer the malady of your collywobbles?" she asked.

"No," I replied gently, sighing in relief, smiling and caressing her hair. "And whatever door or window it is that I opened which you came through, I wish not to tinker with it for fear of losing you to the time from which you are borrowed."

"Borrowed? You make me sound like a library book," she laughed. 

"If you're a library book, you're one I don't ever intend to return, nor one I ever will finish reading."

"Or maybe you can read me, again and again, until my pages crease and my binding wears." Then we blew out the lamp which kept the light by our bed, and made love. No one would ever believe the story we were to tell had we to tell it. Not even Professor Cockney of Greenbriar. So we didn't bother to ever tell it. It was our secret. The best love stories are those lived, not told. I say the same thing to her every night after we make love and settle in bed, for every day and night is each and of its own, a love story within itself. "Until we meet again, my love."

"Tomorrow," she promises with a smile I cannot see through the darkness. "Tomorrow."