“No,” he says. “I have a few things I need to take care of at home. I’ll meet you tonight.” I try to gauge his words, but either he doesn’t know how she feels about him or he’s not reacting.
I pull my bag over my shoulder. Griffon rushes out the door ahead of me, and I’m sure that’s to avoid any more awkward conversations between the two of us.
Janine looks at me questioningly. “Everything’s fine. I’ll call you later,” I say, leaving her alone with Sue.
I decide to walk to the BART station, because it’s a nice day and I’m not meeting Drew until dinner. I push open the doors of Janine’s building to see Griffon sitting on his motorcycle by the curb out front. I glance at him and turn to walk down the street when he calls me back. I take a few more steps. I don’t want to talk to him right now. I kept it together during the meeting, but the less contact we have, the better for both of us.
“Wait!” he calls again.
I can’t exactly ignore him, so I turn and take a few steps back. “What?” I ask, glancing down the street to show him I have somewhere else to be.
“What was all that in there?”
“All what?”
“You were reading Giselle, and Janine set it up.” He shakes his head. “Neither of you is as sly as you think you are.”
“Maybe you should ask Janine about it.”
“I’m asking you,” he says. “What’s going on?”
“If I tell you, you have to keep it to yourself.” I sigh and force myself to look at his face. There are dark circles under his eyes, but aside from that, he looks as good as always. “I felt something dark in Giselle’s essence, something that she was trying to hide, and we needed to figure out what it was.”
Griffon looks surprised. “You thought Giselle had something to do with the theft of the formula? I could have told you both you were wrong. I’ve known her for centuries—she’d never go to the other side.”
“Maybe you’re a little too close to the subject to see it clearly,” I say.
Either he doesn’t get my implication or he ignores it. “So what was it? What did you see that made you change your mind?”
I hesitate. He’s not mine anymore, but that doesn’t mean I want to help Giselle. “It’s not my secret to tell.”
“Fair enough.” Griffon nods to the bike. “I’d give you a ride to the station, but I don’t have an extra helmet.”
I look down at the single helmet strapped to the side and wonder what he did with mine. “That’s okay. I’ll be fine.”
“I can walk with you if you want.”
I glance at the crowds of people on the street. I remember shopping on Telegraph with him before, eating pizza and buying records. The difference between where we were then and where we are now is almost unimaginable. Part of me wants to say yes, to have him walk down the street by my side again, but I know it won’t mean anything in the long run. I have to keep my promise to Drew. And to myself. “No. Thanks. I’m just going to go alone.”
He hesitates for just a moment. “Okay. Guess I’ll see you around.”
I try not to watch the familiar motion of him straddling the bike and pulling the helmet onto his head. My heart is heavy as I watch him stand up, kick the bike into gear, and rev the engine. That sound is always going to mean long rides up the Great Highway to me, feeling free and confident as I sat behind him. He flips up his visor and looks at me. “You were right, back at the hospital. When you said I didn’t give you any choice between me and Drew.”
Even now, the memory of that conversation hurts. “I wasn’t with him then.”
“But you are now.” Griffon doesn’t flinch at the words.
I pause, choosing my words carefully. “You left,” I say to him, watching his face. “Drew stayed.”
Griffon nods his head slowly, flips the visor back down, and guns the engine, pulling the bike away from the curb and into the stream of traffic.
Twenty-Seven
This time, Larry the security guard waves me through the lobby and toward the elevators. He must have buzzed Drew, because he’s waiting for me as the doors open.
“Hi,” I say, stepping into the apartment and trying to gauge his mood.
“Hi,” he says, hesitating just a second before he leans down and kisses me. He closes his eyes and shakes his head, holding one palm up against my cheek. “I want so much to be mad at you. But I don’t want to waste precious time on pointless emotions.”
“Good,” I say, reaching up to kiss him again, surprised at the relief I feel.
Drew steps back and takes both of my hands in his. “But no more holding things back, okay? Promise me you’ll tell me what’s going on. No more secrets?”
“Right,” I nod. “No more secrets from now on.”
“So, where do you want to eat?” he asks, keeping one of my hands in his and leading me into the living room.
“Doesn’t matter to me.”
Drew sits down on the big brown couch and pulls me down with him in a long kiss. We don’t say anything as we finally pull apart, each wrapped up in our own thoughts. I look at Drew’s hand in mine. His arms are tan with a sprinkling of blond hairs. I picture them gliding through water, the sun glinting down on the surface as the waves break into spray. “Did you ever surf?”
“Of course,” he says, laughing a little. “Still do when I go visit the folks. Why?”
I shrug. “There’s just so much I don’t know about you. Like, what did you do when you left home? Where did you go?”
“I went where all good Akhet go when they come of age. First I went to Alexandria to retrieve some things, then it was on to New York and then here.”
“So you were loose in the big city as a sixteen-year-old with a huge amount of money?”
“I told you, it wasn’t a huge amount then. Just enough to get me started.” He smiles, and I can tell he’s remembering things I’m probably not going to get to hear about. “I actually did eat a lot of my meals at Maria’s place in the beginning, out of necessity. But yeah, it was fun.”
“How did you get all of your money to Alexandria? I mean, most of the time you don’t know when you’re going to die. You can’t exactly stop time and say ‘hang on, I just have to go to Egypt real quick and stash some things.’ “ My mind flashes back to the hillside in England where fires were crackling over the screams of the condemned. There’s no way he would have had time to hide things before the soldiers took him away during that lifetime.
“If you have the means to get to Alexandria, you stash things there whenever you can, over your entire lifetime. Most recently, I kept most of my money in a safe-deposit box in New York. My ‘grandfather’ left it to me,” he says, putting air quotes around the word. “It’s so much easier now to pick up where you left off. Used to be, you had to basically start over each time.”
I play with his fingers, trying to remember what he looked like as Connor, but all I get is a fuzzy picture of blond hair and green eyes. His image is hiding in the corners of my mind, like a ghost. “How did we meet?” I finally ask.
Drew props himself up on one elbow against the back of the couch so he can look at me. “We met at the store. You know that.”
“No, not this time. The last time.”
He looks concerned and a little hurt. “You don’t remember?”
“No. I’ve had flashes of things from that lifetime, some from when I was little on a cliff overlooking the ocean, and others from . . . from the bad time at the Tower. But I have no idea how we met, or any of it.” At this point, I can’t put any of my lives together in a linear way. It’s like a bad music video where you see scenes that don’t make much sense out of context.
Drew leans over and kisses me lightly, obviously remembering the time before. “We met at court,” he says.