Finally, they reached me, and up close, I could see how closely Colchester’s pea coat fit his frame, how much stubble had grown on his jaw over the last three days, how the fog clung to him like he was a highwayman in an English poem, and I hated every stupid beat of my stupid knotted heart. I hated how I wondered what that rough jaw would feel like against my own, against my stomach. I hated how I would never know how warm his skin would be if I slipped my hands under his coat and ran my palms up his chest.
But I still wasn’t prepared for what happened next. When Colchester saw me, a grin stretched across his face, a grin that nearly knocked the breath out of me. For a minute, I thought I’d never seen him smile like that—big and pleased and dimpled—and then I remembered that I had, once. When I lay in the forest on my back and he stood over me with his foot on my wrist.
Before I could think about that any more, however, he was talking. “Well, look at you,” he said, laughter curling the edges of his words. “Damn.”
Colchester’s words panicked me. I glanced down at my flat-fronted slacks and dress shoes, at the shawl-neck sweater I wore over a button-down and tie, at the Burberry watch on my wrist.
“What?” I asked, trying to smooth out any wrinkles that might have cropped up since I’d had the hotel press my clothes. “Did I get something on me?” I spun in a circle like a dog, anxious that I’d ruined my favorite pair of Hugo Boss dress pants.
“No, no,” Colchester said, his voice still warmly amused. “Just…you look like such a preppy rich boy right now.”
“Didn’t you know?” Morgan said, leaning against his arm as she gestured to me. “Embry is a preppy rich boy. His mother is the fearsome Vivienne Moore. He went to an all-boys boarding school and then to Yale.” She leaned in even closer to Colchester, as if about to divulge a terrible secret. “He even rowed crew there,” she said in a stage whisper. “Embry is basically a Ralph Lauren ad come to life.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “No more than you are, darling sister.”
“I prefer to think of myself more as a Chanel ad. Dior, maybe.”
Colchester’s eyebrows pulled together just the tiniest bit as he watched our exchange. “Moore, I had no idea about your mother. Or your…background.”
Honestly, this made me a little impatient. Indignant even. “You know no one gives a shit about that here,” I told him, meaning the Army. Carpathia. “Not even a little bit.”
“Of course not,” he agreed, but there was a distance to his agreement and he remained distant as we walked down to the restaurant and sat for our dinner. He remained distant as we ate. And as Morgan reached for the bill and paid for all three of us, his distance crystallized into something else. Self-consciousness maybe. A feeling of embarrassment he couldn’t quite rationalize away, perhaps. And for the first time, I began to wonder about Colchester’s background. The clothes he wore were nice—but off-the-rack nice, clearly purchased on a soldier’s salary. I knew he’d gone to college, but had he gone on a scholarship? Taken out loans? Had he grown up in the suburbs? The city? The country? Suddenly, I burned to know. I burned to know it all. What kind of childhood made a man like Colchester, so serious and self-assured at twenty-three? What had he dreamed of at night, where had he wanted to go? Was he there now? Was he still dreaming of it?
After dinner, Morgan insisted we go for cocktails in some plush bar with private rooms, and so a couple hours later, it was just the three of us in a small blue room with two soft couches, the front of the room lined with a balcony that overlooked a dance floor. An eight-piece was playing pop standards converted into Viennese waltzes, and dancing couples filled the floor below us. I ordered myself a glass of straight gin in anticipation of having to watch Colchester and Morgan dance.
But that didn’t happen. After about fifteen minutes, Morgan started looking green and clammy, clutching at her stomach.
“Bad schnitzel?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.
She glared at me. “I don’t feel well,” she said delicately. Well, as delicately as anyone can when they’ve eaten bad schnitzel. “Excuse me.”
She rushed out of our private cove to find the bathroom, leaving Colchester and me alone together, sitting in silence and watching the dancers.
The knot in my chest felt alive and pulsing. This was the first time we’d been truly alone, just the two of us, and suddenly everything about him seemed more. The stubble thicker, the eyes greener, the large hands cradling his scotch glass even larger.
I drained the gin and signaled the waiter for another.
A few minutes passed like this, me power-sipping gin and Colchester holding his scotch, and then he said quietly, “I wish I knew how to dance.”
This surprised me. Not that he didn’t know, but that he wanted to. “Why on earth would you want that?”
He shrugged and rubbed his forehead with his thumb, looking a little sheepish. “I guess it just seems like the kind of thing a man should know how to do.” He turned to look at me. “Do you know how to dance?”
Was he kidding?
“I think I learned how to dance before I learned how to ride a bike. Morgan and I were Mother’s favorite political props—the sooner she could doll us up in formal clothes and show off how well-bred we were, the better.” I thought of those endless nights at Mother’s events, which grew more and more tedious the older and better-looking I got. By the time I was fifteen, women weren’t asking for dances out of motherly adoration any longer, and I’d go home with blisters on my feet and tiny bruises on my ass where all the Mrs. Robinsons had pinched me.