Running Back (28 page)

“Then we will, Ms. Sullivan.” He nodded at me, and he nodded at
Mike, and started away. I’d almost let the tense breath out when he stopped and
looked back with bright eyes. “I did not mean the Willie Scott comment
maliciously, Ms. Sullivan. In fact, I always admired your mother very much.”

He vanished.

My legs folded and I landed shakily in my seat.

Mike dropped in the seat beside me. “Never thought I’d feel any
sympathy for Jeremy.”

I let out a shaky laugh. “Never thought I’d feel any empathy
for Ceile.” I shook my head to clear it. “Thank you for coming. It meant a lot
to me, to see you there. To see you now.”

He shrugged. “I told you I’d be here.”

And because he’d said he would, he was. A sudden rush of warmth
and certainty washed over me. “Mike—”

“Anyway,” he interrupted, reaching into his pocket and placing
a folded packet of papers on the table. “I wanted you to think about this.”

I stared down at the sheet. “What is this?”

He gave me his crooked smile. “It’s a list of everywhere we
play this season. Including the International Game in London.” He waited a few
seconds as I read the sheet. “I’m not trying to tie you down. You might’ve heard
it that way, but it’s not what I meant. I’ve never known someone like you. And I
don’t think you would be happy bound to one place. I don’t want to bind you. I
just want to go with you.” He stood. “So think about it.”

He didn’t give me time to think. He didn’t even look at me. He
just got up and walked away.

For a moment, my eyes traced all the paper, and my fingers beat
against my leg, and then I relaxed my hand and shut my eyes and took two deep
breaths.

When I stood and looked forward, he had reached the exit.

“Mike.”

He stopped in the doorway, and then slowly turned back.
Blank-faced, to the rest of the world, but I could see the shadows of hurt and
hope. “Yeah?”

“I used to think that I would never care about anything as much
as I cared about Ivernis. And that I would care about it forever.”

I saw the wince in his eyes.

“But I was wrong. Because this—us—it’s entirely different. It
doesn’t edge it out, it’s more—like I have two hearts, and one breaks for
Ivernis, and the other is completely filled.” I paused to swallow. “Mike.
Michael O’Connor. I love you. When I hold objects from thousands of years ago, I
get this feeling, this glow that spreads through my chest and warms spots I
didn’t know were cold, that makes me smile without realizing it—and it is
nothing
compared to how I feel around you.

“But I’m scared. I’m not very good at loving people. I’m very
comfortable
not
being in love. I like my friends, my
career, my life. I have never felt incomplete without romance. Maybe because
I’ve never seen a good example. But I love you. I love you so much, I guess I’m
scared that it will disappear. Because even if I feel so much now, what will it
be like in ten years, twenty? I can’t promise that I’ll always feel this way. I
can’t promise we’ll be perfect.

“What if our fire disappears, and we just flicker lower and
lower until one day we’re cold and dark and dry? It’s so scary I’d almost rather
douse the fire now. Because then at lease the memory of it will be tinted with
roses.

“Maybe one of the reasons I love archaeology so much is that
the more you learn, the more real it becomes. It starts out blurry and
solidifies, and you can’t look at the future and say the same. You can’t clear
away dirt and see fifty years in the future, like you can see into the past. You
just have to wait.

“But I was wrong because it’s not waiting, it’s living. And I
cannot picture a world without you, not now, or in five years, or in twenty.

“And maybe this is all immaterial because you have moved on and
maybe I’m too much effort and you shouldn’t start something with someone who
sees doom written across a relationship, who is irrevocably
broken.
But I thought you should know. I want forever. I do
.
I want all of it. And it might be work—it might be
the hardest thing in my life—but I don’t want to run away anymore. I don’t want
to keep leaving. I want you.”

And then I closed my eyes and said it one more time, because I
didn’t know if I’d ever say it again, and I wanted him to know it, and I wanted
to know I was capable of this. “I love you.”

He didn’t answer, but when I opened my eyes he was staring at
me with a strange combination of wonder and humor and something else. His eyes
were bright, his smile soft, and his hand lifted and brushed a strand of my hair
very slowly behind my ear.

“Natalie. Do you remember the day you told me you didn’t tell
believe in love? You listed off some chemicals and then asked me why I cared.
And then later on you said you believed in it but not in forever.

“And I was so mad. Because you made me want everything you told
me didn’t exist. And the more time I spent with you, the more I wanted it. When
I left, you cut me to the quick. You looked at me like we were nothing, like we
weren’t even worth getting angry about.”

I held up my hands. “I’m sorry. I get it. I’ll leave.”

He caught my hand. “Natalie. I was so mad because I love you so
much, and I didn’t know how to deal with you not feeling the same way.” He
lowered his head so his forehead rested against mine. In the shadows of our
faces his eyes gleamed like amber. “You are not broken. You are not too much
work. And I believe that we will be together until I die. I believe it enough
for both of us.”

“That’s too heavy,” I whispered.

“Then I will change your mind. I will stay with you, and love
you, until you know that this is not going to change, that we will not fizzle,
that we are every single chemical out there and that they are bound together so
tightly that they will keep us warm.” His hand cupped my cheek and he kissed me
until I wanted to cry, and past that, until I’d wound my arms around him and my
heart had lifted, and I did believe him.

And around us I felt the grass and the sea and the sky, and the
last of my doubts disappeared. For the first time, I felt light and free and
real. My eyes were open, my head was straight, and I loved Mike O’Connor with
every part of my being.

Epilogue

Eight Years Later

“Natalie! Get over here!”

The faint cry came as a relief. I’d been troweling all morning, and my back ached from bending over to get at the basket remains. It was a great find; the carbonized cloth remained in such good shape we could see the threads. A conservationist from NUI was coming in this afternoon to work on it, but until then I was the lead.

Still, I was happy to straighten my shoulders, roll my neck, and lope across the field toward one of our new units. We’d just moved over to a new area in the northwest, since the entire site seemed to slant this way. This unit was the farthest one yet, after we’d used a different geophysical testing that handled the dense soil better.

People waved as I jogged past. We were nearing the end of our eighth season, but Kilkarten wasn’t slowing down. We now had a crew of three dozen, and for the past two years we’d hosted a field school for the local archaeology students.

My crew chief beamed up at me from inside the unit, her copper curls caught up on top of her head. I crouched down on the dirt ledge and peered into the unit. Seven feet and still going. At the bottom, a pile of blue-green circular disks spilled out of a cracked container. The oxidized metal pieces were scattered in the dirt.

The sight swam before my eyes and I leaned back on my heels. “What is that?”

Anna laughed. “Free money.”

“Don’t be cute.” I slid down into the unit. Under the dirt and grime of age, I could make out the shape of a wreathed head, the embossed, familiar letters.

Roman coins.

A
cache of Roman coins.

And then my gaze slid away to the curves right next to it. This wasn’t the only vessel here; I could see the outline of amphorae in the dirt. My vision narrowed on one of them, with familiar handles and a familiar lip, and a very distinctive white inlay on the black background. An inlay that had been very popular in Rome in the first century BCE.

I let out a rush of breath, and then gave Anna a fierce, elated grin. “I’ll be right back.”

And then I was running across the fields.

Mike met me halfway. He wore a Kilkarten Field School T-shirt and jeans. He’d been the leading force behind the school since he’d retired from the Leopards two years ago. He joked that he liked teaching kids who were even more clueless about archaeology then he was. Also, some of them were young enough he thought he had a chance of convincing them that football meant touchdowns.

I let out a shriek and threw myself into his arms. He caught me and spun me about. “What is it?”

I pressed my lips against his jaw. “I don’t think that’s part of our site. Maybe it’s why we
have
a site.”

He set me down and brushed the strands of hair that had fallen out of my ponytail back, grinning at me the whole time. “What are you talking about?”

“Kilkarten’s sixth century. But there are coins over there from long before that.” A laugh bubbled up and out of me. “And there’s a vase that is almost definitely first-century.”

His eyes widened. “So...”

“We found it! We found Ivernis!” I kissed him with all the happiness of eight solid years of love and a life together, with the desire and passion of first love, with the joy of a dream made real. Three dream—Ivernis and Kilkarten and him.

He smiled his crooked smile, the sun in his eyes. “I take it you’re happy?”

I nestled my head against his chest, reveling for a moment in his warmth. “I didn’t need Ivernis to be happy. I just needed you.”

Then I broke away and grinned as I jogged backward. “But I am pretty damn excited.”

And I turned and ran across the green land, breathing in the salt and sea. Before me, the earth opened up to reveal a lost city tended by dozens of my friends, and beside me, Mike’s feet pounded against the ground, in step with my own. And in that moment, like so many moments in the last years, I could taste perfection, could feel it thrumming in my bones, resonating with the land and the people who surrounded me. When I stopped, I saw the past at my feet and my future beside me as Mike’s hand took mine. My heart ached with the wonder of it all, and I leaned my head back to the bright, cloudless sky, and I laughed.

* * * * *

Can’t get enough of the new adult genre?

Pick up the debut novel from Allison Parr,
Rush Me
—out now!

Rush Me

When post-grad Rachael Hamilton accidentally gate-crashes a pro-athlete party, she ends up face-to-face with Ryan Carter, the NFL’s most beloved quarterback.

While most girls would be thrilled to meet the attractive young millionaire, Rachael would rather spend time with books than at sporting events, and she has more important things to worry about than romance. Like her parents pressuring her to leave her unpaid publishing internship for law school.

Over pancake brunches, charity galas and Alexander the Great, Rachael realizes all the judgments she’d made about Ryan are wrong. But how can a Midwestern Irish-Catholic jock with commitment problems and an artsy, gun-shy Jewish New Englander ever forge a partnership? Rachael must let down her barriers if she wants real love—even if that opens her up to pain that could send her back into her emotional shell forever.

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About the Author

Allison Parr grew up in small-town New England, where she developed an incurable case of wanderlust. After graduating with degrees in archaeology and creative writing, she spent the next several years living in San Francisco, Paris, Boston and New York. When she’s not traveling or writing, she’s making a mean chocolate cake or bad historical jokes. She’s also amassing enough books to rival the library in
Beauty and the Beast
, though she is still looking for a permanent castle in which to store all of them.

To learn more about Allison’s books and travels, visit her at
www.allisonparr.com
.

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