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Alana wouldn’t have said that she and Chilton were friends , per se, if anyone were to ever ask her, but on the not-so-rare occasion, she and her colleague in psychiatrics would get together over a lunch, and she had been doing particularly well to avoid both Will Graham and Jack Crawford, these days.
She speared a forkful of her salad, looking to the green briefly before she looked back up to the man, a glass of wine poised in his hand, and considered the question with lips pursed thoughtfully. Dr. Bloom was not the type to speak without having chosen her words carefully first.
“It never happened,” she decided, and it wasn’t even a half-truth. Only an unexpected one, perhaps. Chilton quirked his brow, skeptical.
“You’re telling me you’ve never been on a date with Will Graham. Not once,” he reiterated, and Alana couldn’t help but notice that Frederick had grown increasingly interested in Will, these days. She wasn’t sure whether it was with an underlay of homoeroticism, that he inquired, or merely pure scientific fascination. She herself had expressed the latter, even with Graham’s pursuits.
She shook her head, chewing the bite before she spoke out of the corner of her mouth, not impolite but reserving professionalism for her classrooms and their offices. A lunch date was considered neither.
“No. He kissed me, once, but I think maybe I…scared him off, after that. Or perhaps I made it worse– hard to say, with Will. I’m sure we’ve both been looking over our shoulder in the hopes of avoiding…another awkward encounter, if we can help it.”
Chilton’s lips were parted slightly, wine swirled in his glass and his brow ever arched in disbelief. Alana tried her best not to gossip, but it was better to give answers rather than let the man start rumors all on his own.
She turned her phone over and checked the time, then, sighing as she set her napkin aside, adjusting the tilt of her head to shift the weight of brown waves on her shoulders. “I’m sure that won’t last long, though. Unavoidable, considering he wants me to meet him in half an hour…. I’ll catch him on his way out over at the Academy.”
Frederick made a sound, ever-judgemental but not enough for Alana to either remark on or care too much about. She thanked him for lunch and arranged for the tip, standing as she gathered her bag and retired the fabric belt on her dress.
“Next week?”
The psychiatrist smirked, some, smug and ever-charming, when he wanted to be.
“You know me; I’m always down for a chat…..”
Her lips twitched indiscriminately as he pursed his lips for a friendly air kiss, and she gave a nod, picking her phone up from the black iron table.
“Next week, then.”
—
Will could spot her from across the way. Of course he would– she was beautiful, well-learned, well-liked…. He could understand why she had chosen to spend less time with him, particularly romantically, when she had her entire pick, but he intended to make up for it, if she gave him the chance. He met her half-way, curls bouncing slightly as he made his way to her, seeming neither nervous or tired, today. Alana couldn’t help but feel proud, for him, considering his record as of late.
He smiled, lips twitching barely, a handsome face behind his glasses frames, gesturing with the hand that held his wallet before he slipped it into his back pocket, coming to a stop where they met on the sidewalk.
“Will–”
“Before you start,” he interrupted, “I want to say that I was irrational and impulsive, the other day. I shouldn’t have kissed you– or– I should have asked, rather.”
Alana shook her head some, wanting to tell him that that hadn’t been the problem, but he spoke over her again, clearly with much to say, today.
“Anyway, I know we’d talked about a date before things, and that with…me, and things,” his laugh was breathy, an admittance of his faults, perhaps, and she hated it, “and I wanted to make it up to you. Though, not with me,” he was sure to include, on another laugh.
She knit her brows, cocking her head as she spoke again, “Will, I don’t need you to try to make this work. It didn’t happen, and it just didn’t happen, there’s nothing….”
“I have dinner reservations, to this seafood shack on the shore,” he waved a hand, just something he’d had. Not for them, particularly, but he enjoyed to eat out, there, and their fried fish reminded him of home. In any case, he had little use for them, now. “Robert’s gonna be there, this evening. If you wanted to, you should go meet him. I’m sure he’s much better company than I’d be.”
Alana paused. She’d heard about Bobby from the man, once or twice, that they looked enough alike to be mistaken for twins, that he was a field-detective, and significantly more extroverted than Will was, but she hadn’t given him a thought more than passing. He was Graham’s brother, after all.
She considered it.
“Does he know?” she asked, not fond of the idea of being set up on a date before she could even have the opportunity to consent to it, but Will shook his head, lips in a thin line, hands in his pockets. Timid, perhaps. His best apology, though it wasn’t necessary. She relaxed some, tension leaving her shoulders and she adjusted her bag at her side.
“I’ll let you know,” she decided, and he nodded to the agreement.
One Graham for another. Worth a shot, she figured.
—
She stepped out of the car the same time the cop rounded the front of his, unmistakable as Graham’s brother even before their first meeting. His hair was less curly, pushed to the side some aside from the strands that fell across his forehead, placing him somewhere between neat and disheveled in a way that intrigued her, if appearance and put-togetherness said anything for character.
He clocked her from across the lot, grinning as he made his way over, scruffier still than Will tended to be, in a beige polo and dark-wash jeans that had some wear in the knee. Not her favorite look, but she could only assume he’d just come off work.
“Misses Bloom! Well, it’s a goddamn pleasure. I’d expected to come all on my lonesome, this evening!” he stopped with hands on his hips and offered her one, which she shook, grip professional. One of the best in her field. He dropped her hand and looked over his shoulder at the restaurant, turning back to her with a smile and breath that smelled, she was surprised to find, like her favorite kind of scotch.
“What do you say; want to grab a table??”
Alana’s lips quirked some. His confident energy was a pleasant change in pace from Will Graham, whom she loved but in the most platonic and unadulterated sense of the word.
“If I don’t say so myself,” she replied, a smile on her lips as they walked to the front together, Bobby pulling the door open for her before following her in. He slid into the booth, once directed by their hostess, and Alana took her seat across from him, looking around the digs as she settled her purse onto the leather seat beside her. Her eyes made their way back to him, after a moment, and she crossed her hands atop the table, leaning forward some to be more engaging, tasteful bangle dangling at her wrist.
“So, you’re Bobby Graham.” Starting with the obvious. He took a sip of his water as the waiter dropped it off and scrunched his brow, though, shaking his head before he swallowed.
“No— Bronson. I took our mother’s name. Pops was a bastard.”
He sat back in the booth, smiling and relaxed, a silver watch of adorning around one wrist. “You’re a psychiatrist, though– we don’t have to psychoanalyze that.”
She was relieved at that, an opportunity to spend the evening psychiatry aside. She reached for her own glass, then, and the left corner of her mouth quirked. Bronson wouldn’t say so, that evening, but he thought her to be particularly beautiful, in the exact opposite way his ex-wife had been, which he
also
wouldn’t bring up, for the sake of making it through the date unscathed and on better terms than she had been, amorously, with his brother.
“We certainly don’t,” she agreed, and she looked up to the waiter as he came to their table, asking if he could start their evening off with a round of drinks.
She ordered an amber lager, and either to impress, or because they somehow had the same exact tastes, Bobby Bronson ordered the same.
It turned out to be the latter.
—
Alana laughed, looking to the man at her left, telling a story of some rookie cop on the force botching his training with the taser. They stepped off of the curb in the moonlight, sky dark above them, and made their way to their cars, parked a few spaces and an aisle across from each other, but close enough to still be able to hear each other if they stood at their doors.
Bobby stopped dead in his tracks, though, and a string of curses left his lips.
“ Son of a bitch!” he pushed his hand up through fallen strands of hair, letting out a heavy sigh at the vehicle in front of them. The man’s tires had been slashed, completely relieving them of air, low to the pavement and barely noticeable in the cover of the night.
Alana’s first instinct was to offer the man a ride home, or to suggest a tow, but Bronson had pulled out his phone to dial a number, raising it to his ear as he apologized and turned to the side frustratedly, waiting for whoever was on the other end to pick up the line. She looked down and stepped out of her heels, for the moment, not wanting to stand in them longer than necessary and finding the pavement cool enough beneath her feet, worried only that the harshness of the gravel might cause a run in the sole of her stockings. She picked up bits of the conversation, though— only what she could hear from Bobby’s end.
“ Yeah, some…. Probably work; I don’t know. No— are you fucking kidding me? We wouldn’t get this figured out till after midnight…. Yeah. Yeah, just come get me. I’ve got a date, here; I’ll make sure she gets home okay and then I can just ride back with you. Yeah, I’ll figure this shit out in the morning, file a report on the motherfucker…. Yeah, yeah. Okay, I’ll see you then.”
She crossed her arms, looking up at him when he returned to the conversation.
“Got a ride?”
He sighed again, hands on hips as he looked to the car. “Yeah… you can go on home, if you’d like to. I don’t mean to keep you.”
She bent to pick her shoes up and moved toward the curb, curls swishing as her lips went tight, shaking her head. “I’ll wait till he gets here, then we can both go home,” she told him, taking a seat on the curb, elbows on her knees.
“Yeah, alright.” He gave one last sigh and turned away from the vehicle, moving to meet her there, taking the seat beside her.
Bobby would smoke a cigarette, and they ended up talking about the job, after all. Who he thought might slash his tires, if she’d ever met anyone with half a goddamn mind to do something to a level of the same. She even shared a smoke, taking it when offered, but only once in a blue moon. A car pulled ‘round with its headlights on, and Bronson dropped the cigarette to put out beneath his feet as he stood and offered his hand, preparing to part ways for the evening at the arrival of his ride.
Alana stood, and she gave the man a single kiss on his cheek, which she had likely only done under the influence of Mr. George Killian, not enough to get her drunk but enough to let her relax, some, this evening.
She made her way to the car, and as she opened her door to get in, she gave one more glance across the parking-lot to watch Bobby make it to the car, catching instead the moment a handsome stranger stepped from the driver’s side to meet him. She couldn’t hear him as he opened his mouth to greet the scruffy detective, but for just a second he glanced her way, and something in dark, lively eyes twinkled as his gaze met hers. He had been speaking to Bobby, but his smile was for her.
____
Jack Barber. That was his name. He had come to the states to teach courses in cinematography and screenwriting, and while his passions couldn’t have been further from the realms of law enforcement and forensics analysis, he was Will Graham and Bobby Bronson’s cousin. Their second meeting had been happenstance, a chance encounter on a university campus where she had signed up for that day to guest lecture. He had met her in the hallway, smile light and accent soothing, more than pleased to see her there after their stolen glance in the parking-lot two weeks prior. A graduate from Oxford, and a lover of the romance genre in both novel-format and film, he had found the coincidence charming in the way that the works of Jane Austen and Shakespeare often were. She ate lunch with him that day by proper invitation, simple sandwiches at a table in the teachers’ lounge.
Alana Bloom sat on the edge of the fountain, shoeless feet shifting in the water as the stars lit up the sky above her. The air was thick, tonight— the kind of heavy not uncommon for Boston—- and it weighed the waves of her hair down more against her shoulders than she liked. Her dress came to just above her knees, sitting, and the moonlight had turned the tone of her legs into a porcelain pale, the kind that statues were made of, smooth curves in marble.
Jack sat with his hands in his lap, pants rolled to half-way up his calf, bare feet in the water alongside her, only because she’d asked and he would hang the stars in the sky for her. His face was turned skyward, and after a moment his gaze was settled back down along the curves of her face, watching her figure out puzzles in her head, make equations of the ripples in the water. She was a practical woman— far more than he himself could claim to be— and a section of the wave in his hair fell over his temple some as he studied her. He’d thought about writing books about her, screenplays inspired by beauty no actress would be able to accurately imitate, but her practicality had kept him from doing so, except for in his head. He watched her quietly, instead, the perfect picture of fondness painted at his lips.
“You know I’m mad about you,” he spoke, cutting the silence of the air. Alana turned to him, moving one hand to the cement of the fountain ledge beside her to lean her weight against, crossing one leg over the other in a way that dipped her toes up out of the water. Her lips were thinly drawn, and she smiled, but only with one corner of her mouth. Her gaze flitted up and over him, taking in the red of his sweater vest, the way white sleeves were rolled up over the veins of his forearms, putting it all together in a fraction of a second before meeting the angles of his face and dark eyes that always twinkled but sometimes came across as brown instead of blue.
“Mad? Quite the choice of words, for a woman in psychiatry,” she teased back to him softly, leaning his way some to bump her shoulder against his. It was only banter, and the man chuckled, light and full of something hearty, as if laughter was born not in his belly or in his throat but out of the same cavern of his chest where his heart was. He smiled, then, a hand moving to take his own weight, as well, mimicking her posture as he crossed one knee atop the other.
“I mean it, Alana Bloom. Perhaps you have an aversion to the words for my utter adoration of you, but I’d sooner have them put it down as an incurable diagnosis than rescind all I’ve said or thought up to now.”
Alana’s cheeks colored, her lips a faint stain of red, even in the dark, something that had been brighter before it had been wiped and kissed and faded into oblivion. She leaned her weight against him, then, shoulder against shoulder and the upper portion of his chest, looking up to him still as she spoke.
“And what is it that you think, Jack Barber?” she asked, never able to help herself from her natural curiosity, her desire to know and to understand the universe and all of its secrets.
He tilted his head toward hers, some, both looking out to the streams of the fountain, bubbling up in the center and trickling out in ripples to the water around their ankles. His chestnut hair brushed the deeper, richer browns of her own, and he inhaled deeply, letting it all out as he thought about it.
“I think about how it would be to marry you. To bring you breakfast in bed, to wipe your tears with my sweater, god forbid, or print your articles to read though I can’t dream to understand the depth of the topics you write on. I think about what it might be like to take you home for Christmas, to see London, to go to the movies where I saw my first picture. And pictures— I’d take as many as you’d let me, and write the memories of it all down to put into my films, one day.” He breathed in again, deep, and he sat up enough to look down at her, causing her to tilt her face up to him, as well, strands of near-black hair reflecting moonlight. He used his fingertips, then, neither rugged nor soft, and tilted her face up to him. She spoke, her words a murmur in the air around them, blending into the bubbling fountain and the hum of the crickets around them.
“Is that a promise?” she asked, and there was that same banter, amusement underlying perhaps the most vulnerable moment of her life. Jack’s smile pulled dimples at his cheeks, and he tipped her chin up to whisper a chuckle against her lips before he met them.
“If you let it be,” he promised again, and his fingers tangled softly into her hair, weaving through strands at the back of her neck as their lips met in a kiss that made her first conflicting one with Will Graham insurmountably worth it all.