The Geography of You and Me(50)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

They both laughed; they couldn’t have possibly known he was serious.

Now he left the chaos of the market behind, heading toward the water, and as he walked, he thought back to what Lucy had said about New York, how the only way to truly know the place was to see it from the ground up. When the gray waters of Puget Sound came into sight, dotted with ferries, he found himself thinking about the marina in San Francisco and the path along the Hudson River in New York, and how in all of these very different places, this was something that rarely changed: the same blue-gray water, the same rise and fall of the waves, the same smells of salt and fish.

He wondered if the harbor in Edinburgh was the same, too.

He hoped it was.

The rain picked up again, and Owen pulled at his hood.

He needed to figure out what to do about the e-mail.

The problem, of course, wasn’t so much what he’d written; it was what he was going to do about her response.

He didn’t regret what he’d said. After finding her postcard from Paris, he’d carried it with him all week, tucked in his back pocket like a good-luck charm, something to buoy him whenever he felt he was sinking under the weight of the task at hand: the dismantling of all of their memories. And by the time he’d gotten back to Seattle last night, he’d written and rewritten the e-mail in his mind enough times to know it by heart.

He apologized for what happened in San Francisco and explained that he’d ended things with Paisley and admitted that he thought of Lucy all the time even though they hadn’t been in touch.

I miss you, he’d written at the end. And I wish you were here, too.

That was when he should have hit Send.

But for some reason, he found himself writing one last line: By the way, I’m not sure if you’re still planning to be in New York for the summer, but I’ll actually be there the first week of June, so let me know and maybe we could meet up.…

And that, right there, was the problem.

Because not only did Owen have no plans whatsoever to be in New York City the first week of June, he also had no money and no way of getting there.

And no idea what he’d do if—against all odds—she actually wanted to see him.

There were so many things to worry about: the chance that she might be angry with him, the odds that she was still with Liam, the sheer ridiculousness of the suggestion, and most of all, the possibility that she might say yes.

But deep down, he knew that his biggest worry wasn’t any of these things.

It was much worse.

His biggest worry was that she’d say no.

39

Lucy stared at the computer for a long time before lifting her fingers to the keyboard, and with a pounding heart, she punched at three different letters, one at a time, watching nervously as they appeared across the screen:

Yes.

PART V

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40

At first, she’d planned to tell him the truth.

But the truth was so much less appealing.

The truth meant sitting by herself in London that first week of June, imagining Owen in New York: walking through Central Park, waiting in line at the ice-cream shop, watching the sailboats glide up the Hudson. The truth meant doing nothing. It meant missing out. And most of all, it meant not getting to see him again.

And so, instead, she’d said yes.

Then she panicked.

Earlier in the year, when they were still in Edinburgh, they’d planned to go back to New York for the beginning of the summer. But that had all changed with Dad’s new job in London, where he was working too many hours to escape even for a long weekend, much less an entire month. For a while, Lucy and Mom had still talked about going on their own, since it seemed likely that the boys would be there, but now that they both had summer internships in London, there was little reason to go.

“Summers are too hot in New York anyway,” Mom had said. “You’ll like London a lot better.”

Lucy thought this was probably true. So far, she loved everything about this city: the street markets and the colorful buildings, the twisting lanes and expansive parks and the way most everyone sounded like a version of her mother. She even liked her classmates at school, who were not just from England or even America but from all over the world: India and South Africa and Australia and Dubai. In New York, she’d stood apart, and in Edinburgh, she’d stood out; but here, she just stood alongside everyone else, and there was a comfort in that, in fitting in for once.

She liked the weather here, too, which was always gray and damp, never too cold and never too warm, so she had no doubt that she’d enjoy the London summer. But even so, as her mother complained about all those years they’d suffered through the high temperatures in New York, Lucy had been jolted by the memory of that night on the roof, where she and Owen had lain beneath a stagnant sky, sticky with heat and grinning at every limp breeze that managed to reach them, and for a moment, she found herself wishing they’d go back.

But there was no reason to make the trip.

Until yesterday, when she got Owen’s e-mail and decided that in this case, anyway, the lie was a lot more exciting than the truth.

And so she’d written back: I’ll be there. What’s the plan?

It had taken him a full day to respond, and she spent the hours in between with a knot in her stomach, stunned by the possibility of it. It wasn’t that she thought she’d never see him again, because she had more faith in the world than that. But they’d done so much zigging and zagging over the past months, had missed so many chances and squandered so much time, that it seemed hard to believe they might just get another shot at this.

She knew it might not turn out well. It might end up like San Francisco again. It could be a complete and total disaster: They might argue or be overly polite; they might be awkward or nervous or both; they might realize they were better from a distance, better as friends or pen pals or nothing at all.

But they had to see each other again to find out.

When he finally responded late the following night, Lucy was lying in bed, staring at her phone and attempting to calculate the hours between San Francisco and London. As soon as she saw his name appear at the top of the screen, she sat up to read his note, which was a measly seven words.

The lobby at noon on June 7.

The light from the screen seemed to pulse in the dark room, giving the ceiling a whitish glow. She stared at the note for a long time, amused by its matter-of-fact tone, then typed her reply—Not the top of the Empire State Building?—and hit Send before she could think better of it.

Once again, she sat in the dark, awaiting his response, hoping he knew she was only kidding. They were accustomed to corresponding by postcard, where there was endless time between letters rather than endless space on a screen, and they hadn’t adjusted their style just yet.