“Okay. Just—know you can come to me, if you ever need to.”
Poor, uncomfortable Jeremy, trying to do the right thing. I grinned before consuming half a pint of water. “Thanks.”
Of course, as we packed up for the day, Harry Gunner asked, “When’s your man coming back?”
And I immediately answered, “Next Tuesday.”
And Jeremy kind of gave me a look.
Okay. So we were maybe a situation.
For the next week, we dug and sifted and hoped. There had to be something here, but for some reason, we kept missing it. None of the units yielded anything other than the usual cattle bones and litter, and the spike the specialist had found turned out to be nothing more than unusual bedrock, and another was just a type of soil that stunted the voltage measurement. It was hard to keep from widening the units, from thinking maybe we just missed it.
At least it was good for my body. I could feel my muscles coming back to form, biceps and triceps building, thighs sculpted into pillars of strength. I felt like my lungs were so strong I could run a marathon.
Most evenings, we piled into the trucks and headed down to the pub for a couple hours of beer and pool and darts. Sometimes we were invited into someone’s home for dinner. Life would have been perfect, except for the lack of finding anything. And the lack of Mike.
On Friday, Jeremy and I ended up at our own little corner table. I watched him for a long while. I’d always been so happy around Jeremy, so comfortable. That was probably why I’d had a crush on him in undergrad. Because he was safe. Because he would never return my affection, and so my emotions weren’t in danger. But they’d barely been emotions at all. He’d never made me heady with desire; I’d never craved him. My daydreams of Jeremy had all skipped from him realizing my utter brilliance to us gallivanting around the globe, uncovering lost cities and presenting at conferences.
And that had sounded fine, because I knew love didn’t really last, so falling into it was just asking for disaster. But that had been a lot easier to say when I wasn’t caught up in a swirl of emotions. When I didn’t miss someone so badly my chest ached.
Goddamn. I didn’t particularly want to end up on the it’s better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all side of the argument. I’d better check what Yeats had to say about it when I went home.
I put down my fork and took a deep breath. “Jeremy, do you have a girlfriend?’
He started coughing, and I waited patiently for him to recover. He took another sip for fortification. “I do.”
I couldn’t decide if I was surprised or not. “How come you never mention her?”
Not that I expected him to spill every detail of his personal life, but we spent a lot of time together. I knew his favorite dish was mushroom paprikash and he knew about my parents. I could cheer him up when he was tense and he always brought me Hobnobs back from the UK. He didn’t owe me details of his personal life, I just already knew them in every category other than romantic.
A touch of color stained his cheekbones, and he settled his glasses more firmly on his nose. “I suppose because...” He trailed off, then valiantly rallied again. “You never talk about your own personal life.”
I looked out the window at the cobblestones and brightly painted houses. “I’m thinking of dating Mike.”
He looked ready to start coughing again. “But I thought...”
Oh, right. “That we were already dating? Actually—”
“No, that—” He stopped, flustered once again. This was fascinating. I’d never seen Jeremy so embarrassed. “I thought maybe you had a—deal.”
My mouth dropped open. What, like I’d sleep with Mike for Kilkarten kind of deal? For God’s sake, if he’d suspected that why wouldn’t he say something?
Wait. Maybe he meant a friends-with-benefits deal.
“Well, I think we might try it, for real.” I smiled, more pleased than I’d imagined to be telling Jeremy this. “So tell me about your girlfriend. Where’s she live?”
“London. She works at the National Archives. We’ve only been seeing each other for around six months.”
“That’s great.” I took a quick swig and regarded him fondly as he went into detail. After a while, he trailed into a comfortable silence and I took a deep breath. “Hey, I’m sorry if I was ever...too much.”
His eyes softened. “Natalie—you are the best student I have ever had. I want you to know that. You are intelligent, and dedicated, and easy to work with. And we’ll find Ivernis. Don’t worry. We’ll find it.”
My chest filled with so much—with bittersweet pleasure and pride, with sorrow. “Thanks,” I told him, from the bottom of my heart. “And you’re right. I’m sure we’ll find something.”
I was sure of it.
Chapter Eighteen
The O’Connors didn’t come back until the next Tuesday. After Mike flew to the States, the women spent the long weekend on the Aran Islands. Lauren invited me, but I figured they needed some legitimate family time. Besides, it gave me a weekend of kicking a ball around and drinking my feelings in the pub with Paul. I kind of liked doing that. Paul was refreshingly ticked off at the world, and good at grumbling about O’Connors.
But when I came back from the field Tuesday evening, I found the O’Connors in the dining room. I hovered in the hall, watching as they laughed and scarfed down a platter of scones. Anna noticed me first. “Hey!”
I stepped into the room. “How was your trip?”
Anna was off, but I couldn’t look away from Mike. He smiled, but it didn’t go much further than the surface, and I couldn’t tell if he was still angry or if we were okay. I wanted to get him alone, to talk to him, to hold him, but Anna was still talking.
“—and then we went to the Cliffs of Moher, which are the Cliffs of Insanity from The Princess Bride, and they’re crazy. It’s like the end of the world, and the wind made our hair looked like small monsters and you could lean into the air and it practically supported you. Did you guys find anything?”
The abrupt switch—Anna had decided it was time for her to eat, and me to talk—made me start, as did the sudden weight of all the O’Connors’ eyes. I pulled my shoulders back and tried to smile. “There’s always some things to find. We’ve come across some pottery sherds. And cattle bones. But, uh—nothing to support a harbor.”
Kate’s sympathy nearly killed me. “That’s too bad.”
“It’s still the early stages. I mean, it’s a huge amount of land to cover. And while I thought my calculations were spot on—well. I guess I shouldn’t have been trusting maps based off Roman reconstructions of Greek sources, now, should I?” I laughed. The O’Connors didn’t.
I shoved my hands in my back pockets and my eyes found Mike’s. “I was going to go for a run. I don’t know if...?”
He was already standing. Anna started to speak up, and both her sister and mother kicked her.
This time my laugh came out a little more genuine. That was my kind of subtlety.
Mike was changed and downstairs in a moment. “You’re disappointed.”
“Dumb, right? I didn’t have any guarantees.” I broke into a jog, taking the northern path. A veil of fog covered the land, so every movement was oddly fascinating and disruptive. My gut knotted up with anxiety, and I tried to handle it by increasing my pace until we cleared the top of the fog and the cliff. Below us, blankets of white rolled in from across the sea like some actual, sentient creature. Above, the waxing moon hung low and pale in the gray sky, drifting in and out of ghosting clouds. I slowed and faced him. “I missed you.”