In the Middle (An AOJE fan fic for the 2013 Holiday Gift Exchange)
I'm popping up out of nowhere to share a fanfiction I wrote for one of my other fandoms. If you liked "The Lizzie Bennet Diaries", you will probably enjoy the vlog for "The Autobiography of Jane Eyre". If you haven't started watching yet, here's your chance. http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3NxAiyc-89HP3wHV2y5mbwi2TidvocKZ
For those who are already fans, here's the fic I wrote for the AOJE Gift Exchange. Had a blast participating! Enjoy! Feel free to let me know what you think.
In the Middle
“ I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun." - Pride and Prejudice
Jane left her camera and got onto the couch near Rochester. He tensed then saw that she was simply adjusting the blanket on the couch behind him, but she was really close to him. He could feel her warmth radiating off of her as she knelt beside him. Her dress brushed his skin. He took a breath and looked up at her as she paused in her adjusting. She looked at him, and there was a sudden wild moment inside of him, she was swaying toward him, a slight, but definite movement, and he was drifting toward her, unable to do anything else, but suddenly she looked down and shifted back.
“Maybe lift your head a little,” she muttered, and moved back behind her camera.
Rochester took another breath and tried to still his beating heart. For the rest of the photo session he was focused on Jane, on her every movement and word, but once she went off to pick up Adele, and he’d watched her car go down the drive, he wondered again how he had gotten here.
Here: hoping for opportunities for his skin to brush against hers. Making every effort he could to come up with comments that would make her laugh. Wanting to run ideas by her to hear her opinion. Waking with some shadow of her in his half remembered dreams in the morning.
He left the hallway and climbed the stairs to his rooms. He had an office upstairs which opened off his bedroom and his private bathroom. If he came in from the front, he passed the door of his tutor/nanny’s room, something that had not registered much with him when Grace first informed him of where she was putting her. He had only had a half formed idea that he hoped the new person wouldn’t get in his way at the few occasions he found himself at Thornfield. He had no inkling that he would find himself glancing hopefully at the door when he passed it, hoping it was open and indicating that he could look in to see what she was doing. It had never occurred to him that he would find himself looking wistfully at the same door when she went away, and he saw and heard so little from her for a month.
He wasn’t psychic of course, but considering what had happened to him he thought that some tremor in the universe would have alerted him to this great change even before he had shot around the bend in the road in his sports car and nearly run into a small figure which seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. It was only afterward that he realized how hard he had jammed his foot onto the brake to avoid a terrible accident. The car had done a ninety degree turn, before he stopped then he was stumbling out of the car with an excited Pilot not even pausing to hear his usual exit command.
The pain came home to him as he limped toward the girl, but he was so angry and shocked that he didn’t much pause to think, but as he made to yell at her, she was almost shouting back asking him if he were hurt in an urgent earnest voice. Almost unconsciously he obeyed her authoritative tone and found himself being examined by gentle cautious hands. When he questioned her and she looked up, she pulled away and lost some of her confidence, but she was angry as well, and she held on to it. When he realized who she was, it came as another shock. He had not been thinking of his new member of staff as anything tangible and certainly somehow not in this form. He felt curious even despite the throbbing in his foot, but he was still angry too, and he could question this new element in his universe some other time.
His foot hurt so much, he wasn’t sure if he would be able to drive, but he didn’t want her to see that her suggestions about a sprain might be warranted. She had been right of course, and after the doctor Grace had called had come and gone, he asked for a scotch and settled down in his study to think. He usually associated his darkest thoughts with Thornfield. It was part of the reason he tried not to stay there too long. He was in danger of settling on a good brooding session as Blanche would call it, so he got up and limped to Grace’s office where she was looking through some papers and frowning and writing things on her tablet.
“Edward,” she said in the voice she used when she was chiding him
“So what’s the new tutor like?” he said leaning against the door.
Grace looked at him helplessly, “I told you in the e-mail. She’s a university graduate. She’s had some experience teaching children in day care ----“
Well obviously that’s not what I meant.”
Grace shut her lips, obviously miffed. Rochester didn’t let this bother him. He never did. “Does she get along with Adele?” he asked. “Does she talk your ears off? What does she spend all her free time doing? What are her tastes?”
Grace had clearly not thought about that very much. It distracted her. “Why does everyone want to know what everyone else is like?” she murmured wearily. He didn’t understand this, but Grace was always talking in weird asides when she got exasperated. Sometimes they were funny, but generally he ignored them. It was just typical Grace.
“From what I can tell sir,” his assistant said in a measured, restrained way, “her personality seems adequate. I have heard no complaints from Adele or any of the help. She performs her duties credibly and from what I can tell, she doesn’t appear to be a homicidal maniac.”
“That’s good to know,” he replied grinning at her scowl. “Can’t get anything past you Grace.”
Adele was much more forthcoming. “She’s very smart,” she confided in him, “and she has interesting new ideas for games, and she is able to apply knowledge in creative ways.”
“Does she now?” Adele was drawing some sort of complicated abstract which seemed to be made up of lines. “Did Jane give that to you to do?”
“Yes Jane and I usually draw together, but I had a fencing lesson, so I’m finishing it to show her.”
“Is this what Jane did?” He picked up a well crafted line drawing with shapes hidden inside of it which put him in mind of all kinds of things.
“Jane’s a very good artist,” pronounced Adele. “She doesn’t just teach though she likes to hear my opinion on things. She says she learns from me too.”
She was right about Jane being a good listener. He found himself moved to talk to her when they sat down to dinner. She did not say much, but fixed him with a questioning look that seemed to want him to tell her things. Perhaps it was because of her that Thornfield seemed to weigh a bit less heavily on him.
The nights could still make him gloomy though when he couldn’t sleep. He had drunk a bit too much the night of the incident. Not enough to make him drunk but to depress his spirits and put him off of his guard.
He felt almost close to tears from the stress of everything and the pain, then he heard a firm knock on his door.
“Mr Rochester, are you alright?” There was no mistaking Jane’s voice. Her face was pale in the doorway. She shivered as she peered in.
“I hurt my arm,” was all he could manage to say and suddenly she was taking charge again.
“You’re cold,” he said as she made him get up. He handed her one of her blankets, and she absently threw it over her shoulders and drew him back to her room.
Her hands were firm and gentle as she tended to him. She looked very young as she sat before him in a flowered pajama top and bottom, simple, no lingerie for Jane Eyre. In the quiet of her darkened room, he was more aware than normal of the scent which was peculiarly her.
Her hands cradling his were very soft and warm, like the rest of her, and he wondered if she noticed the intimacy of it all, he in his boxers and vest, she holding him in a kind of embrace in her Jane scented, darkened bedroom at 2 am.
She had to almost nudge him out of her room. Somehow he felt reluctant to leave. He wanted to stay and just talk, but he supposed that wasn’t very appropriate though if she had given him any encouragement he would have stayed and damned what was appropriate.
She had been like an angel, coming to him in the darkness, like Florence Nightingale, and right away a poem came to mind. This surprised him. It had been a long time before he felt like writing a poem of any kind. He had learned his lesson long ago. Bad poetry got him nowhere. He wasn’t going to write it down, and he definitely wasn’t going to share it with anyone, but he couldn’t help it. He found himself calling her his angel in his head. Sometimes when she looked at him in a certain way or she reached out to help him in some way, he thought “my angel” and wondered at himself.
He had obligations still. Grace wanted to plan an event with the investors, and he suggested having it at Thornfield. For obvious reasons that was not the best idea, but Blanche liked it, and soon the concept evolved into a weeklong get together with some of their mutual friends culminating in a big, party. Grace added a corporate element to it all of course, and Rochester left the planning to them.
Jane in the meantime exasperated him. She didn’t talk about herself a lot, and when he tried to feel her out (clumsily he admitted to himself), she gave him little crumbs of information in her serene way and turned the conversation elsewhere.
He looked her name up on Google, ignoring the voice inside him that whispered he was being obsessive again. If you looked up Blanche’s name, predictably several links appeared besides tonnes of pictures. A search of “Jane Eyre” led him down several dead ends. Did this girl even exist on earth before he met her in the road? Eventually he noticed a Youtube link....
The videos were a gold mine - a key which he had sought for so long. She talked to her friends, to him, about herself, her life, her feelings. He watched every one, some several times and he smiled, laughed a few times and felt his heart ache for her.
Her openness in them contrasted with her reticence in his presence. She talked about him in the videos, but she seemed more puzzled by him than anything else. He made Grace coax her down to his parties. In some vague way, he thought it might draw her out, but she stayed on the outskirts, talking pleasantly to anyone who spoke to her but not at length. He wanted to go to her, but she was so distant that it seemed too pointed. One night she came to say goodnight, and she looked so drawn, almost close to tears. “You’re not having a good time,” he said. She began to deny it, but her natural genuineness won through. He couldn’t understand what had upset her. He wondered if anyone had been unkind to her, but he hadn’t notice anyone talking particularly to her.
When she said good night, he replied, “Good night, my ----“and he had to stop himself. He just didn’t know. Didn’t know if his attentions would be welcome. He nearly blew it all by revealing he had seen her videos. His sense of humour was often misplaced as Grace, Blanche, some of his investors and several other people told him with varying degrees of sternness after the big party. He had meant to be the unsettling fortune teller from the beginning, but the drinks he had before the performance seemed to have given his comments a smidge more of an edge than he wanted. He couldn’t bring himself to care about them a great deal, except for Jane who was more upset than he had ever seen her, and he was hard pressed to convince her that he was not angry. He had even more difficulty keeping himself from hugging her as they sat in her room talking, and she became reassured and calmer.
He knew he had found a friend though. He knew for sure after he thought of the night when Mason was injured, of how readily she came to help him, of how she walked with him afterward, of how she sat with him and listened to him bumbling through some sort of explanation of his feelings without revealing anything. That didn’t go terribly well, but she was kind and she was comforting. He hated lying to her. Watching her video afterward and seeing how concerned for Mason she was tore at him. He did not have to wonder if she would feel for him like that if he had been hurt. He knew, and he felt she would as a friend as well, but that wasn’t enough. Not at all.
She was more comfortable around him by then. It was impossible to be completely formal after they had spent the night
struggling with Mason and then sitting quietly offering silent comfort to each other on the bench at dawn. He found that she was open to talk about her likes and dislikes more. They talked about musicals and “Game of Thrones” and which books they liked and which they didn’t like.
He thought that she seemed more open, and the afternoon Blanche poked her head into the office and said Jane was looking for him, he had to stop himself from jumping up before she left. He didn’t recall Jane ever searching him out before.
She was in her room, looking exceptionally pretty. She even looked more relaxed these days, less wary. Sitting across from her his knees almost touched her as she sat on her slightly lower chair, and he felt as if he would lean straight to her, if he didn’t make himself stay still, his hands folded.
She hadn’t wanted him for anything like he hoped. Someone in her family was dying, and he heard for the first time about relatives she had. So she hadn’t just appeared out of the air like an angel. For whatever reason he had been feeling lighter recently, perhaps a reaction to Jane’s increased cheerfulness. When she offered to shake his hand when they came to an agreement about Adele’s future, he found he couldn’t let go of her hand. She thought that she would have to leave them, that he would marry Blanche and she would go away, and they would forget her. How could she? He looked into her eyes, hoping she could sense what he could not say, but she glanced away and slipped her hand out of his fingers, quick as a fish, but she was friendlier to him, closer, and he wouldn’t let her go. Not yet. Somehow he had to make sure she stayed.
The time she was gone was hard. Adele seemed to handle it far better than him, reading and doing her lessons and activities as usual, but she had an outlet for her feelings. Jane called and asked to speak to her once a week and they sent e-mails to each other. He could not. He sent a few casual tweets her way which went largely unanswered - she was elusive, exasperating, untouchable, a sprite as well as an angel who had cast a spell on him. He tried to keep himself occupied and after awhile he had to head off on a much put off trip to New York where he had a very uncomfortable interview with Blanche. He watched Jane’s videos at her old home with even greater attention, grieving for her and shaking his head at her obnoxious cousins. He watched the episode when she talked about going home, and having a family over and over until he knew it by heart and wondered when she would come back to him.
He was considering listlessly whether to stay a little longer in the city or not, until Grace mentioned to him in an offhand way in an e-mail that “the nanny” would be returning in a few days. She’s not the nanny, he thought back at Grace as he jumped up to pack. She’s my angel and my sprite, and she’s coming home!
Luck brought him to the airport at the same time as she did, and he didn’t know what it was, but he knew she was glad to see him, maybe as glad to see him as he was to see her, and he was almost giddy, and he wanted to sit there and talk to her forever, but he also wanted to take her home and live with her there forever.
Now he sat looking through her videos again as the afternoon drew on, half listening for the sound of her car to come back. He watched her face in the video at the airport, examining every nuance and change in her expression. When he heard them come back, he jumped up and forced himself to walk casually downstairs to demand that she show him her pictures from their portrait session so he could listen to her talk about them, and he could be near her.
This was what it was like to be in love, he thought, really and not just obsessed. And it didn’t really matter when it had all begun anyway, he was more concerned with where they would go together next.
~The End ~
For those who are already fans, here's the fic I wrote for the AOJE Gift Exchange. Had a blast participating! Enjoy! Feel free to let me know what you think.
In the Middle
“ I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun." - Pride and Prejudice
Jane left her camera and got onto the couch near Rochester. He tensed then saw that she was simply adjusting the blanket on the couch behind him, but she was really close to him. He could feel her warmth radiating off of her as she knelt beside him. Her dress brushed his skin. He took a breath and looked up at her as she paused in her adjusting. She looked at him, and there was a sudden wild moment inside of him, she was swaying toward him, a slight, but definite movement, and he was drifting toward her, unable to do anything else, but suddenly she looked down and shifted back.
“Maybe lift your head a little,” she muttered, and moved back behind her camera.
Rochester took another breath and tried to still his beating heart. For the rest of the photo session he was focused on Jane, on her every movement and word, but once she went off to pick up Adele, and he’d watched her car go down the drive, he wondered again how he had gotten here.
Here: hoping for opportunities for his skin to brush against hers. Making every effort he could to come up with comments that would make her laugh. Wanting to run ideas by her to hear her opinion. Waking with some shadow of her in his half remembered dreams in the morning.
He left the hallway and climbed the stairs to his rooms. He had an office upstairs which opened off his bedroom and his private bathroom. If he came in from the front, he passed the door of his tutor/nanny’s room, something that had not registered much with him when Grace first informed him of where she was putting her. He had only had a half formed idea that he hoped the new person wouldn’t get in his way at the few occasions he found himself at Thornfield. He had no inkling that he would find himself glancing hopefully at the door when he passed it, hoping it was open and indicating that he could look in to see what she was doing. It had never occurred to him that he would find himself looking wistfully at the same door when she went away, and he saw and heard so little from her for a month.
He wasn’t psychic of course, but considering what had happened to him he thought that some tremor in the universe would have alerted him to this great change even before he had shot around the bend in the road in his sports car and nearly run into a small figure which seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. It was only afterward that he realized how hard he had jammed his foot onto the brake to avoid a terrible accident. The car had done a ninety degree turn, before he stopped then he was stumbling out of the car with an excited Pilot not even pausing to hear his usual exit command.
The pain came home to him as he limped toward the girl, but he was so angry and shocked that he didn’t much pause to think, but as he made to yell at her, she was almost shouting back asking him if he were hurt in an urgent earnest voice. Almost unconsciously he obeyed her authoritative tone and found himself being examined by gentle cautious hands. When he questioned her and she looked up, she pulled away and lost some of her confidence, but she was angry as well, and she held on to it. When he realized who she was, it came as another shock. He had not been thinking of his new member of staff as anything tangible and certainly somehow not in this form. He felt curious even despite the throbbing in his foot, but he was still angry too, and he could question this new element in his universe some other time.
His foot hurt so much, he wasn’t sure if he would be able to drive, but he didn’t want her to see that her suggestions about a sprain might be warranted. She had been right of course, and after the doctor Grace had called had come and gone, he asked for a scotch and settled down in his study to think. He usually associated his darkest thoughts with Thornfield. It was part of the reason he tried not to stay there too long. He was in danger of settling on a good brooding session as Blanche would call it, so he got up and limped to Grace’s office where she was looking through some papers and frowning and writing things on her tablet.
“Edward,” she said in the voice she used when she was chiding him
“So what’s the new tutor like?” he said leaning against the door.
Grace looked at him helplessly, “I told you in the e-mail. She’s a university graduate. She’s had some experience teaching children in day care ----“
Well obviously that’s not what I meant.”
Grace shut her lips, obviously miffed. Rochester didn’t let this bother him. He never did. “Does she get along with Adele?” he asked. “Does she talk your ears off? What does she spend all her free time doing? What are her tastes?”
Grace had clearly not thought about that very much. It distracted her. “Why does everyone want to know what everyone else is like?” she murmured wearily. He didn’t understand this, but Grace was always talking in weird asides when she got exasperated. Sometimes they were funny, but generally he ignored them. It was just typical Grace.
“From what I can tell sir,” his assistant said in a measured, restrained way, “her personality seems adequate. I have heard no complaints from Adele or any of the help. She performs her duties credibly and from what I can tell, she doesn’t appear to be a homicidal maniac.”
“That’s good to know,” he replied grinning at her scowl. “Can’t get anything past you Grace.”
Adele was much more forthcoming. “She’s very smart,” she confided in him, “and she has interesting new ideas for games, and she is able to apply knowledge in creative ways.”
“Does she now?” Adele was drawing some sort of complicated abstract which seemed to be made up of lines. “Did Jane give that to you to do?”
“Yes Jane and I usually draw together, but I had a fencing lesson, so I’m finishing it to show her.”
“Is this what Jane did?” He picked up a well crafted line drawing with shapes hidden inside of it which put him in mind of all kinds of things.
“Jane’s a very good artist,” pronounced Adele. “She doesn’t just teach though she likes to hear my opinion on things. She says she learns from me too.”
She was right about Jane being a good listener. He found himself moved to talk to her when they sat down to dinner. She did not say much, but fixed him with a questioning look that seemed to want him to tell her things. Perhaps it was because of her that Thornfield seemed to weigh a bit less heavily on him.
The nights could still make him gloomy though when he couldn’t sleep. He had drunk a bit too much the night of the incident. Not enough to make him drunk but to depress his spirits and put him off of his guard.
He felt almost close to tears from the stress of everything and the pain, then he heard a firm knock on his door.
“Mr Rochester, are you alright?” There was no mistaking Jane’s voice. Her face was pale in the doorway. She shivered as she peered in.
“I hurt my arm,” was all he could manage to say and suddenly she was taking charge again.
“You’re cold,” he said as she made him get up. He handed her one of her blankets, and she absently threw it over her shoulders and drew him back to her room.
Her hands were firm and gentle as she tended to him. She looked very young as she sat before him in a flowered pajama top and bottom, simple, no lingerie for Jane Eyre. In the quiet of her darkened room, he was more aware than normal of the scent which was peculiarly her.
Her hands cradling his were very soft and warm, like the rest of her, and he wondered if she noticed the intimacy of it all, he in his boxers and vest, she holding him in a kind of embrace in her Jane scented, darkened bedroom at 2 am.
She had to almost nudge him out of her room. Somehow he felt reluctant to leave. He wanted to stay and just talk, but he supposed that wasn’t very appropriate though if she had given him any encouragement he would have stayed and damned what was appropriate.
She had been like an angel, coming to him in the darkness, like Florence Nightingale, and right away a poem came to mind. This surprised him. It had been a long time before he felt like writing a poem of any kind. He had learned his lesson long ago. Bad poetry got him nowhere. He wasn’t going to write it down, and he definitely wasn’t going to share it with anyone, but he couldn’t help it. He found himself calling her his angel in his head. Sometimes when she looked at him in a certain way or she reached out to help him in some way, he thought “my angel” and wondered at himself.
He had obligations still. Grace wanted to plan an event with the investors, and he suggested having it at Thornfield. For obvious reasons that was not the best idea, but Blanche liked it, and soon the concept evolved into a weeklong get together with some of their mutual friends culminating in a big, party. Grace added a corporate element to it all of course, and Rochester left the planning to them.
Jane in the meantime exasperated him. She didn’t talk about herself a lot, and when he tried to feel her out (clumsily he admitted to himself), she gave him little crumbs of information in her serene way and turned the conversation elsewhere.
He looked her name up on Google, ignoring the voice inside him that whispered he was being obsessive again. If you looked up Blanche’s name, predictably several links appeared besides tonnes of pictures. A search of “Jane Eyre” led him down several dead ends. Did this girl even exist on earth before he met her in the road? Eventually he noticed a Youtube link....
The videos were a gold mine - a key which he had sought for so long. She talked to her friends, to him, about herself, her life, her feelings. He watched every one, some several times and he smiled, laughed a few times and felt his heart ache for her.
Her openness in them contrasted with her reticence in his presence. She talked about him in the videos, but she seemed more puzzled by him than anything else. He made Grace coax her down to his parties. In some vague way, he thought it might draw her out, but she stayed on the outskirts, talking pleasantly to anyone who spoke to her but not at length. He wanted to go to her, but she was so distant that it seemed too pointed. One night she came to say goodnight, and she looked so drawn, almost close to tears. “You’re not having a good time,” he said. She began to deny it, but her natural genuineness won through. He couldn’t understand what had upset her. He wondered if anyone had been unkind to her, but he hadn’t notice anyone talking particularly to her.
When she said good night, he replied, “Good night, my ----“and he had to stop himself. He just didn’t know. Didn’t know if his attentions would be welcome. He nearly blew it all by revealing he had seen her videos. His sense of humour was often misplaced as Grace, Blanche, some of his investors and several other people told him with varying degrees of sternness after the big party. He had meant to be the unsettling fortune teller from the beginning, but the drinks he had before the performance seemed to have given his comments a smidge more of an edge than he wanted. He couldn’t bring himself to care about them a great deal, except for Jane who was more upset than he had ever seen her, and he was hard pressed to convince her that he was not angry. He had even more difficulty keeping himself from hugging her as they sat in her room talking, and she became reassured and calmer.
He knew he had found a friend though. He knew for sure after he thought of the night when Mason was injured, of how readily she came to help him, of how she walked with him afterward, of how she sat with him and listened to him bumbling through some sort of explanation of his feelings without revealing anything. That didn’t go terribly well, but she was kind and she was comforting. He hated lying to her. Watching her video afterward and seeing how concerned for Mason she was tore at him. He did not have to wonder if she would feel for him like that if he had been hurt. He knew, and he felt she would as a friend as well, but that wasn’t enough. Not at all.
She was more comfortable around him by then. It was impossible to be completely formal after they had spent the night
struggling with Mason and then sitting quietly offering silent comfort to each other on the bench at dawn. He found that she was open to talk about her likes and dislikes more. They talked about musicals and “Game of Thrones” and which books they liked and which they didn’t like.
He thought that she seemed more open, and the afternoon Blanche poked her head into the office and said Jane was looking for him, he had to stop himself from jumping up before she left. He didn’t recall Jane ever searching him out before.
She was in her room, looking exceptionally pretty. She even looked more relaxed these days, less wary. Sitting across from her his knees almost touched her as she sat on her slightly lower chair, and he felt as if he would lean straight to her, if he didn’t make himself stay still, his hands folded.
She hadn’t wanted him for anything like he hoped. Someone in her family was dying, and he heard for the first time about relatives she had. So she hadn’t just appeared out of the air like an angel. For whatever reason he had been feeling lighter recently, perhaps a reaction to Jane’s increased cheerfulness. When she offered to shake his hand when they came to an agreement about Adele’s future, he found he couldn’t let go of her hand. She thought that she would have to leave them, that he would marry Blanche and she would go away, and they would forget her. How could she? He looked into her eyes, hoping she could sense what he could not say, but she glanced away and slipped her hand out of his fingers, quick as a fish, but she was friendlier to him, closer, and he wouldn’t let her go. Not yet. Somehow he had to make sure she stayed.
The time she was gone was hard. Adele seemed to handle it far better than him, reading and doing her lessons and activities as usual, but she had an outlet for her feelings. Jane called and asked to speak to her once a week and they sent e-mails to each other. He could not. He sent a few casual tweets her way which went largely unanswered - she was elusive, exasperating, untouchable, a sprite as well as an angel who had cast a spell on him. He tried to keep himself occupied and after awhile he had to head off on a much put off trip to New York where he had a very uncomfortable interview with Blanche. He watched Jane’s videos at her old home with even greater attention, grieving for her and shaking his head at her obnoxious cousins. He watched the episode when she talked about going home, and having a family over and over until he knew it by heart and wondered when she would come back to him.
He was considering listlessly whether to stay a little longer in the city or not, until Grace mentioned to him in an offhand way in an e-mail that “the nanny” would be returning in a few days. She’s not the nanny, he thought back at Grace as he jumped up to pack. She’s my angel and my sprite, and she’s coming home!
Luck brought him to the airport at the same time as she did, and he didn’t know what it was, but he knew she was glad to see him, maybe as glad to see him as he was to see her, and he was almost giddy, and he wanted to sit there and talk to her forever, but he also wanted to take her home and live with her there forever.
Now he sat looking through her videos again as the afternoon drew on, half listening for the sound of her car to come back. He watched her face in the video at the airport, examining every nuance and change in her expression. When he heard them come back, he jumped up and forced himself to walk casually downstairs to demand that she show him her pictures from their portrait session so he could listen to her talk about them, and he could be near her.
This was what it was like to be in love, he thought, really and not just obsessed. And it didn’t really matter when it had all begun anyway, he was more concerned with where they would go together next.
~The End ~