Troy.
He turned his thoughts back to the present moment. Gas tank three-quarters full. A quick glance at the sun, then his watch, told him they were well within schedule. Grannie and Rose were coming out of the bathrooms as Marian and Florence turned the corner from one of the stalls, bags of souvenirs in hand.
“Ready?”
They arrived at the restaurant after a short drive. They sat down at one of the round tables in the yard, taking off their hats and saying hello to the cat sunning itself in the courtyard .The meal of fish, bread, cheese, olives, and salad was one of the best Keenan had ever had. When the Babes got up to explore the carpet store, he politely declined the offer to join them. Instead he slid down in his chair, tipped his head back, closed his eyes, and tried to figure out what the hell was going on inside him.
“Not interested in Turkish carpets?”
Rose. He didn’t open his eyes, just inhaled her scent. Her skin, the faint aura of roses from that room out of time. “I’ve got nowhere to put one.”
“You have an apartment in Galata,” she said reasonably.
The planning required to move a Turkish rug from place to place would definitely add more than minutes to the time he needed to get gone. “What about you?”
“I ordered a small one for my office at home,” she said, and set The Iliad on the table beside her plate. She made a ch-ch-ch noise with her tongue and crooked her fingers under the table. The cat, a long-haired tortoiseshell far too finely groomed to be a stray, ignored her.
“She likes you,” she said.
“Or my socks smell like fish,” Keenan said, and lifted his tea to his mouth.
Rose smiled at his little joke. The glorious spring day in Ephesus danced around him: filtered sunlight picking out the reddish tone in Rose’s hair; the shade from the trees dappling the remains of their lunch; the purring cat winding around his ankle, angling for leftover fish. Rose smiled at him, a small smile, subtle, provocative, like the woman he’d kissed in a ruin. Like a woman who’d forgotten she owned a mobile, much less had nearly a thousand emails waiting on her laptop.
He didn’t speak, because he didn’t need to. This … thing … affair … whatever it was, belonged in the vacation-fling category, the one-shot fantasy-fulfillment category. It belonged in the basket of a hot air balloon, in Rumi’s lyric poetry, in the magical, mysterious sunshine and heat of a Turkish spring drenching ancient ruins, not in the artificial light of a retina display on a laptop. She didn’t live in this world, and he wasn’t going back to hers.
All he had to do was compartmentalize. Shut out the world for the mission. Good. Fine. He could do that. He was a SEAL, the best in the world at everything he chose to do. Let in what he needed, keep out what he didn’t. So he let the dark desire simmering low in his belly flood his eyes, and watched Rose’s lips part on a soft exhale. Birds chirped in the tree above him, their trilling song adding to the conversation’s slightly unreal cast. Rose set her plate on the ground at her feet. The cat immediately abandoned Keenan’s ankle for Rose’s half-finished fish.
“How far is Troy?”
“Four hours, give or take,” he said. “Some of the drive is along the coast. Should be pretty.”
She made that soft humming noise, scratching behind the cat’s ears. He knew he was hearing things, but he would have sworn both she and the cat were purring.
*
The Babes emerged from the carpet shop discussing the manufacturing process and clutching receipts for rugs being shipped back to Lancaster. They drove through the late afternoon sun and into the early evening. When the conversation faded to that companionable silence, Rose opened The Iliad, alternately reading and watching the scenery flow by. He glanced at the book open on her lap. Achilles was arming for battle, a description that went on for several pages. Most of it was committed to memory, the shield like the light flashing to guide sailors on the open sea, the spear that would be the death of heroes.
Did she understand? Even as the hope flared, he knew it was ridiculous. No one knew unless they’d been there, in a war zone. Even the people who stayed on big bases didn’t really know what it was like to track someone in dusty, rocky silence until you slit his throat then faded into the landscape. You could read all the books, watch all the movies, and you still wouldn’t know.
She periodically glanced out the windshield when the setting sun streamed over the sea, or when the road wound through rocky cliffs, and he wondered what it would be like to read The Iliad for the first time surrounded by the landscape that inspired it. She’d be excited to see the excavations at Troy, to connect the descriptions with the actual place.
He was dreading it.