Epilogue
Three years later . . .
There’s a picture frame on the wall just across from the couch with two photos in it of the exact same thing. They were taken just a few weeks apart on opposite sides of the globe. A man and a woman standing close together, her hand in his, lifted to his mouth as he presses a kiss to her wrist. The first picture was taken in the dim light of a Los Angeles apartment, after too much ouzo and too many tears. The second was in a hotel room in Greece with the Acropolis rising behind them as the sun came up over Athens, no ouzo that time, but a few tears, the good kind.
Turns out Bianca Dimitriou does cry, she’s just very careful who she cries in front of.
It’s a short list.
Their house is cozy, just the way she envisioned it back when Frankie offered it up with her blessing. It’s all hardwood floors and thick colorful rugs, a comfortable leather couch to sink into when she’s grading and a ratty tower in the corner for Amelia with her well-loved green cushion at its feet. That Spanish tile her best friend taunted her with three years ago lines the backsplash in the kitchen, and the walls of the main living area are painted a warm sage. Photos of friends and family line thosewalls, interspersed with Xavier all over the world, her, more often than not, by his side, finding time between lectures and conferences and semesters whenever she can. Their surfboards hang in a rack he hung on the wall of their garage; his old Jeep, still running, gets her back and forth to campus every day.
They’ve built a life together, just like they promised three years ago in Greece. They figured it out, and maybe it doesn’t look like the lives everyone else leads and maybe it doesn’t make sense to anyone except them, but it works. They work. They’ve decided to be happy together in every way they can without worrying about what anyone else thinks of it.
It’s not perfect – nothing is – but she’s happy, happier than most people she knows, happier than she ever thought possible, and that’s what matters.
Still though, things are changing around them now and they’re going to change too.
Amelia leaps up onto the couch and presses her front paws into Bianca’s thigh, begging none too subtly for scritches under her chin.
“He’ll be home soon,” Bianca murmurs absently. Xavier’s spent the last six months in New Zealand, helping to retrieve several Maori artifacts, but when he gets home, he’ll be back for a while. His next book is due early next year and he’s already signed on for another. So for the first time in three years, he’ll be taking some time off – or at least, staying in one place. Maybe finally getting started on the foundation he’s always wanted to run.
And her? Her contract with the library system is up, and while she’s done a lot of good in her time there, she’s ready to move on to something else. She just hasn’t figured out what that is yet, so . . . she’s taking the summer to consider her options. Maybe she’llfinallyfinish a book, develop her own curriculum system to expand down to the secondary level . . . maybestart her own business, her own not-for-profit . . . her own . . . something?
And while they do that, it’ll be just the two of them again. Finally.
She’s half sure they’ll kill each other after a month, but the other half? The other half of her wonders if that much time together won’t make them crave more of it.
They’ve made it work for three years now and she loves her life, but there’s no arguing that when he’s in it, it’s even better.
Glancing down at the ring that’s sat on her finger for three years, she remembers the promise she made.
Someday.
Their friends and family have given up on them. Lexi and Frankie stopped sending her pictures of venues and wedding gowns and bridesmaids dresses after a year. Her parents have long since stopped hinting that they’d make beautiful babies. Paolo has stopped with hismake an honest woman of herjokes. Hell, even Miranda has stopped offering him adjunct instructor positions in her semi-regular attempt to keep him in Los Angeles for more than a few weeks at a time.
Bianca eyes the time at the corner of her laptop screen and then the paperwork on the antique Moroccan coffee table, two empty lines at the bottom awaiting their signatures and an official stamp.
They talked about it, the last time he was home, how their dreams have changed from that frantic need to prove themselves, to accomplish something, to do what they set out to do with their freshly minted PhDs. Because they did those things and once you make a dream come true, that’s all you want to do, forever. So now it’s time for another dream, the one that they have for each other, together.
Someday is finally today.
First, to campus and then from there, city hall . . . Won’t they all be surprised?
She’s just wrapping up her last class of the semester; a sea of freshmen about to finish their first academic year stare at her from their seats in the lecture hall as they get one last review of the course material before their final paper is due next week.
“Any questions?” she prompts as she draws her lecture to a close. Silence reigns, though she knows from experience that sometimes that just means they’re exhausted and not that they fully grasp the material. She’s just about to announce that if anything occurs to them after they leave, they’re always free to email her for clarification, when a voice rings out.
“Actually, I have a question, Dr Dimitriou,” a gravelly voice asks from the far reaches of the lecture hall.
“Yes?” she says, pursing her lips at the intruder at the back of the room. His hair is pulled back, long and ragged after months in the field without her to remind him to trim it, and his clothes are wrinkled from however long he spent in the air getting back to her, but his jaw is freshly shaved.
Her students whip their heads around, almost as one, to see who had the audacity to ask a question when it was clear she was about to let them go.
“If a professor lets her students go five minutes early on the last day of classes, does it materially harm their chances of acing their final paper?”
The entire lecture hall turns back to her and she can feel the hope radiating off each and every face. They can taste the freedom and she’s happy to oblige.
“The only thing that will materially harm their chances of acing their final paper is neglecting to read the feedback I’ve been giving them all semester on each assignment and applying it throughout their research.”
