Free The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story by Theodora Goss Page A

kissedher breasts, her stomach, listened to her moan and whisper, “Yes, there.” And when he entered her, it was like going home, like going where he should have been all along.
    Afterward, she slept with her arms around him, curled against his back. He lay awake in the darkness, thinking about his life, about the two women he had loved. Isabel, fiery and opinionated. So very much alive, until the accident. He’d loved her even when they had disagreed, which had been more often than he liked to remember. He had mourned her loss for a long time. But lately, he’d felt that grief loosening, as though a rope tied around his heart had slipped its knot. And now here was Evelyn, intelligent, poetic, elusive. He didn’t think they would ever have his and Isabel’s epic quarrels. She would be more likely to keep her opinions to herself, avoid disagreeing with him. He would have to make sure she stood up for herself; he knew how overbearing he could be at times. But he could see them together, years from now, growing old: teaching, writing, pottering around the garden. It would be a good life.
    When he finally fell asleep, he dreamed of Gawan’s Court. The clouds were dark overhead, and he could feel a cold wind pulling at his clothes. A woman stood there, auburn hair streaming in the wind, her white robes lifted and tossed. She was holding her arms out to him. Her mouth was open, she was saying something, but he couldn’t hear, the wind was too loud. Lightning crashed out of the sky, hit one of the standing stones. He raised his arms as though they could protect him and stumbled back. And then the rain fell, a driving gray rain, soaking him in an instant. He looked around—where was she? All he saw were the standing stones, the sea in the distance. The woman was gone.
    “E velyn, are you done for the day?”
    For the past month, they had been a couple, although he hadn’t yet told Michael Fitch. He knew he would have to. The university had rules about dating other employees. But he hadn’t wanted to tell anyone yet, hadn’t wanted to disturb the delicate equilibrium of their relationship. Somehow, he still thought of Evelyn as someone who might disappear. It seemed so magical that he had found her again, that he had found happiness again with her.
    In the mornings, they sat together in her living room, drinking coffee and going over their lesson plans. He would make a joke about Chaucer, and she would get it, tell him not to make jokes while she was drinking because, if she laughed, it would send coffee up her nose.
    He had given her a copy of his Arundell Press translation, and he liked to see it on her bookshelf. It made him feel as though he had become a part of her life. During the day they would stop by each other’s offices, checking in about how classes had gone, eating lunch together under a tree somewhere on campus, sharing some of their sandwiches with the squirrels.
    In the evenings, they sat in front of the fireplace, drinking wine. It was already cold enough that he could build a fire. And they would talk, mostly about the poetry she wanted to write, because she hadn’t yet started to fill the notebook he’d given her. It was too difficult to concentrate on poetry when you were grading student papers, she said. And the article he was supposed to complete by Christmas.
    “I have to write something,” he told her. “Here I am, a tenured professor with a translation, an article, and a bunch of reviews to my name. Michael told me they were expecting more of me. Butwhat am I going to do, write articles to appease the department chair? Edit a special issue? The problem, Evie, is that I seem to care more about literature than about scholarship.
Medieval Studies
asked me to write about the chivalric code in
The Tale of the Green Knight
. What do I care about the chivalric code? As far as I’m concerned, the poem is about chopping the heads off giants.”
    “And eternal love,” she had said, smiling.