Free Night Train to Lisbon by Emily Grayson

smoky compartment and Alec Breve glanced up from his playing cards and their eyes met: wasn’t that love at first sight—or at least as close as it comes in real life? That whole headlong rush all evening on board the train, as if their bodies were willing them toward that platform and a kiss born of urgency as much as passion: wasn’t that a now-or-never moment—a perfect example of two lives taking a sudden turn that neither lover could have possibly foreseen but afterward acquires the inevitability of dream logic?
    So Alec was to be her prince. He just wasn’t the kind of prince her mother would approve of, Carson suspected. Sometimes when Carson and Alec strolled, and a silence filled the space between them that neither felt the need to fill, that both in fact allowed to linger, the better to slow the passage of time, she would try to imagine the moment she would introduce Alec to her parents. Carson wouldn’t even have to explain; her parents would just sense that Alec wasn’t one of their own. Her mother would be gracious toward Alec, of course, but Carson would detect in her eyes a surprise mingled with disappointment, and then later her father would pull her aside to quietly inquire just how much she trusted this poor English chap—how she could be absolutely sure Alec wasn’t simply some gold digger with designs onthe Weatherell family fortune. In those moments of silent reflection, Carson would find herself sighing inwardly and wishing that her parents could somehow be as understanding, as accepting—as open to life’s life-altering possibilities—as Jane and Lawrence. And then Carson would turn to Alec and give his hand a squeeze, as if he were the one in need of reassurance.
    For as improbable a prince as Alec might seem in her parents’ estimation, Carson seemed just as unlikely a princess in her own. Sure, her good looks and easy grace and offhand flirtatiousness might be the ideal complement to the likes of Harris Black, but what did she have to offer the likes of Alec Breve? He didn’t care about money. He didn’t need a wife who could oversee a dinner party for twenty without breaking a sweat. He didn’t want everything that Carson Weatherell had been taught, for as long as she could remember, men wanted.
    So what did he want? He wanted the thrill of the chase as he tracked down the subtleties of a physics equation. He wanted the satisfaction that comes from cobbling a life, however improvised, out of mathematics and cigarettes and camaraderie. But most of all what Alec Breve wanted, as improbable as it sometimes seemed to Carson, was her.
    And so in the days following that evening of bacalhau and Shakespeare, they strolled, and they wandered, and they explored, and then one day Alec took Carson on a bus to the very western-most point of the entire European continent, Cabo da Roca, and there, at a small pensão, they made love.
    They had arranged to go there in advance; he’d brought the subject up tentatively, trying to gauge how she would respond. What he’d said was, “Carson, I want to be with you.”
    â€œYou are with me,” she’d said. They were sitting on the porch of her aunt and uncle’s villa at the time, side by side on the porch swing, her head in his lap, and he was stroking her blond spill of hair. Both Lawrence and Jane were well out of earshot.
    â€œNo, I want to be with you,” he tried again, his voice quieter, even shy. “I don’t know how you’ll react to this, and God knows I don’t want to scare you off, but I’ll say it anyway.” He paused, then said, “I want to make love to you. I want it so much.”
    â€œOh,” she said, and she quickly looked away. Of course she wanted this, too, but it was not what she was supposed to want, not even remotely, and as a result, the mutuality of their feelings alarmed her. Whom could she talk to about all of this? Her