Free The Satyr's Curse (The Satyr's Curse Series Book 1) by Alexandrea Weis Page B

she pointed at Julian. “There! That is what I’m talking about. You almost sound as if you’re from another time. ‘Upstanding gentlemen suiting my social station.’” She laughed once more. “I don’t think people have talked like that since the turn of the century.”
    “Oh, I’m sure further back than that,” he mumbled.
    They walked for another block to the end of Dumaine Street and turned down Decatur Street. Jazzmyn noted the way Julian’s eyes took in the tourists scattered about the restaurants and small shops along the way, and then she saw a touch of sadness spoil his pleasant features.
    “What are you thinking about?” she inquired.
    He cocked his head thoughtfully to the side as he watched a couple leaving a souvenir shop to his left. “How much simpler things must have been when this was a small town. No technology, tourists, or sense of urgency filled these streets back in those days. I bet people appeared less frazzled, too. Life moved at a slower pace, and the world was not so…cluttered.”
    “People also died of infections, fevers, and plagues back then, Julian. Information could take months to get from one town to the next, and when you were cut off from the world there was no FEMA or National Guard coming through the floodwaters to save you. Technology may have its problems, but it has saved more people than it has hurt.”
    “Spoken like a true child of your time. You have been raised to live longer, move faster, and absorb more than any other generation before you, but are you truly better off, Jazzmyn? Are the members of your X, Y, or generation Z any happier or more fulfilled than the inhabitants of this city from so long ago?” He turned to the people passing on the sidewalk next to him. “Technology may change, but people don’t. Everyone today still wants what individuals wanted over a thousand years ago.”
    “What is that, Julian?”
    “To be loved. In all my travels it is the one constant that never changes, across continents or across time.”
    “You speak like a man who has known love and lost it.”
    “What makes you say that?” he asked, his voice wavering with curiosity.
    Jazzmyn stopped and looked up into his handsome face. “Because only a man who has lost someone they love would speak so reverently about finding them.”
    Julian stared longingly into her eyes. The noise of the busy French Quarter seemed to still around them, and Jazzmyn could only hear the beating of her heart. Then, slowly, a smug grin crept across Julian’s lips.
    “You are a walking contradiction as well, my dear Jazzmyn. You are a woman who listens with her heart and not with her head. I think you might have enjoyed living in the past when time was not treated as a commodity to be hoarded, but as a luxury to be savored.”
    Jazzmyn dropped her eyes to their joined hands. “If you could go back to the past, to any time, where would you go?”
    “That’s easy. I would go back to the time before the chaos of the Civil War, when people lived quieter lives and all the land surrounding New Orleans was made up of opulent plantation homes, not subdivisions and apartment complexes. Back to a world where grace was a way of life, and not a word in the dictionary…to a time when a man could hear his own thoughts, and reflect on them. I don’t think we realize how noisy our world has become. I would revel in the quiet of that time.”
    “What about the future?”
    He shook his head. “I think the future is overrated.”
    “How can seeing where we go be overrated? You wouldn’t want to live long enough to see what progress we make over the next hundred years, or two hundred years?”
    Julian’s dark brown eyes grew a little colder. “Can you imagine the monotony of living that long? Think of the knowledge people who live to a hundred have. How they know human behavior so well because they have experienced so much of it. Life would hold no mystery if you lived as long as that. Passion would