Chapter 22: Hazel Eyes

"Three years," Jamie murmured, his voice tinged with wonder. He squeezed Cora gently as he spooned her from behind. How had she lasted that long without physical contact?

Jamie couldn't last three days of solitude before seeking out the company of some warm body. He had never been too particular about who or where or why, and few held his attention for long. Several bouts of not-quite-love might have turned to something more, if only some shiny new object hadn't presented itself and turned his head.

He had a weakness for shiny objects. Perhaps because that was all he was himself. A reflective outer surface. Still, it troubled him that the TV show runners had understood this fact so readily. They assumed he would forget his current partner and move on to the next, the moment they presented him with a new face on a glossy poster.

Under normal circumstances, they wouldn't have been wrong.

Jamie could recite the names of the characters from a book he had read three years ago, but not the names of half the people he'd slept with over the same period of time. People flowed through him like a sieve, all while his memory latched onto vast amounts of useless information -- lengthy passages from books or movies he could recite verbatim as easily as reading them off a page.

Cora Glass. He repeated the name inside his head, inventing a mnemonic to ensure its permanent place there. Cora made-of-glass. She might shatter if not handled with care. This woman's name he would remember. And this story she had told him. Jamie vowed so to himself, as he inhaled the scent of her hair.

By this time tomorrow, she would be no more than a memory. He would have to let her go. No question now, with that afterimage hanging in the air: a spurned lover speeding down a highway, with no regard to her pleas to slow down. Jamie had felt his face heat up from guilt as she described it. He'd been planning to do the same thing, metaphorically, with his decision not to send her on her way tomorrow. Override her wishes and keep barreling down the road...

No. Out of the question.

Cora made-of-glass was not to be manhandled in such a fashion. He'd done enough damage with his ghost stories. Now he would simply hold her and listen to her tale of woe. Tomorrow he would send her on her way.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

"For what?"

"For spoiling your evening with my Patrick Swayze impression."

She sniffed. "I'm pretty sure that was me who ruined your evening."

"Did you enjoy anything about your stint in paradise?"

"This is nice." She nuzzled herself closer, urging his arms to squeeze her as he had before.

Jamie obliged, squeezing firmly.

She sighed. "Maybe this was all I really wanted."

"Someone to listen?"

"Someone to hold me," she corrected, tracing her fingers along his forearm from elbow to wrist. "I like your skin."

Her touch made him shudder, but Jamie grimaced at her words. Skin. That's what she liked, of all the things she might have said. "You are a good listener," she had told him earlier, and the praise had glowed inside him. A real compliment for something deeper than the surface. Those sorts of compliments were few and far between in Jamie's experience, and so he lusted for them more than anything.

He didn't want to let her go. No. Not yet. And not because he hadn't been inside of her. Because he longed for her to see something inside of him.

She'd been assessing him since the moment they met with those stern brown eyes.

Were they brown?

Jamie reviewed the various mental snapshots in his head. In her yellow dress the day she met him, he could have sworn her eyes were light brown. But they were green this afternoon. Mossy green.

Had he remembered incorrectly? Jamie switched on the lights. "Look at me a moment."

She glanced over her shoulder but looked away again, blinking against the glare. "Why?"

"Your eyes," he answered. "They're bothering me."

She didn't turn her head to let him see. Instead, she made two circles with her fingers and pressed them to her face. "Not the optometry shop again. Are you giving me a vision test this time?"

"No, not your vision. Your eyes." He tugged on her shoulder, trying to crane around for a better look. "What color are they?"

"They don't have a color," she said.

"What do you mean? Are they hazel? Let me see."

He went up on one elbow, trying for a better angle. She relented and met his gaze for a moment, and he searched the red-rimmed orbs.

"Hazel isn't a real color," she explained. "It's a certain way light scatters when it hits molecules of pigment. It's just a placeholder term for a color we aren't quite capable of perceiving."

"I'm perceiving it right now," he countered.

"And what color do you see?"

Jamie hesitated. He could see how the color had confounded him before. It was not easy to pin down. A light greenish brownish mix. The color of the rocks at the edge of the beach, covered with sand and moss.

"Hazel," he pronounced.

Cora squeezed her eyes shut. "No more eye contact." She shook her head. "I can do skin contact or eye contact but not both at the same time." She turned her face away.

"Is that repulsive to you, too?"

"The opposite. I don't want—" she cut herself off. "Nothing. Just turn the light out, please."

He complied, settling for skin contact for now. "You don't want what?" he prompted.

"Nothing."

"What?" he coaxed.

"I don't want to fall in love with you by accident."

Smart girl, Jamie thought. But why did it feel like being stabbed with a thin needle of fire when she said that? The sensation was so sudden and palpable, it made his chest contract.

"I don't mean love love—" she stumbled over her words, trying to explain herself. "There's a hormone. It gets released with various forms of—of intimacy."

"Ah." Jamie settled in behind her, resting his chin on her shoulder so his lips were near her ear. "You mean oxytocin?"

She shrugged in surprise, knocking him in the chin. The impact made his teeth clatter together, but she didn't seem to notice. "You know about oxytocin?"

There she went again. Cora made-of-glass. Broken glass, more like. All sharp edges and tiny slivers, piercing him with her doubts. "Oxytocin," he repeated, adopting his most plummy accent, his best impression of an Oxford don. "Oft referred to as The Love Hormone by popular media. Did Robbie sneak me the notes on that too, do you suppose? Or perhaps I'm semi-literate after all."

She seemed unfazed by the irritation that had crept into his voice. "You're a puzzle. I can't pin down exactly what you are."

"Hazel eyes, personified," he quipped. "Not easy to pin down. Perhaps you should stay another day and get a better look at me."

She sighed. "What's your plan for tomorrow anyway?"

"As far as...?"

"As far as eliminating me. What will you say as the reason?"

"That's easy. I'll lie."

"And say what?"

"That I'm more interested in the other one. Camilla the beach babe in the corner over there." He waved a hand in the direction of the rolled up poster.

"And that would be a lie?"

Jamie wrinkled his nose, realizing he was caught. Cornered. It didn't matter, he supposed. After tomorrow he'd never see her again, so he may as well tell the truth. "If it were up to me, I'd choose you in a heartbeat."

"You're lying."

He couldn't help but laugh at the irony. The one time he wasn't lying...

Somehow, it was urgently important that she knew he meant it. He couldn't put his finger on why. "Blue eyes are beautiful, but hazel eyes are too."

"Beautiful on the inside."

"I was referring to the outside. I don't know you well enough to comment on the inside."

"Now I know you're lying."

He felt the urge to bite her on the shoulder. He bit his lip instead.

"I thought I was Jane Eyre," Cora challenged. "The original plain Jane. Wasn't that what you called me when you chose me this afternoon?"

Jamie grunted. "You can't believe a word I say in front of the cameras."

"You understand why I find this confusing."

"It's simple." He nuzzled his face close to her ear again. "When we're here at night with the lights out, we're playing Truth or Dare for Cowards. I'm required to tell the truth."

She shook her head. "Just because that's the name of the game doesn't mean you're playing by the rules."

"I am."

"How do I know that?"

"I give you my word as a gentleman."

She laughed. "You told me you're not a gentleman."

"It is a bit confusing, I admit. Even to me."

Her tinkling laughter continued. So much better than the sound of her grief earlier. It made him yearn for more. "Hazel eyes personified," he said. "Right on the boundary between gentleman and not. I cross back and forth depending how the light hits me."

"But what color are hazel eyes when there is no light?" she asked. "Hazel isn't a real color, so are they brown or green?"

"Both at once," Jamie replied smoothly. "A paradox in living form. A metaphysical oddity. Like Schrödinger's cat, both alive and dead at the same time."

"Schrödinger's cat now?" He could hear the bemused smile on her voice. "What do you know about Schrödinger's cat?"

There went another pinprick. He wondered how long he'd be picking shards of broken glass out of his hide when she was through with him. "Why is it so unfathomable to you that I should know something?"

She shrugged in his arms. "People who reference modern theoretical physics in conversation generally don't look like you."

"My knowledge of arcana is vast and deep as the oceans." He was laying it on thick now. Most people didn't use the word 'arcana' in conversation either. "What do such people look like in your experience?"

"Like me," she said. "Or a different-gendered equivalent of me."

"And I am not a different-gendered equivalent of you?"

"No, and I'm not the female equivalent of you either. Camilla is." She said this with a note of finality, like a teacher providing the class with the correct answer at the end of a lively student debate. "Which is why I know you're lying. Not that I don't appreciate the compliment. It's sweet of you to say," she patted his arm, "but thoroughly unnecessary."

A surface. Eyes and skin. That's all she saw when she looked at him. Fair play, he supposed. She didn't know him well enough to see anything deeper.

The question was whether there was anything deeper for her to see. That was what niggled at his mind. He'd known himself for 27 years, and he still wasn't sure of the answer.

But he wanted her to look. Suddenly, he wanted it very badly. It hit him like a blow. A direct hit to the solar plexus.

"Stay." The single word escaped with his exhaled breath.

"What?"

"I'll send you home if you want, but it's not what I want. I want you to stay."

She rolled around to face him. He felt tempted to turn the light back on. The torches outside the bungalow had all burnt out, one by one, and no light lingered to alleviate the darkness.

She touched his face with her hand. It only made the feeling more intense. "Stay one more day," he whispered. "You can let me know tomorrow night if you want to leave after all."

"I can't see your face. My night vision is terrible."

"What are you trying to see? My eye color?"

"If you're lying to me or not."

She rolled away again and settled back into his arms. He tightened them possessively around her.

"I am a puzzle. A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma..."

"A man who talks too much and won't let me fall asleep," she murmured through a yawn.

"Stay another night," he urged.

"Maybe." But her voice had grown fainter, garbled with sleep. "I'll let you know in the morning."

"You can't leave yet," he whispered. "Not with the game unfinished. Now you've confessed your deepest secret, but I haven't told you mine."

But she didn't answer him again. She abandoned him into the abyss of unconsciousness.

And Jamie lay awake.

And he burned to know her answer.

And he wondered why he cared and what it meant.

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