Chapter 15: Nashville Two Weeks Later

I wasn’t there when Aurora told Phillip that the pretense of their engagement was going to have to come to an end. She told me afterwards that Phillip was really very happy for her and understood that it would happen eventually. They would remain the best of friends.

I wasn’t there when they told his parents either.

As I had predicted, Alice wasn’t especially surprised by the news.

The real surprise was that George wasn’t THAT shocked by it either. And while he wasn’t overjoyed by it, it hadn’t crushed him and it hadn’t caused the kind of family rift that Phillip had feared.

“We are not the first family to face this issue,” George said, “but that doesn’t mean that we are not going to continue to support you and honor your decisions. We still love you, son.”

And that was about all there was to it. Phillip said that he wasn’t going to publicly come out or anything. In fact he told his parents he wasn’t entirely sure which way he was headed. He told them that although he thought that he was mainly attracted to men, he sometimes found himself very attracted to one specific woman or another, but the situation had never been right for him to explore. They had always been unavailable one way or the other. He explained that Stephanie was very attractive, but they had known each other for so long that he had never looked at her as the object of his romantic urges; she was his best friend.

“So now I’m free to be with you, Christian,” Aurora said as she updated me over a glass at a wine bar in Franklin, the town just south of Brentwood.

We toasted to our future happiness before dealing with the real thorny issues that still faced us in a life together.

We began to actively (and exclusively, I might add) date, my Aurora and I. We did the kinds of things that people in love would do, short of making love.

I was patient; after all, having waited for her return for three hundred years, what would a couple of weeks or even a couple of months be?

Aurora was of two competing urges. The first was her fear of finally giving herself completely to a man who, to be honest, she had known for such a short time. The second impulse was to have me take her and make her mine completely.

So we did things together. We visited museums; we went to concerts and visited the honky-tonk bars on Broadway Street in downtown Nashville to listen to country western and jazz music. We attended several sporting events; as a ‘faculty’ member at Vanderbilt I could easily get tickets to watch their first-class baseball team.

And it was at a Nashville Predators hockey game that I discovered a raging hockey fan sitting with me. Who would have thought that my petit and demure PhD. candidate could be so invested in the outcome of a game? Fortunately for me, she had adopted the Predators as ‘her’ team. Fans in the stands for twenty feet on all sides of us were amused as could be at my companion as she led them in cheers for the ‘home’ team.

It wasn’t until toward the end of summer when we finally decided to take a trip away together. A trip where we would finally be ‘together’ in the carnal sense of the word.

We weren’t going far. One of my fellow physicians at Vandy had a beach house on the Gulf coast of Florida that he rented out and he convinced me that having a stand-alone house would be a much better experience for us than a hotel. We would have our own refrigerator, a kitchen, and, oh by the way, he also had a fishing boat we could use if we got bored! I laughed at that, but with Aurora I never knew what adventure might appeal to her.

But in a single house, we could make as much noise as we wanted without having people pounding on the walls. And it was my intention to make Aurora’s first time the experience of a lifetime. Hopefully of an eternal lifetime together with me.

The drive from Brentwood to Panama City takes about 8 hours down I-65, and then on more secondary roads through Alabama to the panhandle of Florida. I had Maria clear my Thursday (I didn’t normally work Fridays) and Aurora and I left early Thursday morning.

The drive gave us the chance to talk and share with each other in a more private setting that the public places we had usually been meeting.

Intellectually, I knew that she was a separate person from my Aurora of more than 300 years past, but for all of the differences granted by modernity, the aspects that they had in common were still staggering.

They both had a kindness in their hearts and empathy towards their fellows. They were also serious and students and observers of the world around themselves. Although the modern Aurora was educated far beyond her forbearer, the Aurora of Louis’ court had been just as diligent in trying to understand philosophy, religion, history and all of the other topics of discussion of her time, yet she had to do so with far fewer intellectual tools and training at her disposal.

The beautiful little cottage that we were staying in was close to, but not right on the beach. It would eventually suffer, as many of its neighbors, total destruction at the hands of the great hurricane that struck the area. But at that time, it was a charming and romantic get-away.