First Sight by Jordan Taylor

Author:Jordan Taylor [Taylor, Jordan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NineStar Press, LGBT, romance, contemporary, honeymoon, disability, Amsterdam
Publisher: NineStar Press, LLC
Published: 2018-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Brrrring! Whoosh!

Thundering feet, chattering crowds, push and shove of motion. We moved block by block, Archer stopping often to catch his breath as he tried to explain the sights to me.

“Brick bridge with three arches over this canal intersection. It’s beautiful. Hundreds of years old. I don’t know how some of the canal boats can go under it, though, the arches are so narrow. There are boats tied all the way down this one, and houseboats. It looks like all houseboats on the other side.”

“Like the bikes?” I asked.

“Yeah, not so many chained bikes over here. I guess they’re all out in rush hour.”

It was Monday morning. After a Sunday spent mostly near “home,” pulling ourselves together and still being jet-lagged, we had set out early to explore more of the city on foot and by those light rail trams or whatever they were that took us from the central station to the middle of the street drop-off.

I told him I wanted him to take me to the Red Light District—just so he had to tell me what he saw. And Archer wanted to see old churches and the street markets and all the canals and the tulip market.

No one had warned us that rush hour in Amsterdam was like stepping onto I-5 on a Monday morning, in which every car was transformed into four bicycles. And the whole interstate was two feet wide.

At least, this was how Archer summed it up after the fifth or sixth time he almost knocked me down or yanked me off my feet getting us both out of the way.

And, to think, we had wanted to get married and travel in October especially for it being the quiet time of year. After school was in. Before the holidays. Cheaper prices. Still good weather.

Archer led us up long sidewalks toward what he said was the center of town, following his map to a fry place that they had told us at the hostel were the best in Amsterdam. Even when we hit moments of relative peace without all the noise and people brushing past, Archer was endlessly moving left or right, stopping, indicating what was wrong.

“Pole—right to avoid a hole—jagged sidewalk—pole—curb down—curb up—pole—right to avoid a drop.”

“What’s up with the poles and holes?” I asked, straight-faced.

Archer, tense as a cop without coffee, did not find me amusing. “The sidewalks are damn narrow and there’s…stuff everywhere. There are steps jutting out into them for doorways with a pole at the bottom starting handrails, leaving anyone walking on the sidewalk about a foot of space before stepping into the street. But there are also doorways down all along the way and those are just stairways, amounting to huge holes cut out of the sidewalk to go down to people’s front doors. There’s no rail or curb or anything. If you weren’t watching or out in the dark or drunk, you would just step off into a hole five or six times on every sidewalk.”

I almost had

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