7. Stephanie
— ? —
Stephanie
Six hours later, I was drunk and losing a fight with a tiki torch and a lighter that hated me.
“You’re doing it wrong,” Hugo said from somewhere behind me.
“I’m not doing it wrong. The lighter is broken.”
“The lighter worked fine two seconds ago when I used it.”
“Then you broke it.”
I flicked the little wheel again. A spark jumped, caught nothing, and died.
The sun had slid low and painted the whole sky orange and pink, and one by one the torches around the property had come alive, throwing warm light across the lawn.
Every torch except mine. Because this one had been possessed by a demon with a personal grudge against me specifically.
Hugo was drunk too. We both were, gloriously, the kind of drunk that made everything funnier than it had any right to be.
The party had rolled on for hours, champagne pouring faster than anyone could keep count of, and I’d forgotten how much I missed my brother until he was standing next to me again.
He’d flown in that morning from London, where he did dense and important things with international finance that I’d stopped trying to understand years ago, and we hadn’t stopped talking since.
Well. Talking and drinking. Mostly the second one.
“Give me that.” He reached for the lighter.
I twisted away and shielded it against my body. “No. I can do this. I’m a capable adult woman who can light a simple torch.”
“You’re a capable adult woman who just spilled champagne on her own shoes.”
I looked down at the dark splash across the leather straps of my favorite sandals. “That was the ground’s fault. The ground was uneven.”
“The ground was perfectly flat.”
“Shut up and let me focus.”
I turned back to the torch, planted my feet, and thumbed the wheel one more time. A real flame came up, blue at the base and steady, and my whole heart lifted. I touched it to the wick and held my breath and waited for the whoosh.
Nothing. The wick sat there, black and stubborn and unlit.
“Oh, come ON.”
Behind me a car pulled in off the drive. Gravel popped and shifted under slow tires, an engine ticked down and cut out. I didn’t turn around. My entire attention belonged to the war I was waging with a lawn ornament.
“Ohh, late bloomers!” I called back over my shoulder to Hugo. “Maybe we can recruit them to help with this stupid torch.”
“Maybe you could hook up with one of them.”
“Don’t be gross. They’re probably Kevin’s family.”
“So? You’ve been divorced for three years.”
“It’d be weird.” I flicked the lighter again and got nothing for my trouble. “I’d just picture HIS face the whole time.”
The words left my mouth and I heard them land and wanted to reel every one of them back in. I didn’t need to be conjuring Kevin out here in the dark, his face or his hands or any single part of him. I gave my head a hard shake to knock the image loose.
“Bad idea,” I muttered to myself. “Very bad idea. Come on, we’ve got to light this shit up.”
“You do that. I’m gonna go pee.”
“Hugo. Hugo, don’t you dare leave me with this demonic torture device.”
He was already jogging up the slope toward the main house, one hand lifted behind him in a lazy, unbothered wave. I watched him vanish through the lit doorway and groaned at the sky.
Fine. I could do this alone. I was an independent woman with a master’s degree and a functioning prefrontal cortex, and I could light one goddamn tiki torch without a man’s help. I’d been managing without a man’s help for three years and counting.
I crouched down to get a closer look at the wick, tipping the whole torch toward me to see why it refused to catch. At the edge of my vision, a figure came walking up through the grass toward the party, unhurried. One of Hugo’s late arrivals.
“Hey,” I called out without lifting my head. “Do you know anything about torches? This one is being a real bi-”
I looked up.
Two things happened in the same half-second.
The torch, which I’d apparently been holding at exactly the wrong angle this entire time, finally caught with an aggressive whoosh and a jump of orange light.
And I saw who the man was.
Kevin.
My ex-husband. Standing twenty feet away on the grass. Watching me with an expression I couldn’t begin to read.
He looked good. He looked different. His hair was longer than I’d ever seen it on him, closer to the way he’d worn it at twenty-two, curling faintly where it met his collar. Boyish. Loose. Unguarded in a way the man I’d married never allowed himself to be.
I was staring. I knew I was staring and I couldn’t make myself stop.
I was also, all at once, agonizingly aware of what I looked like.
Sweaty from dancing, my dress creased and my hair escaping in every direction.
I’d been planning to slip away and change before dinner, to put on the good linen thing and reappear as a woman who’d assembled her life into a functioning whole.
Instead I was crouched in the grass, mid-curse, sooty and disheveled and thoroughly wrecked.
My free hand drifted up toward my hair. I caught it halfway and forced it back down. Why did I care. Why in God’s name did I care how I looked in front of this man. He was my ex-husband. He’d forfeited every right to an opinion about my appearance the night he sent me to voicemail.
The torch felt strangely light in my grip.
I looked down.
The torch was falling.
No. The torch had fallen. Was falling. Was dropping toward the dry grass in slow, syrupy motion while I stood there frozen and useless.
The grass caught.
“HOLY SHIT,” I shrieked.
Behind me the crowd sucked in one collective breath. Somebody screamed. The fire spread across the sun-baked lawn faster than anything had a right to move, a widening ring of flame stretching its arms toward a decorative hedge.
Kevin ran.
Straight at it, straight at me. He was already dragging his jacket off his shoulders as he came, one arm and then the other.
I tried to help. I stomped down on the nearest flames, which felt like the obviously correct response right up until searing pain shot up through the soles of my feet and into my ankles.
“SHIT!”
“DON’T STEP ON THE FREAKING FLAMES, STEPH.” He didn’t look up from the grass.
“THEN PUT IT OUT!”
“THAT’S WHAT I’M DOING!”
He was whipping his jacket down against the grass in hard, flat strokes, beating the fire flat and smothering it in sheets.
I staggered back, my feet screaming, and watched him work.
He moved with the same locked-in focus he’d always had, that total narrowing of the whole world down to one problem, and God help me, some ancient part of me remembered exactly what it felt like when that focus used to land on me.
The fire went out. Curls of smoke lifted off the blackened patch and thinned into the dusk.
My legs quit.
I sat down hard in the grass, burned feet stuck out in front of me, heart slamming so loud I could hear it in my own ears. Kevin dropped down beside me, his jacket a scorched rag in his fist, his chest heaving.
Everyone was staring at us. Every face on the lawn, champagne flutes stalled halfway to open mouths.
I started to laugh.
I couldn’t help it. The champagne, the pure slapstick horror of it, the fact that I’d just set my ex-mother-in-law’s sixtieth birthday party on fire in front of half of Nantucket society. It came up out of me in helpless, wheezing gasps.
Kevin looked at me. And then he was laughing too, that low, surprised laugh that used to fill our kitchen.
We sat there on the scorched grass, ringed by shell-shocked guests, and laughed until my stomach ached. It was the drinks. It had to be the drinks. There was no other rational explanation for why I was howling in the dirt beside my billionaire ex-husband at his mother’s birthday party.
“Hi, Steph,” he said when the laughter finally wound down. He was smiling. That crooked half-smile I used to reach up and kiss. My own name in his mouth undid three years of practiced forgetting in a single syllable.
I swallowed. “You ruined a perfectly good jacket.”
The smile faded by degrees. We just looked at each other, close enough that I could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes that hadn’t been there before.
Three years. Three years of silence and distance and telling anyone who asked that I never thought about him. And now he sat close enough to touch, and I had no idea what I was supposed to feel.
He looked good. He looked really good, and I hated that I’d noticed twice. The longer hair softened him. His sleeves were still shoved up past his elbows, and I could see his forearms, the ones I used to trace with two fingers in the dark while he slept.
Wait.
I squinted through the torchlight. There was ink on his forearms. Dark lines, deliberate shapes, patterns wrapping the muscle.
“ARE THOSE TATTOOS?”
The question detonated out of me without a single ounce of permission. I immediately wanted to lie down in the burned grass and let it finish the job on me.
Kevin looked down at his own arms, and for a second he seemed to have forgotten they were attached to him. “Oh. Yeah. I got a few.”
“A few?”
“Some. Enough.”
I was staring again, and I’d stopped even pretending not to. Kevin Coleman, the man who’d color-coded his closet by season and scheduled our anniversary dinners three weeks out, had gotten tattoos.
A shriek from the main house saved me from having to form a follow-up.
“Kevin!” Tris was running down the slope toward us, party dress streaming behind her, heels abandoned somewhere in her wake. “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in Zurich!”
“Happy birthday, Mom.” He pushed up off the grass and folded her into a hug, lifting her half off her feet. “Canceled my flight a few days ago. Your birthday is more important.”
He scratched at the back of his head, and a real blush climbed up the side of his neck. “I wanted to surprise you.”
He was embarrassed. Boyishly, helplessly embarrassed. The great Kevin Coleman, gone pink at the ears because he’d done a spontaneous, tender thing for his mother and gotten caught at it.
Around us I could feel the crowd’s mood shifting, tension threading person to person in a slow ripple.
This had been sold to everyone as a Kevin-free weekend.
That was the whole design of it. And now here he stood, and here I sat in the burnt grass with my ruined feet, and every single person on that lawn knew our history down to the divorce.
Guilt turned over in my stomach. This was his mother’s party. His family. He had every right in the world to be standing on this grass.
I pushed myself up and regretted it instantly. My feet screamed, pain firing up both ankles, and my breath hissed through my teeth.
Kevin was at my side before I’d finished swaying. “You alright?”
“Define alright.” I sucked air through my teeth. “It stings like hell, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He crouched and lifted my foot into his hands before I could pull it back. His palms were warm, and he turned my foot toward the torchlight and examined the damage with that clinical steadiness that had always looked so wrong on the man who’d just been blushing.
“Your shoes melted,” he said flatly.
I looked down. He was right. The soles of my favorite sandals had gone soft and fused into lumpy, unrecognizable clots of rubber. The skin underneath was red and already rising into blisters.
“Shit.”
“I’ve got a medical kit in my car.” He was already rising. “Let me get it and I’ll fix this.”
He took off toward the parking area at a jog before I could get a word of protest out.
Tris materialized at my elbow, her face barely holding back panic. “I’m so sorry, darling. I truly didn’t know he was coming. He told me he couldn’t get out of the conference. I’d never have let you walk into this blind, I swear.”
“It’s okay, Tris.” I dredged up a smile from somewhere. “I’m fine. Truly.”
She didn’t buy it for a second. “We can move you to a different cabin. One farther away. Or I can talk to him about keeping his distance.”
“Tris. It’s his mother’s birthday. He should be here.”
“But you-”
“I’ll survive. I promise.”
Kevin came back with a black leather bag swinging from his hand. He took in the whole tableau in one sweep, his mother’s stricken face, my brittle calm, and his expression buckled for half a second. Pain, maybe. Or guilt. Gone before I could name it.
“Point me to your cabin,” he said.
“It’s the one right there.” I pointed at the blue-shuttered building at the edge of the property. “I can walk, though. You don’t need to-”
He scooped me up before I finished the sentence.
One arm hooked under my knees, one banded behind my back. Bridal style, straight out of a wedding portrait, in the middle of his mother’s party in front of the whole rigid, gaping crowd.
I heard the whispers start. A gasp. Somewhere behind us a champagne glass shattered on the terrace.
“Kevin,” I hissed against his jaw. “Put me down.”
“You can’t walk.”
“I can hop,” I said, with more dignity than a woman in melted sandals had any claim to.
“You’re not hopping anywhere with second-degree burns.”
“They’re not second-degree.”
“I’m a doctor. They’re second-degree.” He set off toward my cabin without breaking stride, his arms rock-steady under me. “Just shut up and let me help you.”
I didn’t know what to feel, so I felt everything at once.
His chest was warm against my side. His heart was going too fast, faster than a man had any reason for while walking across a flat lawn.
He smelled different than the Kevin filed away in my memory.
A new cologne, maybe. Or maybe three years had simply sanded the old scent out of me and this was what he’d always been.
Three years.
I’d spent every one of them building the case that I was over this man.
And now I was in his arms, being carried through torchlight toward a bed he was about to kneel beside, and I wasn’t sure of a single thing anymore. My hand had found the front of his shirt somewhere along the way. I didn’t remember putting it there, and I couldn’t seem to make myself take it back.