17. Kevin
— ? —
Kevin
I helped her dress carefully, brushing sand from her skin, smoothing the fabric of her dress down over her hips.
She was quiet, her eyes distant, focused somewhere past my shoulder on a middle distance I couldn’t reach, and I cursed myself for letting my want win the argument I should have had with it.
This was too soon. I should have waited, given her more time and more space, more proof that this wasn’t just physical for me, that I hadn’t dragged her into the woods to get one good night before she left again.
But God, I didn’t regret it. Couldn’t regret it.
Having her in my arms again, hearing her cry out my name against the rocks, watching her fall apart beneath my mouth after three years of imagining nothing else.
It was everything I’d been dreaming about since the day she walked out and took the light with her.
My heart was soaring even as my head told me to be careful. I felt more alive than I had since the last morning I’d woken up beside her, back when I still thought I had all the time in the world to be a better husband tomorrow.
“Piggyback?” I offered.
She laughed, a soft sound that eased the knot in my chest. “Sure.”
She climbed onto my back and I wrapped my arms under her thighs, hitching her up. We started the trek through the woods, both of us tired, both of us instinctively avoiding the lit paths where we might run into a stray uncle or a cousin looking for the bar.
“I can walk, you know,” she said against my shoulder.
“I know.”
“This can’t be comfortable for you.”
“It’s perfect.”
And it was. My feet were snagging on roots I couldn’t see and my back was one long ache from the water and the sand and the years, and none of it mattered, because she was warm against me and her breath was slow against my neck and for the length of that walk through the dark I got to pretend I’d never lost her at all.
I kept my steps even so I wouldn’t jostle her.
I’d have walked slower if I’d known how few of them I had left.
She was quiet for a moment. Then her arms tightened around my neck, just slightly, her chin coming to rest in the crook of my shoulder, and I would’ve carried her to the mainland and back if she’d asked.
We made it back to the cabin without seeing anyone. I carried her inside, past the little kitchenette and the bunk bed she’d been assigned when her own cabin flooded, and set her down gently on the wood floor.
“You should sleep,” I said. “It’s late.”
She nodded. Her eyes were unreadable, and I couldn’t tell if the distance in them was exhaustion or regret or the beginning of goodbye.
I started to turn away. To give her space. To do the right thing for once in my miserable life instead of grabbing for what I wanted and worrying about the cost later.
Her hand caught mine.
I looked back. She wasn’t saying anything, just looking at me with those honey eyes, her fingers wrapped around my wrist.
I melted.
She tugged. Gently. I moved without any resistance at all, letting her pull me toward the narrow bunk.
She lay down and scooted toward the wall, making room for me. Then she tugged again, and I understood.
I climbed in behind her, my back to the room, and she fit against me the way she always had, her body curving into mine, the last three years suddenly weightless.
I knew this, the exact temperature of her, the way she ran cold and stole the covers, the small dip at the base of her spine where my hand had always ended up.
My body remembered her without being asked.
I wrapped myself around her, one arm under her head, the other draped across her waist, and pressed my mouth to her hair, and I made myself a promise in the dark I had no business making.
That if she gave me this, if she gave me even the smallest crack of a door, I’d spend the rest of my life being the man I should’ve been the first time.
“Sleep, gorgeous,” I whispered. “I’m here for you.”
I felt her relax. Felt the tension drain out of her muscles one at a time, her breathing slowing and deepening against my arm. Within minutes, she was asleep.
I followed soon after.
For the first time in three years, I slept without the dream.
The one where the phone rings and rings on the nightstand and I watch my own hand reach over and silence it, and Jennifer keeps talking about square footage and patient volume, and I don’t know yet, I don’t know that on the other end of those calls my wife is bleeding alone on our staircase losing the only thing we ever made together.
I’d had that dream so many nights I’d stopped being surprised by it.
It didn’t come. I slept the whole night through, though I hadn’t been forgiven, not really, and I didn’t know that yet either.
Then cold woke me.
I reached across the bed instinctively, searching for her warmth. My hand found empty sheets.
My eyes snapped open.
The bed was empty. Her side was cold, cold enough that she’d been gone a while.
I sat up too fast and cracked my head on the top bunk and barely felt it.
The room was bright with morning light. Her borrowed backpack was gone from the corner.
Her toiletry bag was gone from the little shelf by the sink.
Everything that had marked her being here had vanished, and the cabin was just a cabin again.
Fuck.
I was out of bed and out of the door in thirty seconds, not even bothering with shoes.
The gravel bit into my bare feet and I didn’t care.
The pool was empty except for a few early-rising guests nursing coffee, one of whom lifted a hand in greeting I didn’t return.
Her flooded cabin was still shut up, no sign anyone had been near it.
Some stupid, hopeful part of me had expected to find her there, to find that the empty bed was a misunderstanding and not a verdict.
I hit the main house at a run with my heart going through my ribs and my mind already scrolling through all the ways I could have kept her, none of which involved falling asleep like an idiot the one night she’d let me hold her.
My family was gathered on the patio for breakfast. Hugo was there, scowling into his coffee. Harry was picking at a croissant. My parents were sharing a newspaper the way they’d shared one every morning of my entire life.
No Stephanie.
Tris saw my face first. Her expression softened, sad and knowing, and she tapped the empty chair beside her.
“Sit down, darling.”
“Where is she?”
“She left first thing this morning.” Tris poured me a cup of coffee I didn’t want. “Needed to get back to work, she said.”
“When?”
“The first ferry. Around six.”
I checked my phone. It was almost nine. She’d been gone for hours. She’d untangled herself from my arms in the dark, packed her bag in the same room where I was sleeping, and walked out without a word, and I’d been sleeping too soundly, for once, to notice.
I sank into the chair. My whole body felt hollow, scraped out from the inside.
I’d done this to myself, and I knew it, and knowing it didn’t take the edge off.
She hadn’t owed me a goodbye. It gutted me most, that after everything I’d taken from her she’d been right not to trust me with even that, right to slip out into the gray dawn and put an ocean between us before I could wake up and make it harder.
“Did you notice anything wrong?” I asked. “Did she seem upset?”
Tris and Harry exchanged a look I didn’t like.
“She seemed… quiet,” Harry said carefully. “But she said everything was fine. Said to thank you for letting her share the cabin.”
Thank me. Thank me for the best night of my life that had apparently meant nothing to her, or worse, had meant enough to send her running for the six a.m. boat.
“Did something happen?” Harry asked, leaning forward. “Between you two?”
I felt my face heat.
“What the fuck did you do?” Hugo’s voice was sharp, coffee forgotten. “Did you sleep with her, you piece of-”
Harry pinched him. Hard, from the look on his face. He shut up.
I cleared my throat. “We didn’t, no. I mean, yes, in the literal sense of the word. We slept. In the same bed. But we didn’t-”
“I don’t need to know about my sister’s private life.” Hugo looked vaguely nauseated. “Disgusting.”
“YOU ASKED!” I threw up my hands. “And I didn’t say shit!”
Harry rolled her eyes. “But something did happen. You look more miserable than usual.”
I stared down at my untouched coffee, watching the steam die off it.
“We were getting closer, I thought. We talked, we danced, we-” I couldn’t finish the sentence with Hugo glaring at me over the sugar bowl.
“But now she’s gone, and she took the last piece of my soul with her.
I feel like a void. I can’t even get warm and it’s ninety-five degrees. ”
“Oh my god.” Harry pinched the bridge of her nose. “You’re so dramatic.”
“I’m heartbroken. There’s a difference.”
“Why are you sitting here all miserable and lost? Go after her.”
I shook my head. “She needs space. She left without saying goodbye. That’s a pretty clear message.”
“That’s a scared message.” Harry leaned forward, all the exasperation gone out of her.
“I know you want to give her space, but she doesn’t even know you ARE an option right now.
Or that you’re still in love with her and never stopped.
Or that you’ve been moping around miserable and going to therapy for three years just so you can be enough for her. ”
“What?”
Hugo’s voice cut through the table. I looked over at him. His scowl had shifted into a more complicated look, one I hadn’t seen on his face since before the divorce.
“You still love her?” he asked.
I stared at him. “What do you mean? I never stopped.”
“Then why did you leave her alone? Why did you let her feel like it was her against the world?”
I banged my forehead against the table. The impact hurt. Good. I wanted it to.
“Because I was too focused on work and I was a fucking idiot who lost the only person he’s ever loved.”
I’d been through this a thousand times in therapy.
Every missed dinner. Every dismissed feeling.
Every time I’d chosen the clinic over the woman who was building a life beside me.
I knew my mistakes intimately by now, had cataloged and analyzed them and sworn on everything I had left never to repeat a single one.
And the worst of them wasn’t even the work.
It was the night I’d looked at her name lighting up my phone, on a table between me and a woman who could write a check big enough to put my name on a building, and I’d turned it face-down.
I’d told myself she just wanted to talk about paint colors.
I’d told myself I’d call her back. By the time I did, it was her voicemail that answered, and then my sister’s voice telling me to stay away, and my whole life had already come apart in a room I hadn’t been standing in.
“She’s the love of my life,” I said, my face still pressed to the table. “The only woman in existence for me. That hasn’t changed. Ever.”
Hugo was quiet for a moment. Then he sighed, long and put-upon.
“You’re fucking stupid, you know that?”
Tris giggled. I lifted my head to glare at her. “Mom.”
She shrugged, unrepentant. “Well, he’s right.”
Hugo leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. “Loving Stephanie has never been the same as being good for her. You know that, right?”
“I know.” God, did I know. It was the whole thing therapy had been trying to beat into me for three years, that the wanting had never been the problem. “That’s why I’ve been trying. Therapy. Changes. All of it. So I could be someone worthy of her if she ever gave me another chance.”
Tris reached across the table and grabbed my hands. Her eyes were fierce.
“Then go let her know you ARE a choice, Kevin. Let her know you’ll be there for her if she decides to trust you again.”
“Don’t fuck it up again, son.” My father’s voice came from behind his newspaper, even and low. “We all trust you. Don’t make us regret it.”
I looked around the table at my family. These people had every reason to have written me off, and they hadn’t, not one of them, even when I’d given them cause.
My mother, who’d loved Steph like a daughter and kept loving her after the papers were signed, still squeezing my hands.
My father, who measured his words and had just spent four of them putting his trust back in my hands.
Harry, nodding encouragingly. Hugo, who still looked like he wanted to punch me but was apparently willing to set that aside for the length of one conversation.
“I can do this,” I said, mostly to the coffee. “I can let her know how I feel. Start slow. Not to spook her.”
“That’s the spirit.” Tris patted my cheek. “Now go.”
I stood up. Then sat back down.
“Do you know her address?”
Everyone stared at me.
“I’ll text it,” Hugo said.
I stared at him in surprise. Hugo had stood up at my wedding and then stopped taking my calls the day his sister moved out, and I’d made my peace with never getting him back either.
Now he was pulling out his phone. He looked at me then, across the wreckage of the breakfast table, and there was a look in it I hadn’t seen from him in three years.
An understanding, or the first thin edge of forgiveness.
“If you make her cry,” Hugo started.
“I’ll kill myself,” I said. “Don’t worry. Thank you, man.”
Hugo nodded. Just once. But it was enough.
I ran.