7. Sebastian
— ? —
Sebastian
There’s a particular shade of gold that Santorini turns at the end of the day, and I’m watching it move across the surface of my wine instead of drinking it.
The reception moves around me, all of it exactly as my mother designed.
Crystal. Investors. A string quartet sawing away at something meant to sound like importance. I turn the glass by its stem and the gold slides and pools, and somewhere three tables over, a man is telling a story about a yacht, and I am not here for a single word of it.
I’m thinking about my wife.
My mind is trying to recall how the distance between us happened but I can’t point to the day it started.
There wasn’t one. There was just a year that became five, a hundred dinners I missed and told myself I’d make up, a thousand mornings I left before she woke.
We didn’t fall apart the way people in films fall apart, with a slammed door and a reason. We came apart the way a rope does, one thread at a time, until one day you go to lean your weight on it and there’s nothing there.
And it’s gotten worse since we boarded.
I know that. But I was too absorbed in my duties and responsibilities that I let it fester.
All I told myself is that the launch came first, at least for now. I just need to complete things one at a time because I thought there’d be time after.
Now, it slowly dawns on me that it’s a foolish mistake.
My grip tightens on the glass until I feel the stem creak.
“Mr. Austen.”
I come back to the room. The Archbishop is in front of me in robes and beard with a hand extended, and I take it, let him say his blessing over me, some benediction I nod through without hearing, and I manage the smile I’ve been trained to manage since before I could walk.
“A beautiful ship,” he says. “A beautiful family, God willing.”
“Thank you, Your Eminence.” The word family lands somewhere I wasn’t braced for. “If you’ll excuse me. There’s a matter I need to see to.”
I set the untouched wine on a passing tray and go to find my assistant.
Priya is by the service doors, tablet in hand, doing the quiet work that keeps all of this standing.
“The car ashore for tonight,” I say. “It’s confirmed?”
“Confirmed, sir. Seven o’clock. The table on the terrace, exactly as you asked.”
“And the flowers?” I ask. This is the part I actually care about.
“Arranged, sir. They came aboard on the afternoon tender.” She reports calmly. “It wasn’t easy on the island, but there’s a grower up past Pyrgos who had them. Sea lilies. A whole armful of them, exactly as you wanted.”
My chest loosens for the first time all day.
“Sea lilies,” I repeat, just to hear it.
“Sea lilies. Not a rose in sight.” She says it lightly, but she means it kindly, because Priya has worked for me long enough to know this matters.
“A bouquet for the table, and the restaurant’s dressing the terrace with the rest of them, the way you asked.
When you and Mrs. Austen walk out tonight, it’ll be nothing but lilies and candlelight and the caldera. ”
“Thank you, Priya.”
She moves off, a little surprised by my tone, and I stand there a moment with the old memory rising up whether I want it or not.
Because the sea lilies aren’t a preference.
They aren’t a nice touch for a nice dinner.
They’re a place, and a girl, and the first thing I ever knew about her before I knew her name.
I was twenty-three and bored senseless, sent to a coastal nothing of a town called Havenport to look at a marina my father was thinking of buying but never did.
Back then, I’d stopped bothering with the top buttons of my shirt, treating it as some breather and vacation. I was leaning on a harbor rail with my sleeves shoved up, half-watching the fishing boats come in, the phone pressed to my ear more out of habit than obedience.
Two girls drifted past behind me, one of them slowing to look me over, the way women sometimes did. I didn’t turn around, just dreading the long phone call I’m stuck with at the moment.
“Sebastian, are you listening to me?” My mother’s voice, tinny and precise. “If you don’t like Therese, the Scotts have a daughter your age. I’ve told them you’ll be back by Friday.”
“Mm.”
“You cannot keep sulking in some fishing village playing at a simpler life. It’s unbecoming. When your father sends you to look at a marina, he means look at the marina, not vanish into it. Friday, Sebastian. Say it back to me.”
Then I heard a laugh.
It was what turned my head. Bright and unguarded, slightly too loud for polite company.
Down on the sand where the sea lilies grew, blooming straight out of the dune, there was a girl standing barefoot in the middle of them with her shoes hooked in one hand, arguing cheerfully with two old fishermen.
“You’re a thief, Delancy!” one of them called. “That was my crab pot and you know it!”
“Prove it, old man!” She threw her head back and laughed, shoving his shoulder. He grinned at her the way you grin at your own granddaughter.
“Sebastian?” My mother’s voice had gone small and far away, a sound coming from another room, another life. “Sebastian, are you even… what is that noise?”
I wasn’t listening anymore. I couldn’t.
The sun was catching in her hair, warming her brown skin, and she had a face you don’t find in the rooms I grew up in. Open and quick, lit from the inside, freckles the sea had scattered across her nose, a mouth that looked one breath from more trouble.
Every woman I’d ever been introduced to had been arranged, presented, angled toward the light. This one was just standing in a field of flowers being thoroughly, loudly alive, and I forgot, completely, that I had a phone in my hand.
“…back by Friday, do you hear me?”
I took the phone from my ear and hung up without looking at the screen.
A boat horn sounded, and she waved at the fishermen and started up the path, and I finally, belatedly, made my legs work. I pushed off the rail and went after her. No plan, no line, just the animal certainty that if I let her walk off that beach I’d regret it for a long time.
I didn’t make it ten feet.
“You’re not from here.” One of the sundress girls had peeled off from her friend and planted herself in my path, all confidence and coconut sunscreen. “I’d remember. Are you staying long? You should give me your number, we could show you around.”
“That’s kind of you.” I was already looking past her, up the path, craning. “I really can’t.”
By the time I’d untangled myself, gotten around her, to the top of the path where it spilled into the harbor road, the crowd had swallowed her whole. Market stalls and tourists and a tangle of bicycles, and no barefoot girl anywhere in it.
She’d dissolved into her own town as if she’d never been there at all.
I told myself that was that.
A pretty stranger in a field of lilies. The kind of thing you keep and don’t chase.
I only lasted three days.
Three days of walking around town, turning at every laugh that was almost hers and being wrong every time while I told myself I was there for the marina.
On the third day, it suddenly rained hard, emptying the street in seconds, and I ducked into the first warm doorway off the harbor to get out of it. A little restaurant that smelled of coffee, fried fish, and salt, steamed windows, a bell over the door.
And then a voice, from somewhere behind the counter.
“Sit anywhere, I’ll be right with you!”
It settled over me before I’d even placed it, and my whole body went still, because I knew that voice. I’d been hearing echoes of it for three days in every corner of this town and getting it wrong.
At first, I told myself I was wrong now too. I told myself I’d finally cracked, that I wanted it so badly I’d started conjuring her out of strangers.
Then she came around the counter with a coffee pot in her hand, and it was her.
The girl from the dunes, in an apron now, a pen tucked behind her ear, a strand of hair stuck to her cheek from the steam, and my entire vocabulary walked out the door and left me for dead.
“Coffee?” she asked, already pouring, not knowing yet that she’d been ruining my sleep for days.
“Yes.” It came out rough. “Please.”
She set the cup down in front of me, and I reached for it to have anywhere to put my hands but I was so busy looking at her that I closed my fingers around the wrong part and tipped half of it straight over the back of my own hand.
“Fuck…”“Oh, God!”
She had a cloth on me before I’d finished swearing, both her hands wrapped around mine, mopping, laughing at me and trying not to.
“Okay… Wow. You’re supposed to let it cool first. That’s sort of the entire concept of coffee.”
“I’m aware of how coffee works.”
“Are you? Because from where I’m standing you look like you’ve never met a hot drink in your life.”
“I’ve had a difficult relationship with beverages lately.”
“Clearly.”
She turned my hand over in both of hers, checking the burn, her thumb moving light across my knuckles, and then she looked up to say more but the words didn’t come, because we were close, closer than I’d realized.
Close enough that I could see the gold flecks in her eyes and the exact place her laugh lived at the corner of her mouth.
She went still. So did I.
The rain came down on the windows and the whole loud little room fell away, and for one long second neither of us was breathing, and neither of us moved to fix it.
“You’re the girl from the dunes,” I said like an idiot, a man who’d been rehearsing a better line and lost every word of it.
Her eyebrows went up, and a slow smile followed. “You were watching me on the beach?”
“I was admiring the local flora.”
“Uh-huh.”
“There were flowers involved… you happened to be there.”
“You’re a terrible liar,” she said, delighted, and let go of my hand at last, though I swear she did it slowly. “And you’re a menace to yourself. Sit down before you scald the other hand. I’ll get you ice.”
That was the beginning.
Right there, with a burn on my hand and her laughing at me in a room that smelled of rain and the sea.
A girl the whole town loved and who saw me as a person.