8. Margo
— ? —
Margo
There’s a mercy in how tired I am, because the second the plane levels off and Sandy sags warm and boneless against my side, I’m gone too, down under the exhaustion into the one place my head still keeps him young.
I dream about the summer he wouldn’t leave me alone.
It starts the way it always started that summer, with Sebastian Austen standing in my section of the restaurant holding a thing he thinks will impress me.
“Absolutely not,” I tell him, before he’s even finished holding it out.
“You don’t know what it is yet.”
“I know it’s expensive. That’s your whole personality.” I stack two plates up my arm the way my mother taught me and don’t slow down. “Whatever it is, no.”
He follows me. He’s been following me for weeks now, ever since he spilled a coffee down his own arm and looked at me as if I’d hung the moon in the harbor.
It should annoy me, it does annoy me. It also, if I’m being honest with a version of myself I don’t let out much, makes my stomach do a thing I’ve decided to ignore.
“It’s a bracelet,” he says. “I saw it in a shop two towns over and it reminded me of…”
“Sebastian.”
“…your eyes, which sounds like a line, but I promise it isn’t, the little flecks in them are exactly the…”
“Sebastian.” I stop and turn and he nearly walks into me, and up close he smells of salt and money with a warmth underneath the both of them. “I’m not going to be a girl you buy things for. I told you that.”
“You tell me a lot of things.”
“And you don’t listen to a single one.” I push the tray at him so he has to hold it. “Make yourself useful if you’re going to loiter. And I’m not taking the bracelet. Give it to one of the summer girls who’ll appreciate you throwing money at them.”
“But I don’t want a summer girl. I…”
“You’ll want to go back to wherever it is you’re from in a few weeks, which is the same thing.
” I take the tray back and his fingers brush mine and I try my best to ignore it.
“I have exactly one plan for my life and it’s a scholarship, a degree, and getting my parents off that boat before it kills my dad’s back.
There is no line in that plan for a rich boy on vacation. I’m sorry, I don’t have time for this.”
“There’s no changing your mind? Even if you’ve had other boys ask?”
“Half the town has asked. I said no to all of them too, so don’t feel special.”
He grins, and it’s the grin that’s going to be the problem, I can already tell. The one that turns him from a nuisance into an actual danger for my naive heart.
“I feel a little special,” he says.
“Table four wants their bill.”
I don’t take the gold bracelet. I don’t take the necklace either, or the ridiculous flowers he has driven in from somewhere they don’t wilt, or the offer of a car, an actual car, when he finds out I walk forty minutes to my morning classes.
What gets me, in the end, isn’t any of it.
We’re up on the low cliffs past the harbor at the end of a shift, watching the boats come in, because he’s discovered that if he just sits near me and stops trying to buy me things, I’ll let him stay.
The sun’s going down into the water and he’s quiet for once. But he eventually breaks it.
“Don’t laugh,” he says and brings out a thing from his pocket.
It’s a bracelet. A terrible one. Fishing twine, knotted wrong in three places, threaded with tiny shells he’s clearly drilled himself and split half of trying.
“I’ve been working on it for days,” he says, and his ears go red. “Honestly, I don’t know how you people knot anything. The twine is a nightmare, and I burned myself on the drill twice. I’m only telling you all this so you understand that if you throw it in the sea I will simply die.”
I look at it. This lopsided, split-shelled, badly knotted little thing that is pulling a smile to my face.
“Give me your wrist,” he says, softer. “Please. Just to see.”
I give him my wrist.
He ties it on, clumsy, careful, his fingers warm against the inside of my arm, and when he’s done, he doesn’t let go right away. I don’t pull back. The sun goes all the way down while neither of us says the thing we’re both suddenly, dangerously thinking.
“There,” he says, rough. “Now you have to keep me.”
“That is not a rule.”
“It’s a very old maritime rule.”
“You’ve been here a month.”
“I’m a fast learner.” He’s looking at my lips. I’m aware of him looking at my lips. “Margo…”
“I have to get home,” I say, and I stand up too fast along with my hammering heart.
Still, I keep the bracelet on, and we both know exactly what that means.
Sebastian shows up at my window three nights later.
I hear the scrabble first, a graceless scraping up the trellis my father built for my mother’s roses, and then a muffled cursing, the distinct sound of a rich man losing his footing. I get to my window in time to see Sebastian dangling off the side of my house by one hand and the gutter.
“Are you out of your mind?!” I hiss, hauling the window up. “You’re going to break your neck.”
“I had it handled.”
“You are hanging off my house.”
“Stylishly.” He gets a knee up onto the sill, and I grab a fistful of his shirt and haul him in. He half-climbs, half-falls into my bedroom in a heap of limbs and lands on my floor with a thud that seems very loud in a small house at night. “I wanted to see you. You weren’t at the restaurant.”
“Because I was studying, you lunatic, some of us have exams…”
“Margo?” My mother’s voice, down the hall, sleep-rough. “What was that?”
We freeze. His eyes go wide, mine go wider.
“Closet,” I breathe. “Now, now, go, go…”
I shove him. He folds himself into my tiny closet with an offended dignity that would be funny if my heart weren’t trying to climb out of my throat, and I get the door shut on him one second before my mother pushes mine open, hair in a net, suspicion in every line of her.
“I knocked a book off the shelf,” I say. “Sorry. Go back to sleep.”
She looks at me for a long moment, the way mothers do, seeing more than you want.
“You’re up late.”
“Exams.”
“Mm.” A beat. “That better be all it is, Margo Delancy.”
“Goodnight, Ma.”
She goes and the door clicks. I stand there breathing until I hear her own door close down the hall, and then I yank the closet open. Sebastian unfolds out of it, grinning.
This idiot, he’s actually grinning.
“Your mother’s terrifying,” he whispers. “I think we’ll get along.”
“You have to go.” I’m whispering too in close proximity because the room is small and he’s taking up all of it. “You have to go right now, the way you came, before she…”
“Come see me off.” It comes out of him fast, quiet, all the jokes gone from it. “Before the ship sails. Friday. I need to know if this is only me, Margo, because it doesn’t feel like only me, and I’m about to go back to a life I already can’t picture you not being in, so I need to know.”
“Sebastian…”
“Just tell me you’ll think about it.”
“I can’t give you an answer.” My throat’s tight. “I have a plan. I’ve had a plan since I was ten. You are not in the plan. Besides, you’ll be gone and I’ll still be here, and I can’t rearrange my whole life around a boy who’s leaving…”
“Then I’ll wait.”
He’s close now, backed against the window he came in through, one foot already on the sill, and he’s looking at me as if leaving is the last thing on earth he wants.
“I’ll wait at the harbor on Friday until they physically drag me onto that ship. And if you don’t come, I’ll understand, and I’ll never bother you again. But I had to ask. I couldn’t leave without asking.”
Staring into his eyes, I don’t decide to do it.
My body decides before my plan can object and I close the space to kiss him. There, at the window, with the sea breeze coming in cold around us and the whole quiet town asleep below.
He makes a sound against my mouth, relief and disaster all at once as his hands come up into my hair, and he kisses me back as if he’s a man who’s been waiting a month for permission he wasn’t sure he’d get.
It isn’t sweet. It’s weeks and months of me pretending, and I fist my hands in his shirt.
He walks me back a step. Our mouths open wider, tongues sliding hot and wet against each other in urgent strokes.
I press closer, my chest flattening to his as his fingers tighten in my hair and tilt my head to deepen the angle.
Sebastian sucks on my lower lip, teeth grazing just enough to spark heat low in my belly, then dives back in, licking into me with hungry rhythm.
My first real kiss turns frantic fast. I push up on my toes to meet every thrust of his tongue, our breaths mixing sharp and ragged while the cold breeze licks over our heated skin.
His free hand drops to my waist, pulling me flush so I feel the hard line of him against my hip. We grind there in the dark, lips locked and sliding, saliva slick between us as he groans into the kiss and I whimper back, lost in the wet heat of it.
The only reason it stops is the adrenaline that is still in both of us.
Besides, one of us has to be sensible.
“Go,” I breathe against his mouth. “Please. Before I stop being able to make you.”
“Friday,” he says. “I’ll be there. I’ll wait.”
And then he’s gone, out the window, down the trellis with considerably more grace than he came up. I stand at the sill with my fingers on my lips, a handmade bracelet on my wrist, and a plan that suddenly has a crack running straight down the middle of it.
In the end, I don’t go on Friday.
I tell myself I’m being smart. I sit in my morning lecture with my pen not moving and I tell myself that girls like me don’t rearrange their futures for boys who will probably forget me by autumn.
My plan is the only thing that’s ever kept my family afloat and I am not going to throw it away for a summer romance.
I make it to eleven o’clock.