Chapter 15
Celeste
Do I know why?
Maybe. But it’s too hard to admit it.
Even with the wine warm in my stomach, the evening soft around us, and the way this gorgeous man is looking at me with what looks like hunger, I just can’t wrap my head around it.
We’re different species. There’s no way I’m anything to Saylor but a conquest. At my age, it’s my responsibility to see reason.
Saylor gets to live with his head in the clouds, amidst fantasies where we’re hot and heavy at night, and a Hallmark family special during the day just isn’t happening.
And as much as I hate to be the one to burst his bubble, what choice do I have?
I stay silent, testing out words on my tongue before I say them. Saylor, stop. Except I don’t want him to stop. We can’t do this. Then to his prior point, why am I here?
“Come on,” Saylor says, standing. “I want to show you something.”
“Why does that sound a little dangerous?”
He smiles as he holds out his hand. I look at it—callused, broad, paint still under one thumbnail—and I take it, because I’ve lost the ability to say no to this man and I’m not sure when that happened.
He leads me across the yard toward the guesthouse.
It sits about fifty yards from the main house, tucked behind a hedge that’s overgrown but still vaguely architectural.
My mother’s landscaper used to shape it into something geometric, though it’s since returned to its natural state of chaos, which is honestly an improvement.
“I wanted to get in here,” Saylor says, nodding at the door. “But it’s on a separate keypad and the main code didn’t work.”
“That’s because it’s girls only. Boys have to keep out.”
He gives me a look of genuine confusion, and something about his face—the furrowed brow, the slight head tilt, like a golden retriever encountering a math problem—makes me laugh before I can explain.
“This was my space. Teenage years, college summers. When I was sixteen, I got so angry at my parents that I moved out here to punish them.” The memory surfaces with a bittersweet clarity.
The day they missed my school awards ceremony.
I told them I won four separate honors and they still didn’t bother to show.
Nothing was ever good enough to get their attention.
“I packed a suitcase, made a dramatic speech about needing independence from their approval, slammed the front door of the main house, and marched across the yard in the rain. Very cinematic. Very sixteen of me.”
“How long did the rebellion last?”
“Four years. I lived out here every summer through college.” I pause.
“The problem was that my parents didn’t notice.
Or if they did, they considered it a successful transition to self-sufficiency.
My mother sent the housekeeper over once a week with fresh towels.
That was the extent of the search party. ”
Something crosses Saylor’s face—not pity, thank goodness—but recognition. The look of someone who understands a particular kind of loneliness because he’s lived adjacent to it, even if his version had different furniture.
I type the four-digit code that’s etched into my memory, and the lock clicks.
“Your code is one-two-three-four?” Saylor scoffs loudly. “That’s so lazy I wouldn’t even think to try it.”
“Mhmm. That’s why it’s brilliant, right?”
The door opens and the early two thousands hit us like a freight train.
Pink. So much pink. The walls are hot pink, which I chose when I was sixteen because it was the exact opposite of everything in the main house—the creams, the neutrals, the tasteful restraint that my mother treated as a moral philosophy.
In here, I was allowed to be loud. And apparently, at sixteen, loud meant pink.
Boy band posters cover one wall. *NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, a Destiny’s Child poster that I will defend until death.
Movie posters on another—Legally Blonde, Mean Girls, a Kill Bill: Vol.
1 print that feels incongruous with the pink but was entirely intentional because I’ve always had layers.
There’s a leopard-print beanbag chair in the corner.
A lava lamp on the nightstand. Shelves lined with CDs and burned mix-CDs with handwritten labels in purple Sharpie—“Summer Vibes ’04,” “Songs 4 Driving,” “Whit’s List,” and “HIDE FROM MOM,” which I’m assuming was my trap music phase.
It’s an eyesore, truly. Everything—the bedspread, the throw pillows, the fuzzy rug—looks like it was purchased during a single, rebellious, transformative trip to Hot Topic.
Saylor gasps. Not a polite intake of breath. A full gasp, the kind that involves his entire chest expanding and his eyes going wide and his mouth forming a shape that is equal parts delight and disbelief.
“Oh my God.”
“Don’t.”
“Celeste.”
“Do not say a word.”
“This is the most incredible room I’ve ever seen in my life. Very telling. Your good taste didn’t kick in until adulthood, hm?”
I grab the nearest fuzzy pink pillow from the bed and hurl it at his head. He catches it, laughing, and holds it against his chest like a trophy.
“I was sixteen,” I defend, trying and failing to suppress my own smile. “Sixteen-year-olds are allowed to have aggressively terrible taste. We grew up with MySpace, okay? It was a different time.”
“MySpace?” He quirks a brow.
“It’s like talking to a puppy,” I grumble. “You really aren’t registering our age difference, are you?”
“Know what’s so sexy about women your age?
” Saylor asks, catching me completely by surprise.
“Nothing” sounds too self-deprecating, so I don’t say it.
“They usually have experienced enough that they know what they want. No games. No bullshit. They are so sure of themselves, not because they’re arrogant and think they can conquer the world.
Simply that they know what’s worth conquering within the world.
I find that incredibly alluring. The sureness.
Like the sureness you’ve had about Whit and the baby.
I really like that. You never stop to question whether you should do the right thing. ”
Like honey to a dry, achy throat, his compliment soothes me and saves me from all the symptoms of being unseen.
Being around Saylor feels like standing in quicksand, waiting for the fantasy to swallow you up whole.
But that’s the point. It’s a fantasy. Every romance book, movie, story eventually ends with happily-ever-after because the truth is depressing.
Saylor could love me today. But in five years?
In ten? When I drop my child off at college, I’ll be almost sixty.
Is he going to be using words like hot and heavy when my crow’s-feet become more noticeable and my hair has more streaks of gray than I can pull out one by one?
I trusted a man with that kind of devotion once.
With growing old together. But with Greg I didn’t grow. I just got older.
“Are you going to whisper sweet nothings in my ear all night, or are you done?”
“Done? Not even close. But I’ll pace myself.”
I look around the room. Nothing in here is sheeted off.
There’s a layer of dust, but it’s thinner than the main house.
The guesthouse is better sealed, smaller, and the memories preserved in here feel less like artifacts and more like friends you haven’t seen in a while.
I run my hand along the shelf and my fingers leave tracks in the dust, uncovering CD cases and picture frames and a ceramic mug I made in a pottery class that reads “Future Fashion Icon” in crooked letters.
“Care to give me a tour of memory lane?” Saylor asks.
“Sure.”
I walk him through. The tiny kitchen where I secretly loved making cheap Top Ramen and mug cakes in the microwave.
The bathroom with the mirror I used to practice acceptance speeches in front of—“I’d like to thank the Academy”—because when you’re sixteen and lonely, imaginary audiences are better than no audience at all.
The closet, which even then was organized by color, because some things are innate.
And then the bookshelf. The bottom shelf, behind a row of YA mystery novels, is a scrapbook. Thick, overstuffed, the binding straining against years of photos and ticket stubs and dried flowers pressed between pages.
I pull it out and sit on the bed. Saylor sits beside me. Close. Our shoulders touching. The scrapbook falls open to the middle—freshman year of college, the year everything changed, the year I met Whitney.
There we are. Eighteen years old, standing in front of our dorm building, arms around each other, grinning like we’ve just been told the most wonderful secret and are trying to decide whether to keep it.
I’m in a skirt I designed myself—asymmetric hem, raw edges, the confident disaster of someone who has talent and no technique.
Whitney’s in overalls. Overalls. Her red curls are enormous.
Her freckles are a constellation. She’s laughing at something I said, or something I did, or maybe just laughing because that’s who Whitney was—a person who found the world funny and beautiful and worth engaging with at full volume.
“I forgot how lonely I was until I met Whit. I used to spend so much time in here by myself. But after Whit, I was never really alone.”
I turn the pages slowly. Whit and me at a football game we attended for the tailgate and left at halftime.
Whit and me at a diner at three a.m. studying for finals with textbooks we weren’t reading.
Whit and me at a Halloween party where I went as Anna Wintour and only about four people understood my costume.
They just thought I was well-dressed. The drunk simpletons; her bob is iconic and I nailed it.
In their defense, I showed up to the party with Whit who went as a crayon because she said she wanted to be “something everybody liked.” I would’ve suggested donuts or a Subway sandwich, but Whitney chose Crayola.
We were very confusing as a couples’ costume.