25. All Tide Up at the Moment
All Tide Up at the Moment
Silas drops his hand. “What are you getting on about, Laszlo?”
He shakes his head. “Laszlo, you’re not making any sense.”
“Please. If you’ll just hear me out, if you’ll just listen for a moment, Silas.”
“No, no, this can’t be true. It’s … impossible.”
He turns to go, but I reach out and take his hand. It’s limp in mine, and when I meet his gaze, there is heartbreak there. He doesn’t believe me.
“I was … depressed,” I start, squeezing his fingers. “I was losing my love of travel, my love of writing. I had a deadline to meet for my book, and my sister took me down to the pier where a replica pirate ship was waiting to try and help.”
“No.”
“Yes.” I drop his hand and cup his face, my fingers gliding through his scruff.
“I have always wanted an adventure of my own. Everyone in my life has found their place in the world, has found someone to love and love them back, but I’ve always felt lost. For years now, I’ve been unwilling to take a risk because of what happened with Julian.
Until I found you. Silas, don’t you get it?
It was always going to be you. This was meant to happen. ”
Silas gently shoves me away, stumbling back a step in the sand. “Laszlo, stop—”
“For years,” I continue, “I have helped other people. I have listened to friends and family complain when they have so much to live for. I have seen the world, but I have seen it alone because I was terrified of offering myself—all of me—to someone again. But I would rather spend another week at your side aboard your ship than another fifty years alone in my time.”
“Laszlo.”
I’m crying, and with the night falling, I can barely make out his features through my tears. There’s a roaring in my ears, but I scramble for him, desperate, clinging to his shirt.
When he makes no move to leave, I go on, “There is nothing for me there, nothing that matters more to me than you, Silas. Screw my book, screw everything I thought I knew. Please, I don’t want to be anywhere else but here. With you.”
There’s a beat of silence, and neither of us moves. Does he think I’m lying? Does he think I’ve lost my mind? I do not fit in here, and I thought that much was obvious. I thought he’d believe me, just as easily as he accepted my phone. But perhaps I was wrong.
“If you’re not from here,” he starts slowly, “and that’s not to say I believe you, even if that face of yours reads like an open book … how did you get here?”
My heart leaps in my throat. “It’s kind of a funny story,” I say, testing the waters.
He pivots away from me, biting down on his thumbnail. I don’t follow, instead tugging on a loose thread at the hem of my shirt, waiting. He peers at me over his shoulder and away, before nodding.
“I’m listening,” he says.
I take his hand in mine, smoothing my thumb over the back as I pull him down to the sand. We sit across from each other, and I squeeze his fingers lightly, memories flashing through my mind as I struggle to form words.
“Just start from the beginning,” he whispers as if in understanding. “Take your time, Laszlo.”
So I do.
And there’s something so freeing about telling him the truth—my truth. I’ve dropped truths like breadcrumbs in the weeks since I’ve grown to know him, but this is my biggest truth, and I don’t have to hide it any longer.
“Is it magic?” he asks when I’ve finished. “Are you sure you’re not a witch?”
The moon is out, breaking through a thin layer of clouds to cast its silver light upon the beach.
His head is in my lap, and I comb my fingers through his hair as I hum in thought.
“I’m not sure,” I admit. “I mean, I’m sure I’m not a witch, but I don’t know what sent me here.
In my time—in the future, I guess—people claim this is a kind of science.
Something about space-time continuums and…
” He squints up at me with a furrowed brow and puckered lips.
“Never mind,” I say with a chuckle. “It’s confusing. ”
“That might be the most reasonable thing you’ve said all night.”
I trail my fingers over the constellation tattoo on his chest, and he sighs under my touch. “Why do you believe me?” I ask.
Silas angles his head back to meet my eyes. “Because you sputter when you’re lying.”
“Do not,” I protest.
He laughs and sits up, spinning to face me. “You are the worst liar I have ever known, and every second, here in the sand with you, you have been reluctant, careful, and above all, patient. And you haven’t sputtered once.” He leans forward on his hands and presses his forehead to mine.
I tangle my fingers in his hair, and he cups my face in his hands, one of his thumbs stroking my cheek. And I can’t help it—I inhale that familiar musky scent of his. It calms me; comforts me. Grounds me.
“There’s still one bit of information I haven’t told you,” I venture.
It’s difficult to focus as he slides his hand into my hair and gently tugs my head back, a serious expression twisting his handsome features as he scrutinizes me.
“I don’t want to know how I die,” he says.
“You can’t mean that.”
He searches my face. “If you tell me when I die, how I die, I will be thinking about that moment until then.” I open my mouth to tell him it’s less than a week away, but he presses his fingers to my lips, stopping me.
“Promise you won’t tell me. Promise me you’ll let whatever is meant to happen, happen. ”
I nod slowly.
“Good,” he says. “Now, how do you get back?”
“What do you mean, Silas? I’m not going back.”
“Laszlo.” My name is a whisper, a prayer. “You said it yourself. You are from another time.”
“But I don’t belong there.”
“But you can’t be here.” Though I know he’s trying to hide it, his mask cracks, and so does his voice. “This isn’t where your story ends, Laszlo.”
I grind my teeth. “It is if it means being with you.”
We are at a standstill, and I can feel time slipping away from us. Our time together, one way or another, is dwindling, and there is nothing I can do to convince him to let me stay, to convince him that I need nothing and no one but him.
“I believe there is another coat,” I say. I can picture it hanging in the closet in his cabin aboard the ship. “Maybe … maybe we can both go. If there are two, and there are two of us, why not?”
He frowns. “What do you mean? What’s this about coats?”
I straighten, clasping his hand in mine. “That’s how I got here, by pulling on a coat exactly like yours. So now if there are two, we could go together—”
“To your time?” He tenderly pries his hand free. “Laszlo, that’s not how fate would have it—”
“Screw fate!” I stand, hands on my hips as I pace in the sand.
Doesn’t he want to be with me? Doesn’t he want us to be together?
It feels like I’m the only one trying to figure this out.
And there must be a way, right? This is it.
“You and I—we could go back to my time, Silas. We’d be happy there. If you just tried—”
“I’m trying!” he yells. He stands and crosses to me, stopping a hair’s breadth away.
“I’m trying to understand, Laszlo, but none of this makes sense.
And what if we tried and it didn’t work?
What then?” Silas runs a hand down his face.
He looks exhausted, depleted. “You belong in your world as I belong in mine.”
“We belong together.”
“Laszlo.”
I open my mouth to respond, but his tone is final.
So that’s it? After everything we’ve been through, this is how it will end?
My hands are shaking again. I stumble back as I run one of my hands over my eyes, trying to stop the tears, but they just keep coming. God, I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have lied until the very end. At least then we could be happy; we could be together. And right now, that’s all I want.
What’s worse is I can picture it, our happily-ever-after, the one I thought I’d never get. It’s so close, almost within reach. But what if he’s right? What if we tried, and only I made it through? What then? What would I do with that guilt?
And he can’t forget this conversation; he can’t forget my truths. In telling him, I have damned the last of the time we have together.
What have I done?
“Laszlo,” he says. “Laszlo, I need you to look at me.”
I press my hands to my cheeks. My face feels hot, and my throat burns as I say, “I don’t want to leave you here.”
His hands cover mine, gently tugging them away from my face. “You don’t need to leave me; I’m letting you go. You must have always known it would come to this.”
My lower lip trembles as I meet his steady gaze. “Doesn’t this hurt for you, too? Don’t you want me to stay?”
Silas smiles sadly. “I wish I could spend eternity with you, Laszlo. You already know that.” He brings my hands to his chest, and my fingers absently run over the scar across his heart. “I would do anything if it meant I could be with you.”
“Then be with me,” I plead.
He moves closer, and one of his hands goes to my neck, the other cradling the back of my head.
“All right.”
When our lips meet, all I taste is salt, hot and unmistakable, and I realize he’s crying, too.
Within moments, his lips part beneath mine, and there it is, that heady scent of his lingering even on his tongue.
It’s this that finally undoes me. Our tongues meet and he tastes like the sea, and it’s as if every second we’ve been together is replaying across my senses.
I make a startled gasp as he drags my lower lip into his mouth between his teeth, and his grip tightens in my hair, the scrape of his nails across my scalp setting every part of me aflame.
We’ve let all pretenses slide away, and I don’t want this moment to be the only time we touch like this. I don’t want to feel desperate ever again. I want to know with certainty that I can touch him again in the future, kiss him like this without everything we’ve built drawing to a close.
Again and again and again.
I never want this to stop.