12. Margo
— ? —
Margo
The storm comes in off the water without asking permission.
One minute it’s a gray afternoon and Sebastian’s on the floor of my parents’ front room letting Sandy braid ribbons into his hair, and the next the sky’s gone the color of a bruise and the rain’s coming sideways and my father’s out on the step swearing at the sea like it owes him money.
“Nobody’s driving in this,” Martin announces, coming back in soaked to the shoulders. “Road past the church floods every time. You’ll break your neck on the cliff path in the dark.”
He fixes Sebastian with a look that plainly costs him.
“You’ll stay. On the couch. I’ll not have it said a Delancy sent a man out to drown, even one who’d have it coming.”
“Thank you,” Sebastian says, and has the sense not to say more.
So he stays. And it should be unbearable, my husband under my parents’ roof, in the house I grew up in, and for a few hours it nearly is.
But then my mother feeds everyone within an inch of their lives and my father argues with Sebastian about tides in a way that’s almost civil, and Sandy falls asleep mid-sentence with her fork still in her hand, and I carry her up to bed and tuck her in and come back down to a house gone quiet and small around the storm.
My parents go up not long after. My mother squeezes my shoulder on her way past, a whole conversation in it that I pretend not to understand.
And then it’s just us.
Him on one end of the worn couch, me in my father’s chair, a single lamp on, the rain throwing itself against the windows and the fire ticking down in the grate.
The most ordinary thing in the world, a man and his wife waiting out a storm, except we’re not that anymore, or we’re trying not to be, and neither of us seems to know what to do with our hands.
“She braids like her grandmother,” Sebastian says finally, touching the sad little ribbon still tangled in his hair. “Enthusiastically. Without mercy or skill.”
“You could take it out.”
“I don’t want to. She’d notice.” He says it simply, and it undoes me a little, this man who used to time his affection to what the cameras wanted, keeping a bad braid in because a four-year-old might be disappointed.
We sit in it a while, the quiet, the storm.
“Do you remember,” he says, “the first storm we were ever in together? In the city. That café near your old apartment with the leak in the ceiling, and we sat under the one dry table and you made me split a pastry because you refused to order two like a normal person.”
“You wanted your own.”
“I wanted my own. You said sharing built character.”
“It does.”
“It built me nothing but resentment and half a pastry.” And he smiles, and I feel the years fold, and before I can stop myself I’m not in my father’s chair anymore.
I’m soaked to the skin in the middle of a city I moved to in order to become someone, holding an empty iced coffee cup, staring at the man I’d spent a long, stubborn stretch of my life trying to forget.
It happens because I’m not looking where I’m going.
I’ve just come out of the worst interview of my life, the kind where you can feel it dying in real time, and I’m walking too fast with an iced coffee in one hand and my whole future feeling very thin, and I round the corner of a building glass and steel and rich and slam directly into a wall of a person.
The coffee goes everywhere. On me, mostly. Down the front of the one good blouse I own, the interview blouse, ice cubes skittering across marble, and I’m already saying sorry and no I’m fine and don’t worry about it when I look up.
And the whole city goes quiet.
“Margo.”
He looks different. That’s the first thing.
The boy from the harbor who couldn’t knot a line to save his life is gone, and in his place is a man in a suit that fits him like it was grown on him, older around the eyes, standing in front of a building I now understand he probably owns a piece of.
But it’s him. The flecks of gray-blue, the way his whole face opens when he’s surprised. It’s him.
“You’re wearing your coffee,” he says.
“I’m aware of how coffee works,” I say, before I can think, and I watch it land, watch him remember the exact same words in the exact opposite order, a rich boy with a scalded hand and a rag and a girl who wouldn’t take his gold.
“You remember.”
“I try not to.” It’s a lie and we both hear it.
He’s already shrugging out of his jacket, already draping it around my soaked shoulders before I can refuse it, and it smells like him, like it always did, salt gone to cedar and money, and I should hand it back and I don’t.
“Let me buy you another coffee,” he says. “And a blouse. And possibly a new interview, you look like you’ve had a day.”
“I don’t want you to buy me things. I seem to remember telling you that once.”
“You told me that many times. I keep hoping you’ll forget.” He hasn’t stopped looking at me, like I might vanish if he blinks, like the last time I dissolved into a crowd and he’s not making that mistake twice. “One coffee, Margo. You’re wearing the last one. It’s the least the universe owes you.”
And because I’m cold, and because my future’s thin, and because all my careful forgetting falls apart the second he says my name, I say yes to one coffee.
One coffee becomes three hours. Three hours becomes him walking me home the long way so it lasts.
And this time it’s the other way around, this time it’s him showing me the city, his city, the good noodles down the alley you’d never find, the bridge where the lights hit the water, the bookshop open till two that he swears has a cat.
This time I’m the one out of my depth, and he’s the one holding out a hand and saying I’ve got you, you’ll love this, trust me.
I don’t mean to trust him. I do it anyway.
The first time I’m in his apartment I don’t touch anything for ten full minutes.
It’s high up and quiet and full of the kind of things that don’t have prices because if you have to ask you can’t, and I stand in the middle of it in one of his shirts because mine is in the wash after another spectacular incident involving me and a beverage, and I feel, for the first time, the real size of the gap between where he comes from and where I do.
He’s in the kitchen making coffee he can’t drink properly, humming, happy in a way I’ve decided not to think about too hard. And I drift to his desk, not snooping, just orbiting, running a finger along the edge of it, and I see it.
A ticket. Old, soft at the folds, the kind you buy at a little station counter and not online. A ticket to Havenport. My Havenport. The date on it is from that summer, the tail end of it, weeks after his ship pulled out of my harbor and took my stupid heart with it.
I pick it up.
“Sebastian.”
“Mm?” He comes around the counter with two cups, one for show, and then he sees what’s in my hand, and he stops mid-step. “Oh.”
“You bought a ticket back.”
“I…” For a man who negotiates for a living, he’s got nothing. His ears go red, the way they used to on the cliffs. “Yes.”
“When?”
“After. That summer. A few weeks after I left.” He sets the cups down like they’ve gone leaden in his hands.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about you. It was humiliating, honestly, I had a company to help run and a life the size of a small country and all I could think about was a girl at a harbor who wouldn’t take my bracelet.
So I bought a ticket. I was going to come back and find you and make a complete fool of myself. ”
My heart is doing a dangerous thing. “You never came.”
“I did come.” The words are quiet. “I got on that train. I went back to Havenport, to the café, to the harbor. And you were gone. Your mother said you’d left for the city, for school, and I stood on that dock like an idiot with an unused half of a return ticket and I thought I’d missed you for good.
That I’d waited too long. That the girl in the sea lilies was just a thing that happened to me once and I’d been stupid to think it could be more. ”
I can’t speak.
“I kept the ticket,” he says. “I don’t know why. To remind myself, maybe, that I’d tried once and been too late. And then you came around a corner and threw a coffee at me…”
“I did not throw it…”
“…you assaulted me with a beverage, in the middle of my own city, out of nowhere, after all that time.” His voice cracks on it, just slightly. “And I thought, I am not letting the harbor happen twice. I don’t care how many coffees she spills on me. I’m not missing her again.”
And that’s the moment. Not the apartment, not the money, not the view.
This. A man who went back for me when I never knew it, who kept a useless ticket like a scar, who looked at all that missing and decided to fight the second the universe gave him another shot.
I cross the room and I kiss him.
I don’t decide to. My body decides, the way it will keep deciding for me at every important moment of my life, and he makes a sound against my mouth like a knot coming loose after a long time held, and his hands come up into my hair, and the coffee he can’t drink goes cold on the counter while he kisses me back like a man who spent far too long with an unused return ticket in a drawer.
Thunder cracks over the cottage, close and enormous, and the lamp flashes, and I’m slammed back into my father’s chair with my heart pounding and my husband three feet away watching me as if he knows exactly where I just went.
Sebastian hasn’t moved, but there’s a stillness to him now, the kind that pays attention, and I realize the lamp caught my face while I was gone and he read every second of it.
“Where’d you go?” he asks quietly.
“Nowhere.”
“You went somewhere. You get a line, right here.” He touches the space between his own brows. “You’ve had it since you were young. You get it when you’re remembering a thing you’d rather not.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Know me.” It comes out harder than the room, and I hate how much it sounds like a plea. “You don’t get to sit in my father’s house and know me. That’s not one of the things you kept.”