12. Margo #2
He’s quiet for a moment. The fire pops.
“I was remembering the ticket,” he says.
And there it is, laid on the table between us, because of course he went to the same place. Of course the same storm took us both to the same city and the same soaked blouse and the same folded-soft scrap of paper that meant he came for me once.
“You kept it for years,” I say. “The ticket.”
“I still have it.”
I look at him. “You don’t.”
“It’s in a book on a shelf in a house you walked out of. I couldn’t tell you which book. But I know it’s there, because I’ve never once been able to throw it away.”
He leans forward, elbows on his knees, closer without crossing the space.
“I came for you once, Margo. Before there was a ship, or a company that ate me alive, or a mother who made your life a misery. Before I became the man you had every right to leave. I got on a train and I came back for you, and the worst thing I ever did was forget how to keep doing it.”
My throat aches. “You can’t say things like that to me.”
“Why not?”
“Because I filed papers. Because I have a whole life half-built where you’re not in it. Because I stood on a cliff two weeks ago and told you it changes nothing, and I need it to be true, Sebastian, I need it, and you keep…” My voice gives out. “You keep making it not true.”
“Margo.” He says my name like it’s the only word he’s sure of.
And he moves.
He gives me every chance to stop him, sliding off the couch and onto his knees in front of my father’s chair, slow enough that I could put a hand up, say his name, send him back to his end of the room.
I don’t. I sit there with my heart trying to climb out of my chest and I let him come, and when he’s close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off him, he stops, and he looks up at me, and the wanting in his face is so raw and so unhidden that it steals the breath straight out of me.
“Tell me to go back to the couch,” he says, low, wrecked. “Say it and I’ll go. I’ll sleep out here and I’ll never mention this and we’ll pretend the storm did it. But you have to say it, because I’m not strong enough to be the one who does. Not with you looking at me like that.”
I don’t say it.
I reach out instead, and I put my hand against his jaw, rough with a day of stubble, and I feel him go still under my palm as if the whole world just narrowed down to the four inches between us.
He rises up off his heels, slow, giving me the whole way to stop him, and I don’t, God help me I don’t, I tilt toward him instead, and he braces one hand on the arm of my father’s chair and leans in until there’s nothing between us but a breath and the firelight and every word we’ve never managed to say.
His nose brushes mine. I feel him breathe out, unsteady, against my mouth.
“Margo,” he says, and it isn’t a question and it isn’t a plea, it’s just my name, held in his mouth like the last safe thing he owns.
“Don’t talk.”
My eyes are closed. My hand has slid into his hair.
We are a hair’s width from the thing I have spent two weeks swearing I’d never do again, close enough that I can taste the rain on him, close enough that one of us tipping forward an inch ends the argument for good.
“If you talk I’ll think, and if I think I’ll stop, and I don’t want to stop yet. Just… don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
His mouth hovers over mine. I can feel the heat of it.
Neither of us closes the last of it, because closing it is a door we can’t walk back through, and we both know it, and we stay there anyway, trembling on the edge of it, wanting it so much the not-doing aches worse than the doing ever could.
“Mommy?”
We come apart like the floor’s gone live.
Sandy is at the bottom of the stairs in her nightgown, Mr. Elephant hanging from one fist, hair a wild halo, blinking at us with the mild bewilderment of a child who woke up thirsty and found her parents crouched an inch apart on the front-room floor for reasons that do not yet concern her.
“The thunder was loud,” she informs us. “I want water. And Mr. Elephant wants water too.”
“Of course, baby.” My voice comes out near enough to normal that it frightens me, because the rest of me is a struck match that didn’t get to catch.
I’m already up, already smoothing my hair, already crossing to her, grateful for the rescue and furious at it in exactly equal parts.
“Let’s get you and Mr. Elephant some water. ”
Later, when she’s tucked back in and the house has gone quiet, I stand at the bottom of the stairs and Sebastian stands by the dying fire, and there is a whole country between us that was four inches wide a minute ago.
“You should get some sleep,” I say. “The couch is lumpy. I’m not apologizing for it.”
“I wouldn’t want you to.” He doesn’t move toward me. He’s learned that much, at least. “Margo. About…”
“Nothing happened.”
“No.” He says it carefully, and there’s no argument in it, only that low current underneath that might be hope and might be grief. “Nothing happened. You didn’t kiss me.”
“I didn’t.”
“You just didn’t pull away, either.” His eyes hold mine across the room, steady and dark. “You leaned in. I felt you lean in. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t, and I don’t think you can pretend it either. That counts for a thing or two, whatever you decide it means in the morning.”
“It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It doesn’t have to mean what I want it to.” A pause. “But it counts.”
I don’t have an answer, because he’s right, and we both hear that he’s right, and I hate the sound of it.
“Goodnight, Sebastian.”
“Goodnight, Margo.”
I climb the stairs without looking back, because looking back is how you fall, and I’ve fallen off this exact cliff before.
In my childhood bed, with Sandy breathing soft and even in the spare room down the hall and the rain gone to a whisper against the glass, I lie in the dark and I touch my own mouth.
Downstairs, the couch creaks as a grown man tries and fails to get comfortable on a piece of furniture built for someone half his size, and I press my fingers harder against my lips, and I make myself look straight at the thing I’ve been refusing to look at since the storm blew him through my parents’ door.
My heart is faltering again, quietly, in the dark, toward a man who already broke it once.
And I am terrified, because I know exactly how this ends when I let it.