13. Margo
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Margo
I wake up furious, which is easier than the alternative.
Furious I understand. Furious has a shape.
I lie in my childhood bed with the morning coming gray through the curtains and I stoke it the way my father stokes the stove, because underneath the furious is the other thing, the thing from last night, the ghost of a mouth that never landed, and I would rather set myself on fire than lie here one more second feeling that.
So I get up. I throw on whatever’s nearest and drag my hair into a knot and I go to the café like it’s a lifeboat, because if I stay in this house I’ll have to look at the couch where a grown man slept three feet under me, and I’ll have to think about how close I came, and I’ve done enough thinking to last me a decade.
Work. Work is the thing. Work I can do with my hands and none of my heart.
Wallace is already at the counter when I come in, folded onto his usual stool, arguing with the owner about football scores like the world is a simple place.
“There she is.” He grins at me, and it’s such an ordinary grin, so free of everything, that I could kiss him for it. Not like that. Just for the plainness of it. “You look like you lost a fight with a hedge.”
“Good morning to you too.”
“Rough night? Storm kept half the town up.”
“More or less.” I tie the apron on hard and reach for the coffee I don’t need to make. “The roof leaked. Sandy was scared. It was a whole thing.”
“And the fancy one? Heard he got stranded at yours.”
Of course he heard. Everyone heard. There is no sneezing in this town without a witness.
“He slept on the couch,” I say, flat. “It was very boring.”
“Uh-huh.” Wallace watches me a beat too long, then lets it go, because that’s the gift of him, he’s never once in his life made me explain myself. “Well. You’re here now. Come argue with me about nothing in particular. I’ve missed having someone to lose to.”
And I do.
For a little while I stand behind my old counter with my oldest friend and I let it be simple, the two of us bickering about nothing, him reaching over to steal the sugar he always steals, me swatting his hand the way I have since we were small. He is so easy.
That’s the whole of Wallace, he is the easiest person I have ever known, and there was a version of my life where easy was the thing I chose, where I married a man who smelled of salt and knew my mother’s name and never once made me feel like I was auditioning for my own marriage.
I lean into the easy. I let myself laugh, really laugh, because it’s the opposite of everything last night was, and because some ugly part of me wants to be caught doing it.
I get my wish.
Sebastian is in the doorway.
Still in yesterday’s borrowed clothes, the fisherman’s sweater gone shapeless, his hair a mess he hasn’t fixed, and he’s looking at the two of us behind the counter with a face he’s trying very hard to keep still and failing at completely.
I don’t stop laughing. If anything I laugh harder.
Look, I think, with a cruelty I’m not proud of. Look at what easy looks like. Look at the thing you never once managed to be.
Wallace follows my eyes, and his grin dims a notch. “That him?”
“That’s him.”
“Want me gone?”
“No.” Too fast. “Stay. Please.”
Wallace, who has never needed a thing spelled out, sets a friendly hand on my shoulder, and I lean into it and across the café I watch Sebastian’s jaw go tight.
Good.
Wallace leaves eventually, because unlike some people he has an actual job and a boat that needs him, and he squeezes my shoulder on his way out and murmurs, “Shout if you need me,” low enough that only I hear it, and then it’s just us in an empty café with the machine hissing and the whole morning gone wrong.
Sebastian crosses to the counter slowly.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re about to. It’s all over your face. Whatever it is, swallow it.”
“He touched you.” It comes out of him quiet and awful, not an accusation, worse than an accusation, a man reading his own sentence aloud. “He touched your shoulder and you leaned into it like it was nothing. Like it was easy.”
“Because it is easy. That’s what a friend is, Sebastian. Not that you’d know, you don’t have any, you have staff and a mother and a board.”
“Is there anything between you?” He isn’t looking at me now. He’s looking at the spot on my shoulder where Wallace’s hand was, like it left a mark he can see. “You and him. Was there ever?”
And there it is, the jealousy, naked and stupid on the face of a man who has no right to a single ounce of it, and it should make me angrier than it does. It should. Instead there’s a horrible satisfaction in it, in watching him finally feel the thing, and I hate that even more than the jealousy.
“You do not,” I say slowly, “get to ask me that.”
“I know.”
“You lost the right to be jealous the first night you didn’t come home.
You lost it a hundred more times after. You do not get to stand in my café, in my town, and be wounded because a man who was here, who was actually here for me when you were three decks and an ocean away, put his hand on my shoulder. ”
“I know, Margo. I know I don’t get to.”
He drags a hand down his face.
“You think I don’t hear how it sounds? I know exactly what I am.
I’m the man who wasn’t there, standing here jealous of the man who was.
I know. It’s the worst kind of jealousy there is, because I’ve got no ground to stand on and I feel it anyway, right down to the bone.
He gets to make you laugh like that. Loose.
Free. The way you used to laugh before I… ”
His voice catches.
“I did that to you. I took that laugh out of you one missed dinner at a time, and now I have to stand here and watch another man draw it back out like it’s easy, like it was always there waiting, and it’s the truest thing anyone’s ever shown me about what I threw away.”
I don’t have anywhere to put that.
Because it isn’t a claim. That’s the trouble. If he’d stormed in here and staked a claim I could have thrown him out on it. But he’s not claiming me, he’s grieving me, standing in the wreckage with his hands open, and that’s so much harder to be angry at.
So I reach for the thing underneath, the thing that’s actually been screaming since last night.
“Do you know what you’re doing to me?” My voice cracks, and I let it, because I’m too tired to hold it.
“You come back here, and you fail at fishing, and you do the voices for her crab, and you keep a ticket in a book for years, and you kneel on my floor, and every single day you take another brick out of a wall it nearly killed me to build. And I let you. That’s the part I can’t stand. I let you.”
“Margo…”
“I had a plan.”
The tears come now, hot and furious, and I swipe at them like they’ve betrayed me.
“I had it all worked out. I was going to be free. I was going to raise my daughter in the sun and remember who I was and stop feeling like a ghost, and I was doing it, Sebastian, I was actually doing it, and then you walked off a ship and into my town and now I can’t sleep, now I lie awake thinking about a kiss that didn’t even happen, and I hate it.
I hate that you do this to me. I hate that I fought this hard to stop loving you and you just…
you keep showing up, and every time you show up you take a little more of it back, and I don’t know how much of me is going to be left when you leave again. ”
“I’m not going to leave again.”
“You always say that.” I’m shaking. “And I always believe you. That’s the whole tragedy of me.
I always believe you, and I hate myself for it, because if I let you back in and you break me again there won’t be enough left to put back together.
Do you understand? I’m not scared you’ll fail. I’m scared I’ll let you try.”
The café is silent except for the machine and my own ragged breathing.
He crosses the last of the space between us. He doesn’t touch me. He just stops, close, close enough that I can see the wet in his own eyes, and his voice when it comes is barely there.
“Then throw me out,” he says. “Say the word, Margo, and I’ll go, and I’ll stop taking your bricks, and I’ll leave you your wall. I mean it. All you have to do is tell me to go, and mean it, and I’m gone.”
I look at him.
I open my mouth to tell him to go.
And that is not the word that comes out.
I don’t know which of us moves.
I’ve spent my whole life blaming my body for this, the way it decides things my head hasn’t approved, and maybe that’s a lie I tell so I don’t have to own it, because the truth is I want this, I have wanted it since the storm, since the cliff, since a rich boy burned his hand on my coffee a lifetime ago.
I grab a fistful of that ruined sweater and I drag him down and I kiss him, finally, the kiss the storm stole from us, and it is nothing like the almost.
The almost was a held breath.
This is the breath let go.
He makes a broken sound against my mouth and then his hands are in my hair, on my jaw, hauling me up onto my toes, and he kisses me back like a man who’s been dying of thirst within sight of water for two weeks, and every day of the missing pours out of both of us at once.
There’s no softness in it. I don’t want softness. I bite his lip and he groans and presses me back into the counter, and a cup goes over somewhere and neither of us cares, and I can feel exactly how much of a wreck this is for him and I want more of it, I want all of it, I want proof.
“Not here.” I get it out against his mouth, breathless, already knowing I’m not stopping this, only moving it. “The windows. Anyone could… the boathouse. My father’s boathouse, down the path, it’s…”
He kisses the rest of the sentence out of my mouth.
“Show me,” he says.
The boathouse door bangs shut behind us, and the world narrows to salt and rope and the man backing me into the wall.