18. Margo #2
He undresses me slowly, which is its own kind of torment. In the boathouse it was buttons torn off and thrown, a race to get to skin.
Here he takes his time with every layer, pausing to press his mouth to each new stretch of me as he uncovers it, the curve of my shoulder, the inside of my wrist, the soft place under my ribs where my breath jumps, murmuring things too low to catch, worshipping me by inches until I’m trembling and half out of my mind with how gentle he’s being.
“You don’t have to be this careful,” I whisper. “I told you. I won’t break.”
“I know you won’t.” He lifts his head, and his eyes are dark and wet and completely without armor.
“This isn’t careful because I think you’re fragile.
It’s careful because I spent five years rushing past you.
I’m not going to rush a single thing tonight.
I want to learn you again. All of you. Slowly, this time, the way I should have from the start. ”
And then he does exactly that.
He maps me with his hands and his mouth, slow and reverent, terrified of getting a single thing wrong, learning the places that make me arch, the ones that make me gasp his name into the open dark.
When his mouth finally finds the center of me I fist my hands in the sand and I don’t have to bite down on anything, because there are no walls here, no crew, no sleeping child down a corridor, and the sound that comes out of me is loud and unguarded and entirely mine.
He groans against me at the sound of it, holds my hips as I rise off the sand, and takes me apart with a patience that feels almost cruel until it tips over into a brightness so total I lose the shape of the sky.
I’m still coming down when I reach for him, drag him up the length of my body, get my hands under his shirt and shove it off him so there’s nothing between us but the salt on our skin.
“I want to see you,” I tell him, and I mean all of it, not just his body. “Come here. I want to feel all of you.”
He settles over me, bracing on his forearms, and for a moment he just looks at me in the moonlight, his hair falling loose, sand on his shoulder, the CEO burned all the way off him until there’s only the man left. The one I married. The one I found again on a beach at the end of the world.
“I’m going to feel this for the rest of my life,” he says, low. “This exact minute. You, looking at me like that.”
Then he pushes into me, slow, both of us going still and shaking at the fullness of it, and where the boathouse was a collision this is a homecoming, a slow sure joining that reaches all the way to the back of my throat and pulls a sound out of me I didn’t know I still had.
Sebastian sets a rhythm that has nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with wanting to stay, deep and unhurried, his forehead dropping to mine, our breath tangling in the small space between our mouths.
“Look at me,” I whisper, and it’s different from the boathouse, where it was a dare. Now it’s a plea. “Don’t close your eyes. I want you here. All the way here.”
“I’m here.” His voice shakes on it. “I’m not going anywhere. Not this time. Not ever again.”
I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper, and he answers me, and we move together on the cool sand with the surf sliding up the beach beside us, and it builds slow and inevitable, a wave gathering itself.
He slides one hand under the small of my back, tilting me up into him, and the new angle drags a broken gasp out of me and I feel him lose the last of his control at the sound of it.
“Margo.” My name, wrecked, right against my ear. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you. Let go, love, I’ve got you.”
And I do. It rolls through me long and deep, endless, my whole body clenching around him, and I feel him follow me over the edge a heartbeat later with my name breaking apart in his mouth, his arms locked around me like he’s afraid the tide will take me if he loosens his grip for a second.
For a long while neither of us moves. His weight is on me and I don’t want it off. The stars are absurd overhead. The lilies are crushed somewhere in the sand and I don’t care.
Afterward, we lie tangled together with a beach towel thrown over us and the sand cooling under my back and his heart slamming under my ear.
“I forgive you,” I say into the dark.
I feel him smile against my hair. “You already said that. On the beach, before.”
“I know. I’m saying it again. Here. Like this.” I trace a slow line down the center of his chest. “I forgive you, Sebastian. But you should hear the rest of it, so there’s no confusion later. I’m not the girl you married.”
He’s quiet a moment.
Then: “Good.”
I lift my head to look at him, thrown. “Good?”
“I loved that girl. I always will.”
He brushes a strand of hair off my cheek, his touch unbearably gentle.
“But she trusted me the way you trust a person before they’ve shown you what they’ll do with it. I don’t want that back. I don’t deserve that back.”
His eyes hold mine, steady.
“I want to know the woman who took that trust away and walked off my ship with our daughter and her own name. The one who told my mother no and meant it. The one who built a whole life out of the wreck I made and didn’t need me for a single day of it.
That’s the woman I want. Not the girl who didn’t know better.
The one who does, and might choose me anyway. ”
I don’t have anything to say to that. He’s reached into me and named the exact fear I never told a soul, the one where I worried he only wanted the soft, small, disappearing version of me, and he’s set it down between us and told me he wants the opposite.
The words are right there. I love you. They’ve been sitting in my chest since a garden, since a boathouse, since long before I’d admit it. They rise up my throat and press against my teeth, and I get as far as parting my lips.
Then I close them again.
Because we are three weeks and one beach into rebuilding a thing that took five years to shatter, and I have learned the hard way what it costs to hand this man the whole of my heart before the ground under us is solid.
I want to say it when it’s safe.
When I’m sure. When saying it isn’t a hope but a fact.
So I don’t. Not tonight.
“What is it?” he asks, watching my face. “You looked like you were about to say a thing.”
“Nothing.” I lay my head back on his chest so he can’t read the lie on me. “Just tired. The good kind.”
He wraps an arm around me and pulls the towel higher over us both, and I feel him press a kiss to the top of my head, and he doesn’t push, and God, that might be the thing that finally does it, the not-pushing, the letting me get there on my own.
“Someday,” I say, so quietly the surf almost takes it.
“Someday what?”
“Nothing.” I close my eyes and let his heartbeat slow under my ear, steady and sure and here. “I’ll tell you someday.”
And lying there, on a nameless ship’s borrowed beach in the middle of a sea that belongs to no one, with sea lilies crushed sweet into the sand beside us and a man breathing slow against my hair, I let myself believe, for the first time since Santorini, that someday might actually come.