24. Sebastian #2
“Take me home,” she says. “Please. Just take me home.”
“That,” I tell her, “is the one thing today I know exactly how to do.”
We collect Sandy from her grandparents, who have spent the afternoon teaching her to make fish pie and now hand her back smelling faintly of the sea and enormously pleased with herself. Then we go home and do absolutely nothing of value for the rest of the day.
We play games. We watch cartoons I don’t understand. We order pizza despite a kitchen stocked with better food, because Sandy has declared it a “celebration dinner” and there is no arguing with a four-year-old’s logic once it’s made up its mind.
“What are we celebrating?” she asks, her whole face painted in tomato sauce.
“Daddy won an important meeting,” Margo says.
“What did you win?”
“The right to keep doing my job.”
Sandy considers this with open disappointment. “That’s a boring prize. If I won a meeting I’d want a pony.”
“I’ll bear that in mind for next time.”
By eight she’s face-down on the couch, undone by a day she only half understood. I carry her up and tuck her in, and when I come back down, Margo is at the window with the city spread out gold and endless below her.
“Hey.”
She turns. “Hey yourself.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“That it’s actually over.” She shakes her head slowly. “I keep waiting for the floor to give out. For the next disaster to walk in the door.”
“Nothing’s walking in the door tonight.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“No. I can’t.” I cross to her and fold my arms around her from behind. “But whatever comes, we take it together. That’s more certainty than I’ve had in my whole life.”
She leans back into me, and for a while we just stand there watching the lights of a city that, for the first time, feels like it might belong to us.
“I love you,” she says.
“I love you too.”
“I want to go to bed.”
“You’re tired?”
She turns in my arms, and there is absolutely nothing tired in her face.
“Not even slightly.”
***
We barely make it to the bedroom.
It’s different tonight, and I feel the difference the moment her mouth finds mine in the dark of the hallway. Tonight the weight is simply gone. All of it.
There’s no one left to perform for and nothing left to lose, and what’s underneath all of it, when you finally strip it away, turns out to be this.
She’s laughing against my mouth as we go through the door.
“What?” I murmur.
“You have lipstick on you. From me. You look ridiculous.”
“I’ll wear it proudly.”
“You will not.” But she’s grinning as she shoves my jacket off my shoulders, and I let it drop, and I let her back me toward the bed instead of the other way around, because tonight she’s setting the pace and I would follow her off a cliff.
She pushes me down onto the mattress and climbs over me, straddling my hips, and the sight of her up there in the low light, her hair loose and her eyes bright and not one shadow left in them, nearly finishes me before we’ve begun.
I reach for the hem of her shirt and she lets me draw it off her, and then she takes her time with mine, unbuttoning it slow, pressing a kiss to each new inch of skin, laughing quietly when I groan.
“Patience,” she says.
“I have been patient for five years.”
“Then a few more minutes won’t kill you.”
It very nearly does.
She works her way down me without any hurry at all, learning what makes me shake, filing it away with obvious satisfaction, and every time I try to take control she pins my wrist to the mattress and gives me a look that dares me to try again.
So I stop trying. I let her have it. I let her have all of it, because this, her above me, unhurried and unguarded and completely in command of the moment, is a thing I never once let myself imagine I’d get back.
When she finally rises up and takes me inside her, we both go still, and she braces her hands flat on my chest, and for a second neither of us breathes.
“Hi,” she whispers, looking down at me.
“Hi.”
Then she moves, and I lose the thread of every clever thing I might have said.
She sets a rhythm that’s entirely hers, slow and deep and devastating, and I hold her hips and let her ride it out, watching her face the whole time, the flush climbing her throat, the way her lips part, the little breathless laugh she gives when I hit a spot that makes her forget her own tempo.
There’s joy in it. That’s the thing I keep coming back to afterward. Not the desperation of the boathouse or the aching reverence of the beach, but joy, plain and bright, two people who fought their way back to each other and get to have this now, freely, with nothing owed to anyone.
“You’re watching me,” she pants.
“I’m memorizing.”
“Memorizing what?”
“You. Exactly like this.” I slide a hand up her spine and pull her down against me, and I take the pace back from her at last, rolling us so she’s beneath me and laughing and gasping at once, her legs locking around me. “Happy. In my bed. With no one left in the world who gets a say in it.”
“Sebastian…”
“I’ve got you.” I drop my forehead to hers. “I’ve got you. We’ve got each other. That’s the whole of it now.”
She pulls me down and kisses me and stops trying to talk, and I feel it start to gather in her, feel her nails press crescents into my back, and I chase it with her, and when she goes over she takes me with her, my name breaking apart against my mouth, both of us shaking and laughing and holding on as if the bed might tip if we let go.
For a long time afterward there’s nothing but our breathing and the city humming faintly beyond the glass.
We lie tangled in the sheets, and she traces slow patterns on my chest while I comb my fingers through her hair.
“I could get used to this,” she murmurs.
“Being happy?”
“Being boring.” She lifts her head to look at me. “No drama. No scheming mother-in-law. No board meeting deciding our future over breakfast. Just… a normal married life.”
“I hate to be the one to tell you, but our life is never going to be entirely normal.”
“I know. But it could be normal-ish. Normal-adjacent.” She grins. “Normal, with the occasional yacht trip.”
“Ship trip.”
“Whatever.”
I laugh and pull her closer, and I lie there in the dark of a room that used to feel cold and unlived-in and now holds the only place on earth I want to be.
This is the thing I nearly threw away with both hands.
This woman. This life. This absurd, ordinary contentment I spent years too blind to see, chasing a version of success that was never going to love me back.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand.
“Ignore it,” Margo says.
“It’s probably nothing.”
It buzzes again. Then a third time.
“It’s very persistent,” she says, “for a thing that’s nothing.”
I reach for it, keeping my other arm locked around her, and I scan the screen once, then again to be sure I’ve read it right.
Then I sit up.
“What is it?” Margo is instantly alert.
“The flagship.” I read it a third time. “Every system tested, every certificate signed. The port authority is asking the Austen family to appear for the official public launch.”
Margo goes very quiet beside me.
“The flagship,” she says. “The one I walked off. The one where your mother staged the whole thing to end us. That flagship.”
“That’s the one.”
The silence stretches. I know exactly what I’m asking, without meaning to ask it. That ship is the sum of everything that went wrong, the christening where they made her invisible, the suite, the dawn, the nightstand where she left her ring before she took our daughter and ran.
“I understand if you never want to set foot on it again,” I say carefully. “We can send someone in our place. We don’t have to…”
“No.”
I look at her. “No?”
“No, we’re not sending someone else.” She sits up, the sheet sliding down, her chin coming up in the way I’ve come to know means her mind is made.
“That ship is part of our story. The worst part, some of it. But it’s part of what brought us all the way here, too, and I’m done letting the worst things that ever happened to me decide where I’m allowed to stand. ”
“Margo…”
“The last time I was on that ship, I was a placeholder. The wife nobody in the room wanted there. Invisible in my own marriage.” She takes my hand.
“This time I walk on as your partner. As your equal. As the woman who helped save your company and put your family back together and earned every inch of her place at that table.”
A pause, and the corner of her mouth tips up.
“Ship. I’m not going to avoid a ship.”
I pull her in and kiss her like I mean to make up for five years of not doing it enough.
“I love you,” I tell her.
“I know.” She smiles against my lips and reaches past me to push the phone face-down onto the nightstand. “Now put that away. The flagship can wait until morning. Tonight isn’t finished with us yet.”
And it isn’t.