6. Cassian
CASSIAN
The Vance call goes long, and it goes long because I am not paying attention.
This is unusual. This is not a thing I do.
Roland Vance is on speaker, walking through the second-quarter projections he wants me to revise before Thursday, and I am—I will admit it to myself, if nowhere else—looking out the window of the upstairs office at the lawn below, where my fiancée is barefoot in the grass with her sister, drinking something out of a tall glass with a wedge of orange in it, and laughing at something her sister has said, and it is the first time I have heard Maren laugh inside this house.
"Cassian."
"Sorry. Repeat that."
"I said I want the projections by Wednesday now, not Thursday. Are you with me, son."
"I'm with you."
"You sound far away."
"It's the line. Apologies, Roland. Wednesday. You'll have them."
I hang up. I do not look out the window again. I look at my desk, and then at the door, and then at my own hand, which is still hovering above the phone like I forgot to do something with it.
Sebastian appears with the kind of timing that has kept him employed for nine years.
"The bonfire's at sundown, sir."
"What?"
"The beach bonfire. Mrs. Castellan asked the kitchen to set it up this afternoon. We've put a fire ring on the lower beach, brought down the wine, there's a service table?—"
"I didn't approve of a bonfire."
"You did, sir. Yesterday morning."
"Did I?"
"Mm-hm."
I rub the bridge of my nose. "Tell the staff to keep their distance. Family only on the sand. Servers in and out."
"Already done."
"Good."
Sebastian doesn't move.
"What."
"Nothing, sir."
"Sebastian."
"It's only that you've changed your shirt twice today."
"Get out of my office."
He gets out. The smile he isn't wearing follows him into the hall.
The fire is already lit when I come down the path, and Maren is already on the sand.
She is sitting cross-legged on a blanket between her father and her sister, one of my soft wool throws around her shoulders, her hair coming loose from whatever she pinned it with this morning.
The flames make her face gold along one side and shadow along the other, and the laugh I heard through the window earlier — she is doing it again, low and helpless, at something Graham has just said.
I have not seen her like this. In three years at the resort, I have seen her competent. Polite. Quick. I have seen her, in the last week, frightened and clever and tired. I have not seen her, until tonight, easy. It is, I think, the most dangerous thing she's done in front of me yet.
"Mr. Rourke." Delilah lifts a hand from the next blanket over. "Come, come, sit down before everything goes cold."
I cross to Maren without thinking about it and lower myself behind her on the blanket — one knee up, my arm braced behind her so she's leaned, lightly, against my chest. She tenses for the first half-second the way she always does.
Then she settles, and her shoulder fits against my collarbone like the blanket is something we both share, and I take the wine someone hands me without looking at who.
"The bride," Sienna says from across the fire, "looks suspiciously comfortable tonight."
"Sienna."
"What. I'm complimenting her."
"You're never complimenting her," Owen says.
"Excuse you. I compliment my sister all the time."
"Name one."
"Her eyebrows."
"That doesn't count."
"It absolutely counts?—"
"Children," Graham says, mildly. "We are at a fire."
Maren laughs against my shoulder, a small, shaking thing, and I feel it in my ribs more than I hear it.
We eat. Skewers off the fire, lemons charred black, soft bread someone passes around.
Maren feeds me an olive at one point — performatively, with two fingers, a small staged moment for her mother's benefit — and I bite the tips of her fingers a fraction harder than necessary, and she goes very still, and Delilah reacts across the fire with that unmistakable little gasp people reserve for first grandchildren and other life-altering announcements.
It is going well. It is going, in fact, better than well.
Then Sienna sets down her glass.
"Can I ask something?"
"No," Maren says.
"It's a question, Mar."
"Sienna, I swear?—"
"How did Cassian propose, exactly? The actual moment. I asked you on Tuesday and you said one thing, and I asked Cassian on the boat and he said another, and I have been holding it in for thirty hours and I swear I am going to die if I don't get the truth."
The fire crackles. My arm, behind Maren, goes still.
"Sienna," Delilah hisses. "Stop."
"I just want to know if my sister is lying to us."
The word lands. It lands hard. Maren goes rigid against me and I feel the breath leave her, and I do not have time to think, which, as it turns out, is exactly the condition under which I do my worst and best work.
I take her chin in my hand and turn her face up to mine and I kiss her.
I kiss her in front of her parents, in front of her brother, in front of her sister with a phone two inches from her hand, and I do it slowly.
I do it the way a man kisses his fiancée at a fire he has built for her on a beach he owns.
I tilt her jaw with my thumb, and I let my mouth open against hers, and I catch her small sound of surprise on my tongue, and I let it go on long enough that it becomes the answer to Sienna's question and the end of the conversation in one motion.
It is a strategic kiss. That is what I would say later, if anyone asked. It is a strategic kiss for the first three seconds.
Then her hand comes up and rests on my chest, and her fingers curl, light, into the placket of my shirt, and I feel her — this is the only word for it — lean.
I should pull away. The point has been made. The fire has gone quiet, and I can hear Delilah's intake of breath from the other blanket, and I have Sienna on tape, choosing to be wrong in public.
I do not pull away.
I tilt my head and I kiss her once more, slower, the way you kiss someone you have already kissed a hundred times and intend to kiss a hundred more, and her fingers tighten in my shirt, and somewhere in the back of my head a quiet, professional voice says you are no longer performing, and I tell that voice, briefly, to be quiet.
I pull back.
Her mouth is open. Her eyes are not.
"Sweetheart," I say, low enough that only she can hear it.
Her lashes lift.
"Breathe."
She breathes.
I look up across the fire. Sienna studies the sand. Delilah’s hands are pressed to her chest. And Owen—this is the part I file—is watching me, not his sister, with the unreadable expression of a man who’s just heard the answer to a question he never voiced.
"Anything else," I say to Sienna. Pleasantly.
"No."
"Lovely."
The wine runs low. The fire burns down. People stand and stretch, and Graham says something about a walk along the surf line, and at some point a young man I did not invite — one of the deckhands from the Halcyon, off-duty, in a linen shirt unbuttoned at the throat — wanders down the beach with a guitar slung across his back like he is in a film about himself.
He stops at our fire. He greets Sienna by name. Of course he does.
He looks at Maren, who is currently sitting with her bare feet tucked under her on my blanket, the wine flush still on her cheek from the kiss, and he gives her the smile of a man who’s been told, more than once, that he has a good smile.
"Hey." He crouches at the edge of the blanket. "You're Sienna's sister. The bride."
"That's me."
"Wild. I would not have guessed."
"Why not."
"You're the pretty one."
He says it like it's a joke, and Maren does the laugh — the polite one, the concierge one, the laugh she has been trained to do since she was nineteen — and I am on my feet before I have decided to be.
"That's enough."
He looks up. He has the half-second of confusion that comes before the dynamic lands.
“Sorry, man, I was just?—”
“You were just leaving. Up the path. Now.”
“Cassian,” Maren says, low. “It’s fine?—”
“It isn’t.”
I put my hand at the back of her neck—light, possessive, unmissable—and I look at the kid until he stands. He stands. He does the small, nodding retreat that happens when the hierarchy finally clicks. Sienna is wide-eyed. Delilah is, I’ll see in a second, smiling into her wine.
I sit back down behind Maren. My hand stays at her neck. My thumb moves, once, against the warm hollow behind her ear.
"Cassian," she breathes.
"Don't."
"Don't what."
"Don't ask me to explain that. Not tonight."
She doesn't ask. She leans back against my chest, and after a beat, her hand finds my wrist where it rests against her collarbone, and she holds on.
The fire pops. The tide comes in. Above us, the stars are doing what stars do, and I keep my hand where it is, and I do not let myself think, yet, about what I have just done in front of every person in her life.