Chapter 16
DARCY
The Bardot spring rosé release draws half of North Fork on Saturday afternoon. Annie abandons me before we're even through the vineyard gate, because Evan is stationed at the welcome table, crutches propped against a wine barrel, and my best friend has never once pretended to be subtle.
Which leaves me alone in a tasting tent with a glass of warming wine I keep forgetting to drink.
Jane Bardot is holding court by the entrance, radiant and surrounded, and I steer myself the other way.
I compliment Mrs. Johnson's sundress. I nod along to the string quartet under the big white tent.
I behave—convincingly I hope—like a woman whose week contained nothing remarkable.
Meanwhile, on a loop, without my permission is the sound Finn made against my throat on Thursday night.
My memory has been merciful enough not to replay the whole kiss on infinite loop, probably because I wouldn't survive it in public.
Just slivers of it, ambushing me between polite hellos.
My keys hitting the sidewalk, which I heard before I understood my own hand had let go of them.
His voice saying "Go on upstairs, Darcy" rough in a way I'd never heard from him in my life.
And that sound, low against my throat, like the word he wanted didn't exist yet.
Then he stopped. He kissed me until I forgot this town has windows, and then he pressed my keys into my hand and sent me up my own stairs, and in the two days since there has been nothing.
No call. No text. I haven't sent one either, so I can't even be righteous about it.
I teach ambiguity for a living, and I have never hated it more.
I did, for the record, wear my dark denim jeans today.
The good ones that make my ass look like it's living its best life.
The lower-than-normal neckline of my blouse is doing some decent things for my breasts too.
I made the outfit decision at nine this morning, standing in front of my closet and wishing I taught something sexy like drama and had the wardrobe to match.
Then again, Finn kissed me when I was dressed in my schoolmarm best, so there's that.
"Ms. Gable."
The deep voice lands somewhere behind me, pitched low, meant for me and not the room, and the excellent, but too warm rosé nearly leaves the glass.
I turn and find Finn standing beside me in a white button-down with the sleeves rolled up his forearms, holding an unopened bottle down against his leg like it might trip an alarm.
Two glasses hang upside down from the fingers of his other hand.
His eyes make one unhurried trip south and back, and he doesn't say a word about the denim, and the grin says he doesn't have to.
"Are you stealing that?" I ask.
"Liberating it. This one's from the family vault. It's not on today's menu, and my brothers don't deserve it." He tips his head toward the vines. "Come on. Before Evan spots me and requires a hostage."
I should say no. Annie is somewhere behind me falling in love at a welcome table, my mother knows most of this party’s attendees by name, and the last time I was alone with this man I kissed him so intensely I dropped my keys on the sidewalk.
Another five minutes with him and it likely would've been my panties on the ground too.
"Okay," I say.
He raises his voice just enough for the benefit of the couple beside us. "Right this way, ma'am. Your private tour begins at the crush pad and concludes with a view we don't advertise."
He delivers the lines with a sweep of the wine bottle—full showman—and two complete strangers look genuinely jealous. I follow him out of the tent before my common sense catches up.
We walk past the crush pad and between the rows, the party thinning to a rumor behind us.
We keep walking, until the vines give way to the scrubby back edge of the property, toward an old barn I have never once noticed from the road.
Gray shingles gone soft at the corners, doors faded to the color of driftwood. Retired, clearly, decades ago.
He hauls the sliding door open one-handed, muscle moving under the rolled sleeve, and I make myself look at the barn instead of the lickable veins that thread over his tan skin.
Inside it smells like hay dust and sun-warmed wood. A ladder climbs to a loft where the light comes through the board gaps in long gold bars.
"After you," Finn says. "Be careful, though."
"Such a gentleman."
He smirks. "I just want an excuse to get a better look at you in those jeans. You look amazing, by the way."
"Thanks." I sound incredibly calm and unaffected, considering it feels like a swarm of butterflies has just been unleashed inside me.
I head up the ladder, trying not to fixate on the fact that Finn is watching my every move.
The loft is small and warm and improbably romantic.
Two hay bales with an old flannel blanket thrown over them, a low shelf, a milk crate against the wall, and that buttery light lying across all of it.
He comes up the ladder behind me, sets the glasses on the shelf, and digs into the milk crate like a man who knows its inventory by heart. He comes out with a corkscrew.
"That lives up here?"
"Since I was seventeen. Don't tell my mother." He cuts the foil. "Welcome to headquarters."
"Headquarters."
"Bardot Adventure Enterprises. The original office."
I look into the crate he pulled the corkscrew from. It's full of old comic books. Dozens and dozens of them, soft with handling, some of the covers gone, spines worn white. Spider-Man. X-Men. A boy's entire library, hidden in a barn. I teach struggling readers. I know exactly what I'm looking at.
The fact that Finn's secret reading stash confirms my own ideas about teaching dyslexic students with unconventional methods only makes this revelation hit me even harder.
"This was mine," he says. The showman is gone from his voice, the way it went on my staircase Thursday.
"From about ten years old on. When school got loud, or my father did, I came here.
" He works the cork loose without looking at me.
"I could read these. Mostly. The pictures carry you over the hard words.
You get enough of the story from the panels that the letters stop being a wall.
I read until the covers came off, and it was the only reading in my life that didn't feel like drowning. "
I sit down hard on a hay bale. Years of teaching reading, and I have never heard the case for graphic novels made better than a dyslexic boy alone in a barn made it just now, without knowing he was making it.
He pours the wine, hands me a glass, and sits on the bale across from me, forearms on his knees, close enough that his knee grazes mine when he settles. He doesn't move it away. Neither do I, and the inch of denim where we're touching stays warm the whole time he talks.
"My father called this barn a waste of lumber," he says.
"He called me worse. You know most of that already.
" He gives a shrug that doesn't pretend to be easy.
"By graduation I'd worked out that the only place I could be somebody new was somewhere nobody had known me since fourth grade.
So I picked the farthest cliff and kept going. "
"So you left Mattichogue and didn't look back. That took some courage."
He looks at me. "It wasn't brave. It was just... somewhere else."
"And now?" I ask. "What's the dream now? Besides toppling trivia dynasties, obviously."
"Obviously." The grin comes back, and then his hands take over the way they do, sketching in the air while he describes some of his latest business ideas.
Adventure resorts. Family-run feel, real wilderness, guides who eat dinner with the guests.
He's been scouting land in Colorado, he tells me—the only meeting on his calendar he looks forward to—and watching Finn Bardot talk about something he loves is like standing at the front of a coming storm.
The whole barn feels busier, more alive.
Then he stops, and points his glass at me. "Your turn. Trade. One dream you've never said out loud at a party."
I look into my wine, which is extraordinary and no help at all.
"I want to write books. Someday. And before that, sooner than that, I want to run an afterschool literacy program.
Built on comics, in fact." His face changes—softens slightly—and I keep going before I lose my nerve.
"Graphic novels for the kids the reading wars are losing.
I've been quietly planning it for two years and I have never told a single person I'm serious. "
Finn has gone still. Fully still, hands and all, the stillness I once wrote off as a fluke and now know better. It is a strange, heady thing, being the reason a man like that holds still.
"Why haven't you started your program?" he asks.
"I was getting close. I had some money saved up to get it launched, but..." I glance down and swirl my wine for a moment. "I used the money for something else recently."
He groans quietly. "Ah. Let me guess. Revenge on some asshole bully?"
I nod, pointing my finger in a "you've got it" gesture.
He looks at me. "What will it take to start? Sit down sometime and put a real number on it, because I want to be your first backer."
"Finn, that’s not—"
"I'm not being polite." He sets his glass down, which from him is punctuation. "I fund things every quarter that matter less than this. When you're ready, it's one phone call, and I'll be irritating about it until you let me help."
I open my mouth to deflect, and nothing comes out, because he means it. Whatever else Finn Bardot has ever been, he doesn’t fake his feelings in front of me. The town gets the show. Apparently I get this.
"Fine. I'll hold you to it," I manage.
"Good."
The wine is half gone and the light has gone from gold to amber, and maybe that's why I finally muster the nerve to ask.
"Can I ask you about school? One more thing, and then I promise I'll retire the subject."
"Ask."