Chapter 9
T he porch was quieter at night.
The daytime buzz of cicadas had dulled into a low, breathy hum, and the sky was thick with stars, cut clean by the sharp edge of the dunes. Salt clung to the air, heavy and unrelenting, and my bourbon—two fingers neat—left a pleasant burn in the back of my throat.
Everyone else had disappeared into their rooms or showers or whatever part of the evening ritual they were ready for. But I was over being in the house. Too many voices. Too much tension. Too much Charlie.
So I sat barefoot on the wicker chair closest to the railing, one ankle hooked over my knee, glass cradled in my palm, and tried to forget the way her voice had cut through me earlier in the kitchen. “Forgive me if I prefer someone who doesn’t give me frostbite or third-degree burns.”
She said it like she meant it. Like she’d been thinking it for years.
And what pissed me off more than anything was that she was right. I knew she was throwing shade my way. And yeah, I had never been friendly with her.
I took another sip and leaned back, letting the porch creak beneath me.
I’d been watching her too much. Noticing things.
The way she pushed stray curls off her forehead when she was concentrating.
The little sigh she let out every time her pastry layers didn’t line up perfectly.
The flour prints she left on her hips from pressing her hands there, frustrated but focused.
She wasn’t trying to be noticed. That was the worst part.
The screen door opened behind me, and I didn’t need to look to know it was Sloane. Her perfume drifted out before she did—something floral and expensive—and I felt the porch shift as she lowered herself onto the bench across from me.
“A nightcap?” she questioned, setting her glass of Bordeaux on the armrest.
I shrugged. “Long day.”
She sipped and crossed her legs slowly. “You don’t usually get rattled by women with flour on their shirts.”
I turned to look at her, finally. She was watching me, her face unreadable in the low light. Elegant. Composed. And sharper than she ever let on. “I wasn’t rattled,” I said.
“You were irritated. Defensive.” She tilted her head. “Mean.”
I let out a slow breath. “Is this the part where you tell me I embarrassed you?”
“No,” she said. “You’re too poised for that.
You’re measured with your words—even when you’re being mean.
” She leaned forward, fingers tracing the rim of her glass.
“But you were off — and you’re never rattled.
So either she’s gotten under your skin, or you’re pretending she hasn’t, and both are exhausting to watch. ”
I took another sip. Let the burn slow me down. “She’s Jack’s sister. I’ve been snarky with her for years.”
“And?”
Rather than saying the truth — that she drove me crazy in the best ways, but she was off limits and always would be — all I could muster up was “She’s annoying.”
“That’s not true.”
I exhaled. “She’s...always gotten under my skin. Even when we were kids. It’s just how it goes with us.”
Sloane didn’t say anything right away. When she did, it was soft. “Maybe you should consider why. It’s not like she’s some sticky-fingered kid following you around and begging for attention anymore.”
“Obviously not, but she still knows how to needle me and vice versa. We don’t know any other way of co-existing. It’s equal parts familiar and infuriating, and I don’t see it changing anytime soon.”
Sloane balanced herself as she readjusted the leg beneath her, ever poised with the grace of a ballerina.
She regarded me with the attentiveness of a psychoanalyst, and I steeled myself against her piercing gaze.
“It seems as though you enjoy the hot and cold; it’s anything but lukewarm,” she said pointedly.
“I wouldn’t use the term ‘enjoy.’ I prefer civilized interaction, and she’s just too easy to provoke. I like when someone can keep their composure.”
“You like when you can chess-master the conversation to navigate every move. You want to control every shift in tone, every reaction, and she throws you off your game. You can’t control her.”
She wasn’t wrong. But beyond that, I couldn’t control myself when I was around her. But rather than admit anything I’d hardly admit to myself, I shifted the conversation, further proving her point. “If you think I’m so controlling, why are you with me then? ”
She chuckled, not offended, and not rising to the bait.
“Darling, I let you feel like you’re in control when it suits us both, but no one will ever control me.
I don’t need a man. I don’t need anything.
I’m with you because our lives align nicely and it has brought me pleasure. I think you know that.”
She’d described our relationship in the same way she’d describe a five-course meal or a trip to the Riviera: A pleasurable lifestyle with the right aesthetic and a taste of the good life. But where did love fall into that?
Sure, we’d said “I love you” during the course of the past two years, but neither of us were profuse with emotion. And If I was being really honest, it largely felt perfunctory, performative, an obligation when I did say it.
What my Ivy league education hadn’t taught me, though, was whether it was stupid to settle for comfortable companionship and a lifestyle that aligned with your partner’s—or was it stupid not to?
Having lost myself in thought, I was drawn back to reality, to the elegant woman before me as she tilted her head and peered at me. Her expression was almost sad. She stood and smoothed her dress, as she twirled the stem of her wineglass in the other hand.
“You don’t want easy, Fitz. You never did.” Then she turned and went inside.
I didn’t move. The night was darker now. The breeze stronger. And still I sat, glass loose in my fingers, every nerve buzzing. Five minutes passed and then the door creaked again.
Bare feet padded across the porch and her blonde hair glinted as she plopped down in her favorite Adirondack, unaware of my presence. She grabbed something from her pocket and, a moment later, she lifted a joint to her fingers and lit it, the cherried end glowing in the dark.
“Wanna share?” I asked her .
“Oh fuck,” she turned, startled. She looked at me now, half hidden in the shadows of the porch. “I thought you’d gone to bed.”
“Nope,” I said, voice low. “Still here.”
I heard the clink of her glass as she set it down, heard the soft shift of her limbs as she propped her legs up on the base of the chair.
She motioned for me to join her, and I came to sit in the chair next to hers.
We didn’t speak for a long time. The sound of the waves filled the silence.
Charlie flicked ash into the old conch shell and passed the joint back without looking.
She took a sip from her wine glass, then leaned her head against the backrest with a sigh. “You remember the time you and Jack snuck out to smoke on the beach when we were kids?”
I snorted. “Which time?”
She shook her head. “The first time. You thought you were so slick. I was probably eleven. You were, what, fifteen?”
“Sounds about right.” I turned to look at her. “And we were slick.”
“You were caught, Fitz.”
I waved a lazy hand. “Circumstantial.”
“Mm-hmm,” she hummed. “Pretty sure the ‘circumstance’ was Dad and I walking down the beach and watching you try to light a bent cigarette in a wind tunnel.”
That pulled a laugh from me. “God, that lighter. We found it in the garage, and Jack was convinced it was some vintage butane thing that worked better upside down. The idiot nearly lit his own eyebrow on fire.” I took a slow drag and exhaled toward the dunes. “You ratted us out, you little brat.”
Her eyes narrowed with heat. “I didn’t rat you out.”
“You definitely did.”
“No,” she said, sitting forward now, elbows on her knees, voice tinged with something that sounded almost hurt.
“You threw me on the sofa and called me a gremlin. I was upset, and I had a lemon cookie in my hand, and it got smashed when I landed. I was sitting there on the couch trying not to cry when Dad came in and asked why I looked like someone had stolen my puppy. I didn’t say anything about you; he just offered to go down to the beach with me. ”
I blinked. “Wait. That’s how that happened?”
She nodded. “Total coincidence.”
I let that settle. “Well, shit.”
“Yeah.” She leaned back again, her expression unreadable in the dark. “He just wanted to toss a frisbee with me. You and Jack getting caught in your dumbassery was just...collateral damage.”
I ran a hand through my hair. “I always thought you did it on purpose.”
Charlie rolled her eyes. “Fitzgerald Prescott Whitmore III, always assuming every inconvenience is a personal vendetta against your birthright.”
“I mean, you did have a vendetta.”
“I was eleven. My vendetta was that you guys wouldn’t let me tag along to play on the beach. You were always shutting me out.”
I laughed, a real one this time. “You were always trailing behind us. I remember you used to wear those ridiculous jelly sandals that filled up with sand.”
She snorted. “They lit up. They were a vibe.”
“Yeah, a real vibe. Those tacky ass pink jellys that always squeaked like a pissed-off duck when you ran through the house.” He chuckled at the memory. “I threw them in the dunes and hoped you’d forget about them.”
“God, I hated you,” she said, shaking her head with a grin.
“I was deeply hateable.”
There was a pause. Not quite awkward—just heavy .
“Anyway,” she said, tipping her head back to look at the stars, “this is the first time I’ve ever smoked with you.”
I glanced over at her. “Guess we’re finally letting you hang with the big kids.”
“Guess so.”
Her smile was wry, but her eyes had softened.
The smoke drifted between us like an old truce.
And for once, I didn’t feel like ruining it.
When Charlie passed the joint back to me, her fingers brushed mine again—just barely—and I hated how much I noticed it.
Noticed everything. The faint sunburn on her shoulder.
The way her hair had come undone from whatever twist or knot she’d tried to contain it in earlier.
The soft rasp of her voice when she wasn’t putting on a sweet facade.
We sat in silence for a minute, smoke curling toward the sky like punctuation marks we couldn’t bring ourselves to say.
Then she said it—soft and so unlike her it didn’t register at first. “I thought I’d be further along by now.”
I looked over. She wasn’t looking at me. Her gaze was fixed somewhere in the distance, where the dunes blurred into darkness. She cradled her wineglass against her thigh like she needed something to hold onto.
“In life?” I asked.
She nodded. “I’m opening the bakery. That part’s good. Great, even. I love it. But I thought I’d feel different owning a business. More grounded. More successful. Less like I’m holding it all together with duct tape and false confidence.”
I didn’t say anything right away. Mostly because I sincerely wanted to listen to her.
“I thought you were the one who had it all figured out,” I said after a moment, taking another drag. “The one who broke free of the track the rest of us stayed on. The one who actually chased what she wanted. ”
“Yeah, well. Turns out chasing it doesn’t mean catching it — or knowing what the hell to do once you’re standing in it.”
She gave me a quick glance, like she hadn’t meant to say so much. Then she added, quieter, “I think I’ve just been gambling for so long, it’d be nice to just enjoy it and live and feel secure for a change.”
Something cracked in me then — willing myself to be vulnerable with her in return. “I think I find myself in the opposite problem. Everything has been predetermined for Fitzgerald Prescott Whitmore III, as you love to say, since birth, it feels like. I wish I could just gamble as Fitz for once.”
I took in a deep breath, shocked that I voiced that out loud. “I make partner. I close deals. I shake hands with people I hate and win arguments I don’t care about. And at the end of the day, I go home to a house that’s too quiet and a life that looks perfect on paper.”
She looked at me then. Really looked at me. “So why stay?” she asked.
“Because leaving would make it real,” I said. “And if it’s real, I have to admit I built the wrong life.”
The porch creaked beneath us as she shifted in her seat. I could feel the weight of her gaze like heat on my skin. “You didn’t build the wrong life, Fitz,” she said softly. “You just built the one you thought you were supposed to want.”
“And if I come to terms with it not being what I want? What then?”
A long silence stretched out.
“You roll the dice.” She said it so simply.
“Is it weird I believe you more than I believe anyone else?” I pondered. “I guess because you’re actually living it, embracing the life of a gambler.”
She smiled, faint and sad. “When you put it that way, it sounds all romantic and meaningful. But the reality is I’ve got two bank loans up the wazoo, no college degree to my name, no husband to support me. Just a goofball named Thatcher who wears embroidered shorts.”
Maybe it was the weed, but picturing that idiot with his embroidered lobsters did me in.
I choked—actually choked—on the last drag of the joint before full-out cracking up with the kind of open, unfiltered sound I hadn’t made in months.
Maybe years. The kind that shook something loose in your ribs.
The kind that belonged to warm nights and bare feet and a person who knew you too well.
My laughter dominoed and Charlie lost it completely. She snorted, her wineglass wobbling dangerously on the armrest, and she tried to squash it but ended up laughing harder when I tried (and failed) to gain composure.
And just like that, the air between us changed. Once the laughter had quieted to nothing but breath and the occasional sigh, the joint was dead. Her wine was warm. My bourbon was gone. And still, we didn’t move.
The porch around us settled. The breeze was softer now. Crickets started up somewhere near the dunes. “Are you scared, Fitz?” she asked finally.
“Of what?”
“That you’ll wake up in ten years and still feel this way.”
I didn’t hesitate. “Terrified.”
She nodded like she understood something I hadn’t even said. Then she stood, barefoot, hair wild, wineglass swinging lightly in her hand. “I’m going to bed,” she said, glancing at me. “Don’t sit out here too long or you’ll start questioning your whole goddamn life.”
“Yeah, it might be too late to stop that. Goodnight, Charlie.”
She just disappeared inside and left me alone with the smoke and the stars—and the echo of what almost felt like hope.