Page 62 of Under the Stars

Sedge

Winthrop Island, New York

Even the way she climbs into the car.

Call him crazy, but the first time he saw her—through the smeared deckhouse window of the Winthrop Island ferry, an ordinary day in the back half of April—he thought of a forest animal.

Quick, surefooted, wary of people. He still thinks so.

The way she arranges herself, the way she brushes back a piece of hair that’s fallen free from her ponytail.

The glance she sends him. The air that rushes off her skin, smelling of her. Of Audrey.

Stay cool, he thinks. Let her take the lead.

He rolls his palm over the gearshift, waiting for her to settle in. To gather herself.

She draws a deep breath. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

“Safety first,” he says.

She makes a little start, then reaches for the belt and buckles herself in. He pops the clutch and the car jumps forward.

“Sorry for what?” he asks.

“For everything. For your spleen. For being such a jerk.”

“A jerk? What are you talking about?”

“When I called you up and basically broke up with you because you didn’t tell me about your business. How successful you were. And if I hadn’t done that, you wouldn’t have driven down—none of this would have happened—”

“And I would still have a spleen? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Basically.”

Sedge makes a right turn at West Cliff Road.

Audrey doesn’t seem to notice, doesn’t point out that he’s going the wrong way, that Summerly sits at the other end of the island, the eastern tip, behind the sentry booth that guards the Winthrop Island Association.

Either she’s not paying attention where they’re going or she doesn’t care.

He picks through her words to find his way in. The right angle of approach.

“Audrey,” he says, “if I hadn’t noticed you leaving the ferry, if I hadn’t followed you, what do you think would have happened?”

“I don’t know. He was headed for Canada.”

“Exactly. You’d be in Canada with your ex-husband and a stolen painting. On the run. Or maybe the police would have caught up with you at some point. There might have been a chase, there might have been a shootout. You might be dead, Audrey.”

“Probably not dead.”

“He seemed pretty desperate to me, Audrey. He had a gun. He was ready to use it. He had nothing left to lose. He’d screwed up his business, his life.

His marriage. A guy like that, probably a sociopath, with nothing left to lose?

I’m thinking what happened was the best-case scenario, to be honest. I’m pretty relieved you’re okay, just to level with you. ”

He turns left down the gravel road to the airstrip.

“But this wasn’t your problem,” she says. “You—you almost died, and it wasn’t anything to do with you.”

Sedge hits the brakes. The car skids to a stop. He rests his hands on the top of the steering wheel and stares through the windshield to the August wildflowers and the sliver of Long Island Sound beyond them and the image in his head, the image that still wakes him up in the middle of the night.

Audrey standing in the grass, blood streaming from her forehead. That fucker standing next to her, holding her by the shoulder. Gun pressed to her temple.

The rage fills his blood, all over again. Rage and terror.

Stand down, he tells himself. It’s over. She’s safe. She’s right here, she’s sitting next to you. Her smell, her voice.

“What are you saying, Audrey? Nothing to do with me?”

“David was my mistake, not yours.”

There are two Audreys, he knows. He is enamored with both of them because they’re her, because you can’t really love a woman unless you love all of her—if you took out the less congenial pieces, she wouldn’t be herself.

So he loves the Audrey that laughs from her belly, that flits around the kitchen to serve him up some watermelon gazpacho that makes his eyes roll back in his head; the Audrey that makes love to him with abandon, that snuggles afterward into the shelter of his arm and presses her lips against his skin.

And he loves the Audrey that shoots off some sarcastic remark, that waits until the afternoon before answering a tender morning-after text, that pulls away and sits on the deck of his sailboat with her arms wrapped around her knees and stares at the horizon.

The Audrey that wants to trust him and the Audrey that can’t.

But what he knows, what he believes, is that she cares for him.

She does. She feels this pull that exists between the two of them.

The attraction of two bodies, sure. But also the attraction of two people who have been knocked flat and staggered up again, who share the same sense of humor and the same sense of wonder about an undiscovered set of paintings by an artist who lived two centuries ago, who fit together like a pair of puzzle pieces whenever she turns the right way and allows him close enough to click into place.

When she isn’t pushing him away. Convinced he will leave, eventually—that his love is just a temporary shelter, a summer rental, so why attach herself?

He gets all this. He does. If love were easy, everyone would be paired for life.

You have to work for her love. You have to earn it. You have to show her that this shelter they have built is not a temporary accommodation. However fragile, however much in need of renovation and expansion and weatherproofing, it is home. To him, anyway.

He presses his lips together and puts the car back in gear. They spurt forward and around the bend at the end of the airstrip. Cross the tarmac and bounce back onto the gravel.

“What’s the matter?” Audrey asks. “Are you mad?”

“I just—I don’t know what to say. I guess it’s like what I said over the phone. One of us thought we were in this thing called a relationship. And one of us was just having—I don’t know. What would you call it, Audrey? A summer fling?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know what it was! I just got out of this incredibly toxic marriage, Sedge, just feeling incredibly betrayed, incredibly confused—”

“I know that, Audrey. And I was happy to take it slow, as slow as you wanted. Give you all the time you needed. I just thought—”

He shakes his head and stops the car at the trail that leads to the beach.

“Wait, what are we doing here?” she asks.

He cuts the engine and opens the door. “I was going to take a walk. You’re welcome to join me.”

Sedge climbs out of the car. Audrey climbs out too and hurries around the rear to where he stands, staring at the dunes, hands in his pockets. Putting his thoughts in order.

“Remember when I followed you here?” he says. “After the kitchen fire?”

“Of course I remember.”

“I was scared as hell. Scared you were going to walk back out of my life, right when I’d found you again.”

Her feet slip in the sand as she climbs the dunes. He reaches out to grab her hand. Her fingers are warm, strong. He loves their strength. Hands that were made for doing.

They crest the dune and pause, taking in the sight of the Atlantic Ocean as it rushes into Long Island Sound. The distant shapes of Block Island to the left, Long Island to the right. Like serpents resting on the sea.

She says softly, “What do you mean, found me again?”

“There was this girl,” he says. “This woman. I’m sitting there on the Winthrop Island ferry with my gran, minding my own business, and something makes me lift my head and turn to the window.

And she’s standing there, right? She takes my breath away.

I can’t explain it. I couldn’t even see her face.

Just her profile as she looks across the water.

And I think—the idea just appears in my head, like it was always there— that’s her. ”

Audrey pulls her hand from his and wraps her arms around herself. A shudder moves her shoulders.

He continues. “And then she disappears. I turn to say something to my gran, answer a question or whatever, and when I turn back, she’s gone.

I’m looking up and down the deck, and I don’t see her, and I start to panic.

Like maybe she’s a ghost, maybe I was just seeing things.

And my gran puts her hand on my arm and says, Go find her. ”

“Wait, your grandmother said that? She doesn’t even like me!”

He looks at her. “Where did you get that idea?”

“I just know.”

“Swear to God, that’s what she said. Go find her.

So I got up and searched the upper deck and the main deck and finally head down to the car deck, and there you are.

On the stairs. And my heart, Audrey. My heart just left my body.

Right there. Left my body and sailed straight between your palms. I’m laying all my cards on the table for you, okay?

All I wanted in that second was to drop to my knees and beg you to let me fix whatever it was that was hurting you.

” He pauses. “But, you know, stairs. So I gave you my handkerchief instead.”

“I still have it,” she says.

“And then you were gone. And I’m like, I can’t stalk this woman because that would be wrong.

But I need to find her again. I need to make sure she’s okay.

I need to see her face. But nobody’s on the island in April, nobody knows who the fuck this woman might be.

Gran’s starting to ask me what’s wrong, why I haven’t gone back to Boston.

Asking around the locals, drawing blanks.

Until I walk into the Mo for a beer one afternoon and the kitchen’s going up in flames, and there you are. ”

“There I was.”

“And I knew right then, Audrey, I had to find some way to connect with you. To see if this was real, this thing between us. To see if I could make you feel anything like the way I felt about you.”

She tightens her arms and closes her eyes.

“I did. I do. And I screwed it up. I don’t know what came over me, over the phone.

I was scared, I guess. I thought, this couldn’t be real.

That I thought I was in love before. I mean, I believed in David, I believed him when he said he loved me, and now I was feeling all these things, and my head told me you were different, you were nothing like him, you were true, but my gut—my heart, Sedge—”

There is only one thing to do. He turns to face her and gathers her to his chest, as gently as he can, a bundle of Audrey all wrapped around herself, shielding herself, and he shields her.

Her back shakes against his forearms. A breeze scoots across his scalp.

The smell of sand and salt and hair. Audrey’s hair.

Her mother’s honey blond, warmed up with a hint of her father’s ginger.

Not quite obedient. Moves to its own rhythm.

The perfect hair, he’s always thought. He could inhale its scent forever.

“I was, I admit, a little pissed when I hung up the phone that day,” he says. “But then I remembered where you’re coming from. What happened to you before. And I couldn’t necessarily blame you for feeling like maybe I hadn’t been as forthcoming as I could’ve been.”

“I had no right to know your business.”

“But you kind of did, right? You needed trust. I knew that going in, I knew that was the deal. And if I’m honest, I was maybe kind of cagey about it all.

Habit, I guess. I didn’t want you to think—I don’t know, it’s hard to explain.

Around here—my family, friends—nobody talks about money.

How much you have, how much you make. The more you make, the less you talk about it.

No one wants to be that asshole bragging about what a big shot he is. ”

Audrey props her chin on his sternum and looks up. “But you are a big shot. You should be proud of that.”

“Nah, I just got lucky. Seriously. I had this shitty back-office finance job that I hated, because—I don’t know.

Parental expectations. Wife to support. And I saw a way to do it better, so I wrote some code in my spare time—this was when I was going through the divorce, needed a distraction—and it was just that kind of right thing, right time, found the right investor, dumb luck success story. ”

She smiles at him. Her mother’s wide cheekbones, stained with pink. The tension lets go of her shoulders. She unclasps her arms and splays her hands on his chest. “So, what you’re telling me is I’ve fallen in love with an entrepreneurial genius.”

He grins so wide, his mouth hurts. “I’m telling you the exact opposite, sweetheart. I’m just a lucky bastard, that’s all.”

“Whose luck has obviously deserted him. Screwed-up girlfriend who gets him shot through the spleen—”

“Hey, it was my honor to serve you in your hour of need.”

She closes her eyes, like she’s listening to the beat of his heart through her palms. “Oh my God. You’re alive. You’re here .”

“It’s those burgers you make me,” he says. “Best damn burgers in the world, right here at the Mohegan Inn, Winthrop Island, New York. How can I say goodbye to that?”

“And you could definitely use a few burgers right now, to be candid.”

“Anyway,” he says, “I’m just trying to say you had a right to know about all that, and I should have recognized you had a need to know, because of what happened to you with your fuckface con man husband. And if you’ll give me another chance, I’ll do my best not to let you down again—”

“Let me down ? Are you even for real, Sedge Peabody?”

Their gazes meet. Her blue eyes, the color of happiness. He thinks his ribs might crack from joy.

“Sedgewick,” she whispers, “would it be okay if I kissed you?”