He leaned forward, his dress jacket creaking as he braced one hand near her thigh. “Why don’t you ask me and find out for yourself?”
Her throat tightened as she thought of herself nine years ago, terrified and desperate, and Quentin’s dismissive “sorry, babe” while lying through his teeth.
Do it, a voice whispered.
A chill slithered down her spine at the look of seductive menace on his handsome face and she set down her glass withmore force than necessary. “N-no,” she said uneasily. “Just take me home . . . please.”
Nicholas nodded, like he’d expected nothing less, tucking the tip beneath his plate. They walked past the still-hovering Quentin and out into the cold night.
Jay could hear the roar of the ocean in the distance and it reminded her of her youth with the stinging salience of salt in a wound. No matter how hard she railed against it, this place belonged to her as much as her own weary bones did, and she could not unknow the taste of those dark waters any more than she could the bitterness of citrus on a man’s clean skin.
She wondered if Quentin knew how close he had come to ruin.
“Would you really have destroyed this hotel if I’d said yes?”
His lips curled into a small, private smile. “I guess you’ll never find out with that soft heart of yours.”
As they headed down the path that would take them back to the car, Jay impulsively tugged on Nicholas’s sleeve, nudging him down a side path. He followed her gamely towards the beach as she stumbled a little over the rocky shore. There was no one else there. It was off-season for bonfires and all the hotel guests would have been safely ensconced in the warm cells of their lamplit rooms, but as they got closer to the shoreline Jay could see the charred remains of old bonfires from last season, made out of circles of driftwood and cold pockets of ash.
“What are you doing?” Nicholas asked in a bemused tone, as she shivered in her thin, low-cut dress, holding the hem down with one hand as she felt her way across the sand in the dark. “I thought you wanted to go home.”
He didn’t sound at all annoyed but she still felt compelled to explain. “I just needed to get out of there. Look at that—” Shepointed to the moon’s reflection, scattered over the swells like glinting pieces of broken mirror. “That’s a million-dollar view.”
Following her finger, he said, “That’s waterfront, blue jay. It’s closer to ten million.”
“Oh, who cares what itcosts? It doesn’t always have to be about the money.” Jay hopped over a log, nearly losing her shoe when it got sucked into the wet sand. “We used to come out here back in high school. To this exact beach. We’d just bum around the sand all day, and then someone would get food and drinks and we’d sit around the fire and talk about all the things we wanted to be when we grew up. As if we had a choice,” she said, some of the bitterness seeping out.
Nicholas nudged a charred piece of wood with the tip of his brogue. Something in the detritus seemed to catch his attention because he stooped down to pick up what appeared to be a small white stone. He rolled it in his fingers, testing its shape. “What did you say?”
“Nothing, usually.” She folded her arms tighter as she watched his hand. “They all said they wanted to leave here. I did, too. But talking about it like that made me realize that when everything was over, I’d be all alone. And then I was the only one who did leave and Iwasalone.”
She took a few unsteady steps to the side as the wind whipped her dress around her legs.
“Isn’t that sad, Nick? I was surrounded by people but I was always alone. I didn’t know how to be with people because I pushed everyone away. I was afraid they’d leave me as soon as I stopped beingenough. And they let me do it. They let me push them away and they never asked if that was what I really wanted. Except for you. But there was always a cost with you.”
“Welcome to the world of business, darling.” The words were mocking but his tone was achingly gentle. He kicked sand over the ashes. “I tried to tell you it was a fuck or get-fucked world.”
“Were you even happy? You were trapped in that house, too.”
“You’re the one who left,” he pointed out.
“And you’re the one who stayed. You got everything you wanted.”
“We both know that that’s not true.”
He moved closer and she stopped breathing as the static tension between them heightened until it was like a touch she could feel against her skin.
“You were like a dreamer living in a fairytale. You thought there was goodness in restraint. But there isn’t.” He straightened, the fabric of his jacket rippling. “When you feed your dreams to the bonfire, you just end up with a pile of cold dead ashes and a whole lot of nothing.”
Jay laughed humorlessly. “Says the boy who thinks he can buy his way out of trouble with a fistful of twenties.”
“Oh, blue jay. Don’t tell me you dragged me out here just to be sad.” She shivered again and he shrugged out of his dinner jacket. It was the one he’d promised her he would look good in—truthfully, as it turned out. The fabric was still warm from his body when he draped it around her shoulders. “You should tell me your dreams instead. If you do it nicely enough,” he pressed his wind-chilled lips to her cheek, “I might even make them all come true.”
“You never answered my question,” said Jay. “Were you happy, Nick?”
“No.” Heedless of the fine weave of his trousers, he dropped down on one of the half-rotted logs facing the water. It was low enough that his legs bowed comically, nearly level with his chest. “I wasn’t happy.”
Mindful of the fabric riding high on her thighs, Jay sat down beside him. He immediately put his arm around her waist, stretching his legs out closer to the silent fire as he stared out at the silvery sea. Jay extended her leg, and knocked the tip of her heel against his leather brogue.
