His brow furrows. “Why would ye—”
“I wanted to leave something,” I say, cutting him off. “A note. I didn’t think anyone would ever find it. But I needed to… I wanted to leave some proof that we were there. That I was still alive.”
He doesn’t speak. His eyes searching me.
“But someone did find the note, and it made its way back to Nana. She was able to see that I was still alive. She could finally let go and stop waiting for me.”
“James told ye this?”
I nod. “I should’ve told you about the note sooner, I’m sorry.”
His gaze softens, forgiveness already in his eyes. “Ye needed to do it,” he says. “Send a message home.”
I shake my head. “It was more than that. I needed her to know that I was right where I belonged. That I was with you.”
He squints at me, not understanding, and I look up at the dark sky, remembering the moment I pressed the pencil to the paper, remembering the words I wrote. “I signed the note Ellie Wells-Lockhart. Your name,” I say. “I wanted her to know… that I’d found my home. That I wasn’t coming back. Because I had found you.”
He blinks, tears falling.
We stare at each other, breathing the same damp air, looking for something in the other. Atonement. Forgiveness. “You’d been alone so long… before I arrived,” I say. It hurts to think of it now—the years he’d spent at sea without another person to touch, to remind him that he was still alive. “I understand why you didn’t tell me about the boat. I understand why you didn’t want me to go.”
His eyes slide away, focusing on the rocky edge of the island, and I reach for his hand, bringing it to my lips, kissing his palm. He never should have hidden the boat from me, but he tried to make it right. It was the ocean that took the boat away, then brought it back—it wasn’t his fault, not entirely. He was guilty of something, but not fully to blame. And I’ve learned, nothing on the island is ever straightforward—it makes its own rules. The past is long gone. No point measuring or weighing what’s been lost. What might have been.
Time makes no promises. It never has.
He hesitates, his whole body rigid beneath my touch, but I slide my hands around his neck and brush my lips over his. This is how we find each other again, how I remind him that being here is not a choice—not really—fate brought me back to him, time and again. This thing between us is bigger than any choice. It’s bigger than any regret.
“Clay…” I whisper, so softly the word is hardly more than air. My heart rises into my throat. “I signed the note Wells-Lockhart because Ipromised you I’d stay until the end. And I meant it. I wouldn’t trade a single moment of this life. Not even the hardest parts.” I stare into the painful blue of his eyes, pleading, needing him to touch me, remember me. And for the first time, the weight of his hands changes. His fingers graze down my arms to my hips, his eyes press into mine—like he’s still unsure, like he’s afraid to hurt me, curse me, condemn me to a life at sea—but with my next exhale, he kisses me. Gently. Soft and sure.
He can’t deny me. Even when he tries. We are built for each other, and the sea will always bring us back.
“I don’t want to lose ye,” he says against my lips, his voice on the edge of breaking.
“Then don’t let go.”
He stares down at me, eyes shivering in the cold, only inches between us, a hundred years between us, and nothing at all. He slides his fingers along my bottom lip, my chin, counting the seconds, just before his mouth finds me again. Kissing away all the guilt, the sin, the regret. He tastes like the sea, like penance for a life I don’t deserve.
The tall grass licks at my bare feet, the tide breaks against the shore. His mouth pulls me apart while I listen to the rhythm of his inhales that are as steady and familiar to me as my own. And I think:This love is not tame. Or mild. It’s redemptive and terrifying. “I will love you until the very end,” I whisper against his lips, repeating the words we spoke to each other the night he gave me the ring.
He runs his fingers through my hair, a soft, needing exhale sputtering from his lips—and I know I would do anything for him. I would endure violent oceans and countless lifetimes, just to feel one more moment like this with him. Because love like this doesn’t exist in the real world. It lives only out here, at the edge of everything—where time bleeds between morning and night, and a single second contains decades. Eons. I would give up everything for him, all over again. Just to feel his hands on me. Because time means nothing to me anymore. It is a riddle that has no end. A fable that wraps itself around me, until I forget who I used to be.
Rain starts to fall, fat drops sailing down from the cover of clouds, and he takes my hand, pulling me up to the house.
His hands are on my spine before we’ve even crossed the kitchen. A single candle burns from the window above the sink. His mouth searches the soft place below my ear, hungry, desperate in a way I haven’t felt from him in days. He pulls the sweater over my head, drops it to the kitchen floor, lips on my throat, pressing himself against me.
And I feel like I might cry, like I can remember every time I was with James, and how it never felt like this. I never craved him, needed him. Never felt like I was breaking free of my old skin and becoming something naked and new.
Clay’s hands are against my thighs, and he lifts me up, placing me atop the kitchen table—where we have eaten in silence when we were still strangers, where we drank whiskey and I felt his eyes on me, where I have listened to his stories told by candlelight.
An ache rises in my core, and I need him to show me that he won’t ever let go. I need to know that this will always be enough, for both of us.
He levels himself over me, eyes fixed on mine, like he’s thinking of all the ways he might have lost me, all the times when I could have slipped away and never returned. All the nights we would have missed. His lips graze my chin, his fingers at my waist, touching me so delicately that tears break against my eyelids.
“Ellie?” he asks, running his fingers across my cheek.
But I smile, pulling him down to me and crushing my mouth to his.
He pushes the long linen skirt up to my waist, holds me for another moment, breathing, before easing inside me, careful and slow. Like he wants me to remember every second, every exhale, every moment we’re together, so I won’t forget. But I only want him, over and over until the end of time.
