Author’s Note: There isn’t really any smut in this one, as I wrote it to be more sensually romantic than explicitly erotic.
Special thanks to s0rethr0at for her excellent notes and suggestions on the penultimate draft, and to a little ox for enduring and shaping the early ones.
Please enjoy.
A LIFE BETWEEN THE FENCES
~*~*~*~*~
Where James grew up, the soil was tanned dirt, the grass a parched brown that went undrunk like winter leaves. When he saw those first patches of dirt each year, he would watch his window as night after night the jellyfish-blue moon squeezed by, counting down the remaining days of spring. Then, when the summer heat arrived, they would load into the car and drive three hours north to their cottage where the soil was soft and dark and freckled with flat white stones like ancient arrowheads.
Where Astrid grew up, the soil was rich but hidden beneath acres of crabgrass and rustled river reeds. The only patches she saw were where the neighbours’ sheep had chewed the world bald, or where the riverbank had collapsed in the spring floods, where dark veins of mud and minerals and splintered stone became suddenly exposed. For her, the climb into the car and the four-hour knee-to-elbow shouting match with her brothers started as a hassle, but she learned to look forward to it when she saw how pretty the lake was at dusk, the black shore flowing out to meet the sun and the last waves of the day.
He was nine and she was ten when they met on the beach between their cottages. He was talkative, obsessed with bugs and frogs and fish, and she was lanky and shy and only wanted to swim. He annoyed her, the way boys always did with his constant babbling and his need to be the center of attention, and she annoyed him just as much when she admitted she didn’t know the difference between a frog and a toad—and, worse, that she didn’t care.
One blue afternoon, he caught a yellow sunfish off the dock and brought it to her. The jagged bony scales in her hands made her tongue stick out, and she groaned, dropping it into the water where it darted beneath the hard black shadow of the dock. After that, James decided he’d seen enough of the weird swimming girl, and Astrid was happy to be ignored by the childish boy.
He was twelve and she was thirteen when they discovered they both liked the same music and the same movies, and that summer they spent most of their time in hissing bean bag chairs, swapping back and forth his father’s headphones, or eating popcorn together in front of a blue square of television. All summer long they hiked and swam, and he taught her about frogs and toads, and she taught him how to tread water.
Each summer after that they met at the white-planked fences that uselessly marked the neutral stone path that led from the road to their shared beach. Sometimes he would bring her gifts: flowers one summer, homemade cookies another—once a CD he’d made with her in mind. One year, she gave him a sweater she’d knitted, grey and oblong around the shoulders, but he wore it that night by the bonfire and most nights that winter.
He was nineteen and she was twenty the first summer he didn’t come back. She puttered from room to room through her family’s cottage, swimming only when the sun heated the greying dock enough to burn her toes.
“Will he be back next year, Mrs. Gould?” Astrid had asked his mother when they were down by the shore, their ankles caked in seaweed, sand squished between their painted toes. His mother could only offer a sad look and say she wasn’t sure. But she was a mother, and she was only too proud of her son, and only too happy to remind Astrid that her little James was far away visiting England this summer, and maybe Australia the next.
He was twenty and she was twenty-one the first summer he was at the cottage without her. His father’s back had hunched that year, and he’d begun to walk with a dark brown cane James had brought home from England. He’d meant it as a joke about his father’s impending old age, and they’d shared a laugh when he’d given it, but trying to get into the bathroom one night his father had fallen and struck his arm, breaking the bone and turning his skin a splotchy block of yellow and green bruises. The joke seemed in poor taste after that, and when his father began to use the cane sincerely—hopping around on it, calling it his fourth leg—that joke had seemed in poor taste too.
His mother had taken to gardening that summer, evoking beautiful carnations along the fence line, but their cottages still didn’t seem half as lovely as he remembered, and he instead spent the summer on the trails or hiking next to the canal. He’d go as far west as the town of Spring Garden, putting the sun on his back in the morning and returning with his face red and wind-beaten before the newspaper was on the porch in the afternoon. He even took up swimming more than he ever had before, and twice that summer he swam to the lake’s far shore, and he imagined Astrid would have liked that.
“Do you think she’ll stop by?” he asked Mrs. Thompson, but her mother didn’t have any news. Astrid had gone to work at a summer camp, and she wouldn’t be done until September, after the last blackberry bush had been picked and the lake had cooled and the dry autumn leaves had swept across the porch.
Her brothers, Michael and Caleb, had still come that summer. Older by a few years and already done school, they proved just as friendly to James as they’d been with their sister there. They were both tall, with wavy blonde hair and sharp features, as if always on the verge of smirking. Together, the three had bright bonfires on the beach by night and lounging afternoons on the dock, and one night, when Michael admitted he’d never seen a Monty Python movie, they drove forty minutes north to a drive-in theatre to catch a double feature.
The rest of the summer, James watched the flowers that grew in the consummated shadows of cottage roofs, watching how his mother nursed them even after it was clear they wouldn’t last. They’d grown in white and wild at first—and even some vines had crept along the fences, germinated from who-could-be-sure-where—but by August their stems had cankered and greyed and soon not a single carnation had survived. The soil didn’t drain properly, his mother told him. Nothing so beautiful could grow here.
He was twenty-one and she was twenty-two the summer they saw each other again. There were nerves. His sandalled foot tapped on the dock as they sat side by side in wooden deckchairs and made amends for the two-years-long blank spot they’d left in one another’s life.
Still the hyperactive boy at heart, he joked, telling her—with active hands drawn around her—about his trip to England and his first legal beer. His hair had grown thick and dark like untouched woods, brambles curling near his temple, and she liked the charmed quality he’d come to possess—the way his dark eyes looked imperfect and implacable and impish. And she liked his big hands; his thumbs as wide as oar shafts as he gestured around her with his stories.
“What would it take to get you to swim across the lake with me right now?” he asked. The silhouette of the trees overtook the shore, their black line bleeding like oil into the water.
“To cross it swimming? You think you could?” She found it funny that he, the boy she’d taught to tread water, would want to try. Last she’d seen him dive, he still steepled his hands at his chest.
“I did it just last year.”
“You did?” She hadn’t heard that story yet, but she could imagine it, his muscles breaking the green water, his chest spreading wide with every stroke, the soft wake of water foam behind him. “And where did you learn to swim like that?”
“Well, I know all kinds of things now,” he said and, slowly, they looked at one another and laughed. And as she laughed, her blonde hair shook at her shoulders and the meadowed green of her eyes shone, the colours lilting like the reeds where they’d once caught frogs, and he liked the wistfulness of that memory. And her laugh was a richer sound now—not the gangly croaking of a girl of only seventeen, but the haunting song of a swan across the lake at dawn.
He dangled a flip-flop from his toes and then sucked it back onto his foot. He realized he admired her, the way she held herself with magnificent dignity, knees crossed, the light sweater on her shoulders exposing only the soft dimple of a collarbone beneath. Memories were fickle, as quick to forgive as to forget, but his memory of her was unkind compared to the ornament of splendor that she was.
She told him she could only stay for a week that summer—she had an internship as part of her biology degree—and, cocksure, he told her they would just have to make the best of it.
When the sun had downed and the memories were splayed before them like wedding gifts, he took her by the hand to the boathouse. Suspended over the water, the small rowboat creaked, moonlight reflecting on its ghostly hull. Cast in a mask of carnation-white moonlight, her arms wrapped around his neck, and they twirled, dancing to the music of the bristling reeds and the sad notes of waterthrush and the pounding rhythm of all those missed summers.
It was the moment before the moment when she pulled him close and said, “I know all kinds of things, too.”
His lips caressed the jigsaw of moonlight on her neck, hands rolling down her back like cold water. Giggly gasps and bumpy touching. He brushed aside her hair and the rhythm of their breaths rose and fell in the syllables of the world’s oldest sonnet.
Then came the brawl of their bodies—the genteel sighs, the curled toes, the whispers of satisfaction, and the moans that skated like winter air across the open lake.
The waves lapped and the hoisted rowboat creaked, and as she breathed in the pleasant smell of his skin, he pressed into her, then drew out. Together they were the rush of waves on the shore; the surge and the fall; the swell and the peace; the crush and the pull. His beautiful brown eyes, heavy and wet, looked at her with something richer than want, and she felt warm and safe beneath him. His hands slipped under her bare shoulders, hers around his taut back, and for a moment they loved one another honestly.
When she laid tumbled on his chest after they were done, tangled in their clothes like fishing line, she felt his strong body—the line below his nipple that ran hard and firm to the muscle that bridged chest to limb and the heavy curve of his upper arm against her back. He smelled like lake water, and she had forgotten how much she missed that smell, if only because it reminded her of him.
He stroked her fine blonde hair, the goosebumps on her arm rising and falling as he drew a circle with his finger.
They sighed and thought, as young lovers do, that nothing could go on when they were so hidden; that upon seeing them, the moon, the stars—the night itself—would attenuate and slow and offer them time; that if they could have only one moonlit night together, neither of them would ever want again.
But the stars swirled, the night wheeled on, and bit-by-bit the jellyfish-blue moon squeezed by.
“Next summer,” Astrid said at the end of the week, her feet already dangling off the dock and into the next. “I’ll be here for the whole summer.”
“I’ll hold you to it. Maybe we can swim the lake then.”
“We probably could have this year.”
“I think we made the most of it,” he said.
And an hour later she was gone.
He was twenty-three and she was twenty-four the summer she arrived in the all-black Cadillac, tires popping and squeezing the stones beneath as they pulled down the gravel road to her cottage, her fingers intertwined with those of her fiancé, Ryan. His other hand was on the steering wheel, his dark hair as straight as his collar as he smiled and talked about seeing her family again. They passed the sycamore that lurked off the road, the one she’d called the Elephant Tree when she was young, its knotted hollow hide sheltering the red and yellow wildflowers that grew around it.
There, her father had built a swing when she was little, a flat board suspended by two itchy yellow ropes that burned your hands if you moved along them too fast. Her brother Caleb had ruined it the summer he’d decided he preferred a tire swing, and he’d cut the ropes to make room for it. Even three years younger than him, James had chased her brother around the tree when he’d learned what Caleb had done, and together they’d trampled the flowers.
Ryan parked next to her family’s cars, and they staggered out into the oozing warm sun. The white fence stood steadfast between hers and the Gould’s cottage, but the Gould’s place was shuttered and estranged, their grey dock drawn high up the beach like a mountain coldly clinching its snow.
“Where are they this year?” Astrid asked as Caleb greeted them on the deck stairs. The question had come more worryingly than she’d intended, and she blushed at the thought of what her brother might say in front of her fiancé, but he said nothing; he only shrugged and helped Ryan take the bags.
The days passed as they settled like stones into the lakebed, and together Astrid and Ryan found the groove most comfortable among her family. She showed him the trails of her youth, picking the white heads of unblossomed weeds, feeling the high grass that overhung the trail and tickled her knee, squeezing his hand in hers as they walked. She sensed his unease each time she looked down the road at the sound of gravel popping under car tires, and for his sake she did her best to bury her anticipation—to put the feeling in a sack, wrench it down and sink it deep in her gut, but there was no way to kill it outright.
One afternoon, she led Ryan to a black stone creek that cleft lightning-sharp through the woods, where tree trunks buried them in a shameful shade. The mossy bridge over the creek was three steps long, and she stopped in the middle of it, wood bending beneath their feet as she put her hands on his chest, and she kissed him. He was gentle, the same way he was when he corrected her—tender and reserved, and so careful not to blemish her that the only mark he’d ever left was the thin tan line of an engagement ring. His dark eyes looked at hers, big hands squeezing her more tightly into him, and he kissed her on the cheek.
The lake sparkled through the trees as they looped back along the trail to the cottage. James’s mother, Mrs. Gould, was there, black hair bundled loosely behind her as she unloaded a sloshing cooler from one of their cars. From the shadow of the trailhead Astrid watched, heart flopping side to side as she looked for James, but he was nowhere to be seen.
“Is that his family?” Ryan asked, not unaware of the long looks she cast unsparingly at the other cottage, or the way she drifted unmoored from the shore of his chest at night. He had even learned the boy’s name by accident, and although no one had told him anything pertinent, he knew what she suffered from.
“Yes, that’s them,” she admitted, and the blood crowded into her cheeks.
They ate on the deck that night, her parents having invited the Goulds to join them. Mr. Gould came over, hopping alongside his cane, Mrs. Gould with a brilliant white casserole dish in her hands, and they spoke their gladness at seeing them all again after missing them last year. When they’d sat down, James hopped over their fences and clambered up the stairs, sandals flapping against the wood. Astrid would always remember the look that spread out across his face, drawing back his charmed smile as he saw her, and the juddering of his jaw and the passing into a fever of embarrassment as he noticed her fiancé.
“This is Ryan,” Astrid said as Ryan rose, and the two men shook hands. “He cooked for us tonight.”
“He owes us,” Michael said to James. “For Astrid killing our sailboat.”
The barbeque sizzled grey smoke behind them, and the wind shifted. Then, like nothing had happened, James looked at Michael and pointed knowingly to her brothers. “There was money in that boat.”
“That’s what I told her,” Caleb said.
“Not only did not one of you know how to sail a boat,” Astrid said, “but you also didn’t know how to build one.”
Michael sucked the barbeque sauce off the tip of his thumb. “She snatched the money right out of our hands.”
Ryan smiled, sweeping back his dark hair. “What boat?”
“Well.” Michael leaned forward. “The three of us were going to build a sailboat. We could have taken it all around the lake, given sailboat rides, you know, stuff like that. We could have been rich.”
James put a helping of salad on his plate. “I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as that pile of wood.” He took a hamburger. “It was going to be sixteen feet of pure freedom.”
“Freedom?” Astrid asked, half-smiling. “When you’ve nowhere to go but the lake?”
Ryan put his arm around Astrid and also smiled. “What were you going to use for sails?”
“Cattails,” Caleb said excitedly. “We were going to put them in the lake, let them soak, and then weave sails out of the plant stalks.”
Ryan laughed at that. “All in one summer?”
“Bigger things have happened in a summer,” James said.
Ryan had many questions about their sailboat, and the three boys were happy to indulge him. It’d been a long time since they’d talked about it in front of her, and it surprised Astrid to see it come to them so easily. It amused her in a way she hadn’t felt in years, the way they alternated between accusations that she’d ruined their lives and admissions that they knew very little about sailboats.
As they talked, she absently laid her hand on Ryan’s shoulder. James’s expression changed. The weight of her engagement ring became noticeable on her finger, and she withdrew it into her lap, her other hand taking a small piece of the cold white- and black-flecked potato salad onto her fork. She could feel James staring at her, but she couldn’t raise her eyes to meet his.
It wasn’t long after that when James thanked the Thompson’s for their hospitality. He had a headache, he told them, and a need to sit down.
“You’re already sitting down, son,” her father said as he rubbed the grey whiskers of his fine goatee.
James looked at her brothers. “It’s good to see you again.”
Astrid watched him go and the clattering of silverware wore on like a pounding rain.
The Goulds were pleasant and glad to meet Ryan, and they congratulated the couple when Ryan announced that he and Astrid were to be married on that very beach later that summer—and that, of course, they were both invited. She stared at her fiancé, his arm wrapped around her, and she wished so desperately that she could have been as mesmerized by him as she had by the talk of sailboats.
When dinner was done, she and Ryan collected the plates for washing, a tartan dish towel on his shoulder as he stood beside her in the kitchen. Before them, the dark beach stretched down to the water, where waves cut across the lake like glinting rows of snowcapped mountains.
She handed him a plate. “It’s not fair for you to have to wash after you’ve made dinner.”
“I don’t mind.” A plate squeaked clean under his hand, and he quietly put it in the cupboard.
“And I’m sorry about my brothers. Blaming you for their sailboat, I mean.”
“I don’t mind.” A smile and another soft squeak.
“And, I’m sorry if that… I’m sorry.”
He put his big hand on the small of her back and kissed the top of her head. “I don’t mind.”
When they finished, she decided on an evening swim. Ryan was content to stay inside and talk more with her brothers, so she set out with a towel that flashed in bright oranges and yellows, which she left crumpled on the beach. The sun prowled above the horizon as she tiptoed to the water, where a wave ambushed her toes and spilled warmly over her feet. The sun still had some warmth to give for the day, and the water was rejuvenating as she dipped beneath it, wet hair twirling behind her head as she broke the surface. Deeper into the water she moved, until her feet couldn’t reach the sand, and then she floated, letting the black waves lap against her chin.
Splashes came from seaward, and she turned to see James’s arms cutting through the water, each stroke throwing off ambered water beads. He slowed, turning to float on his back, displacing the water with soft bubbles around him.
“Head feel better?” she asked.
He twisted, looking for her voice as his big hand wiped his face. “Oh, hey—yeah, doing better now. Just needed to get into the water, I guess.”
“Are you going to be up here long?” she asked. He was close—close enough for her to see the water slung over his eyebrows. The closest they’d been in two years.
“All summer.” He fought the urge to move closer. When she looked at him, though, he could see an anger that rolled across her green eyes like dark thunderheads.
“Well then, you should know that Ryan and I are getting married here. This summer.”
“Oh?” he said. “Oh yeah, I saw the ring. Congratulations.”
“Thank you.”
He drifted. The waves lapped. “Have you been… long?”
She nodded. “A year.”
“Good,” he said. “That’s good. He seems nice.”
“Yes, he is.”
He looked back at the beach. A pair of white seagulls had landed, strutting near her towel. He swallowed, looking back to her. “I’m sorry we haven’t talked much in the last couple years.”
“I bet you are.”
His eyebrows lifted. “You’re the victim then, is that it?”
“You stopped talking to me!” she cried at once. “You never even said why. All my letters. My calls. You never…” She looked away. “James, after I left—”
“That’s right,” he said. “You left that summer. Not me.”
She let out a short, sharp breath. “Fine.” She floated shoreward. Anything to be farther from him. “Blame me if that makes you feel better.”
“At least I don’t make myself feel better by jumping into bed with the first warm body I see.”
Angrily, she splashed water in his face. He jerked away, and by the time he could see again, she’d already reached the shallows. Her feet stirred the slick strands of seaweed along the sandy lakebed, and she strode the last dozen feet to shore as the water drained off her body. The white seagulls screeched, then pattered and flew away.
“You’re a child,” she called back.
That night he laid awake, sheets strewn across the floor, air conditioner rattling in the vents. He thought of that night in the boathouse; the way she’d looked when the moon was caught in her eye; the way her hair laid wispily against his chest; the way their bodies had tucked into one another. The softness of her skin had filled his hands and when he’d kissed her on the shoulder, he’d been unsure where the moonbeams ended and her body began.
He’d told himself it had been his father’s health that had kept him away from both the cottage and her, but that wasn’t true. It was his garden rose sensitivity that had told him to prune her friendship. She had hurt him by leaving that summer, and so he had removed her from his life. But as he laid in the dark, his toes cold from the air conditioner, he realized the shallowness of his anger and his grief. In the dark ceiling above, he saw the memory of his own anger reflected at him in the turbid greens of her eyes, and he knew he’d done something far worse than her leaving.
He laid fitfully all night, until the sky lightened and he drove into Spring Garden, where the main street was squeezed between diagonal parking spots and limp flowers hung from the pots on streetlights. The general store was bright in the dim morning, like a lighthouse calling him home, and there he bought a box of envelopes from that gaunt mannequin of a man, Mr. Wallace.
When he had been younger, he’d once stolen chocolate from the store. He’d made it all the way back to the cottage with the blue bar in his pocket, where it stayed for two days, the guilt outweighing his hunger. After agonizing over it, he’d told Astrid what he’d done, and she’d gone back with him the next time he was in town. He had wanted to put it back in the box, to pretend that nothing had happened, but she convinced him to apologize.
After James had finished his apology, Mr. Wallace had swiped the bar off the counter. The old purveyor had eyed them both with his finger out. “Next time,” he told them, “I’ll have you both dragged off to jail by your thumbs.” When James had left in a daze down the red interlock outside of the general store, he’d felt like it had been a waste. What was the point of apologizing if they didn’t accept it?
“You don’t apologize to be forgiven,” she’d told him.
He still thought about that sometimes, how much it would hurt to be dragged anywhere by his thumbs, and that was as good a reminder as any that he didn’t need her forgiveness; he just needed to apologize.
With envelopes in hand, he drove back to the cottage, stopping at the grey-barked trunk that Astrid used to call the Elephant Tree. Early morning light lanced through the boughs, and the red and yellow wildflowers gleamed beautiful and dew stained as he picked a handful from around the tree. At the cottage, he tied a piece of brown twine around the rigid stems, wrote a letter of apology, tucked it into an envelope, walked across the beach, and laid upon her porch both flowers and letter.
It felt right to go to the boathouse after that, where he ran his hand along the white paint of the rowboat, feeling smooth globules in his fingers where dripping paint had dried. He threw open the doors to the lake and swung his legs over the boathouse’s edge.
A tar-black shell of shadow stretched across the water before him, the breezy blue morning sky reflected beyond it, and dark green shores beyond that. In the shadow of the boathouse, water bugs skipped off the lake, their rippled steps flowing inappreciably in the dark water. Once, he had known all their names, just as he’d known their purpose and what would eat them and why. There had been an order to things when he was younger, when the world was smaller in the summer; when everything would disappear around him and his entire life would collapse into the space between their fences—and in that space was always Astrid, where, in those too-short summers, she’d become his world. The hurt he’d blamed her for wasn’t fair to her, and neither was his reaction. Ignoring her had been petty and stupid, and his spite had needlessly punished them both.
He sat there, thinking of his mistakes, watching as the shadow of the boathouse slipped away into the morning and, as it did, so did it seem the weeks slipped away into the summer. Soon the heat set upon them, draining the life from their days until they were ravenous creatures of dawn and dusk, fed by the twilight plum of memory. In those dog days, James’s father reminisced of youth, when his body was familiar to him. He spoke at length about what he might have done differently if he knew how things would have turned out, but it was wasted on James, as such omens always are on young men who still know the strength of their bodies.
Astrid’s brothers talked about baseball and what it was like to play when they were younger. They’d been neither good nor dedicated, but the memories of those late high school days spent on a field instead of half-asleep in a warm classroom had given them many stories, and they shared them with Ryan at the slightest of provocations.
Ryan talked about his parents, who would arrive soon enough for the wedding. He didn’t see them much anymore, but he said it would be good that they’d get away from their busy lives in the city for a few weeks. Astrid had met them before and they liked her well enough, but he still thought it would be good for them to spend some more time together before the wedding.
James—though he didn’t speak it—thought about Astrid and the way he’d treated her. Since their swim, she’d spoken to him only in passing, and only when niceties demanded it, and not once had she mentioned his letter. He tried to be pleasantly distant from her, giving the space he thought she needed, and he’d even begun to adjust to the new state of their relationship. Even if she never forgave him, he could still be a friend, and he could still be happy for her. And her family was still pleasant enough with him, with both Michael and Caleb remaining good friends.
It was a July night when the brothers dragged him to Spring Garden to drink at the local pub. The place was little more than a dark-walled asylum for local miscreants, but it had pool tables and that was as good as any way to spend a Friday night. The long bar had the smell of lime and the zest of lemon in the air as James waited to pick up beers for himself and Michael. Ice clinked in glasses behind the polished counter, the bartender working down the bar. Nearby, a woman not much younger than James blinked coyly, a thin black straw in her mouth.
James smiled, leaning against the wood as she teased her black hair and batted her smoky eyes. She was short with curled hair and the lights danced on the tanned skin of her shoulders like a heady mirage. But when he thought about saying something, the beers came, and he pulled back to the pool tables. On their third round, he found her there, still alone and smiling, and by the time he returned for the fourth beer and their third round of shots, she was biting her lip. When he made the mistake of telling Michael and Caleb, they both threw down their cues and wandered over to the bar, sitting near to her.
“I’ve just never seen anyone who is such a virile lover,” Michael boomed.
“It’s really his generosity that makes him stand out,” Caleb said. “Such selflessness.”
Michael picked up the beer just put in front of him. “I certainly cannot believe it. He seems too good to be true.”
“But he’s not!”
The woman shook her head and rolled her eyes, but a smile was clear on her face as she bounced one leg on her knee. James’s ears burned red, and he offered her an awkward smile.
“Indeed, our very sister has never gotten over him, and I suspect she never will,” Michael said.
James turned to the brothers. Michael was already drunk, but it was the look of terrified sincerity on Caleb’s sober face that James couldn’t ignore. Caleb pulled Michael off the black barstool and roughly patted his brother.
“Well, it’s getting late.” Caleb said, and soon he had them both loaded into the car, driving down the dark, bending highway to their cottages. In the backseat, James turned to Michael.
“What did you mean when you said she’d never get over me?”
The silhouettes of lanky trees sped by as Michael shoved him, a dopey smile on his face. “You’re great, James.”
“He’s drunk,” Caleb said. “Pay no attention to that moron.”
“You meant something by it. Tell me what.”
“Well, Jamesy—”
“Ah!” Caleb shouted over his brother. “Ignore him. He’s just shit stirring.”
Michael grinned, putting a finger to his mouth, shushing himself as he laughed. On the last dirt road home, the car squeezed the gravel, tires popping in the dark as they pulled up to their cottages and spilled out with a pleasant goodbye.
In bed beside Ryan, Astrid heard her brothers stumble in through the rolling glass door, and she pulled herself up to see the damage they’d done to themselves. By the time she shuffled to the kitchen hallway, Michael was giddily making eggs, Caleb thumbing his phone at the kitchen island nearby. She stood in the hallway, their backs to her as she listened and watched.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” Caleb said. “It’s just going to make it harder for him.”
“No, it’s all good.” Michael grinned, eyes half-shut. “And I was never onboard with interfering the way you have.”
“Mike, we agreed.”
“Ryan doesn’t even share that many interests with her. She loves science and stuff, and he’s all cooking, and restaurants, and food-whatever,” Michael said. “James would be much better for her.”
“It’s not our place.”
Michael scoffed. “Not our place? You made me hold on to the letter.” He shook his head. “Not our place… what bullshit. James loves her. He’s a good guy. Caleb, you should have read what he wrote, apologizing to her. It broke my heart a little, knowing she’d never see it. He cares about her more than Ryan does—more than anyone, probably—and I think he always will. We shouldn’t have gotten in the middle of them figuring that out.”
Astrid took in a deep breath and guiltily turned away from the kitchen, tiptoeing back to the bedroom. She slunk under Ryan’s arm and listened to the muffled conversation going on in the kitchen until finally the doors of her brothers’ rooms squeezed shut, and the cottage fell quiet around her. Ryan’s breathing thumped in her ear, and the heat of his body overwhelmed her.
She slipped out from under him again, left the room, and rolled open the glass door onto the deck. The waterthrush and crickets crooned, and the silver moonlight hung ribboned on the black waves. At the end of the other dock she saw James, sitting on a wooden deckchair just as they had that night two years ago.
She stepped across the sand and up the dock. It was a mistake, she told herself. Turn around.
Her soft footfalls made him sit upright as she neared.
“Mind if I join you?” she asked.
He nodded. She passed in front of him and tucked one leg under her as she sat. They stared out at the gentle lake and the gorge of milky stars above them. Hiccups of waves jostled the dock—knock, knock, knocking against the timbers as the needlepoint of stars watched them.
Her head rested on the cool wood of the deck chair. “I can’t sleep.”
“No?”
“I used to sleep so much better up here.”
“Well, sharing a bed, you know, that can make it hard for some people to be well-rested.”
“Yeah?” She looked at him, his cable-thick arms above his head, and she folded her hands in her lap with a sigh. “Yeah, sometimes I think I’d sleep better alone.”
“You just need a bigger bed,” he said.
“How big is yours?”
His stomach unsettled, and he let out a slow breath. “Not big enough.”
He moved away from the chair, sitting on the edge of the dock. With a sigh, he dangled his feet into the warm water. “I think it’ll be windy tomorrow. Would be a great day to have a sailboat.”
She slipped off the chair, playfully scrunching her face as she sat beside him. “Still haven’t forgiven me?” Her toes skipped across the waves as she lowered them to the water.
“You think I should?” he asked.
“Why not?”
He straightened his legs, taking his feet out of the lake. Beads of water dripped. “I’ve never been good at forgiving people.”
“Is it so bad to forgive, though?”
“It always felt like giving something away,” he said.
“I think it’s more like giving something back.”
He shrugged. “It’s hard.”
“I know,” she said.
“I’m trying to be better.”
She bumped her shoulder into his. “Me too.”
“Well then, in the spirit of cooperation, allow me to say that I officially forgive you for stealing our sailboat.” He bumped his shoulder back into hers. “But if your brothers ask, this conversation never happened, and you’re still a no-good sailboat-thief.”
“Thank you.” She smiled.
He smiled back and raised his feet out of the water again, listening to the sounds of the waterdrops falling into the lake like kind rain. “So, what brings you out here tonight?”
“I told you, I can’t sleep.”
“Why are you out here on the dock, though?”
She shrugged. “I like the stars.” A memory returned to her. “When I was little, my dad used to tell me they named me Astrid because I was as beautiful as all the stars.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I used to think that meant something when I came to the cottage. I could just lie out here on the dock and look up at them all. It felt like I belonged here more than anywhere else. It’s beautiful out here at night, isn’t it?”
He looked at her, his heart aching. “Some nights more than others.”
“Of course, when I was older I learned my name had nothing to do with stars.” She laughed. “But it still means something to me being out here at night.”
The stars blossomed above, the crook of the moon talon-sharp as it wedged itself unwelcomely among them, its better half lost in that longing black we call the sky. The heavy croak of frogs and the thin screech of crickets played on. They sat in honest silence and, as the warm water fell against their ankles, it reminded them both of that night two years ago.
“Why did you cut me out of your life?” she asked.
He swallowed, knuckles whitening as he held onto the edge of the dock. The black edge of the far shore was visible against the mirror of water, and he wondered how far away it was to swim. He shrugged. “I was hurt that you left.”
“That’s not fair,” she said. “I had to.”
“I know,” he said. “But that’s how I felt. I’d never been with anyone before. When you left—even knowing you had to—it hurt. More than I expected.” He laid flat on the dock, feet still in the water.
“That was your first time?” she asked as his hands stretched above his head and he looked to the stars. She laid beside him, watching his throat jitter as he drew scant breath. For a long moment, neither of them moved.
“I always wanted it to be you,” he said at last. “I thought, what could be better than that? And then it happened, and it was a perfect night, and I knew, laying there with you in that boathouse, you were the girl I was going to marry.” He turned to look at her. “Then a week later you were gone.”
“I never knew that.”
He shook his head. “It was just stupid immaturity, you know? I was being stupid.”
“Yeah,” she said. “You were.”
He smiled and his hands slid down from above his head. He wondered about the last two years and all the times he could have spent talking to her, all the things they could have shared. He had stolen it from both of their lives, and for that, he wasn’t sure there could ever be forgiveness.
“Did you write me a letter?” she asked. He swallowed nervously, and she knew it was true. “What did it say?”
“You never read it?”
“I never got it.”
He took a deep breath and blew it out of his mouth. “It said, I’m sorry for ignoring you all that time. You meant a lot to me, and I treated you really shitty. I should have been honest about how I felt.”
She blinked, unsure what to say. “What else?”
“What else?” He chuckled. “It said, we’re even for the sailboat.”
“What else?” she asked, and her earnestness took him by surprise.
He swallowed. “It said, I wish I’d been better.”
“What else?”
He turned to look at her, a chill on his spine. “It said, I miss the way you say my name.”
“What else?”
“It said, I’ll never meet anyone like you again.”
“What else?” she whispered.
Their hands neared, fingertips touching. “It said, you’re all the best parts of living.”
She pulled herself up and leaned over him. Her hand fell on his cheek, and without thinking, she kissed him. His hand went to the back of her head, pulling her deeper into their kiss like a flower pressed into the pages of a book. A replete sigh left her, and he laid her back on the dock. Their kiss broke, and her eyes opened. She saw his hungry heartache as her hands ran up the thick muscles of his arms, her hair lying scattered on the dock behind her like a broken halo. His eyes glistened, his chest heavy with anticipation.
“Don’t stop,” she said.
But he pulled away.
“Oh, no—don’t.” Her eyes teared, and the embarrassment of what she’d done overwhelmed her. “I’m sorry—that was… Oh, I’m so sorry.” She got to her feet, the metal and wood of the dock clamouring and clonking beneath her as she fled down the dock, her face red hot.
James could only sigh and stare with anguished abandon at the endless waves of stars above.
It was only days later when the inescapable crush of the wedding descended upon them. Ryan’s parents had arrived, and the preparations had moved beyond the point of no return. It was to be a small ceremony with only a handful of friends and family from both of their lives, but already everything was paid for. If a bachelor or bachelorette party had taken place before their wedding day, James knew nothing about it, and he was better for it. He had tried to keep his distance from the Thompsons. He knew, even if she’d lost sight of it for a moment, it wasn’t him she wanted.
Towards the bottom of the beach, an oak wedding arch had been assembled, decorated with pink and yellow flowers, with dozens of footprints cratered in the surrounding sand. Although neither Astrid nor Ryan were members of his denomination, they had called a priest from Spring Garden to perform the service. He was a sprightly man with big red cheeks and thinning white hair, and his love of weddings meant he was happy to officiate theirs.
The day she was set to marry, Astrid’s hands trembled all morning long. She told herself the doubts that tumbled in her stomach were only cliches. Everyone had doubts and fears on their wedding day, but not everyone was marrying someone as wonderful as Ryan. He was a good man, and good for her; he was neither unappealing nor unstable, and he had always been so kind to her. But as the day wore on, those feelings she’d tried so hard to drown for two years coughed up, and all she could think of was James and their last kiss.
She wished for inclement clemency, but the only drizzle was the warm sun pouring on their heads as her brothers arranged the white chairs on the beach. In the late afternoon, as she was sequestered in her bedroom, her bleary-eyed mother brought her the bouquet and sat next to her on her bed.
“You look so beautiful, Astrid,” her mother said, fussing over the folds of the pure white wedding dress. “Ryan is very lucky today.”
“Am I?” she asked.
Her mother’s face stalled, and she touched at her own blonde hair as she stood in thought. She looked down at the wedding dress, then back to Astrid. “You don’t think you are?”
“I don’t know.” Astrid fanned her eyes, chasing tears away. “God, I spent so long on this makeup, I don’t want to cry.” She laughed.
“Oh, you’re lucky, honey—of course you are. Ryan is a good person. He has a big heart, and he loves you as much as you love him. Everyone can see that.”
“I don’t think I love him right.”
Her mother took her hands. “There’s no wrong way to love someone if you love them honestly.”
“You think I should go through with it then?”
Her mother sighed sadly and squeezed Astrid’s hands. “Honey, it’s just nerves. Everyone feels them. I don’t think it’s a mistake at all.” Her mother squeezed again and then said she had to finish getting things ready and left.
Not long after, a knock came and Caleb pushed into the room. He’d put on a well-fitted suit, his wavy light hair well-combed. “You look great,” he said. “And everything out there looks great. It’s shaping up to be a great day.”
She smirked. “You’re using the word great a lot, and that’s concerning.”
“You’re great. Ryan’s great. It’s all great. The seagulls definitely haven’t started attacking people on the beach.”
She laughed. “Don’t say that—don’t even put it out there.”
“No, really, it looks great out there, and we’re ready whenever you are.” He squeezed her shoulder and opened the door, but she stopped him with a small sound.
“What do you think of James?”
Caleb closed the door, swallowing as he turned to her. “James?”
With hurt she looked at him, unsure how to ask the question in her throat. “Do you not like him?”
“I like James,” he said tenderly. “He’s a good friend.”
“Then why did you hide his letter?” Her voice was thinner than ice on an autumn puddle.
Caleb’s head tilted back looking to the mess of things spread across her bed. In him, there was a cycle of tumultuous tides that washed across his face, and he took a seat on the chair nearest to her mirror. “How d’you find out?” he said finally.
“I heard you talking to Mike about it.”
He took a deep breath. “Astrid, I think the world of you. You’re my baby sister, and I want you to have a good, long, happy life.” He put his hands on his knees. “James is a good person. I like him. But when he stopped talking to you two years ago, with no warning… I’d never seen you so hurt. I like him, but I hate him for doing that to you.” His voice choked, not with anger, but well-meaning despair. “For a whole month, you stopped answering our calls. I didn’t want it to happen again.”
She delicately sat on the bed, far away from him. “You didn’t have a right to do that.”
“No… maybe I didn’t.” The air escaped from his nose in a long sigh. “But do I have the right to tell you what I think now?”
She nodded slowly.
“Ryan’s the best man you’ve ever dated. I trust him to be good to you. He’s kind, and thoughtful, and he doesn’t solve his problems by ignoring you. He took most of the summer to be here with us. As much as I like James, I know Ryan is the one you’re meant to be with. He’s a good man, and what you have is good, and it will be keep being good.”
“But what if it isn’t?”
“You think it would be better with James?” He shook his head. “Don’t put yourself through this. I know you’re nervous, but you have a great thing here. Don’t think about what you’re missing. Think about what you have. Think about how happy you are.”
Her face slackened, and the whole summer she’d spent with Ryan came to her. It had been pleasant, and she did care for him. He was a good man and kind to her, and she would be foolish to give him up. “It wouldn’t be fair to hurt him at this point, would it?”
Caleb crossed the room and gently took hold of her wrist, squeezing. “It’s just a stressful day.”
“You’re right,” she said. “It’s just stressful.”
He put on a half-smile and whistled. “Man, can you imagine if you had a wedding with hundreds of people? I don’t know people do it.”
She grinned as he left, but behind him, she closed the door and slid down against it. The bed she’d slept on next to Ryan for that whole summer looked bigger without him, even if it was full of a mess of her things, and in all that time she’d still not had a good sleep.
Outside, the violins edged on, drawing her out of the cottage. The procession of her bare steps on the sand brought her into the garden of her ruination, where the people rose, black-suited and darkly dressed, like bent rows of blossoming death. All eyes turned to her. The violins strained. Ryan smiled from under the oak arch, and she put her red cheeks down, walking the dark carpet that was laid out like a plank on the beach.
The black-robed priest spoke pointedly of their union, reciting what they’d told him, keeping his remarks short and hurrying them into their vows. Ryan’s smile was as wide as she’d ever seen it as he took her hand and told her all the things he loved about her—the way her nose crinkled when she did mental math; the way she always woke up with one lazy hiccup; the way she inspired him to always be better. He loved everything about her, he said, and he would spend his life proving it to her.
Cold white flower petals tumbled across the beach on the breeze. James watched from the back of the crowd as Astrid stared ahead blankly until Ryan put his hands on her shoulders. She snapped out of it, as if remembering where she was. She said her vows, and the pang of fear caught in James’s throat. A part of him—small and stupid and hopeful—had convinced himself that she wouldn’t go through with it. Ryan slipped the ring onto her finger, smiling and overjoyed, and with a smaller smile Astrid slid a ring onto his finger as well. James’s heart sank as he watched them sharing a long smile, but as they leaned in to share their kiss, James stood.
“Astrid Thompson, I love you,” he said. The breeze died. The water stilled. One by one the weddinggoers looked to James in the back of the crowd. “I loved you before I even knew what love was, and I know you love me too.”
The breath of each cottage summer carries with it a different kind of hope. The warm summers that mollify; the wet summers that breathe life into the wildflowers. Those summers when it seems the moon is brightest, and those when the stars are as brilliant as the sky. The days of wavy beaches, and the nights of silver waters. The cool mornings when water bugs ripple inappreciably in the shadows, and the blue afternoons when children catch yellow sunfish from the docks. These are the hopeful moments of cottage summers, and they are what she thought of as she stared between the two men she loved.
And it was in those memories of hopeful summers that she realized she only loved one of them honestly.
He was twenty-four and she was twenty-five the summer he married her on the beach. A tall oak arch stood above them, decorated with brilliant white carnations as the waves lapped the afternoon shore. The white-robed priest—who had promised to officiate the wedding only so long as there were no hysterics this time—smiled at them and listened to their vows as James and Astrid promised to love one another, forever and always. Their friends and families watched gladly as they shared that first wedded kiss and that summer at last they swam the lake together.
Where James grew up, the soil was tanned and undrunk like winter leaves, and where Astrid grew up, it was hidden beneath crabgrass and rustling reeds. But where their children would grow up, the soil was soft and dark and flecked with white stones like ancient arrowheads—where the black shore flows out to meet the sun and the last waves of the day.