“Cover your eyes,” he says. I place my hands over them, listening for the click of the door latch. With his hand on the small of my back, he guides me forward. “You can look now.”
“Oh my god.”
“You like?” Mason grins.
“Is this real life?” I laugh, moving toward a bookcase on my left. This entire room is walls upon walls of bookcases, floor to ceiling, filled to the hilt. Hardcovers. Leather-bounds. First editions. All of them literary classics.
“I know you like books,” he says.
“Understatement, but yes.”
“I wanted to thank you for coming with me,” he says. “I know it’s not easy working with me, and I’ve been a pain in the ass the last couple of days.”
“Another understatement.” I flash him a smirk, then return to the beautiful book babies before me, sliding a copy of Anna Karenina from its proper place.
“As a token of my appreciation, I wanted to bring you here,” he says. “And let you pick out a couple of books. Yours to keep.”
“What?” I close the classic Tolstoy tome and lift my brows. “Are you serious?”
Mason’s lips tug up at one side. “Yeah. Whatever you want.”
I don’t know how I’m going to choose, but I know we don’t have all day, so I’ll try to hurry. Scanning the spines, I realize everything is alphabetized, which should at least make things a bit easier. Within minutes, I find a pristine, first-edition copy of The Great Gatsby, sliding it off the shelf and clutching it against my chest.
Making my way to the other side of the room, I maneuver around an oversized desk centered in the space, pausing when I spot a book lying on top of a ten-year-old calendar that seems to be stuck on the month of March.
Setting Gatsby aside, I inspect the other book, my breath hitching when I realize it’s a first edition of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
“Oh, that was my stepfather’s favorite book,” Mason says, his hands in his pockets as he watches me. He hasn’t so much as checked out a single book since we’ve been in here, and I imagine he has no idea how priceless some of these relics are. “He read it all the time. Guess the author used to live on his street or something when he was a kid?”
And now it makes sense, Ford’s love of Kerouac.
Flipping the cover open, my fingers trace the messy, faded ink inscription.
“To Bobby Hawthorne,
All of life is a foreign country.
Jack Kerouac.”
“Can I have this one?” I ask.
Mason nods. “Have whatever you want.”
“Thank you.” I grab Gatsby and hold both books close to my heart. I’m going to give the second one to Ford. He may have hurt me, but this book belonged to his father, and he should have it.
Mason gives me a tour of the place, I suppose for a lack of something better to do or maybe one last attempt to try and impress me. When we’re finished, he orders lunch from a local café and sends the driver out while we wait on the back patio, watching the waves lap onto the shore.
Making myself comfortable on a lounger, I page through my original Great Gatsby, dragging my palms along the creamy paper and inhaling its deliciously musty scent, my gaze landing on a line I’ve always loved: “He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.”
Exhaling, I feel a bittersweet smile curl across my lips as I think about Ford. He used to look at me like I was the only person in the room, the only thing that mattered. For a brief sliver of my short life, that man wanted me. And for the last five years, all I’ve wanted was to recapture that … to have that one more time.
Closing the book, I resolve to accept my fate: Kerouac doesn’t want me anymore.
It’s time to move on.
Chapter 53
Ford
All eyes are on the bride and groom … except mine.
I can’t take mine off of her. My Absinthe. My intoxicating addiction.
It was only supposed to be sex, but here I am two days later, craving her. Missing her. She’s in every face I see, every thought that occupies my one-track mind, her breathy sighs playing like a loop in my ear.
I so badly wanted to fuel the fire, keep the raging torch burning just as bright as it had been all those years. It was easy to resent her from afar than to accept how empty the last five years have been without her in them.
After the boathouse Thursday night, she left Aunt Cecily’s and went back to the hotel. I didn’t see her once yesterday, and I thought maybe she’d left Sag Harbor altogether. But then Mason walked into the church fifteen minutes before the wedding earlier today, my beautiful Halston draped on his arm in a pale pink dress that hugged her curves, her dark hair swept into a sophisticated bun at her crown.
Almost immediately she saw me.
And just as fast as it happened, she looked away.
I wasn’t able to usher her to her seat; the groom’s second cousin got to her first, but I intend to find her at the reception, to steal her away and find a quiet place to go so we can sort this out, make sense of what remains.
Bristol and Devin kiss, the priest introducing them as “Mr. and Mrs. Hotchkiss” as music begins to play from the organ pipes up front. The two of them dash down the white satin aisle, and I rise, heading to the front to begin dismissing rows.
When I get to Halston’s, she still refuses to meet my penetrating stare, so when she passes, I brush my fingers against her hand.
Our eyes meet for a single unbroken moment before Mason takes her hand and pulls her away. She disappears into the crowd a moment later, and I lose her all over again.
But I’m getting her back tonight.
“Have you seen Mason’s date?” I ask Nicolette a couple of hours later. The reception venue is packed, most people either seated at their assigned tables or mingling at the bar. All I’ve done since we arrived is search for the girl in the pink dress with the sad green eyes.
But she’s not here.
“That’s a weird question.” Nic wrinkles her nose.
I don’t have time to explain.
“I wanted to ask her a question,” I say. It’s the truth. I want to ask her a lot of questions.
“About what?”
I exhale. “I need to find her. I’ll be back.”
She rests her cheek against her fist, studying me. “You’ve been acting so freaking weird ever since we got here.”
Waving her off, I grab my tumbler of Scotch, take a healthy drink, and leave the table.
Circling the room, I check all forty-two tables, the span of the open bar, the backstage area where the wedding band preps, as well as the hall by the restrooms.
She’s nowhere to be found.
The air in the reception hall is thick and stale, a mix of perfumes and colognes and kitchen fumes. Heading outside so I can fucking breathe, I spot Mason walking toward the building, his chauffeured Escalade driving off.
“What’s that about?” I keep my cool, pointing to the SUV as it grows smaller in the distance. “You lose your date?”
Mason’s hands are in his pockets and he shrugs as if he doesn’t care. “Said she didn’t feel well. Wanted to go back to the hotel. Couldn’t even stay past cocktail hour. Fucking women, right?”
Dragging my palm across my mouth, I suck in a deep breath and let it go. So she doesn’t want to talk to me tonight. That’s fine. I’ll give her space. But tomorrow at brunch, all bets are off. I’ll corner her—I’ll throw her over my shoulder caveman style if that’s what it’s going to take, but I will talk to her.
Chapter 54
Halston
Dear Kerouac,
When I was a little girl, I didn’t have much. Often times we went without basic necessities like heat and food, running water, or shoes that fit. My parents’ addictions were priority one. I never really knew where I fell in the lineup after that, but it was somewhere toward the bottom.
Growing up, things like love and trust and healthy, functional relationships were foreign concepts to me. My parents never once told me they loved me. I didn’t have friends because, let’s face it, no kids wanted to hang out with the girl with greasy hair and smelly clothes that fit funny. We weren’t close with extended family. So I mostly kept to myself. Being alone was all I knew. I was all I had, really.