I take a step in the direction of the marina, but he stops me, his hand catching my hip.
“What am I supposed to do, Firefly? Just watch you walk away?”
The irony of that question combined with the pain his nickname for me now elicits has a harsh laugh barreling out of my chest, because the alternative would have been for him to come with me.
Which is exactly what I’d asked him to do.
Not to come with me here, to this beach, on this night — but to the Bahamas, to the next boat, the next adventure. We were supposed to leave this island together. We were supposed to walk hand in hand into our next gig as a couple. All summer, I thought that was the plan.
I thought that because he’d let me.
“You were supposed to mean what you said,” I tell him, more dejected now, my voice soft and weak. “You were supposed to come with me, Finn.”
There it is again, that tight jaw, that grinding of bone. It’s too dark to see the color of his eyes — are they sea green tonight or more of that ocean blue? — but I feel them piercing through me just as much as if it were high noon.
I wait for a response, and when it doesn’t come, another sad laugh leaks out of me like helium from a pricked balloon. I laugh at him and at myself, too.
Fools, we are.
Love-drunk fools.
Wiping my nose with the back of my wrist, I shrug, the bottle of wine I’d toted to the beach with me making a sloshing sound in my hand. “Go on, then. You came here to say something? Say it. Say what you haven’t already.”
“Ember, I don’t—”
“Say it,” I snap, using my free hand to shove against his chest. My body lights up with longing the second I touch him, even for that brief second, every cell within me yearning to givein, to collapse into his arms and let him hold me — even if just for one more night. “Go on. I’m all ears. Tell me what—”
“Come with me.”
For a split second, the words have me speechless.
Hopeful.
But then anger slides right back in.
“Come with you,” I deadpan. “To Ireland. Where there is no yachting season. Where I walk away from my career, my aspirations, for you.”
“And what, it’s somehow fair for you to ask the same of me?”
I try to sharpen my gaze at him then, to pierce him the way his words were cutting me. But I feel it, how I soften, how my shoulders deflate and my eyes sting with the all-consuming sadness that’s ripping me apart.
“I never asked anything of you,” I whisper. “Except for you not to lie.”
His nostrils flare. “Em, I didn’t—”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t lie. Don’t try to make me feel crazy. I was there.”
“I never said I wanted to stay in yachting.”
“You never said you didn’t!” My chest heaves. “All those times I laid my head on your chest and talked about what came next, all the nights I dreamed aloud of where we’d go, the places we’d see together — you never stopped me. You never told me the truth.”
He closes his eyes as I step into his space, my chest pressing just below his, face angled up as I dare him to look at me and tell me I’m wrong.
But he can’t.
“I… Ibeggedyou, Finn. I begged you not to hurt me.” I hate how my eyes gloss with tears when those words croak out of me. “And you looked me right in my eye and told me you wouldn’t — all the while knowing you would.”
“Stop.”