Girls of Brackenhill(63)
Wyatt served dinner: Perfectly seasoned and broiled sirloin, sliced thin on a bias, red and warm in the center. Fresh pasta with red wine sauce, tomatoes from Wyatt’s garden. Caramelized onions and fennel. While they ate, she talked about her work. He talked about his daughter, Nina. He saw her three times a week and overnight every other weekend. They didn’t keep to a formal schedule, and his ex-wife gave him carte blanche to see her whenever he wanted, as long as he called first. When he spoke about her, his cheeks took on a rosy glow. He laughed easily.
As they cleaned up, they got back to talking about Brackenhill. The mysterious history. Her childhood—but only the happy memories. She talked about Aunt Fae building faerie houses and planting bright, bursting annuals along the garden’s borders. How she and Julia had found the storm shelter, a secret room in the middle of the forest; was there anything more enchanting than that? How they had never gotten the chance to explore it. The basement, a labyrinth of rooms that had held so much promise when she was a child—how she had known, with certainty, that they were mystical. The rooms had moved on her, reconfigured as they ran through them, getting lost, panicking and laughing and gleeful and terrified and all things at once.
Hannah felt her insides grow warm, slippery. Her heart seemed to expand in her chest, her fingertips buzzing. The basement had been terrifying, but it had been theirs. Hers and Julia’s. Hannah had never permitted herself to remember the magic of Brackenhill, just the tragedy, and certainly never out loud. Wyatt sat at the breakfast bar, transfixed, as she cleaned up and talked—she had insisted, as it was the least she could do for the delicious dinner.
“I’ve never heard you talk so much at once,” he murmured, his voice thick in the small kitchen. “It’s like you’ve . . . come alive.”
And it was how she felt. Aggressively alive. Vibrating with life, in fact. Every skin cell and every nerve ending seemed to pulse.
She stood in front of Wyatt, and from his barstool, he gazed up at her. He was so beautiful, thought Hannah, and the guilt pierced her heart.
“I should go,” she said regretfully. The sun had long set, the stars outside the windows brighter than in any night sky she’d ever seen.
He nodded and stood, his face inches from hers.
She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t concentrate on anything but his mouth, his eyes, so dark they seemed black. His breathing, fast and uneven, like he was trying to steady himself.
“What if . . . I didn’t,” Hannah said, holding his gaze, not asking a question exactly. Posing it as a statement. What would happen if she didn’t leave?
She lifted up on her toes and kissed him. She reached out, her hands on his hips, the slightly soft pad where his jeans met his skin, her fingertips grazing under his T-shirt. He groaned softly at her touch and seemed to battle himself, his fists clenched by his sides, fingertips flexing, as Hannah trailed kisses down the side of his face, his neck, his skin warm and smooth and smelling like shaving cream—he had shaved for her. Before finally bringing his arms around her, crushing her against him. She remembered everything. Every muscle, every line and curve of his body, held the glint of memory, the same but different. No longer boyish, clumsy, and eager. Confident, adult—the disarming patience of a deliberate man.
His hand came to the side of her face, cupping her cheek, deepening the kiss, his tongue seeking hers, and she felt like her blood might actually be on fire. She wrapped her legs around his waist, and he carried her through the house to another darkened room, and she was overcome by déjà vu: this man, his bedroom, his smell, and his touch. It all came together in a paint swirl of memory, bursting with color like the sunset behind the mountains, too bright to look at directly, so instead she closed her eyes, felt his fingertips skimming her hips, his lips on her stomach, her breasts, a gentle kiss in the hollow of her throat that sent shock waves down her spine and her legs, turning her liquid. His hands slowly patching her back together. Making her feel whole, not for the first time.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Then
August 1, 2002
It was a terrible cliché that the worst fight of Hannah and Julia’s relationship would be their last one.
“There’s a picnic in town.” Julia stood in the doorway between their rooms, wearing a white, gauzy off-the-shoulder dress and red wide-brimmed hat, looking like a model. Her hair was shining, ringlets cascading down her back. So different from Hannah’s floaty wave. “For the Rockwell Fish Fry.”
Rockwell was a fishermen’s town. The Beaverkill was the most popular trout stream in the country, and Rockwell’s entire identity came from fly-fishing. The downtown contained fly shops and bed-and-breakfasts that catered to out-of-town fishermen. At the end of every summer, the town held a fish fry.
Hannah had been lying on her bed, reading, and she looked up, startled at her sister’s sudden appearance. It used to be their normal, but lately, an unspoken wall had been erected. The doors between their rooms remained firmly shut. She didn’t know when the divide had happened. The first week of June had been joyful, pancake breakfasts with whipped cream and strawberries from the garden and quiet games of checkers in the evening, and then slowly, Julia had changed. By the third week in July, they’d barely been speaking. Hannah could never figure it out (and she tried plenty). Julia had turned sullen, quiet, moody. She was either gone, destination undeclared; hunched over a little brown journal; or secluded up in her room.