Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series (40 page)

This was the very sort of day he imagined spending with Destiny. A long shore walk, followed by food at the tearoom, perhaps a drink with his parents, then a long night together at the hotel.

He’d rather it be raining than have a perfect day like this, made utterly imperfect by what was missing.

He’d already, actually, reserved a flight to Ohio for next week, and he hadn’t purchased a return on it. He and Destiny had talked nearly every day recently, but she had been distracted and brief, almost as if she wanted to keep their conversations very short. He hadn’t been able to understand it, and his previous confidence that giving her time in order to gift her with perspective on her feelings, and his, was feeling shaky.

He had been feeling unfair, particularly as the early summer was unfolding so beautifully and represented such a contrast to the life he knew she had to deal with every day in Lakefield—her sister’s health, her fledgling business, the end of her library appointment.

There was no rule he couldn’t spend time with her in Lakefield, couldn’t ease into a long-distance relationship and still have better hopes for it.

Also, he just needed to
see
her. He needed to hold her and feel her skin against his. He need to kiss her and kiss her and kiss her. Then listen to her talk.

He had told her that his love was about wanting, and not needing, but he hadn’t accounted for what the muscle of his heart had to say about it, how much it had come to depend on its own fullness and satiety.

He rubbed his thumb over his phone, compelled to call her. It would be late
afternoon in Ohio, which was often a good time to catch her. He stared down the beach, worrying his phone, watching, of course, a ginger-haired woman in a yellow-flowered dress make her way down the shore with her blanket and picnic.

He always noticed ginger-haired women.

Except, as she walked closer, his heart stopped, so hopeful it couldn’t manage a beat.

She was too far away to possibly hear, but he couldn’t help it. “Destiny!” He yelled, straight into the wind, except, she stopped and turned her head toward his position on his rock.

Then the gorgeous, mad, amazing ginger-haired woman dropped her blanket and her picnic and ran.

Toward him, unbelievably.

By the time he scrambled off the rock and stumbled inelegantly onto the sand, she was on him, in fact she was on him so fast he couldn’t keep ahold of both of them, and fell backward. But he kept his arms around her.

“Oof,” he grunted. Their eyes met once, just glancing really, and then she was kissing him.

God
, he thought. It was perfect. Even with the cold seawater seeping into his pants and her bony knee boring into his thigh and her hands a little too tight in his hair. She could barely keep her mouth on him, breathing so hard from her run across the beach, but he caught her mouth with his whenever her lips met his.

He inhaled her—her breath, her hair, the sunny smell from her body. He moved his arms to her shoulders and flipped her over so he could pin her down and really look at her.

Take her in.

“You’re here,” he said.

She grinned up at him, more beautiful than the weather, her eyes silvery. “I am.”

“I’m certain I’ve just sat in the sun too long, and I’m imagining it.”

“You didn’t tell me your mother was so—
helpful
.” She wrinkled her nose.

He laughed. “Making that face after meeting my mum is definitely proof of life. You’re not a mirage.”

“I’m here. For real. I know it’s real because everything’s all filled in. I took a plane, and a train, and a bus to get here. I got a little worried at one point that I would also have to take a boat, because did you know that Aberaeron is far away from Ohio? Like, there is almost not enough land around here to give this place a name. Oh! I saw London! Just a few parts, but that’s where I flew into.”

“You came straight here?”

“Straight here from Ohio. No stops. The bus driver very kindly dropped me off at your mom and dad’s place when I told him where I was going.”

“Old Luke?”

She laughed. “Yes! That’s how he introduced himself. ‘Old Luke
ydy f’enw I
,’ he said, and I shocked the hell out of him when I said
‘Mae’n dda gen i gwrdd â chi, Destiny ydy f’enw I.’
It turns out that it was a really, really long trip, and I may have a knack for languages. Who knew?”

He was trying to recall a moment he’d been happier but couldn’t manage it. “I’m not sure what to say. You’re here. Beautiful and perfect and with a very acceptable Welsh accent, and here.”

She reached up and took his face her in hands.
“Fi cariad eich, Hefin Thomas.”

He had to look away. Just take a moment to look at the sea, wide and calm. He buried his face in her neck. “I love you, too.”

She pushed up on him, and he pulled her up to sit on his lap and lean against his rock.

“Your mom said you’d be on your rock and gave me superlong and freakishly accurate directions, including which people I would pass on the beach.”

He laughed, pulled her in tighter.

“Oh! Wait, we have to go grab that basket and blanket. I promised her we would enjoy that picnic. Also, I am starving. I haven’t had anything but junk food for what feels like years and years.”

He set her on the beach. “Wait here, then.”

“Okay.”

“You won’t go anywhere?”

“I seriously can’t move until I’ve eaten and maybe slept for six months.”

“Right.” He jogged to the spot where she had dropped the basket and his mother’s quilt. She had her arms around her knees, looking out at the water.

She loved him.

His mum’s basket was heavy, and he couldn’t believe she had carried all this from his parents’ place to the shore. When he reached her again she held up her hands. “Gimme.”

He spread the quilt out and she promptly curled up on it, and he thought she might have even snoozed a little because he had to tell her twice to eat. His mum wasn’t much of a cook, but she was very good at making sandwiches and buying up cakes from the tearoom, so there was food enough for six.

“Ohmahgawd,” Destiny said, her mouth full of bacon sandwich, “this is so
good
.”

“Everything tastes better on the shore.”

“You could be right. Don’t eat all of that chocolate thing with the purple-icing flowers.”

“So.” He looked at her, and she looked back, smiling around her sandwich.

“Pour me some tea.”

He handed her tea in the lid of the thermos and she took a long drink and a deep breath. “There was this tree.”

And then she told him everything. About the tree, the very idea of which made him drag her over to sit on his lap again, his heart pounding so hard he could feel it in his jaw. A lot about her mother and a trip they would need to make, someday, to Pittsburgh. About the miracle of renter’s insurance. Updates on Sarah and what Sarah and Sam needed to work out and how pleased Paul was with the panel and with him.

She talked as he watched the bathers come and go, as he watched familiar boats in the distance. He sometimes made her stop to drink more tea or eat a pastry. Eventually, her voice got softer and her words slower, and she was heavy in his arms, asleep.

He didn’t know if it would work, or if there was even truly anything at work, and it had been a long time since his heart had been concerned with spiritual matters, but he thought of Destiny’s mother, remembering her photograph in Destiny’s house, and he thanked her. At the very least, for the name she had given her remarkable daughter.

He would write a letter to Mrs. Lynch later.

Destiny stirred just as he was worried that it had gotten too cool. She turned in his arms and wrapped hers around his neck. It felt so good he was worried he would die from it.

“Hey, you.” Her sleepy voice made him want to do things to her on this beach he had never imagined in the entirety of his life doing to women on this beach. And he had spent his teenaged summers here.

For an answer, he kissed her. This time, it was slow, soft, then not so soft as she slid her tongue over his and moaned, just a little. He grabbed her bottom lip with his teeth before she could get to his top one, but of course, that was what she did next, her tongue against his teeth.

“Touch me,” she whispered, and since she was facing away from the beach, he slid his hand under the straps of her dress, pulled one side down and hooked a nipple with his fingertip, pressing it, then found the other. Her bucks were so slow in his lap that they were almost family-friendly, but he ruined it by letting his hands travel to her bottom and cupping it low with both hands, massaging it over the skirt of her dress.

“Where are you staying tonight?” he said against her neck, licking as he went.

“I got a room at the Harbourmaster hoping we could eat sticky toffee pudding for breakfast.” She kissed the hollow of his throat.

“Do you think we can wait until we visit and have a drink with my parents?”

She leaned back and grinned. “Barely. But I want to meet your dad. He was somewhere in the village when I showed up at your place. I think I both
didn’t
surprise your mom and completely surprised her, all at the same time.”

“Well, it’s possible I’ve been talkin’ a lot about you.”

“Is that right?”

“It’s also possible she was thinking about the money I just tossed on my one-way ticket to Ohio, departing next week.”

Both Destiny’s hands flew to her mouth, where she pressed them, with wide eyes.

“Oh no, you didn’t.”

“Oh, but I did.”

“Oh holy shit, Hefin. Shit. I am sorry. I’ve been sort of coy on the phone because I really wanted to do the surprise thing, and even if the surprise thing turned out
completely awesome, I should’ve told you I was coming.”

He laughed. He felt so absolutely unbothered he was certain that life had started over for him, from the very beginning.

“No. I liked this surprise. I had the notion to surprise you, as well. I’ll pay the penalty to have it changed for when your tourist visa expires and we need to return for your home stay before applying for a new visa. Unless—” He looked in her face, holding his breath.

She smiled, just a little. “Unless?”

“This is simply a visit? I don’t want to assume you’re—”

She wrapped her arms around him. “Assume. Not simply a visit. I’m with you. As long as you’ll have me.”

He let out his breath smashing her to him. “Okay, then.”

“I wouldn’t have come to you like this if it wasn’t to be your goose. I know how you are. You feed a girl some pancakes and toss your whole life in after her.”

“True. You’ve got me there.”

She let him hold her for a little longer, then insisted that they go to his parents’ just as he was thinking they could live right there on the beach, forever, right where she’d made her promise to stay with him.

They took the longest way back possible so he could show her the city-center bridge, the tearoom, the dunes, the brightly painted beachfront houses. He’d never seen her laugh more, from a woman who loved to laugh, and the village he knew like the feel of his own stride looked different with her alongside him.

Just as he knew it would.

His mother spent the evening teaching Destiny more Welsh and had never had a better pupil. Hefin spent the evening watching his dad watch Destiny, needing to know what he was thinking. His opportunity came when his mom offered to show Destiny her Welsh history re-creation gowns and Destiny, surely cracked from jet lag and sherry, seemed eager to look. He followed his dad into his workshop where he snuck his evening cigarettes.

“You didn’t say she was a ginger.” His dad carefully dropped his match into a bucket of water in the shop for that purpose.

“Didn’t I?”

“No, I don’t recall you did, then.” He took a long draw of smoke. “You’re surprised she came.” It wasn’t a question.

He was surprised, but only at the fact of the specific surprise. Having her here, the woman who’d lived in the same Ohio neighborhood her whole life, seemed entirely unsurprising.

He was already starting to feel that she’d been here ages, or that she always had. That he had toddled with her on the beach still in nappies, sat in school with her learning Welsh folk songs, kissed her at all the dances.

He thought over his life here in Aberaeron and somehow, she was inserted into it, her hair shot through with summer light bouncing up from the shore.

He’d been home for weeks now, but he hadn’t brought it up, and neither had his parents, but he had to, now. “Dad, what did you think of Jessica?”

His dad smoked thoughtfully, and Hefin picked up a piece of scrap wood to pick at with his pocketknife. His dad smoked, and then spoke at his own pace.

“She was beautiful, of course. Clever. I liked she was so thrilled you picked her up off the beach like you did. Your mum loved her, of course. Jess did a good job keeping up with your mum, still does occasionally, on the email. After your visa was worked out, then your permanent residency, we started worrying we’d never catch eyes on you again, unless we traveled.”

“I’m sorry, Dad, I—”

His dad waved Hefin’s words away with the point of his cigarette. “No, that’s enough, then.”

They sat together in the quiet. The wind had picked up into a few squalls far offshore so they listened to the rough waves as they hit the beach.

“We were happy together, for a time. We stayed friends. Any suffering I did, Dad, it was my own.”

“Carving worked you out of that, I suspect.”

Hefin smiled in the dim of the workshop. It had.

After a long time, and long after his dad’s cigarette had hissed out in the bucket of water, his dad got up and clapped a hand on Hefin’s shoulder. “When I looked into your
Jessica’s face, I saw a life. Don’t know how better to put it. When she looked at you, there was a life in her face that she was considerin’. Couldn’t fathom what it was, but you gave her something she wanted. That was good. If your only boy, your only child’s going off into the world, you look into a face with a life all coveted and worked out like that and think ‘well then, don’t know why he won’t be just fine.’