The Beginning of Always (45 page)

“Fine, we leave at eight.”

“Roger, Captain.” I gave him a sarcastic salute with my palm against my forehead.

But before he turned to leave, I suddenly found myself asking a question that had been on my mind since last week at his hotel apartment. “Why don’t you like wearing ties?”

Alistair stilled. “What do you mean?”

“Whenever you leave a meeting or get back to your car or house, you remove your tie. Why?”

“Maybe it’s just uncomfortable.”

“Maybe. But I don’t think so.”

Alistair studied me for a moment, then tightened his lips and looked away. He shrugged his broad shoulders, leaning his weight against the door frame with his arms crossed, his shirt straining with his casual motions.

“Bill once said that important men wore ties, that one day I’d wear a tie and wouldn’t work in the fields. People would listen to me. I’d have a say in the world. I think of what he said every time I wear a tie.” He paused, then ran a palm over the base of his neck, reliving the memory in his head. “I don’t like it.”

“I guess that’s a hard statement to forget.”

“There are some things you can’t forget, ever.” Alistair stared straight into my eyes at his words, his fingers contracting and making a hard fist.

I held the contact for several seconds, then glanced away. At the sound of his shoes against the hardwood, walking away, I called out to him.

“Alistair.” He turned at the sound of my voice. “I’m attending as a journalist. Not your date.”

Alistair didn’t respond at first, but after several seconds, he gave me a short nod.

“I’m on duty,” I said further. “I don’t want the same fiasco with Solomon to go down again. No more misunderstandings.”

“Understood.”

“Okay, then.”

Alistair returned a small smile, almost sadly, his brows dipping ever so slightly downwards. “I’ll wait out in the living room.”

The dinner was unspectacular in every sense. A middling-to-fair restaurant of above-average-quality food at exorbitant prices in a view-drenched dining room about ten minutes away from the house. The investors’ personalities were as scintillating as their engagement factor and I sat through dinner, pretending to observe and make mental notes, but screaming in boredom and discomfort.

We drove back to the house in silence. It would have been awkward, but I was too emotionally spent to care.

I took a shower and dressed in my pajamas, then went to the kitchen for a bottle of water. As I rounded the corner that led to the great room, there was a single low light on in the area right next to the kitchen.

It was the bar, an enclosed space with a wide dark granite countertop and shelves of liquor bottles behind the counter. And there stood Alistair. His hair was damp as if he had just come out of a shower and he had on what I now surmised was what he slept in—nothing but a pair of boxer briefs.

When I got closer, I noticed he had two half-filled bottles of hard liquor in front of him. “You really shouldn’t drink so much, especially alone.”

“Well, you’re here, so I’m not alone anymore.” Alistair reached down below the counter and pulled out a second glass. He cocked his eyebrows at me and after a second of hesitation, I sighed and pulled up a barstool. Alistair slid the crystal tumbler towards me as I sat down.

“That’s a good girl,” he said, pouring me a generous spill of amber liquid.

I curled my fingers around the cool glass and brought the drink to my nose. After a cautious sniff, I asked, “Whiskey again?”

Alistair turned the bottle towards me so I could read the label.

“Oh. Bourbon.”

We drank silently, I took shallow sips as Alistair just studied his glass.

“You like this house?”

Alistair shrugged, noncommittal and disinterested. “It was a good buy.”

“Just like everything else? It’s always just a good buy?”

Alistair’s gaze flicked up to meet mine. “It’s easier to look at things from an objective viewpoint. The price was right, the neighboring property values are strong, so, yes, it was a good buy. I don’t know what else you want me to say.”

We were both weary with the fighting, with the constant back-and-forth. Alistair was saying what was on his mind, and I was doing the same.

He continued, “You don’t have to keep on analyzing me. Not everything is subject to interpretation. Most of the time I just do things because they make good business sense.”

“Most of the time? What about all the other times?”

“Can’t say I’m filled with good business sense all of the time.”

“Or good sense in general,” I muttered.

Silence settled down again between us. These long heavy pauses filled with everything we wanted to say and everything we couldn’t say. The past settled within the ridges of the white noise around us, inconsequential sound scraping and filling every crevice of the moment—the ticking of a clock, the scrape of the glass against stone, the waves beyond the doors.

There was an honesty in the moment. There was so much to say that it was impossible to know where to start.

Alistair tried first. He was still staring into the glass, catching the reflection of the room in the liquid. “I’m reminded of a comment someone made to me a while back. The yearning. It never goes away.”

“No, I suppose it doesn’t.”

Alistair took a deep drink of his bourbon. “Why did you ask me about my ties earlier tonight?”

“Just an observation I made. I guess I’m just not used to you wearing ties.”

“You know … you once told me you liked removing ties off me.”

“I did?”

“At my prom. You …” He sighed and ran his fingers through his wet hair. “You touched the knot of my tie and said you liked how it looked, but that you wanted to take it off later that night. You made me promise I’d let you do it.”

The niggling edge of a memory crept from my mind’s coffers.

“The entire time we were driving to Holland, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.” Alistair paused. “Do you remember?”

I nodded slightly, “Yeah, I think I remember.” I’d spent so much time fighting to scrub my teenage years from my memory that a lot of what had happened back then was vague. It was too painful to relive those years with such clarity, so I had chosen to shut down instead. But his senior prom, the thoughts and the emotions of that night, all that came trickling back into this moment.

Alistair leaned forward, his weight heavy on his palms outstretched along the edge of the countertop. His shoulders were tense, the muscles straining hard lines all along the contours of his body and down his arms. He shook his head, then laughed quietly to himself. A private joke, filled with misery.

“That’s my problem. All I can do is remember; all I have are memories and secrets, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about any of them. I remember so much of the past that I can hardly think about anything else. The present. The future.” Alistair looked up at me. “There’s a lot I regret about the past. About us. I can’t go back to fix it, and I can’t find any answers to make things better in the present. I have so many means, but no solutions.”

“You can’t go back.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “We can’t go back. You can’t keep looking at me as if I’m a solution, as if I’m the answer.”

“Why not? Why can’t I? What else can I try?”

“The past is the past. It’s done.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. The past is still alive. It’s still here, still haunting both of us.
She
still lives in both of us.”

My eyes widened and my spine went tense.

“You can’t change the truth,” Alistair said quietly. “You can’t run away forever.”

I clutched at my shorts, fabric bunching under my fingers. “Why not? Why can’t I? What else can I try?” I wet my lips. They quivered slightly against each other. “You think I like running, that this amuses me, that I enjoy being like this? I don’t know how else to be, what else to do. This was my way of dealing with it all, and I can’t say I … I just can’t break apart again. I won’t be able to handle it. I’m hardly even whole.”

Alistair studied me.

“You’re not whole. I’m not whole. Even before everything happened, we weren’t whole.” He shook his head. “You used to say I loved my secrets, that I let them define who I was. You can’t hold a secret like that forever. It’ll ruin you.”

“I’m already ruined,” I whispered. “You can’t fix me.”

“I never wanted to fix you, Florence. All I ever wanted was for you to be happy. You thought you could fix me, when all the while we were both broken. We just didn’t know it because we were together. Only apart did I see reality. I’m sorry I failed you, that I failed us. That I failed her.”

My vision went misty. I cried silently, shoulders shuddering with my sobs while Alistair knocked back another shot. He didn’t move towards me, didn’t try to touch me, to comfort me. In this, he knew that would be useless. So we remained, on opposite ends of that wide bar, each dealing with our shared grief in our own ways.

“I failed us too. I failed us all in the worst way. I’m sorry,” I gasped between tears.

Later on that night, long after I’d left Alistair alone with his thoughts so I could be with mine, I sat up in the wide, plush bed. I couldn’t cry anymore. I’d had my fill, had wiped my tears away, already fought to right the ship and failed.

I was suffocating and I knew it. All the years of denying the truth were catching up to me, and the running was wearing me down.

In sleep, I would have doubted my conviction. Because only then did I realize the past never truly leaves us and that memories unacknowledged destroy us from the inside out.

Secrets were meant to be kept and meant to be grieved, alone.

So that night, I dreamt of her, of it, of us.

Of regret and mistakes.

Of guilt.

Of death, always looming about the corner, the taste of tears in the air.

Chapter 23

I
sat, pin-straight and stock still, in the living room. The house was dark and quiet. Dad hadn’t come home yet and Nicolas was at a friend’s house.

He was going to be here any minute.

My lips mouthed my speech wordlessly, opening and closing, pursing and retracting by motion only, formulating the sentences I had practiced for the past week. All silently.

I have some news. This isn’t ideal and I know it comes as a surprise, but I want to let you know that I had no way of—

My soundless speech stumbled in my head and I lurched forward slightly, taken aback. My heart began racing. If I couldn’t deliver this news to myself, without words, how was I to tell him? My gaze flicked to the large grandfather clock in the corner.

He’d be here any minute.

My eyes began to water, but I shook my head, refusing my body’s natural need. I couldn’t cry. He’d know the second he saw me. I fought back the tears, struggled against the tide of emotions that pressed upon me, that threatened to break free of their bonds.

I had to keep it together.
Keep it together, Florence.

Let’s start again.

I have some news. This isn’t ideal and I kno—

The sound of tires crunching over sand and gravel filtered into the hushed room.

I bolted upright.

My feet took me across the foyer and spilled me out into the porch. I didn’t know what was worse—delaying this or running to face it. My body was calling for the latter, needing release of this awful tension I’d been harboring for what seemed to be forever.

I was running towards the driveway just as the truck’s engine shut off.

Alistair smiled at me as he jumped down from his car. My heart was beating unbelievably fast and seeing him just made it go into overdrive until it was almost a whirl.

His hair was long and floppy, loose and brushed carelessly aside. He was wearing his college sweater and a pair of old jeans, his backpack slung over one shoulder.

Alistair’s face split into a wide grin.

“What’s the rush?” he said with a laugh. I slowed down, then froze in my spot.

I didn’t know how to say it now. With him in front of me, happy, absolutely marvelous, I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t ruin his Christmas and his life.

Alistair slammed the door and walked towards me.

“It’s alright, come here.”

I charged forward, throwing myself into his waiting arms. He laughed and gave me a tight squeeze. I buried my face against his chest, breathing in his scent desperately. I didn’t know how much longer I would have the opportunity. I rubbed my nose into his faded cotton sweater, hiding my expression against him.

“Hi,” I murmured, my voice muffled.

“Hey,” Alistair said. He kissed the top of my head.

It was our monthly ritual. He’d drive back to St. Haven and come to my house, we’d greet each other out in the driveway and spend the evening together. Most of the time he’d sleep over at night; sometimes he’d go back to Blair Farms after I fell asleep, but I was always out in the driveway, ready to hug him hello.

Alistair had no way of knowing that today was different than the many other days and weekends we’d recreated this scene.