“What do you think of me, Maya? From this week. From yesterday. From the guy at the bottom of the sea. From the beach. Tell me this is just a shell. Say it. Say you don’t believe me.”
“I can’t,” I sob. I shake my head, try to compose myself. I no longer feel in danger of Ness harming me. The danger I feel is far graver than that.
“I need you,” Ness says.
“To write your story?”
“No. Screw the story. Someone else will write it. They’ll get the facts wrong, but I don’t care anymore. It’s the shells. The shells are going to come back. That’s all that matters. We’re so damn close, and I want you to be there when it happens. I want you by my side.”
“Why?” I ask.
“You know why.”
I look him in the eyes. I see him through a veil of tears. But I’ll know if he’s lying. I’ve seen this enough times to know. I’ve heard the words from those who didn’t mean it, who didn’t really mean it.
“Say it,” I say. “Say it, and make me believe it, damn you.”
Ness smiles. Blood trickles down his jawline. The sea crashes and roars beside us.
“Ladies first,” he says.
40
But I can’t say the words. This is how relationships are most like the things I collect: We build these hard exteriors. We pull ourselves inside, block off the only way in, don’t let anyone see our true selves. Ness waits for me to tell him that I love him, but I’m still scared. I still doubt. Nothing feels real. Because I won’t crawl out and feel the world for myself.
“Show me,” I tell him. “Prove what you’re saying is true, and then I’ll decide how I feel. I want to see what you’re doing up there. Make me believe you’re doing something good.”
This is the most I can give him, this opening, my willingness to have been wrong about him one last time. For the moment, with him wounded and bleeding and me untouched, I believe that I’m not in danger, that he isn’t out to hurt me. Not only is he the one bleeding, the anger is now mine alone. My own sins have been forgiven.
Whether Ness really meant to show me what lies beneath the lighthouse or not, the secret I’ve uncovered there puts all the rest into perspective. And I realize the truth of what he hinted at once, that the story he wants to tell will make a mockery of my pieces. Maybe the story that ran today, the one that will hurt Holly and perhaps no one else, enraged him because of my betrayal, not because of his desire for self-preservation. I allow myself to believe this as I follow him in the direction of the estate and toward a flight of stairs that winds up the bluff. I allow myself to consider that he was angry in the shower not for the damage I caused his family’s reputation, but because he feared I felt nothing for him, that I had been using him all along.
I nearly press him on this, but I choose to walk in silence.
We tread up creaking and salt-air-worn steps, palms on rough splinter-toothed rails, Ness climbing ahead of me. I remember following him into his house what seems like several years ago. A lifetime ago. I came here to write about the world he wanted to destroy, to hoard for himself, to spirit away—and now he says it’s a world he wishes to save, to protect. I feel a tug in every direction on the deepest parts of my soul, this compound wish to be with a man both dangerous and protective. A man who could wreck vengeance on my behalf, but never upon me.
My mother pointed this out to me on a shelling walk, before I went off to college. “You’ll love most the ones who can hurt you,” she warned me. It was a version of my father’s more pithy: “Men are pricks.” However stated, it’s a lesson that must tragically be learned, not told.
“You okay?” Ness asks as we reach the top of the stairs.
I nod, out of breath. He’s the one with twin trails of blood curving down his neck. He’s the one whose family name is besmirched in today’s paper. And he wants to know if a flight of stairs has wronged me. And in that question, and that steely gaze, I don’t doubt for a minute that he would burn the stairs into the sea if I hinted at any offense.
“I’m fine,” I say.
We follow the ridge toward the lighthouse. There’s a winding dirt path worn into the grasses right at the edge, and I realize that Ness must walk from the estate to his secret lair sometimes. Perhaps every day. This is where he’s been the last four years, watching the sun rise over the glittering sea to his left, then watching the sky redden and the planets and stars come out as he winds his way back home at dusk. All for what? I want to see. I want to meet the people in the white cloaks, these people who moments ago I feared. I see two of them far ahead, by the lighthouse. I see the jeep and the guards as well. They watch with hands shielding their eyes as we approach.
Fifty meters away, and the men get in the jeep as if to come out to us, but Ness waves them off. I see them hesitate for a moment, but then they drive sullenly away, disappointed perhaps at this tease of danger, this thrill of excitement, of actually being needed.