Beatriz Williams - Along the Infinite Sea - Love, friendship and heartbreak, the perfect summer read

“Don’t be stupid,” I whispered.

“I am stupid. I am stupid for you. I am filled with folly. But stop. I see I am alarming you. I will go back to my ship now. It is best for us both, don’t you think?” He kissed my hand. I hadn’t even realized he was holding it. He kissed it again and turned away.

“Wait, Stefan,” I said, but he was already hurrying down the stones of the terrace, and the sound of his footsteps was so faint, I didn’t even notice when it faded into the morning silence.

I passed through the dining room on the way to the stairs, and instead of finding it empty, I saw Herr von Kleist sitting quietly in a chair, eating his breakfast. He looked up at me without the slightest sign of surprise.

“Good morning, Mademoiselle de Créouville,” he said, pushing back his chair and unfolding his body to an enormous height.

“Good morning, Herr von Kleist.” I was blushing furiously. The champagne bottle hung scandalously from one hand, the valise from the other. “I didn’t expect anyone up so early.”

“I am always up at this hour. May I call for some breakfast for you?”

“No, thank you. I think I’ll take a tray in my room.”

“We have missed you these past ten days.”

“I’ve been staying with a friend.”

“So I was told.” He remained standing politely, holding his napkin in one hand, a man of the old manners. The kitchen maid walked in, heavy-eyed, holding a coffeepot, and stopped at the sight of me.

“ Bonjour , Marie-Louise,” I said.

“ Bonjour , Mademoiselle,” she whispered.

I looked back at Herr von Kleist, whose eyes were exceptionally blue in the light that flooded from the eastern windows, whose hair glinted gold like a nimbus. He was gazing at me without expression, although I had the impression of great grief hanging from his shoulders. I shifted my feet.

“Please return to your breakfast,” I said, and I walked across the corner of the dining room and broke into a run, racing up the stairs to my room, hoping I would reach my window in time to see the Isolde ’s tender cross the sea before me.

But it did not.

Annabelle waits for her to finish, like a woman who’s done this before: waited patiently for someone else to finish vomiting. When Pepper lifts her head, she hands her a crisp white handkerchief, glowing in the moon.

“Thank you,” says Pepper.

“All better? Can we move on?”

“Yes.”

The engine launches them back down the road. Pepper leans her head back and allows the draft to cool her face. Annabelle bends forward and switches on the radio. “That was too late for morning sickness,” she observes.

“I don’t get morning sickness.”

“Lucky duck. Nerves, then?”

“I don’t get nerves, either.” She pauses. “Not without reason.”

The static resolves into music. The Beatles. “Yesterday.” So far away. Annabelle pauses, hand on the dial, and then lets it be. She sits back against the leather and says, “Are you saying the bastard’s been threatening you?”

“He’s been trying to find me, and I’ve been making myself scarce, that’s all.”

“Why? He is the father, after all.”

“Because I know what he wants.” Pepper examines her fingernails. She thinks, You’re an idiot, Pepper Schuyler, you’re going to spill it, aren’t you? You’re just going to lose it right here . Her throat still burns. She says, “I didn’t even tell him. He found out, I don’t know how. He called me up at the hotel and yelled at me. Why couldn’t I get it taken care of, he wanted to know.”

“What a gentleman.”

Pepper gives up on her fingernails and looks out the side. They’re passing close to the ocean right now, that grand old Atlantic, toiling away faithfully under the moon. “He was very good at the chase, I’ll say that. I always swore I’d never sleep with a married man. I know what everyone says about me, lock up your husbands, but the truth is I just flirt. Like a sport, like some women play bridge. And silly me, I thought he knew that. I thought we weren’t taking it past first base, until we did, one night. Big victory, big glasses of champagne, big beautiful hotel suite, and before you know it, the all-star hits himself a home run right out of the park, a grand goddamned salami. Oopsy-daisy, as my sister Vivian would say.”

Annabelle drives silently. She keeps one hand on the wheel and one elbow propped on the doorframe beside her. Pepper steals a glance. Her head is tilted slightly to one side, showing off her long neck. The skin is still taut, still iridescent in the moonlight. What bargain did she make with the devil for skin like that? Whatever it is, Pepper would happily take that bargain. What was the point of an eternal soul, anyway? It just meant you spent eternity in fleecy boredom, strumming your harp. Pepper would rather have twenty good years on earth, flaunting her iridescent skin, and then oblivion.

“What are you thinking?” asks Pepper.

Annabelle raises her head and laughs, making the car swerve slightly. “Do you really want to know?”

“It beats the Beatles.”

“I was thinking about when I fell in love, actually. How grateful I am for that. We were in the South of France, in the middle of August, and I was nineteen and just crazy about him. We were right by the sea. I thought I was in heaven.”

“What was his name?”

She pauses. “Stefan.”

The radio plays between them, the instrumentals, a low and mournful string. Someone believes in yesterday. Pepper stares at her thumbs in her lap and thinks about the night she lost her virginity. There was no sunshine, no Mediterranean, no mysterious Stefan. There was a friend of her mother’s, after a party. She had flirted with him, because flirting gave you such a rush of delicious power. Such confidence in this newfound seventeen-year-old beauty of yours, that a man twenty years older hung on your every banal word, your every swooping eyelash. That he would tell you how you’d grown, how you were the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. That he would lead you dangerously into a shady corner of the terrace, overlooking Central Park, and feed you a forbidden martini or two and kiss you—you’d been kissed before, you could handle this—and then do something to your dress and your underpants, and a few blurry moments later you weren’t handling this at all, you were bang smack on your back on the lounge chair with no way to get up, and maybe it was a good thing he’d fed you those martinis, maybe it was a good thing you couldn’t remember exactly how it happened.

The song changes, some new band that Pepper doesn’t recognize. She reaches forward and shuts off the radio.

They reach Cocoa Beach at half past one o’clock in the morning. A bank of clouds has rolled in, obscuring the moon, and Pepper can’t see a thing beyond the headlights. She’s too tired to care, anyway.

“Here we are,” Annabelle says cheerfully. “The housekeeper is in bed, but the cottage should be ready.”

“You do this kind of thing often?”

“No. I just had a hunch I’d have company.”

Pepper stumbles out of the car and follows Annabelle across a driveway and up a pair of stone steps. A little house by the beach, she said, but this is more like a villa, plain and rough-walled, like something you might find in Spain or Italy, somewhere old and hot. The smell of eucalyptus hangs in the air.

Annabelle holds open the door. “I expect you’re tired. I couldn’t keep my eyes open when I was pregnant. I’ll save the tour for tomorrow and take you straight to bed.”