“Came to update you,” Charlie says, “We’re in a three-way bidding war!”
Willa wishes Bodhi was here; she’d appreciate the snort Willa gives in response. “That’s great, Charlie. And I trust you to squeeze every last penny out of whoever wins.”
“Darn tootin’.”
Ever since Willa decided not to take the cottage, she and Charlie have developed a casual comfortableness, though it was a little strange at first since she’d never met him.
“Lane and I haven’t been close in a long time,” he admitted when Willa brought it up while she was signing paperwork at his gleaming mahogany desk at the office. “She was the golden child, and I was the scapegoat. I was so jealous of her, until the tables turned. Now I don’t envy that golden child status one bit. To be blunt, Willa. It sucks.”
When Willa asked Lane about it, she just shrugged and said that was how it was. “We’re both trying to break out of old patterns,” she said.
In the cottage, Charlie looks around and whistles. “You’re really sitting on a treasure here,” Charlie says, folding his sunglasses and tucking them into the ‘V’ of his polo. “The location, the way it’s been so well maintained, the fact that it’s only ever had one owner in sixty years. The property value has skyrocketed. You sure you don’t want to take ownership first and then sell?”
It’s a question she asked herself over and over after Lane presented the opportunity to her a few weeks ago. It’s tempting, but no. “I wouldn’t feel right about it. My grandfather is having some significant health issues, and my grandmother hasn’t been able to fully retire yet. It’s wearing on her. Now they won’t have to worry about it.” She glances around the cottage, imagining every memory crammed invisibly into every square inch. “And anyway, it’s time for me to move on. I think I finally realized that this place will always be part of me, no matter where I go.”
“Lane doesn’t mind me taking over then?”
“Lane recommended you.” Charlie seems a little taken aback, but pleased. “Also, I love her, but she was a terrible realtor, and I think we all know it.”
Charlie flashes one of his easy grins. “You love her?”
“I—” Willa flushes. “Yeah. I do.”
Willa is still weighing whether she should go off with Lane on her sailing adventure or if she should first find her own path. What happens after the house sells, she doesn’t know. What she’ll do for work, she doesn’t know either. But wherever Lane goes, with Willa or not, and no matter what dream Willa finds to chase down, she knows that love won’t change.
“Well,” Charlie says, plucking his sunglasses from his shirt. “I’m glad you love her, because she’s put me in a bit of a bind.”
“A bind?”
“It’s just me at the office since she quit and the folks are gone. My property manager got poached by a different firm. Things are a little—” He twirls a finger around his ear and grimaces.
It’s a lightbulb moment, an of course moment. No one knows this island as Willa does. No one loves it the way she does; no one else tucks every inch of it into their heart every single day. She knows how to sell things, how to find that perfect something for someone or deal with a picky, difficult customer with a smile on her face. And no one knows how to accentuate the positive by framing things just right quite the way she does.
“You know, Charlie,” Willa says, walking him to the door with her own winning grin. “I had over five hundred thousand followers on Instagram at one point…”
* * *
“I can’t believe you’re so far away now,” Willa whines. She tucks her chin over Bodhi’s shoulder and pouts.
“Oh, my god, Wills. It’s across the sound and south a little.”
“So far away,” Willa whines again. It feels like a million miles with Bodhi in Wilmington instead of sleeping in the room next to hers. They’re at a tavern in downtown Wilmington, drinking fancy cocktails on a patio with a fire pit and a view of the Cape Fear River. It’s a grown-up version of the beach bonfires at home, and Willa isn’t sure she cares for it.
“You and Lane are going way farther, right?” Hunter asks. “If you go.”
Willa makes a face. “We’re not talking about me, Hunter.”
Bodhi dislodges Willa from her shoulder and shakes her empty glass toward Hunter. “Babe, can you go get another one of these? Thank you.” After she goes, Bodhi turns to Willa. “Is this about me leaving or about Lane leaving?”
Willa opens her mouth to say it’s about Bodhi leaving, of course, and then starts to switch to admitting that it’s actually about Lane leaving, but the truth, as she has been learning, lies somewhere in between. “It’s like, all these things I’ve always wanted and thought I could never have and now that I do it’s—”
“Terrifying?”
Willa breathes out with relief. “Yeah.”
Here in the city, the nighttime is so much busier and brighter than on the island. Crowds of people pass on the cobblestone streets; snippets of loud conversation pass in and out; music pumps from speakers above them and carries, muted and thumping, across the street from a club. Smells from restaurants mix with cigarette smoke and car exhaust and the earthy scent of the river. What places could she and Lane sail to? Will they be loud and bustling or quiet and rural? Something new that Willa’s never seen?
“Remember when you asked me once if it ever felt like I was just like, running in place?” Bodhi says with her eyes on Hunter as she weaves through the crowd with two fresh drinks. “I think we both were. But change is gonna come whether we want it to or not. Might as well embrace it. Besides, Wills, you’re the bravest mofo I know.”
Back on the island, the ferry will be finishing its last run and docking for the night. The beam from the lighthouse will soon sweep across the dark water. Willa’s grandparents’ house is sold, as of this afternoon. The sail shop is now in Max’s hands. Many of their core group of friends are gone or making plans to be. It always seemed to Willa as if the island would stay the same forever, but of course it won’t. Of course, it never did. Hunter and Bodhi wind themselves together on a couch, flirting with the guy who was already sitting there. Across the patio, Lane is chatting easily with Charlie, who came along to celebrate the big sale and Willa’s new, very flexible, job as a property manager. Lane smiles and waves, and Willa’s chest warms. She wonders sometimes what would have happened if she’d never run into Lane. What trajectory would her life have taken? Would she have been as unchanged as the ferry lumbering back and forth on its route? Perhaps searching endlessly across an empty ocean like the beam of the lighthouse? She thinks she would have gotten here somehow. Lane finally comes back, just as Hunter and Bodhi leave with their new companion.
“Ready?” Lane says.
“Ready,” Willa answers.
Epilogue
The sink is backing up again. Not only is it just barely big enough to accommodate two sets of breakfast dishes—two bowls, two coffee mugs, four spoons—but whatever 1970s boat plumbing system it’s been labyrinthed into makes it cough up the contents of the gray-water tank on a frequent, though random, basis.
“Did you flush the toilet too hard?” Lane asks, shirt pulled up to cover her nose. The odor is a forceful bouquet: sewage plus rotting food plus the chemical-sweet smell of the drain treatment they dump down it to keep the backups to a minimum.
“How would I even do that?” Willa replies through a plugged nose. “Like, aggressively flush a toilet? How would I go about doing that?”
“I don’t know!” Lane drops the shirt covering half of her face to make a frustrated gesture with both hands, then grimaces at a fresh wave of stench hitting her anew. “Ugh.”
Their options for dealing with a backed up sink while miles and miles out to sea are very few. Their options for dealing with each other while miles and miles out to sea on a thirty-two-foot-long sailboat with just under
two hundred square feet of living space are even fewer. Willa squeezes herself into the cramped kitchen space, which is really just a two-burner stove, mini fridge, microwave and tiny sink boxed in by equally cramped cabinets, and grabs a cup to help Lane scoop the filthy, putrid water from the sink.
“I’ve got it.” Lane grunts, elbow colliding with Willa’s arm; the now-full cup splatters gray water across the counter. Willa curses and switches to cleaning off the counter.
“No, no. If you’re gonna blame me, I’ll do it. Everything is always my fault, right?”
“I’m not blaming you.” Lane says, in a tone way too placating for Willa’s liking. She dumps a cupful of dirty water into a bucket that they keep under the sink for exactly this purpose. Also, for sea sickness. “I was just thinking that maybe when you flushed the toilet, it caused the backup.”
“Right, because I’m so incompetent I don’t know how to flush a toilet!”
“Oh, my god, stop being so defensive!”
“You know what?” Willa spikes her plastic cup onto the counter and extricates herself from the tiny space. “Maybe you should do it yourself.” She stomps across the cabin, up to the cockpit and out onto the deck, going all the way out to where the railing comes to a point at the very tip of the hull. She leans against it and looks out across the ocean, endless in all directions. It’s as far as she can get from Lane right now, and the pit in her stomach makes her wish she wasn’t. She could have helped Lane finish emptying the sink at least.
Willa is living her dreams, with the person of her dreams, so she should be nothing but happy. She’s finding, though, that even a dream life can be messy. And sometimes it can smell like rotting sewage and drain cleaner.
Willa pulls her phone out and opens her new Insta account, and starts a livestream. In the camera, her hair is snarled in the wind, the skin on her shoulders is peeling and raw, but even she can see how bright her eyes are these days, how genuine her smile. “Hey all, so in my ongoing effort to keep things real with y’all—I’m sure you’re all still having nightmares from the wicked sunburn I got in the Bahamas, use that sunscreen, kids!—things on the boat are not all paradise either, I assure you…”
She quickly details the sink, the struggles of sharing close space with someone, how hard it is missing everyone sometimes. When she signs off, Willa feels a lot better. The fight about the sink didn’t really have much to with the sink, not really.
Before they left Porter Island, Lane worked on fixing up the boat and gave sailing lessons all summer and through the fall while Willa got the hang of her new job as property manager and realtor-in-training at the Cordova family real estate firm. So when they took sailing trips together, it was an overnight here, a weekend there, never farther than a ways up or down the East Coast, never long enough to get on each other’s last nerve. This is the tail end of three months, December through February, after they sailed south and east to the places Willa had always wanted to see. And now she’s seen the crystal clear waters and the white sand beaches and the calm brown water of the gulfs. She was surprised but pleased to find that no matter what it looks like, ocean waves sound just the same when she closes her eyes. No matter how far they’ve sailed, she recognizes it. Deep in her soul, she knows it.
“Hey,” Willa says, ducking down the stairs and finding Lane in the very back of the cabin, cross-legged on the bed, as if she was also trying to get as far away as possible. The smell has been contained somewhat, and, when Willa closes the vinyl panel that sections off the bed from the rest of the cabinet in lieu of an actual door, it only smells a little terrible.
“Hey.” Lane fiddles with the cowrie shell bracelet they bought in Port Lucaya. “Sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry.” Willa shuffles over on her knees. There’s only space for a bed, one just barely big enough for the two of them, and overhead cabinets that they’ve stuffed to the brim. “I was being defensive.” Willa sits cross-legged, too, and takes Lane’s hand.
“Well, I was blaming you,” Lane says, fiddling with Willa’s fingers.
“Yeah. Maybe I do flush the toilet too aggressively though.”
Lane’s frown tips up into a wry smile, and she lifts their joined hands to press her lips to Willa’s knuckles. “I think I’m ready to go home.”
Willa has worried a lot about how they would make this work long-term. They haven’t talked about it because Willa hasn’t wanted to know the answer. Being with Lane, exploring all these new places, being a team and sailing the boat together, it’s been enough. But Willa has a job to get back to, family and friends-turned-family she misses. Lane, however, sold her condo and quit her regular job and still has a strained, if slightly improved relationship with her family. If Porter Island is an open cage that allows Willa to flit back and forth as she pleases, then what is it to Lane? A tether to a place she doesn’t want to be and people she’d rather leave behind, or so Willa had worried.
“You think of it that way?” Willa unfolds her legs and pats the mattress. Sometimes it’s easier for Lane to talk if they aren’t directly face-to-face. “Home?”
Lane tucks herself into Willa’s chest, sighs as Willa wraps her arms tightly around her. “I never thought I’d say this, but yeah. I think I do.”
Willa breathes against her silky hair and smells salt and coconut shampoo and the slight lingering odor of the backed-up gray-water tank. “What changed?”
Lane is still uncomfortable with emotions, still struggles with vulnerability. Willa, for that matter, is still prone to act first and think later, to scrutinize herself and come up wanting. But what Lane feels for her, how she feels with Lane, that’s no longer a question. It’s there every time they kiss, and in the way Willa catches Lane looking at her when she thinks Willa isn’t looking back; it’s evident in the way Willa wakes every morning with Lane’s arms and legs twined over her body, as if Lane was afraid Willa might disappear while she’s sleeping. Lane’s feelings for her are there in every meal she cooks for Willa in the tiny kitchen, and when they’re docked and go their separate ways to explore, she can see Lane’s true feelings in the way her eyes light up when they find each other again, her excitement in telling Willa what she saw and did and bought. She knows how Lane feels about her, and yet, when Lane turns in her arms and looks in her eyes and says, “Well, I guess I fell in love,” Willa’s heart is suddenly too full to fit in her chest and she has to kiss Lane just so she can breathe again.
“I love you too,” Willa says and rests their foreheads together.
“How about you?” Lane asks after a while. “Are you ready to head home?”
“Yeah,” Willa says, though it’s not entirely true. She is anxious to get back to Porter Island and find some solid ground, but she doesn’t think of Porter Island that way anymore. Because as long as she has the ocean and Lane, she’s always home.
The End
Acknowledgments
Thanks, as always, to my patient and supportive family. To Annie, Candy, and Choi for still believing in me and still pushing me. Finally, growing up queer in the South for me means having a complicated relationship with the idea of home. Of loving a place but knowing it doesn’t always love you back, at least, not the real you. Like Willa, I learned to hide parts of myself and fake it just to get by, and also like Willa, I could only do that for so long. This is the first story I’ve written that is set in my home state and even though there will always be a part of me that yearns to leave, North Carolina is stitched into my heart and always will be. So thank you for being my home and for giving me so many people I love, and for being the place where I learned to love myself.
About The Author
Lilah Suzanne is a queer author of bestselling and award-winning romantic fiction. Their 2018 novel Jilted was named a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Foreword INDIES Award and won a Bisexual Book Award for romantic fiction. Their critically acclaimed Spotlight series included the Ama
zon #1 bestseller Broken Records, along with Burning Tracks and Blended Notes. Lilah also authored the romantic comedy Spice, the novellas Pivot & Slip and After the Sunset, and the short story “Halfway Home,” from the holiday anthology If the Fates Allow. A writer from a young age, Lilah resides in North Carolina and mostly enjoys staying indoors, though sometimes ventures out for concerts, museum visits, and quiet walks in the woods.
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INTERLUDE PRESS
ALSO BY LILAH SUZANNE
Jilted
Lambda Literary Award Finalist
In Lilah Suzanne’s new romantic comedy, Carter, a weary architect, and Link, a genderqueer artist, bond over mutual heartbreak when their respective exes run off together. Against the eclectic and electric backdrop of New Orleans, Carter and Link have to decide if a second chance at love is in the cards.
ISBN (eBook) 978-1-945053-65-8
Broken Records
Spotlight Series, Book One
Los Angeles-based stylist Nico Takahashi loves his job—or at least, he used to. Feeling fed up and exhausted from the cutthroat, gossip-fueled business of Hollywood, Nico daydreams about packing it all in and leaving for good. So when Grady Dawson—sexy country music star and rumored playboy—asks Nico to style him, Nico is reluctant. But after styling a career-changing photo shoot, Nico follows Grady to Nashville where he finds it increasingly difficult to resist Grady’s charms.
Tack & Jibe Page 19
