Elin Hilderbrand - Here’s to Us

He does go out with Buck one night after service, and he confesses everything to his friend; then he gets so drunk, he blacks out. Buck delivers him home to Laurel, and in the morning Deacon worries that Buck has told Laurel his secret. Buck, Deacon knows, wants Laurel for himself. Somewhere in his confused mind, this stirs up an accusation that Laurel is sleeping with Buck behind Deacon’s back.

Laurel doesn’t get mad. She doesn’t see the accusation for what it is: an admission of Deacon’s guilt. Instead, she laughs in his face.

“Me and Buck?” she says. “Hahahaha!”

He wants to get angry at her for laughing, but he can’t summon the energy. He is an awful, horrible, evil, damaged human being for lying to his angelic wife. He starts to cry, and Laurel does what she always does when he cries: she pulls his head into her lap and strokes his hair.

He loves Laurel. He will stop seeing Belinda. Belinda is heading back to L.A. in another week anyway. Deacon goes to the St. Regis after service, and right away, before there is any time for funny business, he tells Belinda it’s over. It was a mistake, he says. He is married. He has a son.

Belinda stares at him, and then she crumples to the floor. Deacon can’t leave her in a sobbing pile. He doesn’t want to leave her. He loves her-not because she’s famous or glamorous or rich. He loves her because inside she is broken, just as he is. She is lonely, just as he is.

Belinda wants Deacon to move to L.A. She will be able to introduce him to people. His career will really take off. She will buy him his own restaurant. He can be his own boss.

Leave Laurel? he thinks. Leave New York? Leave his job at Solo? Leave Hayes, the little boy he’s raising the way he wished he’d been raised? He can’t imagine doing any of this, but he becomes convinced that he’s meant for bigger things. Because they blew the entire advance check on the Nantucket house, he and Laurel still live on a budget. If he goes with Belinda, things will be better for all of them.

He picks Belinda up off the ground and carries her to the bed. He still can’t believe she chose him, Deacon Thorpe from Stuy Town, when she could have had any man in the world.

“Come with me,” Belinda says. “Please, Deacon.”

He can’t say no. It’s as if he’s turned over control of his sensibilities. It’s like black magic.

“Yes,” he says. “I’ll tell her tomorrow.”

He fell asleep on the mildewed but surprisingly comfortable cushions of the bamboo-framed sofa and dreamed of kissing Laurel. He had almost gone through with it on the deck. He had been this close.

But then Belinda had shown up, ruining everything. Buck wondered how to create another situation in which kissing Laurel might be possible. He had been married twice, but most days it felt as though he had absolutely no experience with women.

What would Deacon have thought if he did kiss Laurel? He would either have said, Way to go, buddy! or he would have been explosively angry and jealous.

Buck woke up from his nap unsure of where he was. Then he remembered. He was “living the life on Nantucket.” He had been to this house only once before, in the summer of 1987, and that had been awful enough to ensure that he wouldn’t return in the thirty years of his friendship with Deacon. This house, with its damp, rickety yard-sale furniture and its persistent smell of a salt marsh, had been about as far from Buck’s idea of “paradise” as a place could get. When Buck visited before, it had rained all weekend long, leaving Buck to alternately play tedious games of Monopoly with Deacon, Laurel, and Hayes and then twiddle his thumbs while Hayes napped and Laurel and Deacon had sex upstairs. Buck and Deacon had gone on an “outing” to the liquor store in the 1946 Willys jeep that Deacon had bought as an “island car.” The jeep had no top and no doors. Buck had held an umbrella while Deacon drove, but the umbrella had inverted in the wind, and Buck had returned to the house soaked and chilled to the bone, which no amount of time standing under the outdoor shower had remedied.

Buck got to his feet. He needed to relieve himself, and he was starving. He couldn’t remember which door would reveal the bathroom. The first door he tried was a closet that held someone’s yellow rain slicker, a pair of rubber pants with attached suspenders, and an assortment of umbrellas. Buck tried to imagine what circumstances would require rubber pants-fighting a fire? He tried another door and found paper towels, cleaning supplies, a broom, and a mop. Finally, he stepped out the sliding door and, finding no one around, peed off the back deck. He was still wearing half his suit, but he managed to feel some connection with nature. He was a little more relaxed, a little less citified, now that he was here. Buck closed his eyes for a second and heard a distant roar, which he realized was the ocean.

It was pretty overwhelming for a boy who had grown up with yellow cabs and ambulance sirens.

Buck stepped back into the kitchen. In the fridge, he found cheese and crackers and green grapes and a rotisserie chicken. He pulled everything out onto the counter and started stuffing his face. He couldn’t remember being this hungry in all his life. He didn’t even have the patience to put the cheese and crackers together; he just crammed them into his mouth separately. He ripped the drumstick off the chicken and mowed through that and then, thirsty, he checked the fridge for beer. Drinking in the middle of the day was something he had only ever done with Deacon.

On the bottom shelf, he discovered a case of St. Pauli Girl. Laurel must have bought it, knowing it was Deacon and Buck’s favorite beer. Deacon used to call St. Pauli Girl “the girl we share.”

The girl we share. Buck thought about kissing Laurel. Deacon would not have liked it one bit, he was now certain.

Buck pulled out a bottle of St. Pauli Girl and twisted the top off with his forearm, a trick that Deacon had taught him and that it had taken Buck only eight or nine years to master. He raised the bottle into the air and said, “Here’s to us, two selfish bastards.” And then he drank.

“Buck?”

He swung around as Belinda sauntered into the kitchen wearing just a towel-and because this was American Paradise, where pitiful never went out of fashion, the towel was thin and threadbare and only just long enough to cover Belinda’s famous ass. Buck turned his attention back to the chicken.

He said, “I just woke up. I was hungry.”

“Yes,” Belinda said. “You took quite the power nap.” She sat on one of the bar stools. “I’ll take a beer if you’re offering.”

Was he offering? He was too much of a gentleman to tell her that she was interrupting a rare moment of John Buckley introspection and that he would rather be left alone to finish stuffing his piehole and to mourn the loss of the best friend he would ever have. So instead, he ducked into the fridge and took out two more beers-one for Belinda, another for him. Again, he twisted the tops off with his forearm. The first time, when he was alone, had been to impress Deacon, he supposed. But this time it was to impress Belinda.

She raised her eyebrows and accepted the bottle. “Thank you,” she said.

He couldn’t look at her without his eyes traveling down to the place where the towel was tucked into her cleavage. He could see her erect nipples through the thin terry cloth. When she brought the beer bottle to her lips, the material loosened at the top; the tuck threatened to come untucked. Oh dear God.

“Where’s Laurel?” he asked. The kitchen clock said two thirty; the kids weren’t due to arrive until five thirty. He needed Laurel to save him.

“She went into town,” Belinda said. “Bookstore to browse, she said, then to Flowers on Chestnut for a bouquet for the dinner table.”

Buck nodded. Come home, Laurel, he thought. I need you now.

He said, “You know, I have some business to discuss with you and Laurel.”

Belinda shook her head; the towel loosened a little more. “We aren’t talking business now, Buck. This weekend is about honoring the memory of the man.”

“Oh, I know…,” Buck said. “I don’t mean to be crass or mercenary, but there are things that you and Laurel need to be aware of.”

“Why do I need to be aware?” Belinda asked. “Deacon and I divorced a dozen years ago. We have no common interests except for Angie.”

“That’s not true,” Buck said. “The will…” He trailed off. He needed to proceed cautiously here. In the Alcatraz of Buck’s brain-where he kept thoughts he didn’t want to escape-was this: Belinda was the only person in Deacon’s “family” who could save this house. She could pay the $436,292.19 to get it out of hock and then maybe come up with a way to pay the mortgage. That would be shoe money for her. But Buck was afraid to ask. She was intimidating and dismissive. Maybe if he just told her a third of the house was hers, she would offer to help. She might think him an uncouth boor for bringing up Deacon’s money troubles when they were supposed to be mourning-but then again, they were real troubles. This house was going to be repossessed in less than two weeks, and the treasure chest of happy-go-lucky Thorpe summertime memories would go with it.

“The will?” Belinda said, and she laughed. “Did Deacon leave something to me? I find that very hard to believe.”

She stood up, holding her beer bottle with both hands, and that did the trick-her towel fell to the floor.

“Oops,” she said. “My towel.” But she made no move to pick it up or to shield herself. Belinda Rowe was naked before him.

Buck felt an uncomfortable stirring in his pants, and he cursed himself. He was getting hard. He couldn’t help it; he was a man. He didn’t even find Belinda particularly attractive! She was nowhere near as beautiful as Laurel. Well, correction: Belinda Rowe was beautiful, iconically so, but she was too much of a china doll for Buck. He liked his women real.

Belinda walked over to him.

Oh no! he thought. He didn’t like where this was headed. Belinda was no dummy; she knew what she was doing. The blush traveled up his neck, to his cheeks, involuntarily. It was the curse of an Irishman, along with the ginger hair, the freckles-his fair skin gave every emotion away.

“Very hard to believe,” she said. She gently pried the beer out of his hand and set it down on the counter. She then wound her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him. He couldn’t help himself; he groaned. It had been a while since he’d been with a woman, and, although he in no way wanted anything to happen with Belinda Rowe, he couldn’t ignore her naked body pressed up against him, nor her long, strawberry-blond hair and her intoxicating scent. She shifted her hip so that it grazed his erection.

Okay, this is awful, he thought. But that got rolled over when she dropped to her knees before him and undid his zipper.

Belinda, no, he said. Or maybe he didn’t say that. Maybe he just thought that as she took him in her mouth and licked and sucked him until he came in explosive bursts, crying out quietly twice.

Belinda returned casually to her stool and re-secured the towel around her body.

Buck hurried to zip his pants. “I thought you were married,” he said.

“I am,” she said.

Buck was suddenly exhausted and very, very disappointed in himself. He couldn’t bear to think of Laurel in the hushed, rarefied atmosphere of the bookstore, selecting a novel off the shelves, reading the blurbs on the cover, and carefully replacing it before selecting another novel. If she found out what had just happened, she would… lose all respect for him? Call him base? No, she would understand; that was the crushing thing. Laurel had it in her head that Belinda was prettier and more desirable, certainly more famous and celebrated. She would say, Of course you let her, Buck. It’s okay.

But it wasn’t okay.

It made Buck love Laurel all the more.

Buck started cleaning up the food and putting it away. He said, “I don’t usually drink in the middle of the day.”

“No, me neither,” Belinda said. “But desperate times call for desperate measures.” She finished off her beer, then set the bottle down for him to clear. “I’m off to shower.”

They took the four o’clock fast ferry. When Angie saw the church steeples and the gray-shingled buildings and the sailboats in the harbor bathed in the late-afternoon sun, she felt a little better. She was home.

They disembarked and walked down the wharf. Hayes hailed a taxi; taking care of travel arrangements was his specialty, she knew, but still, she envied his confidence. He was comfortable in the world; she was comfortable in the kitchen.