noticed that so clearly if he’d seen her only the one time.
Once, just once, he’d said. As she stood over him in her bathing suit. “I know. We got them together.”
Sadie was all pale pink skin that freckled in the summer. She was wide-brimmed hats and oversize sunglasses and SPF 50 in every lotion she used; a collection of freckles on her forearms that almost looked like a tan from a distance. I was a color that bordered on olive, even in the winter, like my mother. I never had to worry about the summer sun this far north. The only similarity between me and Sadie was the color of our eyes, a shade of hazel. And this ink, binding us together.
But Connor was shaking his head. “But why that.”
Sadie had picked it. Drove us out to the shop the day she returned, our second summer. “Incomplete infinity,” I told him. Because there was nothing that lasted forever. The ends of the symbol stretched toward each other but never met. The curved line, looping with promise, truncating at a point—so I couldn’t look at it without feeling a yearning, too.
Connor’s head drifted to the side as he leaned even closer. “All I see is the letter S.”
CHAPTER 18
Dusk began to settle on the ride back. All I could think about, with the thin towel wrapped around me, was the shape of the tattoo. The shape of the S of Sadie’s necklace, left behind in her room in Connecticut. The gold edges lined with diamonds, digging in to my palm.
Do you trust me? she’d asked when she found me waiting for her on the bluffs. And I did. What other choice was there? I had been adrift and alone, and then I chose something else. I chose her. That day, she drove us straight up the coast to the tattoo parlor. She’d had the design ready, something she had thought about all winter, I had believed. Something that would be permanently etched onto both our bodies, bonding us together—for infinity, or as long as our bodies should last.
How many times had I felt another person tracing the lines, told them with confidence: Nothing lasts forever. Meaning: Not you, not me, not this.
I believed it had bonded me not only to Sadie but to my place in the world. Given me a purpose, a reminder.
But the necklace. The one I’d found when Bianca caught me in Sadie’s room—I strained to see it clearly in my memory—the looping S, the edges curling toward each other—
Connor cut the boat sharply to the right, so I had to grip the railing. All that remained were Connor’s warning words—and this creeping realization that maybe I had branded myself not with a promise of who I would be but who she was from the start.
I gripped the jewelry box tight in my hand as we veered away from the mouth of the harbor, where the water funneled and calmed all at once. We were heading north, toward open sea.
“What are you doing?” I called to his back, but my words were swallowed up by the wind.
Connor kept the boat heading diagonally, and as the sun dipped below the bluffs in the distance, I knew exactly what he was doing. He cut the engine abruptly, and I leaned forward from the change in momentum. Not Connor, though. He never broke stride as he walked across the boat, dropping into the seat beside me.
My ears buzzed from the change of equilibrium—the sudden stillness, without the raging wind. We were at the whim of the current, the creaking of the hull below us as we moved untethered in the waves. In the distance, on the bluffs, one house grew brighter as the sky turned a dusty blue, plummeting to night.
“I remember sitting here at night with you,” Connor said, feet up and crossed at the ankles. “So I think if anyone should be asking questions here, it’s me.”
I gestured my free hand toward him, trying to keep it from shaking. “It was a long time ago, Connor.”
“So,” he said, “was it everything you imagined?”
I shook my head. “It’s not like that.”
“No? It’s not everything you hoped it would be?”
“No, I mean, it’s not what you’re thinking.”
Those summers when we were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, sometimes at night, we’d take his dad’s boat from the harbor, just beyond the bluffs. Anchored here, far enough offshore, you could watch them in the dark, and no one could see you doing it.