Summary: Esther and Liam spend a magical evening at the beach. Set after the Forgotten Falls scene and before Constantine talks to Liam at the end of Book 1, Chapter 10.
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The walk back to the beach takes thirty minutes. Five for retrieving their clothes, ten for the climb downwards, fifteen for the long slow walk back to shore, Liam’s hands still interlocked with hers. But to Esther, it feels like no time at all.
“Looks like everyone’s left,” he whispers, his fingers absently tracing a line across the lifeline on her palm. Esther bites her lip, and shivers a little.
He turns to her, frowning, his hands now running down the length of her arms. Lines of worry mar his skin. “Cold?”
Esther swallows, not wanting him to know. It’s crazy, how aware of everything she gets around him nowadays. The taste of salt in the air, the thrum of falling water, the way his bare skin feels on hers. Being around him is like exposing yourself to sensory overload – too much to take all at once.
It’s like he’s drained her of all her blood and left liquid lava running in her veins instead.
“Esther?” his voice is soft, almost impossible to hear amidst the crashing of the waves, “Thank you.”
“You’ve told me that twice already today.” Still, she can’t help but smile.
“It’s not nearly enough,” he says as his hands wage a losing battle against the wind to keep his hair in place, “There will always things that happen to you you’re never quite prepared for. Things you need time away from before you can face them again, deal with those questions again.”
It’s what the King said today, isn’t it? She remembers the brief announcement King Constantine made this afternoon at the Regatta, about stepping down and crowning Liam king in a matter of weeks. For a second Liam allowed the shock he felt to show on his face, before remembering where he was and slipping back into that stoic mask she was starting to know so well. So frustratingly well.
“You gave me that time and that space today, Esther. I don’t know if I’m more ready for it now than I was before, but I think I’ll be able handle it when the time comes.”
She isn’t aware how it happened, but now her hands are in his, his eyes boring into hers, his hair completely messy and windswept and whipping around his face. Behind him the setting sun begins its descent in streaks of reds and yellows, forming a halo behind him.
He’s never looked more beautiful than he does in this moment.
“Sun’s about to set,” he murmurs, his eyes never leaving their interlocked hands, his voice almost…regretful? “Time to leave now, Lady Esther.”
…Sunset?
Sunset!
She was so carried away in being with him till now, she’d almost forgotten.
“Wait,” she’s rummaging hurriedly in her bag for her phone now, wondering briefly if she should shake the contents out to check. She would if they weren’t on the shore. “I almost forgot today. I need to take pictures.”
“Of the sunset?”
“Yeah.” Where the hell did she that phone?
He watches her in silence as she rummages through her belongings. “Is this something you do every day?”
“Yes,” she mutters, panicking now. Every day she tells herself she’ll clear out the clutter in her bag, and everyday she looks back at it and finds nothing that she wants to throw away. The last thing I want the man of my dreams to know is what a terrible hoarder I am. “I’ve been doing it every evening since I was sixteen. Now where did I – aha!” She whips out her trusty black phone now, triumphant, and is gifted with Liam’s amused, lopsided little smile.
“Hey!” she says, trying very hard not to smile back, “it’s not like I lose my phone every day.”
Liam raises an eyebrow. Ugh. Nothing quite escapes you, does it?
“Alright, alright,” Esther admits grudgingly, “So maybe it does. On occasion. Sometimes.”
“I’m sure.” He’s grinning now, looking out at the sea with his laughter reverberating in his chest.
She looks away from him, long enough to examine the mellowed sun through her phone, watching it take its leave of the sky in a splash of warm colours and darkened hues. She takes care to place the sun in the centre, to press her touchscreen twice for exposure and clarity.
She waits until the right moment, watches as the evening sky blossoms into an ocean of fire and finds its mirror in the sea below. The picture is perfect – the colours brighter and more vivid than she’d expected them to look. Dad would be laughing at me right now for believing this is something we can use phones for.
“He took photographs of sunsets too?”
She turns to Liam, confused. “Who?”
“Your dad. Did he take a lot of photographs?”
Damn, I said that out loud, didn’t I?
“He had to,” she tells Liam, grinning, “It was his job.”
She doesn’t stop taking pictures. That’s the thing with keeping a sky diary – you never know which moment might be the most perfect one, so you keep taking them one after another hoping the next would be better than the last.
“But this sunset thing…it was the thing he’d do once he came home. We’d go to Big Lake at the City Park in New Orleans, him standing and little me on his shoulders, shoving candy into my gaping maw.”
“And your mother?”
Esther stiffens. “That depends. Most times she was home. But as a kid…if it was the 22nd, she’d be out of state for a day or two. None of us ever asked her where.“
Liam stares at her, looking like he wants to ask her more, but she doesn’t want to give him the chance yet. “It was fun with Dad. Really. He’d always point to funny-shaped clouds. We saw one that looked like a lady with a chignon once. Clearly the heavens wanted to imprint Olivia Nevrakis’ silhouette on the sky that day.”
She can almost feel her father here, in this beach, laughing and shuffling his feet, occasionally smoothing the premature grey on his temples. He would carry her or hoist her on his shoulders when she was younger, and take her hand as a teen.
Liam chuckles. “That sounds like something Maxwell would say. He does that with cloud shapes. And constellations. The night we landed in your bar he was telling us he saw a constellation in the stars looked like a spoon. ‘Of course it would, Galileo,’ Drake told him, ‘that’s the Big Dipper.’”
“Knowing Maxwell, he’d probably call it “a sign that we take Liam’s bachelor party to the seediest bar we can find”.”
Liam’s laugh is a little louder, a little less polite. She loves it when he’s like this.
“Not in quite those words, but yes.”
She takes her last picture just as the sun is about to sink into the sea. And she knows. By the many-hued clouds, by this flood of orange and red, by the crashing of waves turned pink – this one is perfect. This is the one she will keep.
“Will there be space left on your phone? You’ve taken so many.”
“I’ll keep only one. You can’t take chances with a sunset. No one knows until the sun’s gone which moment turns out to be the best one.”
Unbidden, her father’s voice comes back to her. You never know when the sun will seem more beautiful on a given day, squirt. Is it when it’s just beginning to set? Is it when it hides behind a cloud, spreading its rays everywhere? Is it when it sinks into the arms of Mississippi River, and you can see that reflected in the eyes of someone you love?
She looks at Liam now, and knows her father was right all those years. His face seems softer in this light, all those worry lines and sharpness leeched away. She notices now the streaks of grey in his hair – tinted pink in the fading light – and the urge to touch them makes her dig her nails into her palms. His eyes are dark – mahogany-dark, coffee-bean dark – and in them she can see the sky and the sea both. It’s more perfect to her than any picture she could hope to capture.
“Where is he now?”
Esther feels the pinprick of tears behind her eyes, and blinks them away fiercely. This is stupid. It’s been so long…
“He’s gone.”
She’s ashamed of how hoarse her voice sounds now, and ever more so when she sees that flash of regret in Liam’s eyes.
Slowly, gently, he takes a step behind her, holding her against his chest. His hands are loose around her waist, giving her the space to push him away if that’s what she wants. Biting her lip, she leans back against him so all she can feel are his arms around her waist and his heartbeat against her ear. He tightens his arms around her. He understands.
It feels almost like an eternity: the two of them standing amidst the waves, holding their ground against the disappearing sand, their hair crusty from salt deposits. She’s lost count of the minutes (hours? It can’t be hours, the sun is still there) before Liam moves away, Ieaving her with a sense of temporary loss.
He takes out his phone from his coat pocket. “Do you mind taking a picture of this in mine?”
“Of the sunset?”
“Yes,” Liam says, “As a keepsake. Of today. Of you.”
She blushes, then clicks the picture quickly just as the sun is about to disappear.
His eyes glisten a little. He’s giving her that lopsided little smile again, unaware of the backflips it makes her gut do. She will still maintain that nothing – not the sunset, not the waves, not the pictures she has taken – can be more beautiful than the sight of Liam when she’s made him truly happy.
“It’s funny,” Liam tells her, his fingers lightly stroking her cheek, “how you can look at the sun directly only when it’s kissing the ocean.”
A little like you, she wants to tell him, so far away some of the time – so closed and distant – and so close and warm and vulnerable in my arms other times.
They say little as they walk in the moonlight, stopping only when they see the King approaching them. He speaks to both of them briefly, talks of visiting the shores from time to time. He looks older today, Esther thinks, and more tired. Is she imagining that look of wariness as his gaze shifts from Liam to her?
“I’m sure you heard my announcement earlier today about my, ah, retirement…”
“I did,” Liam says. His expression never changes, but Esther can tell how much stiffer his back is now, how tense his muscles are.
“I feel I owe you an explanation,” King Constantine looks away, the lines on his face beginning to deepen. “Lady Esther, please pardon us. I would like to have a moment alone with my son.”
Esther looks at them, son to father to son, bowing and walking away when she sees the look on Liam’s face.
It is the last she hears from him for a while. In the next few weeks, she only gets to see him from afar, shaking hands and greeting guests and going through the motions of court. He doesn’t stay long anywhere, doesn’t speak to anyone.
There was only one time she managed to catch a glimpse of him somewhere alone, staring at something on his phone screen for the longest time. He looked so sad, so alone, so away from this world that’s his.
But then he put his phone away and left before she could even find it in her to come forward. She wonders some days if she had just dreamed up that gilded afternoon at the waterfall.
When that thought comes, Esther takes out the picture she took that day. Remembering his arms around her, remembering the steady thrum of his heart, the sunset trapped in his eyes. She can see neither him nor herself in that picture, but they’re there. She knows.
She tries to remember, on those days, that his eyes have never lit up with anyone the way they have with her.
She tries to remember that no matter how far away they are from each other, the sun will never stop leaving the clouds to kiss the sea.
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