“That won’t be necessary,” Celeste says. “I can take care of myself.”
“Can you?” Shooter says. His eyes flash with blue sparks. Celeste can’t look directly at him, then she decides that she’s being silly, of course she can look at him, and she does. The bottom drops out of her stomach, whoosh! He is so painfully attractive. Maybe she just needs to build up a tolerance. Even the best-looking men in the world—George Clooney, Jon Hamm—might seem run-of-the-mill if you looked at them long enough. “What seat are you in?”
“One-D,” she says.
“I’m in twelve-A,” Shooter says. “I’m going to ask them to give me Benji’s seat.”
“I’m not a senior vice president from Prague,” Celeste says. “You don’t have to babysit me.”
“You’ve been dating my best friend for nine months,” Shooter says. “I want to get to know you. Hard to do from eleven rows away, don’t you agree?”
“Agreed,” Celeste concedes.
They sit side by side in the front row of the plane. Shooter lifts Celeste’s carry-on into the overhead compartment, then asks if she would prefer the window or the aisle. She says aisle. She realizes most people who have never flown before might want to sit at the window but Celeste is terrified. Shooter waits for her to sit down and then he sits. He’s a gentleman, but then so is Benji. Benji is the ultimate gentleman. Benji stands whenever Celeste leaves the table to go to the ladies’ room and he stands when she gets back. He holds doors, he carries a handkerchief, he never interrupts.
Shooter pulls a flask out of his back pocket and hands it to Celeste. She eyes the flask. It’s alcohol, she assumes, but what kind? She is far too cautious a person to drink without asking. But in the moment, she doesn’t feel like being cautious. She feels like being daring. She accepts the flask and takes a swig: It’s tequila. Celeste drinks tequila only when she’s with Merritt, although personally she thinks it tastes like dirt. This tequila is smoother than most, but even so it singes her throat. However, an instant later the tension in her neck disappears and her jaw loosens. She takes another slug.
“I carry that because I hate flying,” Shooter says.
“You?” Celeste says. “But don’t you fly all the time?”
“Nearly every week,” he says. “The first time I flew, I was eight years old. My parents were sending me to summer camp in Vermont.” He leans his head back against the seat and stares forward. “Every time I fly I have an atavistic reaction to the memory of that day. The day I realized my parents wanted to get rid of me.”
“Were you a very naughty child, then?” she asks. She sounds exactly like Merritt, she realizes.
“Oh, probably,” Shooter says.
Celeste hands Shooter back the flask. He smiles sadly and takes a slug.
Later, Celeste will think back on the twenty hours she spent on Nantucket with Shooter alone as the kind of montage they show in movies. Here’s a shot of the airplane bouncing and shaking during turbulence and Shooter raising the window shade in time for Celeste to see bolts of lightning on the horizon. Here is Shooter taking Celeste’s hand, Celeste imagining her parents’ reaction when they are informed that Celeste has died in a plane crash. Here is the plane landing safely on Nantucket, passengers cheering, Shooter and Celeste executing a perfect high-five. Here are Shooter and Celeste climbing into a silver Jeep that Shooter has rented. The sky has cleared, the top of the Jeep is down, and Shooter takes off down the road while Celeste’s blond hair blows behind her. Here is Elida, the summer housekeeper, meeting Shooter and Celeste at the front door of the Winbury property, known as Summerland, and informing them that Mr. and Mrs. Winbury have also been detained in New York but that they should make themselves at home; she, Elida, will return in the morning.
Here is Celeste acting nonchalant when she enters the house. It’s a palace, a summer palace, like the monarchs of Russia and Austria used to have. The ceilings are soaring, the rooms are open, bright, airy. The entire thing is white—white walls, white wainscoting, whitewashed oak floors, a kitchen tiled in white with pure white Carrara marble countertops—with stunning bursts of color here and there: paintings, pillows, fresh flowers, a wooden bowl filled with lemons and Granny Smith apples. Celeste would say she can’t believe how glorious the house is, with its six bedrooms upstairs and master suite downstairs; with its uninterrupted views of the harbor; with its glass-walled wine cellar off the casual “friends’” dining room; with its dark rectangular pool and Balinese-style pool house; with its two guest cottages, tiny and perfect, like cottages borrowed from a fairy tale; with its round rose garden in the middle of a koi pond, a garden that can be accessed only by a footbridge. Shooter gives Celeste the tour—he has been coming to Summerland since he was fourteen years old, over half his life—and hence his attitude is charmingly proprietary. He tells Celeste that he used to have a terrific crush on Greer and had near Oedipal dreams about killing Tag and marrying her.
“Essentially becoming my best friend’s stepfather,” he says.
Celeste shrieks. “Greer?” Celeste likes Greer, but it’s hard to imagine her as the object of teenage lust.
“She was so beautiful,” Shooter says. “And she doted on me. She was more my mother than my own mother. I think she would probably write both of her sons out of the will and leave this place to me if I asked her nicely.”
Celeste laughs, but she’s beginning to believe that Shooter might have the ability to disrupt primogeniture and overturn dynasties.
Here is Shooter pouring Celeste a glass of Greer’s wine and opening one of Tag’s beers for himself. Celeste feels like they’re teenagers throwing a party while their parents are away. Here is Shooter opening a can of cocktail peanuts, then paging through the Nantucket phone book and making a call behind closed doors. Here are Celeste and Shooter clinking wine glass to beer bottle as they sit in Adirondack chairs and watch the sun go down. Here is Shooter going to the front door, paying the delivery boy, and bringing a feast into the kitchen. He has ordered two lobster dinners complete with corn, potatoes, and containers of melted butter.
Celeste says, “I thought it was pizza.”
Shooter says, “We’re on Nantucket, Sunshine.”
Here are Celeste and Shooter after dinner and after several shots of Tag’s absurdly fine tequila headed to town in a taxi to the Chicken Box, which is not a fast-food restaurant but rather a dive bar with live music. Here are Celeste and Shooter dancing in the front row to a cover band called Maxxtone who play “Wagon Wheel,” followed by “Sweet Caroline.” Here are Celeste and Shooter pumping their fists in the air, chanting “Bah-bah-bah!” and “So good! So good! So good!” Here are Celeste and Shooter stumbling out of the Chicken Box and into another taxi that takes them back to the summer palace. It’s one thirty in the morning, which is later than Celeste has stayed up since she pulled all-nighters in college, but instead of going to bed, she and Shooter wander out to the beach, strip down to their underwear, and go for a swim.
Here is Celeste saying, “I’m so drunk, I’ll probably drown.”
“No,” Shooter says. “I would never let that happen.”
Here is Shooter floating on his back, spouting water out of his mouth. Here is Celeste floating on her back, staring at the stars, thinking that outer space is a mystery but not as much of a mystery as the universe of human emotion.
Here are Celeste and Shooter wandering back inside the house, wrapped in navy-and-white-striped towels that Shooter swiped from the pool house. They linger in the kitchen. Shooter opens the refrigerator. Elida has clearly provisioned for the weekend; the inside of the Winburys’ refrigerator looks like something from a magazine shoot. There are half a dozen kinds of cheese, none of which Celeste recognizes, so she picks them up to inspect: Taleggio, Armenian string cheese, Emmentaler. There are sticks of cured sausage and pepperoni. There is a small tub of truffle butter, some artisanal hummus, four containers of olives in an ombré stack, from light purple to black. There are slabs of pâté and jars of chutney that look like they were mailed directly from India. Celeste checks the labels: Harrods. Close enough.
“Okay, can I just say?” Celeste puts a hand on Shooter’s bare back and he turns to face her. The two of them are illuminated by the fluorescent light of the fridge and for a second Celeste has the sense that she and Shooter are curious children peering into a previously undiscovered world, like the young protagonists in a C. S. Lewis novel.
“Yes?”
“In my house growing up, if I wanted a snack? There was a tub of Philadelphia cream cheese. And I spread it on Triscuits. If my mother had been to the Amish farmers’ market, there was sometimes pepper jelly to put on top.” Celeste knows she must be deeply and profoundly drunk because she never, ever shares details about her life growing up. She feels like a fool.
“You are such a breath of fresh air,” Shooter says.
Now Celeste feels even worse. She doesn’t want to be a breath of fresh air. She wants to be devastating, alluring, irresistible.
But wait—what about Benji?
It’s time to go to bed, she thinks. This is what she always suspected happened when one stayed up too late; reputations were shredded, hopes and dreams destroyed. What had Mac and Betty always told her? Nothing good happens after midnight.
“And also?” Celeste says. “If I held the refrigerator door open for this long? I would have been scolded for wasting energy.”
“Scolded?” Shooter says.
“Yes, scolded.” She tries to frown at him. “I’m going to bed.”
“Absolutely not,” Shooter says. He regards the contents of the fridge, then grabs the truffle butter. A rummage through the cabinet to the left of the fridge—he does know where everything is, Celeste thinks, just like he owns the place—produces a long, slender box of… bread sticks. Rosemary bread sticks. “Come sit.”