❝ SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 6TH, 2021 —
at the akman family estate with @augustortiz.
Emerald silk shimmied over spandex leggings that were cast off and abandoned in the driver's seat of a car. Heels were hopped and hobbled into on an ascent up the stairs. Shay was running late - as usual - but she’d be damned if she waltzed into the dining room looking any less than the level of perfection her mother would expect.
Deft fingers coaxed a pair of diamond teardrops through her ears and she paused in the powder room off the grand foyer just long enough for a swipe of color across her lips. MAC’s ‘Please Me’ pink - an apt choice for what surely lay ahead. Not for the first time, and undoubtedly not the last, Shay stared at her reflection, wondering why even the simplest family dinner had to be such a show.
As if their family’s finest china cared whether she picked at the food upon it wearing something from Saks or a pair of ratty sweats? Would the marble floors weep if they were kissed by the scuff of old Chucks instead of the Aquazzura’s pinching her feet?
For one bold, reckless moment Shay wanted to find out.
She stood there, sucked into that yawning wasteland of indifference within her meticulously made up eyes, and wanted to ruin something. One of the priceless ginger jars her mother had scattered about - not because she liked them, but because it’s how all the other ‘mistresses of the lake’ were decorating these days. Their five course meal fit for an army instead of a party of three. The fortune of soulless art on the walls. Herself.
An familiar, incendiary urge toward destruction swept through Shay’s veins like a brush fire, and yet... steady hands smoothed a wayward curl into submission. Skimmed over her hips, her thighs, and adjusted the fall of her dress.
Almost thirty, and she was still her mother’s little marionette.
She pilfered a glass of Macallan from her father’s study on her way to the dining room and approached the imposing double doors, twenty minutes late. By the time she tossed it back, chucked the crystal snifter in one of her mother’s many potted plants ( hah! ), and ventured inside she wished she would’ve made it two. Or five.
It wasn’t the exquisitely dressed table - complete with far too many settings - that stole the breath from her lungs, or the flinty glare in Cemre Akman’s eyes above a deceptively saccharine smile. It was who stood beside her, dapper in his three piece suit yet looking every bit as desperate to be anywhere else as she was.
It’d been two years since Shay was last home. Two years since she’d last seen him. She never called to say she’d returned this time around, though it struck her now that perhaps she should’ve. Perhaps if they’d talked once in these two months she would’ve realized tonight was about more than just dinner with her parents. It was a spectacle of an entirely different beast.
Cemre slinked forward on stick thin heels - the epitome of poise, grace, and silent but deadly condemnation. Twenty minutes late, scotch on her breath, and not a drop of polish on her unadorned fingers. She’d be hearing about this later. At present, her mother just pressed forth to kiss each cheek, not so subtly shoving between Shay’s shoulder blades to force her front and center for their company. “Şeyda, you remember Mr. and Mrs. Winthrop. Their son, August, their daughter—”
Shay tuned her out. Shay tuned everything out but the achingly familiar landscape of his face.
It might’ve been two years, but she remembered their last moments together as if it were only yesterday. How her fingertips penned invisible promises and apologies alike over the canvas of his back. The way weak rays of morning light rimmed the curtains drawn over her hotel windows, edging the thick drapery in luminous gold. It’d spilled across his still form. Across that back, tattooed and lightly marred by the crimson streaked evidence of her love. She remembered how badly she wanted to dip in and taste the ink and sunshine off his skin. How she pressed a kiss to his passion-swept hair and left him sleep, instead.
Whenever he’d woken up, be it five minutes or five hours later, she’d already been gone. Shay texted him to say she’d made it back to New York okay later that evening, or perhaps it was the next week. She never told him how hard she’d cried during take off, though. How close she’d been to coming back.
Now - roughly seven hundred and thirty days later - she never would.
The whip-snap of her mother’s voice pulled her out of the reverie, reminding Shay that manners demanded an actual response. Her throat stubbornly resisted her attempt to swallow before she managed to sink into a pretty, heart-wrenchingly impersonal smile. “Of course I remember, anne. They’ve only lived next door most of my life.”
Ignoring brittle tightening of Cemre’s mouth in response to that sprinkling of sass, she greeted his mother and step father first. It was a coward’s move - one that only granted the tiniest reprieve and chance at finding composure before she had to face him, too.
“August.” Her gaze tried to flee for the floor of its own volition, but she forced herself to look up again. Shay’s eyes honed in on him through the thick, onyx fringe of her lashes and it took every ounce of self restraint not to lean in too close. Not to ping into his arms like some long lost magnet finding home and reclaim what’d always been hers. He wasn’t. He wasn’t hers, or her home. Not in the ways he always should’ve been - the ways he deserved.
“It’s lovely to see you again.” So unremarkably neutral, so polite. She could’ve been greeting the mailman or the grocery clerk, not the only man to ever seen her naked soul. It made Shay sick, this false pretense of loose acquaintance. The way they came and went in each others lives with a self-imposed lack of permeance. Her fault, not his.
“How’ve you— how’ve you been?”
