Page 84 of The Lost Heiress
The summer that Saoirse was fifteen, Teddy came to Newport a single man, and all his attention was focused on Saoirse, as if she were his singular purpose for existing. He took her out to lobster dinners at the club, strolled with her—fingers interlaced—barefoot on the beach in the moonlight. He opened her car door and brought her flowers and called when he said he would. Once, when it was just the two of them smoking pot in his father’s boathouse, he told her about how his older brother had committed suicide with a hunting rifle right before Christmas three years before, and she held his head in her lap, stroking his hair as he cried. It was the only time she had ever seen him look vulnerable, like a little boy. She was sure that she was the only one who got these pieces of him, the only one who knew what he was really like.
He took her out one day, on his boat, and kissed her urgently, but when his fingers trailed to the hem of her shirt, Saoirse pulled away.
“What’s the matter?” Teddy asked.
“I wouldn’t want to do that with, well, someone who wasn’t serious about me,” Saoirse said.
“You think I’m not serious about you?” Teddy asked, sounding hurt, with a hint of accusation. “I thought it was obvious, the way I feel about you.”
“It is,” Saoirse said. “I mean, to me, it is. But I’m not sure it is to everybody else.”
“I didn’t know you cared so much about what everyone else thought.”
“I don’t,” Saoirse said. “I guess I just need, like, a sign of commitment, that’s all.”
“What, like, a promise ring?” Teddy asked.
“No, not like a promise ring,” Saoirse said. Her face burned. She wished he would just get it, just understand her, not make everything so hard. Not make her practically beg.
“God, Teddy,” she said, “I just want us to call this what it is, to finally put a name to it, that’s all.Idon’t want to see anyone else, and I don’t wantyouto see anyone else. And frankly, I don’t know if you feel that way, because if you do, you’ve never actually said so.”
She felt embarrassed for needing it, for saying it all out loud. She felt childish. Small.
When she had brought it up to Teddy before, always in roundabout ways, he always shrugged it off, saying that titles and labels were stupid, arbitrary, which puzzled Saoirse, because she knew that he had consented to them before, with someone else. Besides, titles and labels, they mattered to Saoirse. They existed for a reason. She wanted everyone to know that she belonged to Teddy and Teddy belonged to her. She wanted to draw a line in the sand, not to box them in but to keep them from losing each other. She steeled herself for his pushback, his teasing, his admonishments for her conformity to what he saw as tawdry societal norms.
“Is that all?” Teddy asked.
She nodded, but she couldn’t look at him.
He climbed down onto his knee in front of her, pulled her hand to his chest.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Meerkat,” Teddy said. “My little mongoose. Light of my life.”
Saoirse tried to pull her hand away. “Don’t,” she said.
But Teddy held her hand anchored to his chest. “I’m serious,” Teddy said. “Meerkat, I’m crazy about you. Lover, sweetheart,boyfriend. Call me whatever you want. I’m yours.”
She wasn’t entirely sure if he was making fun of her or if he was being completely genuine. That was the maddening thing aboutTeddy—sometimes, you couldn’t tell. But she decided to believe him, to take him at his word. To, as she had time and time again, give him the benefit of the doubt. She laughed and let him kiss her. She didn’t protest when he swept her up into his arms, or when he carried her belowdecks, or when he unbuttoned her blouse.
Afterward, he rolled over onto his back and fumbled for a cigarette and lighter from his discarded pants’ pocket.
“You’re such a tease,” Teddy said.
“What?” Saoirse asked. She felt cold suddenly, and she pulled the bedsheet over her bare chest.
“You didn’t bleed,” he said. He handed her the cigarette. “You’re not a virgin.”
She took a drag from the cigarette and stayed quiet.
It didn’t count, before,she wanted to say.It was just for practice.
By the time they both went back to school in the fall, things had shifted between them, the distance loosening the threads that held them together. When he didn’t call when he said he would, and she’d get angry because she had stayed in, waiting to hear from him, he’d say she was being unreasonable. It was dizzying the way he always turned everything on its head, inverted it, turned her hurt against her like a weapon wielded back against herself. Somehow, anytime she voiced a need, she was the one being insensitive; she was the one who misunderstood. If she started out needing reassurance, by the end of the conversation, she was the one reassuring him. With Teddy, she was always on the wrong side of everything. He made her feel like she deserved it, the push and pull of their relationship.
Once, after they’d broken up for the last time and Ransom had pulled her out of school and brought her back to Cliffhaven, Saoirse had called Teddy late at night, when everyone else in the house was asleep. She had the number to the fraternity house at Columbia where he stayed. When someone answered, she asked for Teddy, and they set the phone down to go look for him. She heard noises in the background—lots of people talking all at once, and music. A party. After several minutes, she was sure that whoever had answered thephone had forgotten about her, or maybe they had found Teddy but he didn’t want to talk to her. She was about to hang up, but then she heard Teddy’s voice on the other end.
“Meerkat,” Teddy said, and her heart soared at the sound of his voice curling itself around her nickname. “Where have you gone off to, my little mongoose? I called around to Choate a couple weeks ago, and some girl told me you were no longer enrolled. Said you were sick or something.”
