Page 22 of Lost Dreams

Oren furrowed his brow. “Kenny can deal with it. We’ve been friends forever. Girls come and go, you know?” He laughed, then added, “Although I don’t think I’d let you go that easily. You’re different.”

“I don’t know,” Aurora said. “Maybe we can go out after the project’s over? I take my art really seriously. I…”

Kenny came in carrying chips and popcorn and crackers and cheese. He tossed them across the bed and gave them a look that meant What did I miss?

“Aurora was just telling me that she takes her art seriously,” Oren said. “Very seriously. But actually, I don’t think you’ve talked to us about your art very much, Aurora.”

Aurora slid her tongue across her teeth and considered the men before her. Oren looked jocular, as though he was in the midst of a game he felt sure he would still win despite this moment of defeat.

When Kenny turned his eyes toward her, a look of expectation fixed across his face, Aurora knew that she needed to say something to fill the silence.

“I went to art school in Berlin,” she offered finally.

Immediately, the guys were impressed.

“Berlin. Whoa. That’s, like, a crazy artsy place,” Oren said, sitting back down on the bed and taking a chip. “What was your medium?”

“I experimented with a lot of different things,” Aurora said. “My great-grandfather’s a filmmaker, as you know, and I considered going down that path, but my boyfriend at the time wanted me to paint more, so I found myself painting.”

“Boyfriends, huh?” Oren teased. “They always tell you what to do.”

Aurora decided not to mention that her boyfriend, Sebastian, had also been her professor. So of course she’d done what he told her to do because he seemed the best pathway to the art world.

“Did you graduate?” Kenny asked, his voice quiet.

Aurora shook her head. “Berlin got sort of intense for me. I had to go.”

“We’ve heard that story before,” Oren said. “Plenty of film students in New York relocated to Berlin. A lot of them burned out. Did you party too much?”

“No. Not really,” Aurora said.

Aurora remembered going clubbing with Sebastian, of course, but she’d never been particularly rowdy. She’d just liked the music, and she’d liked to dance. Her favorite part of the night had been when she and Sebastian had gone home together on the subway, their hands laced as they’d kissed. When they’d left the train, the sun had been coming up over their city, the city where they’d fallen in love. It all felt like a fantasy, now.

Kenny and Oren were quiet for a moment.

“You know, we heard some people from your family talking,” Oren said, arching his eyebrow. “Something about you in business school? But we didn’t want to believe it.”

Aurora cackled. “Yeah. No. That was my dad’s whole thing. He wanted me to go to business school so I could help him with his restaurant empire.”

“He sounds wealthy,” Oren said.

Aurora thought about their Rome apartment, about how she and Nadia had had to share a room, about how she’d heard her parents fighting deep into the night about cash. “We do okay,” she said. “But we’re nothing like the Whitmores used to be.” She gestured vaguely around them, indicating the entirety of the White Oak Lodge.

“You should take us to Berlin sometime,” Oren said suddenly. “We’ve always wanted to go, and you can show us around.”

Aurora cracked an ironic smile. “I don’t know about that.” She’d told herself she’d never go back to that city, since that was the site of her original breakdown. But she didn’t want the guys to know that.

For a little while, they talked about how they were going to bring the story of Great-Grandpa Charles’s tragedy to light on screen. They talked about Edmund Whitmore, about the horrors of war, and about how those horrors could slip into the narrative they were trying to tell about Nantucket Island. It was a beautiful and fluid conversation, one that drew them further and further away from Aurora’s private tragedy in Berlin.

Later that night, they made a bonfire on the beach. When Oren went to get firewood for the flickering flames, Kenny sidled up to her. She could feel the heat from his breath on her neck.

“You’re good at this,” he said.

“At what?” Aurora could barely hear her own voice.

“At making art. I can feel it when you talk about the documentary and what it can be,” Kenny said. “Your instincts are there, even if you haven’t made anything for a while. It’s beautiful to witness.”

Aurora turned to gaze into his eyes. She considered telling Kenny that Oren had asked her on a date earlier today, that they were in dangerous territory. But before she could, Oren came around the corner, and Kenny and Aurora split apart.