Chapter Ten – Crew #2
“The thing,” she says, gesturing vaguely. “The charming-your-way-past-boundaries thing.”
“Right.” I step closer, grin crooked.
She laughs despite herself, and that’s all the permission I need to lean against the railing beside her. We stand there, side by side, watching gulls swoop low over the water.
After a while, she says quietly, “About last night…”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t regret it.” She sighs. “But I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Same,” I admit. “Except for the part where I definitely want to do it again.”
Her breath catches. “You really don’t have a filter, do you?”
“Nope. Tried one once. It broke.”
She laughs again, shaking her head, but there’s color high on her cheeks. “You’re impossible.”
“You keep saying that like it’s a bad thing.”
She sets the broom aside, facing me fully now. The wind lifts a strand of her hair, and it brushes across her mouth. I have to fist my hands in my pockets to keep from reaching out. “You scare me,” she says finally.
“I scare you?”
She nods. “Because you make me forget how hard I worked to be fine.”
My chest tightens. “Then let me help you remember you can be happy instead.”
She stares at me, eyes shining, and for a second, it feels like she might step closer. Instead, she whispers, “You say stuff like that, and I don’t stand a chance.”
“Good,” I say, a half smile tugging. “Neither do I.”
We end up spending the afternoon fixing a loose shutter and reorganizing books she swears are alphabetized but clearly aren’t. She keeps pretending to be annoyed, and I keep pretending I believe her. The air hums between us like a held breath.
At one point, she’s on a small step stool reaching for the top shelf. I move behind her—just to steady it, I tell myself—but my hands find her waist automatically. Warm. Solid. Real. She freezes, glances down over her shoulder, our faces only inches apart.
“Careful,” I murmur. “Wouldn’t want you falling.”
Her voice is barely a whisper. “Too late.”
It hits like a jolt, the truth in it. I could kiss her again right here, surrounded by books and dust and sunlight, but I don’t. Instead, I ease back, hands sliding away slow enough to feel every heartbeat between us.
She exhales shakily, climbs down, and the look she gives me could burn through brick. “You’re dangerous.”
“Only if you run.”
That night, after she locks up, I help her carry the last box of dry books to her car, ready to take them over to the school. The moon hangs low, swollen and yellow. She sets the box down, dusts her hands off, and turns to me.
“I’m still figuring this out. I spent so many years trying to ignore the fact that you even existed,” she says.
“I’ll wait,” I tell her.
She studies me for a long moment, then steps close enough that her fingers graze my chest—just once, featherlight. “You’re going to ruin my peace.”
I grin. “You ruined mine first.”
Her lips curve, soft and dangerous. “Then I guess we’re even.”
She walks away before I can respond, keys jingling, taillights glowing red against the dark road. I stand there until they disappear, the night wind curling around me, carrying her scent and the taste of rain.
The morning smells like warm paper and cinnamon again, like the lighthouse baked something overnight and left it on the windowsill just to mess with me.
I show up early, pretending I’m there to help her set out chairs for story hour.
I’m terrible at pretending. Bailey’s already moving through the shop with that efficient grace, a stack of picture books balanced on one hip, hair twisted up with a pencil.
The pencil is a hazard to my health. It makes me think about tugging it out and watching her hair fall.
“Left side needs three,” she says, pointing with the book. “We’ve got five toddlers and a baby who thinks books deserve a personal attack.”
“I can handle a baby,” I say.
“You can’t even handle me.”
“Accurate,” I admit, and she bites her lip like she wasn’t planning to smile, and her mouth betrayed her.
Parents drift in with little kids who look sticky and hopeful, the way small humans do when there’s a promise of crayons and sugar.
I end up on the rug with a foam otter puppet someone thrust into my hands, the otter making eye contact with Bailey across the semicircle like he knows secrets.
The cat decides I’m furniture and sits on my thigh, tail flicking, smug as a senator.
Bailey opens the first book, a lighthouse story naturally.
Her voice changes when she reads—slower, warmer, like each sentence is a small boat she’s easing across the bay.
Kids lean forward. One leans into me. The puppet leans back into him.
I do the otter’s voice, and it’s ridiculous, and the room laughs.
Bailey shoots me a look that says you’re a menace and don’t stop.
The pencil in her hair is going to be the end of me.
Halfway through, a little girl crawls into Bailey’s lap and announces, “You’re pretty like my mom when she’s not mad,” then sticks a sticker to Bailey’s cheek.
The entire row of adults tries not to cry, including myself.
Bailey catches me swiping at my eye like a coward and tilts her head, a soft little question in the corner of her mouth.
I shrug. The puppet nods solemnly on my knee, as if offering commentary.
When I read the second book—because someone asked and because I’d do anything if a small army of toddlers asked politely—my shoulder complains at the reach.
Bailey notices. She drifts closer under the pretense of turning a page.
Her hand lands lightly on my upper back, warm through cotton, just enough pressure to make the joint settle.
It’s a tiny correction, the kind Marcus would make.
It hits like a benediction, and the shoulder behaves.
The room keeps breathing, and for a brief, profound moment, I can see the whole of a different life stretch out: me on this rug once a week, her next to me, this small chorus learning what light is.
It’s all a new revelation I wasn’t ready for.
After parents scoop up kids and scatter crumbs like confetti, Sawyer arrives with a box of supplies and an entire weather system of smug. “Delivery,” he calls, stepping over a spilled cup with the grace of a man who’s dodged stickier threats.
“What is it?” Bailey asks.
“Tarps, twine, a new nozzle for your outdoor spigot.” He lifts the box onto the porch and winks at me.
We take the box around back to check the spigot, and I swear to God the nozzle is sentient. It waits until my hand is directly in front of it to cough a surprise jet of water straight into my face. Bailey claps a hand over her mouth, failing spectacularly to pretend she’s not delighted.
“You did this,” I accuse.
“I would never,” she says, eyes sparkling. “Nature did this.”
“Mother Nature’s cruel,” I say, flicking water off my chin.
Her smile turns into a dare. “Maybe she thinks you need cooling off.”
“Is that so?” I say, reaching for the nozzle.
It obeys me once, streams politely in an arc.
Then it sputters and decides on chaos, spraying both of us.
We yelp, then laugh, then it devolves within seconds, the way these things do, into a war that’s mostly hands and shouting and the knowledge that if I look at her too long with water dripping from her jaw, I’ll forget the rules, the town, my name.
She darts left, and I catch her with one hand on the small of her back.
The water hits us both in a clean sheet, like the sky joined in.
Her sweatshirt darkens, clinging. Her hair slips free of the pencil. I go still.
She does too.
The hose falls, thudding onto the grass and slumping into a harmless snake.
My palm stays on her back, fingertips memorizing the scallop of bone, the heat, the yes.
She’s looking up at me with rain-wide pupils, mouth parted, breath quick.
We’re alone except for Sawyer, which is a lie—town is around us, the bay, the light, the history—but for a moment, every witness goes mercifully blind.
“Crew,” she says, warning and want and the last thread of a boundary.
“I know,” I say, and I do. I move my hand first because restraint is something I can offer when the rest of me is a lit match.
We stand side by side under a sun that can’t decide on full forgiveness. She flicks a drop from my ear with two fingers, carefully not. We call a truce without calling it. The nozzle surrenders as Sawyer fixes it, docile now that it has chaos to remember.
Inside, I hang her sweatshirt over the back of a chair while she changes upstairs.
The fabric is heavy with water and hints of vanilla and something that is just her.
I lay it flat, smoothing it without thinking, and have a brief, insane thought about sharing a drawer one day, about sweaters that hold the smell of two people’s days.
She comes down in a dry T-shirt, damp hair tucked behind her ears, bare feet whispering over the floorboards. We fall into work again—mending a loose hinge, re-shelving drying books, bickering about alphabetization while secretly re-ordering our lives.
Afternoon drops a quiet over the cove. The shop grows that amber hush I like best, the kind that makes you lower your voice without knowing why.
Bailey brews tea and pretends not to watch as I reach for the jar of honey without flinching when the shoulder pulls at the far edge of my reach.
I catch her pretending and make a face. She rolls her eyes like she isn’t fond enough to go soft around the edges.
“Dinner at my mom’s,” I say a little later, when the day has collected itself toward evening. I don’t plan it. The words just…arrive. “Lila will be there. Dean. Maybe Ivy and Rowan if she’s done threatening journalists. Come. Please.”
Her shoulders go up, then down. Fear, then the calm right after a wave breaks, and you realize you’re still here. “That’s a lot of Wrights.”