Chapter 5 #2
Jack laughed, accepting her refusal with a grin that made her toes curl.
Sam would've pushed. Would've demanded to know what she was working on, make her explain every silence, and would've turned her desire for privacy into a character flaw that needed fixing.
Jack just... let her be.
And Clara didn't know what to do with that.
After breakfast, Clara retreated to her drafting table with her coffee and stared at the half-finished panel from yesterday.
Marina confronting the sea witch. Dialogue that wasn't working. A story that was supposed to be escapist fantasy but kept bleeding reality at the edges.
She picked up her pen. Set it down. Picked it up again.
Her phone buzzed. She glanced at the notification—a comment alert from her Tidal Lock page. Then another. And another. Three in the span of a minute, which was unusual for a Tuesday morning.
She thumbed it open. Someone had shared last week's update on an indie comics blog she'd never heard of—"Hidden Gems: 5 Webcomics That Deserve a Bigger Audience.
" Tidal Lock was number three. The write-up was short but earnest: "Deceptively simple art, devastatingly sharp writing.
C.H. Winters is doing something special and almost nobody knows about it yet. "
The comments were already rolling in. New readers. People she didn't recognize.
Clara stared at the screen for a long moment, something between pride and panic fluttering in her chest. Then she closed the app and set the phone face-down on the desk.
It was just a blog post. A tiny blip. It didn't mean anything.
She had a deadline.
Through the window, she could see Jack working on the east side shutters. He'd dragged a ladder over from the shed, his expression in work-mode. His t-shirt rode up as he climbed, revealing a strip of lower back that Clara absolutely did not notice.
Stop staring at your temporary houseguest like a creep and get to work, Hawkins.
She forced her attention back to the panel. Marina's expression needed to be defiant but vulnerable. The sea witch needed to look amused but dangerous. The dialogue needed to—
"Dammit," Jack's voice drifted through the open window. "Who installed these things, a drunk orangutan?"
Clara smiled despite herself. She'd asked that exact question when she'd tried to fix them herself last year and nearly taken a header off the ladder.
She watched him work—couldn't help it, really, since her drafting table faced that exact window and moving it would disrupt her entire organizational system.
Jack attacked the shutters, removing rusty screws one by one, examining the wood for rot, making notes on a piece of paper he'd tucked into his back pocket.
He worked like his father had probably taught him. Slow. Thorough. Doing it right instead of fast.
Sam had been the opposite. Everything was about speed, shock and awe, getting to the next thing. He'd once told her that taking your time was just another word for wasting it, that people who moved slowly got left behind.
At the time, she'd thought it sounded ambitious and exhilarating. Now it just sounded exhausting and sloppy.
Clara turned back to her panel and tried to focus. Drew three lines. Erased two of them. Drew them again in slightly different positions. Erased them again.
This was pathetic. She had a deadline. She had a story to tell. She had a sea witch who needed snarky dialogue and a lighthouse keeper character who—
Wait.
Clara stared at the panel she'd drawn last week. The one with the lighthouse keeper—a woman who talked to seagulls and kept the world at arm's length—giving relationship advice to a lost sailor.
She'd based the lighthouse keeper on herself. Obviously. That's what writers did—mined their own neuroses for material and called it art.
But now, looking at it with fresh eyes after last night, after this morning, after Jack Callahan had trusted her with his broken pieces, the dialogue felt... wrong.
The lighthouse keeper was telling the sailor to give up. To respect that some people didn't want to be found. To accept that isolation was a choice, not a prison.
But what if that was bullshit?
What if Clara had been lying to herself for three years, calling solitude a choice when really it was just fear wearing a different name?
Her pen moved before she could talk herself out of it. She flipped to a new page and started sketching.
A lighthouse keeper. Walls built high. A sailor asking for directions. But this time, instead of turning him away, the lighthouse keeper looked... uncertain. Like she wanted to help but had forgotten how.
The dialogue came easier now:
Sailor: "How do I tell someone I care about them without scaring them off?"
Lighthouse Keeper: "Why would honesty scare anyone?"
Sailor: "Because sometimes people have been hurt so badly, they mistake kindness for manipulation."
The lighthouse keeper didn't have an answer to that.
Clara stared at what she'd drawn, her chest tight.
This was too close. Too real. Her readers would know. They'd see right through the metaphor to the terrified woman hiding behind it.
She should erase it. Start over. Draw something safer.
Instead, she kept going.
An hour later, Jack appeared in her peripheral vision, climbing down from the ladder. He wiped his hands on his jeans—they were covered in rust and what looked like ancient paint chips—and gathered his tools.
Clara told herself she was just taking a break. Resting her eyes. Definitely not tracking his movement toward the lighthouse door.
He came inside carrying the toolbox, setting it down by the door with a satisfied sigh.
"Shutters are done," he announced. "They won't bang anymore. Also, I found a wasp nest the size of a grapefruit behind the left one, so you're welcome for not getting stung to death in your sleep."
"My hero," Clara said dryly.
"I accept payment in coffee and sarcasm." He moved to the sink to wash his hands. "How's the work going?"
"It's... going."
"That sounds ominous."
"Deadlines always are."
Jack dried his hands on the dish towel—the one with the lighthouse pattern that her grandmother had embroidered—and leaned against the counter. Not hovering. Not pushing. Just... present.
"I gotta ask something about Tidal Lock. How autobiographical is it?"
Her pen froze mid-stroke. "What makes you think it's autobiographical?"
"Because good stories usually are." He tilted his head, studying her with those warm hazel eyes.
"The lighthouse keeper character. She keeps people at a distance.
Talks to seagulls instead of humans. Acts like she chose isolation when really she's just scared.
C'mon, now that I've met the infamous C.H.
Winters, it seems a little on-the-nose."
Clara's stomach dropped. Being read that accurately by someone she'd known a week felt like having her diary cracked open on the kitchen table.
"You've known me for a week. I'd hardly say that you're an expert on me."
"Definitely not an expert but I'd have to be blind not to notice the parallels."
And that's why I chose to write under a pseudonym, Clara wanted to grumble.
"The lighthouse keeper isn't me," she lied through her teeth.
"Okay."
"She's just a character."
"If you say so."
"I'm not—" Clara stopped. Set down her pen before she stabbed through the paper. "Why does it matter?"
"It doesn't. I'm just curious." Jack pushed off the counter, hands in his pockets. "I build things with wood. You build things with stories. I just wondered how much of yourself you put into them."
"Well, keep wondering," she retorted, unwilling to budge on that score.
Jack's mouth twitched. "You know, Hawkins, you're something else. Hand-holding in a thunderstorm one night, back to 'none of your business' by morning."
"It's called range," Clara said, smothering the grin that had no business finding her lips. "Now, leave me alone. I have a deadline and you're blocking my Muse."
Jack raised his hands in apology, though that crooked grin as he backed away did terrible things to her ability to remember why she didn't want him in her space, and then he was gone.
Damn him for being so observant. Of course she was the lighthouse keeper.
The comic had been her form of therapy, the way to work out the feelings she didn't have the ability to share. Somehow an illustration had felt less painful than saying out loud how badly Sam had hurt her.
How Sam had decimated her sense of self in ways that she couldn't have imagined were possible.
Clara swallowed the sudden lump in her throat.
She tossed her pen into the mug she kept on the desk, unable to think after that. Couldn't focus. It wasn't Jack's fault that he'd washed up on her shore, wasn't his fault that he'd ended up stuck in her spare bedroom.
Definitely wasn't his fault that she was emotionally constipated after her last relationship.
She paced the circular room, her footsteps echoing off stone walls. This was ridiculous. She barely knew him. Shouldn't care two shits about his business, his issues, or what he seemed to pick up about her from sharing space together.
And yet…
She cared that he'd lost his brother. Cared that he carried guilt that wasn't his to carry. Cared that he moved through the world like he didn't deserve to stay anywhere long enough to matter.
She cared, and caring felt like opening a door that led directly to the sea.