Chapter 12
twelve
"You're holding it wrong."
"There's a wrong way to hold a rope?"
"It's a line, not a rope. And yes. Very wrong. You're going to lose a finger."
Jack looked down at his hands, at the line—not rope, apparently, because boats had their own language and he hadn't been issued a dictionary—wrapped haphazardly around his palm.
"I build houses," he said. "I frame walls. I install cabinetry that could survive a nuclear event. I think I can handle a piece of r—a line."
Clara, standing at the helm of her boat with the casual authority of someone who'd been doing this since she could walk, gave him a look that could only be described as maritime pity.
"You sank your last boat, Jack."
"That was weather-related."
"You sailed into a storm. In a boat you bought from a stranger. With no marine experience."
"I had some marine experience."
"Name one."
"I've seen Jaws."
Clara closed her eyes. Opened them. Took the kind of breath that suggested she was reconsidering every romantic decision she'd made in the past month.
"Okay," she said, with the patience of a woman who had apparently chosen to love an idiot and was committed to the bit. "Let's start from the beginning. This is a cleat. You secure the line to it like this." She demonstrated a figure-eight pattern with the efficiency of muscle memory. "Your turn."
Jack tried. The line went somewhere that wasn't a figure eight. It was more of a figure nothing—a shapeless knot that defied geometry.
Clara stared at it. "How did you make it worse?"
"Talent."
"Undo it and try again."
"I can't undo it. I don't know what I did."
Clara hip-checked him out of the way—physically moved him, one hand on his waist, pushing him aside like he was a piece of furniture in the wrong spot—and freed the line with three efficient tugs. The knot dissolved like it had never existed.
"Show-off," Jack muttered.
"Competence isn't showing off." She reset the line. "Again."
This was their morning. Clara teaching Jack to handle a boat. Or more accurately, Clara discovering in real time that the man she was sleeping with had the nautical instincts of a golden retriever.
He couldn't tie a proper cleat hitch. He couldn't coil a line without it tangling.
He steered too hard, over-corrected, and nearly took out a lobster buoy on their third pass through the harbor.
When Clara tried to teach him to read the wind—"feel it on your face, which direction is it coming from?
"—he'd squinted into the breeze and confidently pointed the wrong way.
"That's south," Clara said.
"I knew that."
"You pointed north."
"I was testing you."
The thing was, Jack wasn't actually this bad at physical tasks.
His hands knew how to work. Could build a mortise-and-tenon joint blindfolded, could set a hinge by feel, could read the grain of a board the way Clara read the water.
Wood made sense to him. Had rules he understood, properties he could predict.
Water didn't give a shit about his rules.
Water moved. Changed. Responded to forces you couldn't see—current, tide, wind—and expected you to adjust in real time instead of planning ahead.
You couldn't measure twice and cut once with the ocean.
You just had to feel it and react, and Jack's instinct for reaction had been dulled by years of working with materials that stayed where he put them.
Clara, on the other hand, was in her element. Literally.
Jack had seen her confident before—at her drafting table, in her kitchen, navigating the politics of her town.
But on the water she was something else entirely.
Commanding. Sure-footed. Reading the wind and current the way he read wood grain, making constant micro-adjustments to the throttle and wheel that kept the boat gliding smooth even when the swells picked up.
She was also, he noted, enjoying his incompetence way too much.
"Left is port," she called from the helm, watching him fumble with a bumper. "Right is starboard. If you can't remember, port and left both have four letters."
"That's actually helpful."
"I know. I'm an excellent teacher. My students, however, leave much to be desired."
"Student. Singular. And he's doing his best."
"His best is alarming." But she was grinning when she said it—that full, unguarded grin he'd been seeing more of lately, the one that made her whole face change. "Come here. I'll show you how to dock without destroying municipal property."
Jack crossed the deck to stand behind her at the helm, and because he was already there—because she was right there, warm and windblown and smelling like salt and sunscreen—he wrapped his arms around her waist and rested his chin on her shoulder.
"I'm trying to teach you something," Clara said, but she leaned back into him.
"I'm a hands-on learner."
"Your hands aren't on anything instructional."
"Depends on your definition of instructional."
She elbowed him lightly, laughing, and Jack pressed a kiss to the side of her neck just to feel her shiver.
This—the softness of it, the laughter, the way their bodies had learned to fit together in the space of a few weeks—still caught him off guard.
He kept waiting for it to feel temporary.
Kept bracing for the moment it would sour or fade or become something he needed to escape from.
It hadn't happened yet.
Tim's lobster bake was, by all accounts, the social event of the summer that nobody had officially planned.
It started because Tim had gotten a deal on lobster—"My cousin's friend's boat came in heavy, I've got thirty pounds I need to move before they go bad"—and had texted the group chat that he was cooking on the beach behind the restaurant and everyone should bring sides and beer.
By the time Clara and Jack arrived, the beach had transformed into an impromptu party. Tim had dug a pit in the sand, layered it with seaweed and rockweed over hot stones, and was loading lobsters, clams, corn, and potatoes with the intensity of a man performing surgery.
"Don't touch the pit," Tim warned as Jack approached. "Don't look at the pit too long. Don't breathe on the pit. The pit has a process."
"Noted," Jack said.
"He's been like this for two hours," Lena reported from a beach blanket nearby, where she was sketching in a notebook with a beer balanced on her knee. "He made Evan cry."
"I did not make Evan cry," Tim said without looking up. "I gave him constructive feedback about his corn-shucking technique and he had an emotional response."
"He called it 'an act of violence against the corn,'" Evan muttered from behind a cooler, where he appeared to be hiding.
Sarah arrived next, dragging Nate behind her with one hand and carrying a massive bowl of pasta salad with the other. "I made food! Well, Nate made food. I supervised."
"She ate half the cherry tomatoes before they went in the bowl," Nate said. He was tall, quiet, and had the gentle bewilderment of a man who was still adjusting to his girlfriend's volume.
"Quality control," Sarah corrected. "That's supervision."
Ben and Tyler brought wine—"a nice Sancerre because lobster deserves respect"—and staked out the best spot on the beach like they'd scouted it in advance. Blanket, glasses, cheese board. These two did not mess around.
"You have a dedicated wine opener in your beach bag," Jack observed.
"You don't?" Tyler looked genuinely confused.
"He's a carpenter," Ben said, adjusting his glasses. "He probably opens wine with a chisel."
"I've opened wine with a screw and a pair of pliers," Jack admitted. "Once."
"Horrifying," Tyler said. "Clara, your boyfriend is a barbarian."
Clara, who was helping Tim adjust the seaweed layer, went pink at boyfriend but didn't correct it. Jack caught the flush and felt something warm expand in his chest.
Boyfriend. Was that what he was? They hadn't defined it. Hadn't had the conversation with labels and expectations and all the things that made Jack's flight instinct twitch.
But Clara hadn't corrected it.
And Jack didn't want her to.
Dale materialized at some point—nobody saw him arrive, he was simply there, sitting on a rock at the edge of the gathering like he'd grown out of it.
Jack caught Dale's eye. The older man held his gaze for a beat, then went back to his lobster without comment. From Dale, that was practically a hug.
The food was, predictably, incredible. Tim served the lobster bake on newspaper spread across driftwood planks, and for twenty minutes nobody talked because their mouths were full of butter-drenched lobster and sweet corn and clams that tasted like the ocean had personally seasoned them.
Jack sat in the sand with Clara's legs draped across his lap, a beer in one hand and a destroyed lobster carcass in front of him, and listened to these people who'd become—somehow, without his permission—his people.
Tyler was arguing with Tim about whether drawn butter was superior to clarified butter, a debate that had apparently been running for three years with no resolution.
Lena was sketching Evan while he wasn't looking, capturing his permanent state of drowsy detachment with a few precise lines.
Sarah was telling a story about a third-grader who'd brought a live crab to show-and-tell that had ended in an evacuation of the classroom, and Ben was laughing so quietly you could only tell by the way his shoulders shook.
This was what he'd missed. Not just a town, not just a place, but people who showed up on a beach on a weekday because someone got a deal on lobster and texted the group chat. People who argued about butter and sketched each other and told stories that got funnier with every retelling.
People who knew him. Not Jack-passing-through. Not Jack-the-carpenter-who'd-be-gone-by-fall. Just Jack.
"What are you thinking about?" Clara asked, bumping his shoulder.
"Nothing."
"Liar. You had a face."
"I always have a face. It came standard."