Chapter 12 #2
"You know what I mean." She studied him with those green eyes that missed nothing. "Good thoughts or bad thoughts?"
Jack looked at the group. At Dale on his rock. At Tim wielding tongs like a scepter over his pit. At the sun going orange over the water and the steam rising from seaweed and the sound of people he cared about laughing at a story about a rogue crab.
"Good thoughts," he said. "Really good."
Clara smiled and leaned into him, and Jack let himself be present in this moment without qualifying it or calculating its expiration date.
Progress.
They left the lobster bake after dark, pleasantly full and slightly sunburned and buzzed on Tim's dad's cider—a smaller batch than the festival supply, equally illegal, somehow stronger.
The boat ride back was warm and slow, the water calm, the sky thick with stars. Clara drove; Jack sat on the bench behind the helm and watched her. The ease of her hands on the wheel. The way she read the dark water by instinct, navigating around rocks she'd memorized a lifetime ago.
"I've been thinking," Jack said.
"Dangerous."
"About the gallery railing."
Clara glanced back. "What about it?"
"The design. The balusters are basic turned spindles—functional, fine, nothing wrong with them.
But the view from up there is incredible, and the railing blocks a lot of it.
" He leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
"If we replaced the spindles with a cable rail system—stainless steel cables, horizontal—you'd keep the safety but open up the sightlines.
You could stand up there and see the whole horizon without anything breaking it up. "
Clara was quiet for a moment. "That sounds expensive."
"Materials, maybe two hundred bucks. Labor's free." He paused. "I was thinking we could do it before the fall storms hit. September, maybe. The existing posts are solid enough to anchor the cables, so it'd be—"
He stopped.
September.
He'd said September. Had planned a project that wouldn't start for two months. Had used "we" like it was a given—like of course he'd still be here, still working on Clara's lighthouse, still waking up in her bed and making her over-salted eggs and learning the wrong way to tie a cleat hitch.
The word hung in the salt air between them.
Clara didn't pounce on it. Didn't turn it into a conversation about commitment or timelines or what any of this meant. She just said, quietly, "Cable rails would look beautiful up there."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I've always thought the spindles blocked too much of the view."
They looked at each other in the dark, the boat's running lights casting soft green and red across the water. Something passed between them that neither of them named.
"September it is, then," Jack said.
Clara smiled and turned back to the water. Jack sat back on the bench and looked up at the stars and let himself think the thought he'd been circling for days:
Next summer, I could build her a proper dock.
He didn't flinch from it. Didn't immediately drown it in qualifications or exit strategies or the familiar litany of reasons why he couldn't stay.
Just let it sit there. A quiet, terrifying, wonderful thought.
Next summer.
Clara cut the engine as they drifted into the lighthouse cove, letting momentum carry them the last few feet to the dock. The silence was immediate and total—no music, no voices, just water lapping against the hull and the distant rhythm of waves on the rocks.
Jack moved to the bow to grab the dock line. Actually managed a halfway decent cleat hitch. Looked up to find Clara watching him with an expression that was equal parts impressed and amused.
"That was almost competent," she said.
"High praise from Captain Hawkins."
"Don't push it." But she was already crossing the deck toward him, and something in the way she moved—deliberate, unhurried, her eyes not leaving his—made the air between them shift.
She stopped in front of him. Close. The boat rocked gently, and she put a hand on his chest for balance. Didn't remove it.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi."
"We're alone."
"We are."
"On a boat."
"Also true."
Clara's hand slid up his chest to his collar. Her fingers curled into the fabric. "I've been thinking about something all night."
"The cable railing design? Because I have sketches—"
She kissed him. Not the soft, sweet kisses they'd been trading at the lobster bake when they thought nobody was looking—though everyone was looking, obviously, because Beacon's End.
This was a different kind of kiss. Hungry.
Purposeful. The kiss of a woman who'd been patient all evening and had run out of patience.
Jack's hands found her hips on instinct. "Here?"
"Here."
"On the boat?"
"On the boat." Her fingers were already working the buttons on his shirt. "Unless you have objections."
"I have zero objections. I have the opposite of objections. I have—" He lost his train of thought when her mouth found his neck. "Okay, yeah, here works."
The boat was not designed for this. It was a twenty-foot center console with a bench seat barely wide enough for one person to sit comfortably, let alone two people trying to—well.
They made it work.
Clara pushed him onto the bench and straddled his lap in one fluid motion that suggested she'd thought about this more than once. The boat rocked with their combined weight, water sloshing against the hull in a rhythm that matched the suddenly frantic pace of Jack's pulse.
"If this boat tips—" he started.
"It won't tip."
"You say that with a lot of confidence for someone who's currently—oh God—" Clara's hips rolled against him and coherent thought exited the conversation. "Okay. Not tipping. Great. Carry on."
They were laughing and kissing and fumbling with buttons and zippers in the dark, the boat swaying underneath them, the ridiculousness of it only making it better.
Jack's shirt ended up somewhere near the stern.
Clara's top got caught on her elbow and they had to stop kissing long enough to wrestle it free, both of them breathless and giggling.
"Romantic," Clara deadpanned, finally pulling it over her head.
"The most." Jack pulled her closer. Kissed the curve of her shoulder. The hollow of her throat. Lower, until she gasped and her fingers tightened in his hair.
"Condom," she said against his ear.
"Please tell me you have one."
"Jacket pocket."
"You planned this."
“Maybe,” she admitted, and Jack laughed against her skin because this was becoming their word, their inside joke, another small brick in the thing they were building together.
He found her jacket, found the condom, managed it with only minor difficulty—he was improving, statistically—and then Clara was sinking down onto him with a slow exhale that made his vision blur.
The boat rocked. Stars wheeled overhead. Somewhere in the distance, a bell buoy chimed, keeping time with a rhythm neither of them was paying attention to.
This was different from the other times.
Not desperate like the first night. Not tender like the morning after.
This was fun. Playful. Clara laughing when the boat lurched and she had to grab the gunwale for balance.
Jack groaning when she shifted the angle and found something that made his brain go blank.
Both of them shushing each other and then immediately being louder, because who was going to hear them? The seagulls? The fish?
Clara came first, biting down on his shoulder to muffle the sound, her body clenching around him in waves that pulled Jack right over the edge after her.
He buried his face in her neck, arms locked around her waist, and they held each other through it, the boat swaying gently, the water keeping its own quiet rhythm beneath them.
After, they sat there tangled together on the bench, half-dressed and breathless, the night air cool on their skin.
"So," Clara said, her cheek against his shoulder. "How's your boating education coming along?"
"I think I just earned extra credit."
"Don't flatter yourself."
"Four stars?"
"Three and a half. The boat rocking was distracting."
"That was physics, not me."
"I'm grading on results, not excuses." She lifted her head, and in the faint glow of the dock light, her face was soft and happy and completely unguarded. "Take me inside. I'm cold and you're warm and I want to sleep in an actual bed."
Jack helped her off the boat—managed the dock line on the second try, progress—and they walked up the path to the lighthouse, shoulders bumping, fingers linked, the comfortable silence of two people who'd run out of things to prove to each other.
Inside, they fell into bed without ceremony. Clara curled into him like someone who'd been doing it for years instead of weeks. Jack pulled the quilt over them and listened to her breathing slow toward sleep.
Through the window, he could see the gallery railing. The southwest post he'd repaired. The spindles he was going to replace with cables.
In September.
"Jack?" Clara's voice was drowsy, already half gone.
"Yeah?"
"I'm glad you sank your boat."
He smiled into her hair. "Me too, Hawkins. Me too."