Chapter 4
Chapter four
Morgan ended up staying with Ty for a whole week.
It was a little embarrassing to admit how nice it was to be with someone again.
Not just someone, but a guy who genuinely seemed to have no clue and no care as to why Morgan was on Parrish Island and what he’d been doing before.
Ty never asked anything personal, other than finding out how Morgan felt every morning and what he could do to help.
After a few days of waiting for the ball to drop, Morgan realized that Ty was never going to ask.
He didn’t have a phone. Didn’t have a computer or internet access.
He didn’t get the paper or listen to a radio.
Ty was the closest thing to completely isolated that Morgan had ever heard of, and he had absolutely no curiosity when it came to the outside world.
It could have made for a pretty dismal time together, honestly, especially once Morgan felt well enough to stay awake for more than a few hours at a time, but instead …
He enjoyed it. Morgan enjoyed Ty’s company and discovered pretty quickly that the other man was far from boring or dull; he just turned his attention in different directions.
He was an avid fisherman, going out in his boat before dawn every morning to get the morning catch and take it into town.
He maintained lines of communication with several different scientific researchers when he went into town as well; apparently, he facilitated several on-island studies every year.
A little digging turned up the fact that Ty actually had a degree in wildlife biology, shyly admitted over a cup of tea in the evening.
The house might not be electrified, but Ty had brought over every one of Morgan’s devices, along with batteries and solar chargers, and more fuel for the propane stove, and the little lamp he’d pulled out of the chest in his bedroom.
“I got it years ago,” he said the third day Morgan was there, once it was a little easier for him to move around and stay awake.
“All correspondence courses. It was, mmm, a challenge to get through it. But the degree makes it easier for me to stay here, so it was worth it.” He showed Morgan some of his textbooks, ancient things from the 1970s that he’d put in a lockbox in one of the kitchen cabinets, of all places.
“You can read them if you’re getting bored,” he added with a little twinkle in his dark, sloe eyes.
Morgan laughed. “I think I’ll stick with novels for now.”
Ty nodded thoughtfully. “Phil liked novels too.”
It was the first time since Morgan’s bumpy arrival that Ty had mentioned his great-uncle. It wasn’t as though the subject was forbidden, exactly, just that talking about him seemed to make Ty sad.
“Mmm. He would read them out loud to me sometimes. I never understood the stories, though. He liked …” He wrinkled his nose. “Thrillers.”
Morgan nodded. “I remember reading a bunch of his books when I came to visit. All Chandler and Le Carre and Harris. I had a nightmare after reading Silence of the Lambs at the lighthouse; I woke Uncle Phil up with my yelling. He was a little more careful about what I had access to after that.” He glanced at the textbooks.
“Um. If you—how did you do the reading for your degree? If you don’t mind me asking.
” Wow. You insensitive fuck. Way to be invasive, you—
“Phil read them to me,” Ty said without a hint of self-consciousness. “He helped me write my papers as well although I had to do all the dictating. He said I couldn’t use him to cheat.” He smiled a bit sadly. “He was a good person.”
“Yeah, he was.” Morgan swallowed around the lump in his throat that had welled up at the thought of just what a good person his uncle had been. “He seems like he was a good friend too.”
“He was. I miss him.”
Morgan looked down at the table. “Me too.”
“Mmm.” They sat in silence for a moment. “He’d be happy you came back.”
“I wish I’d done it earlier.” Maybe then he could have talked to Phil in person about Ty, learned about the secrets the man was keeping directly instead of feeling his way around them now. Because it was clear, very clear, that Ty was a man with some big secrets.
How long had he lived here, really? Was he the last Ty Smith’s son?
Grandson? An interested party who’d taken on the identity, like a hermit crab slipping into a new shell?
Why was no one curious about who Ty really was?
Was he a part of witness protection or something?
Why couldn’t he read? How could someone so clearly intelligent be illiterate?
Morgan was so, so curious, and if he had still been the him of six months ago, he would have gone after answers with unswerving focus and force, setting aside things like hurt feelings for the sake of discovery. But now …
Fuck it. He’d run here to hide from his past. How could he fault Ty for doing the same? Whatever his secrets were, Morgan preferred to learn them when Ty wanted to share them. It was the least he could do.
“I liked it,” Ty offered into the silence. “Being read to. Even though I didn’t understand the thrillers very well.”
Hmm, actually … “I could read some of my book to you,” Morgan offered.
“It’s called Wolf Dictionary. It’s by a woman named Jane Wodening; she was a hermit who lived in the mountains of Colorado for years and wrote a lot about the animals she lived near up there.
” It was the sort of book Bentley had teased Morgan relentlessly for liking: “Literary bullshit, you ought to be reading scientific journals so we don’t get surprised in the market,” but even when he was living the high life, a part of Morgan had always longed for nature.
Ty smiled, a broad, happy smile this time. It was so beautiful on his face that it took Morgan’s breath away. “I’d like that.”
“Okay, then.” He retrieved the book from the duffel bag himself, groaning a little at the stretch in his shoulder but glad he was able to bend down—that was a big improvement from even a few days back.
He sat down at the table again, stopped to sip his tea, and then moved back to the beginning of the book for Ty’s sake.
He cleared his throat and began. “Night. The moon half full. An inch or two of new snow on the mountains …”
Morgan got through the first chapter and expected to stop there, but when he finally looked up, Ty’s eyes were wide, his expression open and entranced.
For a second, his eyes almost seemed to flicker, like his pupils didn’t know whether to be big or small, but then he blinked, and the illusion was gone. “Will you keep going?”
Morgan glanced back down at the book. “You like it, then?”
“It’s beautiful.”
Oh. That was nice to hear—almost too nice to believe, honestly.
It had been a long time since Morgan had bothered sharing his likes or dislikes with someone, outside of a puff-piece interview, but if he could rely on anything right now, it was that Ty was being honest. He had no reason to pretend otherwise; the man didn’t seem to get bored.
“Sure, I’d be happy to.” He bent his head and read another chapter, then another, and finally stopped once his voice was hoarse, and his cup was empty.
Ty refilled it with water without Morgan having to ask, and they sat in companionable silence for a bit until he said, “Have you ever been to the place in the book?”
“What, Colorado?” Morgan shrugged. “A few times. Not this place specifically, but I’ve been skiing there, and I collaborated with some researchers in Boulder before when I—” He cut himself off, not wanting to get into anything to do with his former life, but Ty didn’t even seem to register the blip.
“I’ve never seen mountains before.”
Morgan stared at him. “What, really? But they’re so close.” Not the Rockies, obviously, but the coast wasn’t that far from the Cascades.
“I don’t like to be away from the water,” he said, finally looking away.
Questions piled up behind Morgan’s teeth, his interest in Ty taking a sharper turn now that he could keep his thoughts straight. He bit them back, though. He wasn’t going to repay the stoic silence he’d received when it came to his own past with being invasive about Ty’s.
“My sister’s kind of like that,” he offered after a moment. “She hates to travel. I don’t remember the last time she came to visit me out here; I think it’s when I was still in college.”
Ty gradually reoriented on him, and Morgan silently congratulated himself on finding a way back into conversation that Ty could tolerate. “Is that … Katherine?”
“Yeah, but she goes by Katie,” Morgan confirmed.
“She only came to the island, mmm, once. Right?”
“Right, when she was fifteen, and I was ten.” And Katie wouldn’t have come back then if she and Dad hadn’t been fighting so badly their mother was afraid to leave them alone in the house.
Apparently, he found her making out with her boyfriend, overreacted, and threw the kid out with a few punches for good measure, and then the kid’s parents called the cops.
It turned into a whole CPS investigation that Morgan barely remembered the outline of, but he did remember how tough his mother took it all.
Hence the trip, which Katie complained about the whole time.
“She’s happiest in the place she’s made a home,” Morgan finished.
“Mmm. Like a sea urchin.”
Unbidden, the image of his sister, with her wavy brown hair transformed into needle-like black spikes, came into his head, and Morgan started to laugh.
“Yeah.” He chuckled. “A lot like that, actually. She’s—she’s nice, she’s good to me, she’s a good person.
But she isn’t made for leaving home base very often. ”
Ty smiled. It was the first time Morgan had seen him smile, and it was … transfixing. It took a face that was handsome but cold and turned it into something bright, like the moon reflecting off water. Not warm, exactly, but welcoming.