Chapter 4
Kieran
The Friday doesn't happen. She cancels it by text — something came up, raincheck — and I know a retreat when I see one, because I've spent my whole life watching people back away from edges, and I let her have it, because the alternative is pushing, and I'd rather lose her slow than break her fast.
So I do the only thing I know how to do with a feeling I can't have. I burn it off.
I take every job. I take the jobs nobody wants — the dawn fuel runs, the all-night watches, the marina cleanup the morning after a storm dumps a half-acre of kelp across the docks.
I haul, I scrub, I fix, I lift. I show up before I'm asked and stay after I'm dismissed.
When there's nothing left to do at the compound I drive to the marina and find more, because the work is the only thing that quiets the want, and even the work only quiets it while my body's screaming, so I keep my body screaming.
It's an old strategy. It's the oldest one I've got.
When I was a kid and the wanting got bad — wanting a mother who wasn't coming back, wanting a father who wasn't capable, wanting out of a life that had already decided what I was — I learned you could outrun it if you ran hard enough.
You couldn't kill it. Rhett's right about that; it waits.
But you could exhaust yourself past the point where you could feel it, you could buy yourself a few hours of merciful numb, and a kid will take a few hours of numb over a whole day of wanting every single time.
So I built a body that could absorb punishment and a discipline that could deliver it, and now, twenty-four years old and aching over a woman I can't have, I do the only thing the kid knew how to do: I run until I can't feel my legs and I call it ambition.
It doesn't work. That's the difference between wanting a way out of a bad life and wanting her.
The bad life, you could exhaust into silence.
Her, I drag the want through every sandbag and every dawn run and every double watch, and it doesn't get quieter, it gets clearer, because the work strips everything else away and leaves just the want standing there in the cold, patient, lit up.
I've never wanted anything that survived the work before.
I don't know what to do with a thing that survives the work.
So I work harder, which is insane, which I know is insane, and I do it anyway.
Theo notices. Of course Theo notices. Theo notices everything; it's his entire job.
He catches me reloading the bed of the truck with sandbags at six in the morning after a night watch, and he stands there with his coffee and watches me for a while, and then he says, "You're working like a man with something to prove. "
"I'm a prospect," I say, not stopping. "I've got everything to prove."
"You've already proved most of it." He sets the coffee on the tailgate. "I sponsored you because I saw something. The work this last month — that's not the same as what I saw. That's something harder. You running from something or toward something?"
I keep loading sandbags. "Toward the patch."
Theo's quiet a beat. "Good," he says, and I feel like a traitor, because it's the truest lie I've ever told a man who trusted me. He picks his coffee back up. "Don't break yourself doing it. A dead prospect doesn't earn a patch, he earns a plot."
He starts to walk off. Then he stops, and turns back, and looks at me with those flat river-stone eyes that read men for a living, and for one bad second I'm certain he knows — that he's known the whole time, that the next thing out of his mouth is going to be her name.
"Whatever it is," he says instead, slow, "the thing you're running from.
You can tell me. I pulled you out of worse.
There's not a lot you could say that'd send me anywhere.
" A pause. "Door's open. That's all. I'm not gonna make you walk through it. "
And that — the door he leaves open, the trust in it, the man giving me a chance to confess and meaning it kindly — that's worse than if he'd hit me.
Because I look him in the eye, the man who reached into the cell, and I say, "Just the patch, Theo.
That's all it is," and I watch him believe me, and I go back to the sandbags, and the want gets clearer, and the lie gets heavier, and somewhere under both of them a third thing starts to grow that I don't have a name for yet, the thing that's going to make all of this impossible to keep running from.
He walks off. I load the truck until my shoulders give out and then I load it some more, and the want sits in my chest the whole time, patient, exactly the way Rhett said it would. Real things wait for you. He told me that on the gate in the dark, and he was right, and I keep hoping he's wrong.
Griffin's the one who calls it.
We're rebuilding a section of dock that the storm tore loose, just the two of us, driving new pilings in the cold with the gulls screaming overhead.
Griffin's good company for hard work — he doesn't fill the silence, and when he does talk it's worth hearing.
He's got his own history with this, everyone does, his prospect period tangled up with a marine biologist he's now disgustingly happy with, and somewhere around the fourth piling he stops, leans on the sledge, and looks at me with an expression I can only describe as pity dressed up as patience.
"It's the tattoo artist," he says.
I drive the bolt I'm working. "It's the dock."
"Kieran." He waits till I look at him. "I went through this. The wanting-something-you're-not-supposed-to-want thing. You think you're hiding it. You're not. You've got the exact face I had. Half the club's already running odds."
"There's nothing to run odds on."
"There's always something to run odds on.
That's what makes it the club." He picks the sledge back up.
"I'm not gonna tell you what to do. I'm just gonna tell you the work won't fix it.
I tried the work. Built a whole research station's worth of fixing-it.
It was still there when I put the sledge down.
" He drives the piling, one clean stroke, the muscles bunching in his back.
"Some things you can't outwork. You can only out-honest. Figure out what it actually is, and then have the guts to call it that, even if calling it that costs you. "
I drive another bolt. The cold's gotten into my hands and the rain's started again, fine and gray, and I think about whether to say the next thing, and then I say it, because Griffin's the closest thing to safe I've got out here.
"How'd you know? With yours. That it was the real thing and not just — wanting what you couldn't have.
Because that's a thing too. You want something more because it's forbidden.
The forbidden's half the heat. How'd you know it wasn't just that? "
Griffin's quiet, lining up the next piling.
"Fair question," he says. "Honest one. Most guys never ask it — they just decide it's love because love's the flattering answer.
" He sets the piling. "Here's how I knew.
The forbidden stuff, the heat off the wall — that gets less the more you're around the person.
You get close, the mystery burns off, and if it was only the chase, you're bored inside a month.
But the real thing goes the other way. The closer I got, the more there was.
Every conversation opened three more doors.
She got more interesting, not less. The wanting didn't burn off — it deepened, it got specific, it stopped being about the chase and started being about her, this exact person, the way she argues, the way she's wrong about things, the way she laughs at her own jokes before the punchline.
" He drives the piling home. "So that's the test. You spend more time with the tattoo artist and the heat dies down — it was the wall.
You spend more time and it gets deeper, more specific, more her — that's the real thing, and brother, you are in for a world of trouble, because the real thing doesn't quit. "
I think about three months of lessons. About how every single one made her more interesting, not less.
About how the wanting started as heat off a wall and turned, somewhere I can't even pinpoint, into something so specific it has her exact frown in it, the one between her eyebrows that she doesn't know she makes.
About how it deepens every time, never burns off, never quits.
"Yeah," I say. "That's — yeah."
"Yeah," Griffin agrees, not unkindly. "That's what I figured. Sorry, kid. Would've been easier on you if it was just the wall."
"And if calling it that costs everything?"
Griffin's quiet for a moment, the gulls wheeling above us, the cold coming off the water in sheets.
"Then you find out what you're actually made of," he says. "Which, between us — I think you already know. I think that's what scares you."
He's not wrong. He's so not wrong that I can't even argue, so I drive the next bolt, and the next, and we finish the dock as the light goes flat and gray, and I drive back to the compound with my hands torn up and my chest exactly as full as it was, and I think about being made of something, and I'm not sure I want to find out what.
I find out four days later, and I don't get a choice about it.
I'm at Black Tide Ink. I shouldn't be. The lessons are technically still on but they've gone careful and stilted since the Friday-that-wasn't, and I've been telling myself I come now to keep things normal, when really I come because I can't make myself not come.
Freya's working a walk-in — a tourist, sunburned, a guy in board shorts who's clearly been drinking on the pier since noon, getting some impulse design on his forearm that he's going to regret by autumn.
I'm at the window with my sketchbook. Everything's fine.
Then he doesn't like it.