26. Sabrina
— ? —
Sabrina
The yacht rocked gently beneath us as we motored out past Brant Point.
Killian had called it “testing a stabilization prototype,” which I’d known was complete nonsense the moment he said it.
But I’d played along, letting him help me onto the boat, accepting the blanket he wrapped around my shoulders, pretending I didn’t notice the nervous energy radiating off him in waves.
“So where exactly is this prototype?” I asked, settling into one of the deck chairs.
“Below deck. Very sensitive equipment. Can’t show you until we’re in open water.”
“That sounds made up.”
“It’s extremely real and definitely not made up.”
“You’re a terrible liar.”
“I’m an excellent liar. You just know me too well.”
The sun was sinking toward the horizon, streaking the whole harbor gold and pink and orange. The water sparkled with reflected light, and the familiar shape of Nantucket grew smaller behind us as we headed toward the outer harbor.
I’d been on this boat before, years ago, when we’d borrowed it from one of Killian’s business contacts for an anniversary trip. We’d anchored in a private cove and made love on the deck under the stars, and I’d thought then that life couldn’t possibly get any better.
It had gotten worse instead. And now, somehow, it was getting better again.
The engine cut out, and we drifted to a stop in the middle of the harbor. The sudden silence was almost startling after the constant thrum of the motor.
“So,” I said. “The prototype?”
“Give me a minute.”
Killian disappeared below deck, and I sat alone watching the sun sink lower. The sky was shifting from gold to deep orange now, the first hints of purple appearing at the edges.
The deck lights came on.
Not all at once, but in a sequence, a pattern that rippled across the deck in waves. At first I thought it was just decorative, some kind of preset light show he’d programmed. But then I looked closer, and my breath caught.
I knew this pattern.
It was data. Specifically, it was the visual representation of data from my first published paper, the signal processing work I’d done in graduate school.
The peaks and valleys of the light sequence matched the waveforms I’d spent months analyzing, the patterns I’d identified that had launched my entire career.
He’d translated my research into light.
“Killian,” I breathed.
The speakers crackled, and a small voice filled the air.
“Mommy?” Ivy’s voice, pre-recorded, bright and excited. “Daddy says your brain is his favorite machine. He says it does things nobody else’s brain can do. And he says I’m lucky because I get half my brain from you, which means I’m going to be really smart too.”
I was crying before she finished the sentence.
Killian emerged from below deck. He was wearing a slightly rumpled button-down and dark pants, and his hair was doing the thing it did when he’d been running his hands through it nervously.
He looked terrified.
“I had help,” he said, gesturing vaguely at the speakers. “Tessa recorded her while I was setting up the boat. Ivy thought it was a game.”
“You translated my research paper into a light show.”
“I thought you’d appreciate it. The mathematical elegance of the visual representation, I mean. The way the patterns translate across different mediums.”
“That’s the nerdiest romantic gesture anyone has ever made.”
“I know. I’m aware that I’m deeply weird. But I figured you already knew that when you married me, so there was no point in trying to be normal now.”
He walked toward me, and I saw that he was holding something in his hand. A small velvet box, worn at the edges in a way that suggested it had been handled many times.
He stopped in front of my chair and, with more grace than I would have expected from someone his size, lowered himself to one knee.
“Killian.”
“Let me do this.” His voice was shaking slightly. “Please. I’ve been rehearsing all week and I’ll forget everything if you interrupt me.”
I pressed my lips together and nodded.
He opened the box. Inside was a ring I recognized immediately.
We’d designed it together years ago, during one of those late-night conversations that happened when we were too happy to sleep.
We’d sketched it on a napkin, debated the details, argued playfully about stone size and band width.
We’d never actually had it made. It had been a dream, a someday, a thing we’d do when we had more time.
He’d had it made.
The ring was simple and perfect, exactly what we’d imagined. A modest stone in a setting that was elegant without being ostentatious. I couldn’t see the engraving on the inside, but I knew it was there. Our private joke, the one nobody else would understand.
“I’m not asking you to marry me,” Killian said. “We’re already married. We’ve been married for seven years, and for at least two of those years I’ve done a spectacularly bad job of being worthy of that commitment.”
“Killian-”
“I said no interrupting.” He took a breath.
“I’m not asking for a wedding. I’m asking you to choose me.
On purpose. Every day, for the rest of our lives.
I’m asking you to let me spend however many years we have together making sure you never dim for me again.
I’m asking you to believe that I can be the man you deserve, even though I’ve given you plenty of reasons to doubt it. ”
He lifted the ring from its box.
“Sabrina Kerrington. Will you choose me?”
“Yes.” The word came out broken, tangled with tears and laughter. “Yes, you absolute idiot. Of course I’ll choose you.”
He slid the ring onto my finger with hands that trembled slightly, and then he was standing and pulling me up and into his arms, and I was laughing and crying and calling him names while he held me tight.
“I love you,” he said into my hair. “I love you so much it doesn’t fit in words.”
“I love you too. Even though you’re weird and you make light shows out of data and you keep lists about everything.”
“Those especially,” he said, and kissed my forehead.
The sun had almost disappeared now, the sky deep purple and scattered with the first stars of evening. Killian led me below deck, where the small cabin was lit with candles and the bed was made up with what looked like every pillow on the boat.
“You planned this,” I said.
“I may have done some advance preparation.”
“How did you know I’d say yes?”
“I didn’t. But I hoped.” He turned to face me, his expression suddenly serious. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. We can just lie here and look at the stars if that’s what you need.”
“That’s not what I need.”
I reached for him.
The kiss started gentle, exploratory, two people relearning each other after time apart. But it deepened quickly, hunger building beneath the tenderness, and soon his hands were sliding under my sweater and mine were working at the buttons of his shirt.
“Slow,” he started to say against my mouth. “I want to take my-”
“I have waited weeks,” I said, and got a fist in his shirt and pulled until the buttons gave. “You can take your time on the second one. Right now I need you to stop being careful with me.”
His restraint snapped clean through at that. The reverence didn’t leave his face. It just caught fire. “Okay,” he said, low and rough. “Okay. Not careful. You’re going to regret giving me permission.”
He got me out of my clothes fast, but he still stopped for each new stretch of skin, pressing his mouth to it as though he couldn’t stop himself. My collarbone. The curve of my breast. The slight swell of my stomach where our baby was growing.
“Mine,” he said against my skin, rough with it. “Every time I look at you I can’t believe you’re real, and you’re mine.”
“I’m very real.”
“I know. That’s what makes it incredible.”
He lowered me onto the bed and settled over me, his weight braced on his arms. The candlelight threw shadows across his face, and I traced the familiar lines of his jaw with my fingertips.
“Say it,” he said, thumbing my jaw. “Out loud. I want to hear you ask for it.”
“You. Just you.”
He kissed me as though he could get inside me through my mouth, and his hands stopped being gentle and started being greedy, palming, gripping, learning me back by feel.
He found the places that made me gasp, the spots that made me arch off the bed, and he was already breathing like he’d run here, his heart slamming where my hand had flattened against his chest, right over my own name.
“I love the sounds you make,” he said, his mouth moving down my neck. “I love that I can read your body better than any data set I’ve ever analyzed. You’re my favorite equation, Sabrina. The one I’ll spend my whole life solving.”
“That’s nerdy.”
“You love it.”
“I do. God help me, I do.”
His mouth reached my breast and I stopped being able to form coherent sentences. He teased and tasted until I was writhing beneath him, my hands fisted in his hair, desperate for more.
I was slick and swollen and clenching around nothing, my hips chasing a friction he kept just out of reach, and when his fingers finally dragged through me he groaned, the wet heat of it almost too much for him. “Christ, Sabrina. You’re soaked.”
“Then do something about it,” I said, and dragged his mouth back to mine.
“Now,” I said against his mouth. “No more waiting. I need you in me.”
He reached between us and positioned himself, then paused, his eyes finding mine in the dim light.
“I love you,” he said. “More than data, more than logic, more than anything that makes sense. You’re the variable I can never solve for, and I never want to stop trying.”
He pushed into me in one long stroke that punched the air out of both of us, seating himself deep, and my head fell back against the pillows, the thick stretch of him dragging a broken sound out of me before I could catch it.
“That’s it,” he breathed. “Christ, the way you take me. Seven years and it still knocks the sense clean out of me every single time.”
Then he moved, and there was nothing slow about it.
He set a pace that had the bed knocking against the hull, one hand fisted in the pillow by my head, the other hauling my hips up to meet him, and he talked the entire time, filthy and wrecked.
“That’s it, take it. Christ, you’re so tight around me I can barely think.
You feel that? That’s all me, that’s how deep you take me. Don’t you dare stop making that sound.”
His pace kept climbing, relentless now. “I want to feel you fall apart with me this deep in you,” he said against my jaw, past caring what he said. “Soak me. Fall apart and let the whole harbor hear who’s doing it to you.”
The first one caught me with no warning at all, snapping through me so hard I sobbed his name into the cabin. He worked me through it and never once let up.
“That’s one,” he said, his voice rough. “I want another out of you. Give it to me.”
“I don’t know if I can-”
“You can. You’re going to give me one more if I have to work it out of you.” His hand slid down between us. “Look at you, still dripping for me. Come on.”
He changed the angle, hitting something that made me buck up off the bed, and this time I didn’t bother staying quiet. There was no one for miles, and he’d earned every sound.
“That’s it. Give it to me. I’ve got nowhere else to be.”
The second one built slower, a deep, dragging pull he seemed to feel coming, gentling and then driving into it to stretch it out until I couldn’t take any more. When it finally broke it wrung me out completely, and he let go right behind me with a groan I felt in my own chest.
We lay tangled together afterward, breathing hard, our bodies slick with sweat in the warm cabin air.
“Right,” he said eventually. “The divorce paperwork.”
I laughed weakly. “What about it?”
“We should probably call off the lawyers. Unless you want to file just so we can have makeup sex again. Because this was really good makeup sex.”
“I’m not paying Victoria Pryce’s hourly rate for foreplay.”
“Fair point. Expensive foreplay.”
“Very expensive.”
He shifted so he was looking at me, his expression suddenly serious.
“Okafor gave me homework this week,” he said. “She wants me to tell you when I’m struggling instead of building you something to make up for it. She says the building is a dodge.”
“She’s not wrong.”
“She has never once been wrong, and it’s insufferable.” He exhaled. “I adjusted the medication, too. The dosage was too low. It’s helping with the hyperfocus, or at least it’s helping me hear the timer.”
“You didn’t tell me about the dosage.”
“I wanted to show you instead of just talking about it. But I also want you to know that I’m doing it because you’re worth having a brain that stays in the room. You’re worth rewiring every dysfunctional pattern I’ve ever developed. You’re worth everything.”
I reached up and kissed him, soft and unhurried.
“I believe you,” I said.
And I did. Finally, completely, I did.