Chapter 3 #2
“It’s almost like I know you.” He lifted one shoulder.
“Take her for a while. I’ve got a slip down by C dock.
It’s quiet there. There’s shore power. I replaced the bilge pump and the head last spring.
She’s ready to go. No pressure,” he added quickly, palms out like he was approaching a skittish horse.
“If you want to stay here, stay here. But if you want a door that closes on your own noise, I can give you that.”
I looked past him at the dark line of the horizon and the way the stars doubled in the sliding glass reflection.
I could already feel it—the way the world narrowed on a boat.
The way problems did too. Deck, lines, mast, hatch, stove, berth, the soft thump of a halyard in a night breeze. A map I knew in my bones.
“You sure?” I asked.
“Rios,” he said, amused now, “I am not only sure, I’m selfish. If you sleep, you will be human again, and then I can rope you into fixing my gate and hanging the cabinet doors I’ve been avoiding.”
Because I knew he expected it, I smirked. “Ah. There it is. The trap.”
“Always,” he said cheerfully. “What do you say?”
Inside, the bedtime story rolled toward its end. Caroline’s voice joined Aubrey’s, steady and warm. A page turned with a whisper. Someone giggled. Eli hiccuped and sighed.
I swallowed. “I say thank you.”
“Good.” He clapped his palms lightly on his thighs and stood. “We’ll walk down there after bedtime and make sure everything’s fired up. Lights, water, shore power. You can move in tomorrow if you want.”
“Tonight,” I heard myself say.
Hoyt’s brows lifted, but he only nodded, unperturbed. “Tonight, then.”
We sat a minute more, both of us listening to the end of the house’s evening song. My shoulders crept down a notch I hadn’t realized they’d climbed. Space. A place to put my vigilance without resenting the people I loved for being noisy and alive.
Caroline slid the door open with her hip and stepped onto the porch, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear.
Her pajama pants were sprinkled with cartoon lobsters.
There was a smear of something unidentifiable on her shoulder.
She was radiant with the kind of tired happiness that could only be earned.
“They’re down.” The gaze she turned on me was pointed. “You look a fraction less haunted. What did he say to you?”
“I offered him the boat,” Hoyt said.
Caroline’s face opened like the sunrise. “Oh, thank God. I was trying to figure out how to make that not sound like I was kicking you out.”
“You are not kicking me out,” I said quickly.
“Obviously.” She came to me and put her hands on either side of my face, thumbs sweeping the sweat at my temples, the way she’d done when we were kids after Dad slammed a door too hard and the house rattled. “You are loved here, siempre. But you also look like a man trying to sleep in a beehive.”
“That is an apt metaphor,” I said dryly.
“Then take the boat and get some quiet,” she said. “And come eat breakfast here in the mornings so I can see your face.”
“Deal.”
Her eyes searched mine. The part of me that had perfected the mask shifted, tried to slide it up. The other part—the one that had crossed an ocean for this porch—held still.
“You’ll tell me when you’re ready?” she asked softly.
“Yes,” I said. The word caught for a second. “When I’m ready.”
“Good.” She kissed my forehead the way Mom used to, like it was a blessing. “Go with your brother-in-law. I will not wait up because I will be unconscious in eleven minutes.”
She disappeared back inside with a little wave. Hoyt pushed up to his feet and offered me a hand I didn’t need but took anyway.
“Come on, sailor,” he said. “Let’s go turn on your lights.”
I followed Hoyt in my own truck. The drive took less than ten minutes, but it seemed like miles.
Distance enough that I could breathe. C dock sat farther from the streetlights, tucked behind a line of taller pilings where the bigger boats moored up in storm season.
Hoyt’s boat rode easy, the masts clean lines against the sky.
He stepped aboard first. I leapt up after, my legs automatically accommodating the familiar rock of hull underfoot.
The deck smelled of sun-warmed rope and fiberglass. A different kind of home.
Hoyt moved through the cockpit by habit, flipping switches, checking gauges. Shore power hummed alive. Cabin lights clicked on one by one, throwing warm pools across the teak.
I stood in the companionway and let my eyes adjust. Everything was tidy—of course it was—but not precious. A blue blanket folded on the settee. Two mugs in the galley rack. A paperback face-down by the little berth and a pencil trapped in its pages.
Hoyt ducked his head out of the forward hatch. “She’s all yours.”
“Thank you.” The words seemed inadequate, but they were all I had.
He took them as if they were more than enough. “I’ll help you haul in your stuff.”
“I’ll get it,” I said. “You go relieve Caroline from pretending not to wait up.”
He laughed. “She lasted two minutes past her prediction. She is definitely out.”
We stood there a little awkwardly, two men on a lit boat in a dark marina, and then he reached out and pulled me in for a hug I didn’t know I needed until the second it started. Solid. Brothers, if not by blood. He thumped my back once and stepped away.
“Good night, hermano,” he said.
“Night.”
He headed up the dock, whistling under his breath, a tune I couldn’t place. I watched him go until he hit the shadow line and disappeared.
I retrieved the bag with my essentials and went below.
I didn’t unpack. Didn’t do anything to settle in.
Instead, I turned off all but the little reading light near the aft berth, and sat on the edge of it with my feet braced on the floor.
The boat rocked, close and sure. The sounds I could hear here were mine to inventory: water, wind, a fender creak, the occasional distant laugh.
No monitor. No baby startle. No house bones.
Only a perimeter I could monitor without moving. Doors I could see from where I sat.
I set my phone face down. I didn’t need it to tell me anything right now. I stretched out and closed my eyes. For a long time, I breathed with the water. When my body startled, it had a place to land.
For the first time in too many months, the dark felt like a room instead of a field.
I slept.