Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
SAGE
Finn goes off the rope swing before anyone’s called ready, and I laugh so hard I nearly drop Briar’s lead.
He hits the water in a cannonball that soaks Cora from twenty feet.
She’s already screaming his name and wading toward him with murder in her eyes before he even surfaces.
I stand there on the bank with my boots still on and realize I haven’t laughed like this, this loose and stupid and easy, in longer than I want to count.
Sunday. Day after the fundraiser, same as every year of my life I can remember, and this is the first one in two years I haven’t had a legislative session or a headache conveniently scheduled for exactly this morning.
Nobody made me explain the other two summers. That’s the strange mercy of a family, blood or married, that loves you enough not to ask the question they already know the answer to.
I felt it this morning, saddling up at the stables before any of this.
Briar sidestepped under me when I swung up, and I settled deep, and my whole body reminded me, sharp and immediate, exactly which lady parts were making me sit a little careful.
Behind the Dead Horse against cold brick, his mouth rough against my throat, my legs locked around him while somebody’s smoke break interrupted and didn’t stop either of us.
Then hours later, in our own bed, slower, filthy in a different key, him telling me exactly what he wanted before he took it, both of us sweaty and slippery with love by the time the moon rose outside the window.
I was sore in a way that had nothing to do with riding and everything to do with a husband who does not believe in half measures. I bit down on a smile and nudged Briar forward before anyone could read my face and ask why.
The lake sits in a cirque of granite an hour up from the boundary house, high enough that snow still clings white in the shadowed couloirs above the far shore even in July, feeding the water down through channels that never fully dry up.
A second lake waits twenty minutes further up a rock shelf, smaller, colder, the kind of place you only bother with if somebody dares you.
This one’s ours, all of ours, has been since Knox and Holt and I dragged all the Sullivan kids up here the summer I was thirteen, because Rimrock in mid-July gets unbearable and somebody had to show them where the good water was.
Fuchsia monkeyflower crowds the shoreline right where my boots land, wet and bruised-looking under the spray kicked up by the fight already breaking out over the donut float.
Lupine runs purple through the meadow behind it, and somewhere past that, Indian paintbrush burns red and coral in patches like somebody scattered embers through the grass and forgot to put them out.
The water’s so cold that steals your breath on entry and turns your whole body electric within ten seconds, deep enough in the middle that Knox used to swear there was no bottom and none of us ever proved him wrong.
Finn’s brought an inflatable donut float strapped to his saddle like contraband, hot pink and entirely too large for a horse to carry with any dignity, and the second he’s got it inflated he’s paddling out to the middle of the lake declaring himself king of something nobody agreed to.
Tate and West and Wyatt converge on him with the kind of focus usually reserved for federal indictments, and Tate finally gets a hand under the float’s far edge and pitches him straight into the lake.
“Betrayal,” Finn sputters, coming up gasping. “I fed you last night.”
“You fed me free pie from Nell.”
“Details.”
Cricket loses her mind at the shoreline, barking at every splash like she’s personally offended by the chaos, darting in ankle-deep and retreating in the same three seconds, over and over, a red blur of righteous fury nobody can convince to actually get wet.
Felony stands at the tree line twenty feet off, unbothered, methodically stripping leaves off a low branch like the whole lake could catch fire and he’d still finish his lunch first.
Knox and Maren float out past the worst of the splashing, her arms looped loose around his neck, his hands settled easy at her waist like they’ve got nowhere else in the world they’d rather be treading water.
They were supposed to be in Belize by now, some overwater bungalow Maren wouldn’t stop talking about for a month before Robbie Vásquez vanished and left his blood in his truck and put a hold on everyone’s plans, and then Dawson and I got married three days later and buried their honeymoon under our wedding on top of it.
Nobody’s heard either of them complain once.
Knox says something against her temple and Maren laughs, head tipping back, sun catching the water dripping off her jaw, and the two of them look so thoroughly, uncomplicatedly happy that it puts an actual physical ache in me to watch it.
I want that. The thought arrives before I can stop it, sharp and jealous.
Not the easement, not the alliance, not the version of my marriage that still runs on strategy and spy conditions and careful calculations even in a granite lake an hour from anyone who’d report back.
That. Whatever Knox and Maren have, worn easy as an old shirt, nothing put on for company.
I don’t know if Dawson and I will ever get there.
I’ve had enough doubts about it in enough quiet hours to fill a legal pad.
I’m not sure a body that’s spent years locking every door against him will open just because he learns to knock again.
I’ve had lovers since him, plenty, none of them careless choices, and I never once let a single one all the way in.
Dawson broke something in me the first time, cleanly enough that it sealed shut rather than healed, and I genuinely don’t know if what’s growing between us now is strong enough to work its way past scar tissue that old.
I want to believe it can. Wanting isn’t the same thing as knowing.
Holt sits at the edge with his boots off and his jeans rolled, Mackenzie’s head against his shoulder, both of them watching the chaos with the serenity of two people who’ve spent enough of their week in actual danger that this, watching idiots fight over a pool float, counts as the good kind of vigilance.
Tessa finds me on the bank before I’ve got my boots fully off, drops down beside me, and doesn’t bother easing into it.
“You’re back.”
“I’m back.”
“I’m not going to make it weird.”
“You’re already making it weird.”
“I just missed you. Sue me.” She bumps her shoulder into mine, easy, no weight behind it at all, which is why it lands. “The lake’s not the same with only half the Blackwaters showing up.”
“I had reasons.”
“Two summers is a long time to keep missing the one day a year everybody shows up.” She says it lightly, watching Finn get flipped off the donut a second time, not quite looking at me. “I’ve got a guess why. I’m not going to make you confirm it.”
I don’t have an answer for that, so I don’t reach for one.
I just watch Dawson wade out past the shallows, blue swim shorts riding low on his hips, water climbing his stomach, the same body that kept me up half the night, and I take a deep breath and let the nervousness loosen. I’m here. It’s going to be a fun day.
“You’re staring,” Tessa says.
“I’m supervising. Somebody has to make sure Finn doesn’t drown.”
“Sure. Supervising.”
She doesn’t push it further. She just grins, wicked, and goes to referee whatever new crime is unfolding around the donut float, and I peel my boots the rest of the way off, then my shirt and jeans after them, down to the white bikini underneath.
Months of yoga before sunrise, trail runs I’m now making time for, hours a week in the saddle with Briar, all of it shows in the lean, toned line of my stomach and my legs, and I feel healthy in my own skin in a way I haven’t in years.
I smile and let myself have an afternoon that doesn’t require a strategy.
We slip away a little after two, when the cooler’s half empty and everyone’s loose on cheap beer and sunburn, deep enough into a game of chicken that nobody really tracks two horses peeling off from the tree line. Finn does.
“Where are you two sneaking off to?” he hollers, cupping both hands around his mouth for maximum carry. “Don’t come back with wildflowers in places wildflowers shouldn’t be!”
“Ignore him,” I tell Dawson, not turning around, heat climbing my neck anyway.
“I usually do,” Dawson calls back, easy, over his shoulder. “It’s part of his charm.”
“That’s not a no!” Finn’s voice chases us halfway up the trail before the trees finally swallow it.
“There’s somewhere else,” Dawson says, quiet, already reaching for Bravo’s reins. “If you want to see it again.”
I know which somewhere he means before he finishes the sentence. My stomach clenches like it did the first time he ever said it to me, twenty years old and reckless and certain nobody would ever find out.
We ride the fork nobody else ever took, up past the second lake’s turnoff and along a game trail so faint it barely counts as a trail at all.
Dawson takes point without discussing it, the same automatic read of ground he brings to every room he walks into, checking the tree line twice before he lets Bravo pick up the pace.
Twenty minutes later the trees open onto a smaller pool fed by its own thin waterfall, granite walls close enough on both sides that the whole place feels like a room somebody built on purpose and forgot to tell the rest of the world about.
This was ours the summer I turned twenty, and standing at the edge of it now with a marriage license between us, I have to stop and just breathe through what it does to see it again.
“You kept coming back,” I say.