Chapter 11 #2
“Don’t quote me,” I said. “I’ll deny it.”
The hushpuppies arrived steaming in a basket.
Honey butter made its own small sin in the bowl, shining and soft.
I put one into my mouth and almost made an indecent sound.
It’s ridiculous the way fried dough can put a woman back into her body after a day like mine. Rib by rib, I felt the armor shift.
“Okay,” Tamika said, watching me with satisfaction. “Now that you’ve remembered you’re mortal, let’s talk about treading carefully.”
I rolled my eyes and popped another bite to keep from speaking. She took that as permission.
“You are a force,” she said, meaning it as both compliment and caution.
“When you decide something is wrong, you burn a path to the fix and take out anyone who stands in the way. It’s why we follow you onto beaches where tourists think they get a vote and why donors who came for a selfie leave with an empty checkbook.
But if you make the Navy the villain before you can prove it, you’ll lose them.
And you’ll lose McGuire. She’s a good one. ”
“I know,” I said, and did. The beer softened my voice. “I know.”
“Also,” Becca said, soft but not timid, “Ryker got us 7–Delta in forty minutes and Atlas’s guys stayed out of the camera shots without us asking.” She twisted her napkin, caught herself, smoothed it. “That’s … not nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” I agreed.
The music from the jukebox changed—something old and dirty-blues, a bassline that felt like sweat. The deck had begun to fill with men whose days had left lines on their faces and women who wore their heat like jewelry. The air moved slow. I let it.
“You’re thinking of him,” Tamika said as salt glinted on her brown skin. Her box braids were knotted high under a ball cap, and her shoulders held the square set of years on the sling. She spoke the way women who loved you did—stating it, not asking.
I stared at the river. Lying would’ve been an insult. “I don’t have his number,” I said, as if the lack of digits could hold the size of the problem. “Even if I did, I wouldn’t?—”
“Call him,” Becca filled in.
“Right.” I wanted the word to sound righteous instead of regretful. It didn’t. “He’s … Dominion Hall-adjacent, which means he’s Navy-adjacent.”
“Or he’s a man who was in your bed and said the word ‘breathe’ like a sacrament,” Tamika said, uninterested in letting me hide in hyphens.
“Tam,” Miguel said mildly, like a seatbelt.
“What?” She grinned. “I like poetry.”
I took a slow drink and didn’t argue with any of it. A gull strutted along the railing and considered our hushpuppies. I flicked a piece of cornbread off the edge into the water, and it dove after it. We applauded like idiots. Humanity returned to my bones, inch by inch.
We lasted almost thirty minutes without talking about strandings. It felt like a record. The second pitcher arrived. The light slid down the river and turned everything that wasn’t beautiful into something that could at least masquerade. My shoulders found a lower setting.
I tried on generosity toward the Navy the way you try on a dress a friend swears will suit you.
It pinched in places I didn’t want to admit I was soft, but it didn’t make me itch.
Parts of it even felt right—McGuire’s quiet competence; the way a nineteen-year-old sailor would obey a power-down call from a scientist he’d never met because his chief told him to; the memory of my father’s dictionary open at the edge of a spec book.
Maybe the villain wasn’t a uniform.
“What if,” I said slowly, tasting the words like a foreign spice, “they are not the ones this time?”
Tamika lifted her glass. “Then we slay the right dragon instead of the nearest.”
I clinked hers with mine and let the taste of the beer sit on my tongue.
Suddenly, the door banged open—bar-style, a little too hard. Warm night air followed the stranger inside. For a beat, the deck quieted, then the chatter surged back.
I looked up because I am a coward with a stubborn streak and I wanted to prove to myself that I had not been waiting.
He stepped in like gravity remembered him.
Jacob.
Black T-shirt, the same boots as last night, hair damp like the water had just had its say.
He stopped for half a breath at the threshold because the room did what it always does when a certain kind of man walks into it—it rearranged itself.
He let it, then moved. Not to the bar. Not to the jukebox.
Toward the space where I was trying to be a woman drinking beer with her friends on a weeknight.
Tamika’s knee touched mine under the table in a question. I didn’t shift.
He saw me the way a compass sees north—inevitable, unstartled. His mouth did that thing it had done under the portico at dawn, the smallest curve that felt private even when it happened in public.
“Shit,” Becca whispered, delighted and appalled. “He’s real.”
Miguel’s laugh was low and approving. “Of course, he is.”
Jacob stopped at the rail, and looked at me. Not past me. Not through me. At me.
“Evening,” he said, voice roughened by salt and wind and whatever he’d done with both since I’d left him at dawn.
My pulse did the thing I told it not to do.
The hush of the deck gathered and lifted. Behind me, Tamika swore softly in a way that counted as a blessing.
I did the only thing the day hadn’t bullied out of me: I inhaled slow, let it touch the places that had gone tight, and found I could hold both things at once—the work and the want, the science and the sin of being a person with a man friend who had just walked into my evening like he’d been invited.