Chapter 21
The Drive Back Inland
The first ordinary thing Nathan noticed was the sound of the car unlocking.
After hours of water, lanterns, cliffs, and the low authority of Dane's voice, the sharp chirp in the marina parking lot sounded almost vulgar. Marissa laughed once under her breath, not because anything was funny, but because the world had the nerve to resume itself in small mechanical noises.
Nathan opened the passenger door for her.
She paused before getting in. The parking lot lamps made her look different than she had on the boat.
Less enchanted, more human. Her hair was wind-tangled, her dress creased, her eyes tired and bright.
The moon had made her mythic. Fluorescent light gave him back his wife, which was somehow more dangerous.
"Are you all right to drive?" she asked.
"Yes." He looked toward the slip where the Midnight Mercy rested. Dane was no longer visible. "I'm awake in every possible way."
"That makes two of us."
She got in, and Nathan closed the door gently, as if she were carrying something breakable. When he slid behind the wheel, neither of them reached for the radio. The silence belonged in the car with them.
For the first ten minutes they drove through sleeping streets without speaking. The harbor disappeared behind low warehouses and dark restaurants. The smell of salt faded. Inland air returned, warm and dry and full of sprinklers, asphalt, and midnight lawns.
Marissa watched the passing lights. "I keep expecting to feel like we did something wrong."
Nathan kept both hands on the wheel. "Do you?"
"No." She turned toward him. "But I feel like we did something impossible, and now I don't know what to do with myself."
He almost made a joke. His old reflex came to the surface, eager and useless. He swallowed it.
"I know what you mean," he said.
"Do you want to talk now or wait until morning?"
That question would have annoyed him a year ago.
He would have heard it as an obligation, a marital worksheet, something that turned heat into homework.
Tonight he heard its generosity. She was not asking him to perform emotional fluency.
She was giving him the dignity of choosing when his nervous system could tell the truth.
"A little now," he said. "Not all of it."
Marissa nodded. "A little is good."
He took the freeway on-ramp. The road lifted, and for a moment the city opened below them, orange lights scattered across the dark like a cheaper imitation of stars.
"When he kissed you goodbye in the cabin," Nathan said, surprising himself by beginning there, "I thought I was going to break."
Marissa went very still.
"Not because you did anything wrong," he added quickly. "Because it was tender. I expected the jealousy to be easier if I could turn him into a villain or turn you into someone reckless. But it wasn't like that. You were careful. He was careful. And somehow that made it more real."
She reached across the console and placed her hand on his thigh, not high, not teasing, just present. "I felt that too."
"Felt what?"
"That tenderness made it harder to dismiss. If it had been some crude flirtation, maybe I could have laughed it away. But it wasn't crude. It was beautiful. That scares me."
Nathan breathed through the first hard flash of fear. "Do you want him?"
She did not answer quickly. He loved her for that and hated the waiting.
"Yes," she said at last. "But I want you to understand what that yes means before you decide it has ruined us."
"Tell me."
"I want the part of myself I felt with him. I want the way his attention made me aware of my own body, my own choices. I want the way you looked at me when you stopped trying to hide from it. Dane is part of that. I won't pretend he isn't. But he isn't the whole thing."
The lane markers flowed beneath the headlights. Nathan let the words land without rushing to punish them.
"I wanted you too," he admitted. "Not just as the man who touched my wife. I wanted his calm. I wanted his confidence. I wanted to be angry at him and couldn't quite manage it."
Marissa's thumb moved once against his leg. "That's a very honest thing to say."
"I'm trying to decide whether honesty is going to kill me."
"It won't."
"You say that like a woman who has not recently watched her husband hand her to a boat captain for a dance."
She laughed, and the laugh loosened something in the car.
"I wasn't handed," she said.
"No. You weren't." Nathan glanced at her. "That mattered."
"It mattered to me too."
They drove another mile in silence. This silence was easier.
At a red light near their neighborhood, Marissa looked down at her bare feet on the floor mat. Her sandals were somewhere in the back seat, forgotten beneath Dane's folded jacket until she had returned it before they left.
"Do we tell morning the truth?" she asked.
Nathan watched the light stay red longer than it had any right to. "We tell morning enough truth to keep us from lying by accident."
"What does that mean?"
"It means we sleep first. Then coffee. Then rules. Then maybe..." He hesitated.
"Maybe what?"
"Maybe we decide whether Saint's Mouth was a place we visited once or the first coordinate on a map."
The light changed.
Marissa leaned back against the seat, eyes shining in the dashboard glow. "You sound like him now."
"God help us."
She smiled. "I liked it."
Nathan drove them home with her hand still on his leg, the hidden cove no longer behind them, but beneath everything.