Chapter 29
NATALIE
After, the house had gone so quiet I could hear the rain ticking itself smaller on the window. We lay there, my ear on the thick drum of his chest, his palm spread over my ribs.
I tipped my head back and found his eyes. “For the record,” I said, voice scratchy and content, “that was very, very good. And also—two days ago it might’ve killed me. Good thing you vanished.”
His laugh shook under my cheek. “I was thinking the same thing halfway through,” he said, and the corner of his mouth crooked. “Pearl would’ve walked in and shot me.”
“She’d have used a penlight as a weapon,” I said. “Non-lethal, but humiliating.”
We were grinning like fools, and then the grin folded into something steadier. He tucked a damp curl behind my ear, thumb pausing at my temple like a question. “How’s the head?”
“Quiet,” I said. “No drum solo. No fireworks. Just one very bossy metronome that sounds like a nurse I know.” I breathed in, caught the clean after-sweat of his skin and the lingering hint of his soap, and let the breath out slow. “Don’t disappear like that again without giving me more warning.”
“I left because of you,” he said simply. “And I came back because of you.”
“I know.” I let that sit between us, true and heavy and not a chore to carry. “Still. Next time, leave a breadcrumb. Or a bear claw.” I lifted the pendant where it lay on my sternum and knocked it gently against his dog tags.
He nodded once, the kind of agreement that sounded like habit forming. For a minute, we didn’t talk. We just learned the new quiet of sharing air in my little house as if it had always been ours.
“Okay,” I said at last, because my brain, rested and fed and slightly ruined in the pleasant way, wanted to make a plan. “Next steps.”
He cut his eyes toward me, amused. “Are we in a staff meeting?”
“Always,” I said, then softened it with a kiss to his collarbone. “What does life look like, if I win?”
“You mean when,” he said, which made something in my chest purr.
He rolled to face me, propped on an elbow.
“It looks busy. No, it looks … guarded. Schedules. Security you’ll hate until the first day you’re grateful for it.
A thousand people asking you for five minutes.
And me figuring out how to be a wall where you need one and a window where you don’t. ”
“Windows,” I said. “I like that word.”
“Me, too,” he said. “I don’t want to be a shadow that worries your team. I don’t want to be the story. I want to keep you alive and make a home that makes the job survivable.”
“And be my sex,” I said, very serious. “Don’t forget that bullet point.”
“Duly noted, Madam Mayor.”
I traced the line of his jaw with one finger, the roughness of the day already shading back in. “Reporters asked me today whether Dominion Hall would bankroll me,” I said. “On camera. Like they were hoping I’d flinch hard enough to make a sound bite.”
“What’d you say?”
“That romance doesn’t sandbag streets,” I said, and watched the laugh fight to stay out of his eyes and lose.
“That this race is about drains and buses and a city that tells the truth. I didn’t say anything about money.
Because I’m not entirely sure yet what the right words are.
I’m not looking for a sugar daddy in a Greek Revival. I’m not looking to be anyone’s mascot.”
“They haven’t offered,” he said, voice flat enough to be metal. “Maybe they will. If they do, it won’t be about owning you—it’ll be about testing what kind of Dane I am.”
“And?” I asked quietly.
“The kind who knows the difference between protection and control,” he said. He watched me watch him. “If it comes, we set the terms. We can say no.”
“We’re going to say no when we need to,” I said, half smile. “To everyone. Equally.”
He reached out and tugged the sheet up over my shoulder, an old-fashioned gesture that made me feel new. “There will be implications,” he said. “Whether I like it or not. Whether you do or not. Dominion Hall changes a room just by existing. If you and I exist in it together—”
“Then we over-disclose,” I finished. “We write it down. We publish who I meet with and why. We recuse where we need to. We take the small ethics class nobody makes us take. And if Dominion Hall wants to give, they give through the channels everyone else uses. No envelopes. No winks. No boys’ club handshakes. ”
He nodded. “I’ll say it to them before anyone else asks: I won’t be the reason anyone doubts your decisions.”
“You won’t,” I said, and I let him hear the certainty in it. “They’ll try to make you. But they can’t if we don’t give them a handle.”
He blew out a breath and let the weight of it go. “What else?”
“Everything,” I said, and rolled onto my stomach so my chin propped on my hands and I could see his whole face without craning.
“I want you to go to Holly Hill. I want you at Granddaddy’s table before the week is out, eating cornbread and collard greens and arguing with him about zoning like that’s foreplay, because apparently in my family, it is.
I want you to meet my dad and see his studio and smell the turpentine and the oranges he uses to clean his brushes.
I want to stand in front of his big, messy canvases and confess the parts of my childhood that belonged to the city and the parts that didn’t.
I want you to know every last boring thing about me. ”
His eyes went softer and darker at once. “I’ll go tomorrow,” he said. “Tonight, if he’s awake.”
“Tomorrow,” I said. “Tonight I want something ordinary and pretty. Dinner somewhere I’ve loved since the city learned how to spell my last name.”
“Name it.”
“The Painted Crab on Shem Creek.”
“The one with the shrimp boats and the boardwalk you like?” he asked. He had listened when I rambled once about the way the light lays down flat on that water at dusk.
“That one,” I said. “I’m going to show my Montana boy what God meant when He invented seafood.”
He pretended to look nervous. “I’ll do my best with the little forks.”
“You’ll get one mallet,” I said. “Swing responsibly.”
He sobered a touch. “The cameras will follow.”
“They will,” I said. “That’s the new normal. If we run, we run straight through it. Let them film the part where we order hushpuppies and tip well and you pick shell out of my hair.”
“Okay,” he said. “We set our own story.”
I sat up, reached for the robe slung over a chair, and cinched it. “On another topic—the trip idea?”
“What trip?” His eyebrow lifted.
“Before the election,” I said. “Two quick runs, three days each, tops. Not junkets. Working trips. On my dime or the campaign’s if we do it right.
Miami-Dade and New Orleans, maybe. Or Norfolk.
Places that have had to grow up fast about water.
We talk to their public works, their planners, their neighborhoods.
We steal good ideas and credit them. We bring cameras because I’m national right now whether I like it or not, and if they’re going to point them at my mouth, I’m going to use it. ”
He watched me, the faintest smile. “You want to turn the love story into homework.”
“Exactly,” I said, delighted he understood my particular kink.
“If a network wants a segment, they can stick a chyron that says: Boring Heroics Tour. We’ll make ‘preparedness’ trend for a minute.
And when I say we need to move money from pretty to necessary, I’ll be standing on a pump house in a city that already did and lived to tell the tale. ”
He nodded slowly. “We’ll need to plan it so no one can say you’re campaigning on someone else’s tax dollars.”
“Kimmy will die of joy building a compliance spreadsheet,” I said. “You’ll meet me at Gate B while hiding your knife in your boot because you don’t trust the TSA.”
“I trust them to miss the knife,” he said, and I laughed into his shoulder because the joke wasn’t entirely a joke.
He caught my face in both hands and kissed me, not the way that had erased my brain before, but like a normal person who had time. It felt so bare I could have cried. “We’re going to be okay,” he said into my mouth.
“We are,” I said, and let myself believe it.
We dressed like people who had a reservation.
I tugged on a green dress and a denim jacket because Charleston doesn’t like you to look too serious.
He pulled on a clean button-down that made me want to be rude to it later and boots that had survived worse creeks than Shem.
I did mascara I wouldn’t regret in the salt air and slid the bear claw back under the collar where it could be private.
He watched that, the way men who notice do, and said nothing, which somehow said everything.
On the porch, the evening smelled like washed wood and tide. The cameras across the street lifted as if on a string. We didn’t flinch. He took my hand like we were a normal couple in a normal town going to dinner on a normal night, which is to say, he took my hand like it was a fact.
Shem Creek had been its own mood as long as I’d been alive—shrimp boats bobbing like old men in church, gulls rude, dolphins lurking like insiders who already know where the good fish is.
The Painted Crab sat blessedly between fancy and picnic, a place that made you feel like a local.
The host did the polite-panic thing when we walked in, then remembered hospitality like a muscle and smiled wide.
“Out on the deck?” he asked.
“Always,” I said.
They put us by the rail. The rain had finally given up—just rinsed air and a faint, clean hush left behind.
The marsh went green to pewter as the light slid.
A pelican did an impression of a dump truck into the water and came up triumphant, looking pleased and prehistoric.
A couple at the next table whispered and tried not to stare and then stared anyway when Ethan helped me sit as if my ankles were made of antique glass.
“You’re going to make every woman in Charleston raise the bar,” I murmured.
He looked drily pleased. “Good.”