Chapter Six – Crew #2
My shoulder cooperates, mostly. Sweat is good.
It makes the body honest. I check the time every ten minutes and pretend I’m not.
I shower, do the thing where I stare at the mirror and give speeches I’ll never admit to, pull on the navy Henley Lila calls “the bay during a murder plot” (rude), and the boots that make me taller when I don’t need to be.
The lighthouse appears exactly where it always is and somehow closer.
The bay looks like a sheet of slate on which someone wrote secrets.
Her porch light is on. The shop glows behind the glass.
I park, breathe, do a shoulder roll to keep the tremor away, and walk like this isn’t the most consequential small distance of my adult life.
“Hi,” she says at the door, and it hits me in the spine.
“Hi,” I say, because apparently that’s our entire vocabulary when it matters.
“You brought tea?” She eyes the thermos.
“Damn, I forgot.”
“On brand,” she teases, flipping the sign to CLOSED. “Come on.”
We climb—spiral, breath, hand on rail. My palm hovers behind her back and never touches because restraint is religion tonight.
The lantern room greets us the way an old dog greets a child—tail thumping, polite, hopeful.
Her rug is a dare. She sits cross-legged, and I swear my pulse calibrates to the length of her exhale.
We pour. We drink. The air smells like fall and storms that haven’t decided yet.
“Honest questions,” she says, and it isn’t the news. It’s the law.
“God,” I say. “Okay.” I set my cup carefully because my hands aren’t the steadiest.
“Why didn’t you stop it?”
I thought she’d ease me in. She doesn’t. It’s very Bailey to rip the bandage when I’ve brought extra gauze.
“Because I was a coward,” I say, and it’s almost a relief—the word finding air. “Because the room was louder than I was brave. Because I thought if a crowd loved me, the one person I wanted to love me would feel obligated to catch up.”
Her eyes don’t flinch. She takes it like she takes rope—measured, strong. “You hurt me.”
“I know.”
“Do you still have it?” she asks, and the question lands gently and surgically.
“Yes,” I say, because there’s freedom in not lying to yourself or to the woman who might still own you. “It goes with me everywhere.”
Something in her breath stutters and then smooths. “I hated you.”
“I earned it.”
“Good,” she says, and there’s the ghost of a smile that doesn’t make it past her mouth. “Now we can stop pretending to be polite.”
We talk. About then. About now. About how silence is also an answer, and how we both gave too much of it.
She tells me about winter break and how leaving for two weeks felt like two years because the town kept asking her questions like quizzes, and she failed all of them.
I tell her about the hit that ripped my shoulder and a part of my certainty, and how the silence after the crowd gasped felt like the first time the world told me maybe not you.
“Are you afraid?” she asks.
“Every minute,” I say. “Of doing it wrong again. Of loving the idea of you more than the person in front of me.” I run a hand over my jaw because it feels like the only true gesture left. “I don’t want to put you on a shelf. I want to stand next to you and be useful.”
She watches me like she’s grading a paper, and I might pass if I show my work. “What are you afraid I’ll do?” she asks.
“Fold,” I say, and she blinks. “That you’ll fold yourself small to make me fit. That you’ll give me the lighthouse and leave yourself in the dark corners.”
“Crew.” She says my name like it’s heavy and she’s strong. “Rule one: I don’t fold. I reorganize with extreme measures.”
“Hot,” I say, because the alternative is crawling across the rug and learning the taste of her shoulder, and we’re not doing that yet.
She rolls her eyes, fondness smudging the edge. “Rule two: if you want to touch me, you ask. Out loud.”
My spine goes electric. “Out loud.”
“So I can say yes,” she says, more serious now, “and you’ll know it’s yes.”
“Rule three?”
“No assumptions,” she says. “About the past or the future. I decide what forgiveness looks like. You decide what you can carry. We both decide if we’re building something or playing house.”
“Building,” I say, instantly. She looks relieved and annoyed that I didn’t agonize. I grin. “What? I’m decisive about two things: breakfast and you.”
“That’s unfortunate,” she says, smiling despite herself. “I’m complicated.”
“I like complicated,” I say. “It keeps things interesting after the awkwardness.”
She laughs and presses her palm to her mouth like she can keep it in.
Her eyes are warm and dangerous. Somewhere out over the water, a buoy clangs.
The windows hum in their frames like a satisfied cat.
We drink more tea. We read a page each from a book about people who almost ruin it and don’t—because they choose to be grown instead of dramatic.
We don’t kiss. Every cell in my body yearns for it, though.
When we finally stand, it’s slow. Gravity changes when you leave a room that holds a version of you you like.
Down the spiral, her sleeve brushes my arm, and restraint becomes an Olympic sport.
At the counter, she slides two cookies into a paper bag and writes RULES on the front, underlining it with a flourish like an executioner with manners.
“Same time tomorrow?” I ask, light so she can say no without bruising anything.
“Maybe,” she says, which is woman for yes, if you don’t screw up between now and then. “If you’re good.”
“Define ‘good’.”
“Honest. On time.” She tilts her head.
“Always.”
At the door, I do the thing I’ve been practicing all night: I ask. “Can I touch you?” The words feel like they cost something and buy everything.
Her chin lifts. “Where?”
“Your waist,” I say, voice dropping without my permission. “For two seconds.”
She thinks about it like a jeweler, like a captain, like the woman she is when she’s deciding whether to open a door and let a man inside her house and her life. “Two seconds,” she says.
I step closer, set my palm lightly at the warm place between the sweater hem and the pants, and the universe changes shape. I don’t pull. I don’t push. I just learn the temperature of her bare skin. One. Two. I drop my hand and step back before I make a menace of myself.
“Good night, Crew,” she says, soft and seismic.
“Good night, Bailey,” I say, and it tastes like belief.
Outside, the air is cooler, the fog gathering itself into a low, thoughtful animal.
I stand on the porch long enough to memorize the sound of her turning the lock and the way the lamp inside paints gold into the doorway like she’s made of it.
My truck engine coughs awake. I pull out and don’t turn on the radio because I want to hear the world think.
Halfway home, at the overlook where the road shoulders out, I park and kill the lights.
The newer lighthouse throws its beam across the bay, slow and steady, like a promise practiced into muscle memory, while Bailey’s smaller lighthouse shines a beacon barely discernible to any passing boats.
I take out my phone. Her name sits there, simple and dangerous.
I type I can still smell the book pages.
And you. The letters gleam back like they want to be history.
One tap would do it.
I don’t tap. I watch the words breathe on the screen and then erase them, letter by letter, a small act of worship to a bigger thing—patience, maybe, or respect, or the way my mother told me to show up with my whole chest and not my highlight reel.
The message box goes blank. The want doesn’t.
Good. Let it live. Let it make me better or make me wait or both.
The night air is cold enough to bite. I roll the window down and breathe until the ache settles into a bearable shape.
The light sweeps the bay, again and again like a heartbeat.
When I finally pull back onto the road, I say it to the dark, to the water, to the boy I was and the man I’m trying to be, a line that’s been sitting inside me like a compass. “Stay gold, B.”
I don’t send anything. I don’t need to. The light’s already carrying it.