Chapter Twenty-four – Crew
I spend the first hour fixing the back gate I promised Bailey I’d repair, which is a metaphor I don’t have the energy to unpack. The hinge is stubborn. So am I. When it finally gives, the satisfying pop is almost obscene.
Bailey leans in the doorway with a glass of lemonade that would shame the sun. “Look at you,” she teases. “Handyman heartthrob.”
“I’ll have you know I’m multitalented.” I lift the drill like a trophy. “Gate whisperer, scone consumer, amateur ring-light assassin.”
She bites her smile and passes me the glass. Our fingers brush. That familiar voltage runs my spine like a fast route. The porch is empty. The town has jobs and casseroles to deliver. For the first time in days, the lighthouse feels like it’s just ours.
“Close the door,” I say.
Her brows flick up. “Bossy.”
“Focused.”
She steps back, toe nudging the door shut. The latch clicks—the one I replaced, the one that doesn’t rattle now when the wind has opinions. I set the drill down and take two steps, erasing the distance.
We’ve been living in borrowed moments—stolen kisses between hearings and press calls, a hand on her back while she reads, a forehead press that says more than any speech—because chaos has been loud and we’ve been louder. Now the quiet stands up and stretches and asks if we remember how to use it.
“Hi,” she says against my mouth.
“Hi,” I answer into hers.
It feels different after saying it on camera, after the pier, after the warehouse. Not heavier—truer. She curls a fist in the front of my shirt and pulls me with the confidence of a woman who made a town bend and a corporation blink.
We don’t race. We drift, bumper boats/carousel horses/something with bells and a slow smile.
Her back finds the wall. My hands find the curve of her waist. The room finds a warmer temperature than the thermostat suggests.
She tastes like lemon and stubborn. I kiss the laugh from the corner of her mouth and the worry from the line between her brows.
She slides her palms under my shirt and relearns a map she’s already memorized.
“Door’s locked,” she murmurs, breath tickling my throat. “Right?”
“Double,” I promise, and press a kiss to the hinge of her jaw because it makes her shiver. “Triple if you ask nicely.”
“You think I ask nicely?” She hooks her fingers in my belt loops and walks me backward, slow as a hymn, toward the stairs. “I make lists.”
“Bossy,” I repeat, and let her win.
We climb, kissing like we have time now—like the world isn’t waiting downstairs with consequences and calendars.
The lantern room windows make small, square paintings of the bay, lightning stitching silver through the water.
The floorboards creak like they’re rooting for us.
In the bedroom, the cat does us the favor of leaving, tail high, like he refuses to participate in our poor choices.
Her sweater comes off; my breath does, too.
I don’t rush. I want her aware of every second of it—my hands sliding up her sides, my thumbs tracing the familiar lines I’ve missed more than I let myself admit.
I kiss her shoulder, the hollow of her collarbone, the inside of her wrist where her pulse is writing my name.
She laughs when I drop a kiss just below her ear; I laugh when she noses along my jaw and finds the place that makes my knees consider surrender.
We’re careful with my shoulder and reckless with everything else.
“Crew,” she whispers when I slow down on purpose, mouth hovering at her sternum, hand warm and steady at her hip. There’s a plea in it. There’s power, too. She’s not shy with me anymore—not hiding in any of the places she used to keep quiet.
She drags me up by my shirt and kisses me like gratitude and challenge at once, like she’s daring me to keep control.
I answer by backing her toward the bed, letting her feel the promise of what I’m not giving yet.
Her fingers clutch at me, impatient now, and the sound she makes when I break the kiss to trail my mouth lower is worth every second of restraint.
We fall together, air knocked out in the best way.
It’s heat and hush and the sheet tangled in my calf.
It’s the kind of closeness that makes words useless and makes breath do the talking.
When she arches, I cover her mouth with mine to catch the sound; when I groan, she bites my lip like I’m a secret and she’s bad at keeping them.
We hover right up against the line we promised to imply and stay there—delicious, relentless. My hand slides under and up; hers answers, nails grazing down my back. The room smells like salt and us. The world narrows to a pulse we sync without trying, a rhythm that feels inevitable.
Clothes end up in random piles across the room. My cock eases into her slick center like it’s found its way home. My heart lurches in overwhelming feelings with every thrust. And when we both fall over the edge, I can’t imagine being anywhere else.
After, we don’t spring apart. We melt. My forehead rests against hers. Her fingers draw lazy circles at my nape. I count the beats in my chest and realize they’re not sprinting—they’re steady. That terrifies me in a way that feels like joy.
“You’re dangerous,” I tell her, voice rough.
“Occupational hazard,” she says, smug and wrecked.
“We’re keeping the door locked,” I decide.
“Until lunch,” she agrees, and then remembers she owns a business. “Or until Ivy breaks in with muffins.”
“She would.”
We lie there, the ceiling fan whispering encouragement, and talk about nothing—lists for the week, the inspector’s surprisingly poetic signature, the way Rowan’s goat ate a cease notice like performance art. We don’t talk about Nashville yet. But the conversation moves toward it like a tide.
She traces the tape peeking from under my shirt. “You have the call with the GM tomorrow.”
“I do.”
“And you know what you’ll say?”
“I do,” I say, because I promised her slow and honest, and I intend to be both. “I’m not taking the mentor role because it’s cleaner for the press. I’ll take it if it’s right for me.”
“And if it’s not?”
“I walk,” I say, and feel the weight and light of it together.
“I stay here more. I work the farm. I try my hand at commentating games; maybe broadcasting. I coach the high school kids if Coach Allen will let me. I read to otters with a British accent and let the internet roast me. I fix every hinge in this place twice.”
She smiles without looking at me, which means it’s the kind that belongs to herself. “I won’t let you give up something you love out of fear.”
“And I won’t keep something that only loves me when I’m useful.”
We go quiet. The wind fingers the lighthouse skin and makes the glass hum. The water hisses against the rocks like a whisper you tell yourself when you’re brave.
“I want you here,” she says, voice so soft I might be the only one who ever gets to hear it. “But not if here means small.”
“Here is not small,” I say, and kiss her knuckles for emphasis. “Here is precise. That’s harder.”
She turns her head and meets my mouth with hers like we’re signing something sacred. Then she sighs and rolls out of bed, sheet wrapped around her to preserve a shred of dignity we burned an hour ago. “We should open.”
“We did,” I murmur, not moving.
“Crew.”
“Fine.” I sit up, wince fresh, grin anyway. “I’ll make the porch respectable while you pretend to alphabetize and actually read.”
“Accurate,” she says, and kisses me once more, quick, like a tip.
Downstairs, the day resumes its small-town shape.
Lila organizes a volunteer list with the quiet ferocity of a general.
Ivy prints REOPENED signs that feature the otter puppet in a hard hat.
Rowan replaces two loose shingles on the back addition while Dean times him and yells splits.
Mrs. Winthrop returns with actual legal counsel (“He’s very handsome,” she confides, “and knows what a variance is.”).
The inspector drops by “just to say we’re on the schedule,” and leaves with a lemon bar because kindness is our favorite weapon.
The GM calls earlier than expected. I take it on the side steps, looking at the water because it keeps my jaw from doing things my temper will regret.
“We want you,” he says. “But the room changed. You know that.”
“I do,” I say. “So let’s change with it.”
Pause. Papers shuffle. Someone murmurs offscreen. “You’re proposing…?”
“I come in as QB2 when needed,” I say. “Half season. I mentor Jax, not as a prop, but because he’s good and deserves someone who actually cares.
I get Tuesday-Thursdays flexible so I can be in Coral Bell Cove when we have major town events—yes, I said town events—and you stop putting my personal life in your PR decks. ”
He laughs like he respects me against his will. “That’s a lot of leverage for a guy with a shoulder the papers say is ‘hot garbage.’”
“Then don’t take it,” I say calmly. “But it’s the only way you get me and the town in the same season without wrecking both.”
“We can commit to a window,” he hedges. “Maybe not that wide.”
“Then commit to honesty,” I counter. “If I’m a brand to you, say it to my face. If I’m a man, treat me like one. If you want the comeback story, you get the parts that happen off the field, too.”
He sighs. “You were easier when you just threw.”
“I was worse,” I say.
“We’ll talk at the facility in three days,” he decides. “Bring your proposal. Bring your conditions.”
“I’ll bring scones,” I say, and hang up.
Bailey steps out with two paperbacks and Holly Golightly sunglasses, which she wears only when she’s feeling chaotic. “How’d it go?”
“They want me,” I say. “I want me, too. We’re negotiating.”
She hands me a book. The Art of Slow Miracles. “Homework.”
“Fair.” I tap the other paperback. “That one for me, too?”
“No,” she says sweetly. “That one’s to prop the door.”
Afternoon softens into the kind of light that makes everything look like a photograph you keep on your fridge with a dumb magnet. Kids come in for popsicle-bright picture books.
At five, a delivery I didn’t order arrives: a new sign for the shop, hand-carved, gilt edges, elegant script.
A note: From anonymous donors who think your door should shine as stubbornly as your light.
Bailey runs her fingers over the letters like braille.
“We can accept this,” she decides, “because sometimes strings are just ribbon.”
“Sometimes,” I agree, and don’t tell her I know exactly which billionaire and which pop star paid for it, because the point is that they did it quietly.
Dusk finds us on the dock with takeout in boxes and bare feet on wood still warm from the sun. The water has turned the color of a good bruise. The lighthouse beam ticks its metronome. The town is a murmur behind us.
“We’re winding down,” Bailey says, like a promise she’s testing out loud.
“Soon,” I say. “Not tonight.”
She tips her head onto my shoulder. “One more storm?”
“Probably,” I say. “One more negotiation, one more hearing, one more man who thinks he can narrate us better than we can.”
“And then?”
“And then ordinary,” I say, like it’s the fanciest thing I’ve ever ordered.
“Porch dinners. Friday night games, even if I’m on the sideline.
You pretending you don’t need help with inventory, and me pretending I don’t love being asked.
Goat invasions. Ivy’s songs. Lila’s lists.
The cat hating me with dignity. Us, tired in good ways. ”
She’s quiet long enough to make me nervous. Then she says, “Make me a list.”
“Of?”
“Ordinary.”
So I do, whispering it into the bay like a vow.
“You in that cardigan with the elbow patch you refuse to fix. Me fixing it just to make you mad. Waking up to your hair trying to fight the pillowcase and losing. You reading to me on storm nights. Me reading to you when your voice is tired. Soup on the stove that ruins the wooden spoon. Your grandfather asleep in his chair and snoring like a tractor, and we love him more for it. A porch swing that doesn’t squeak because I got it right the second time.
The lantern room staying dry because we did the roof and because I learned how to say ‘we’ without choking.
A kid from town showing up with a football and a question and me saying yes.
You handing me a paperback and saying, ‘This one will hurt, but in a useful way.’”
Her hand finds mine and squeezes once, then twice. Morse we invented for ourselves. Yes. Yes.
We eat. We laugh. We behave indecently for a minute when the moon climbs, and the pier is empty, and the wind covers our sighs.
It’s heat and implication and the sweet feeling of her tucked against me, breath in my neck, my palm spread over her stomach like a promise.
I tuck her under my arm and stare at the black ribbon of the horizon and think of the boy I was who thought legacy was a stadium, and the man I am, who knows it’s a porch light and a stubborn bookstore and a woman who kept a note that once made her small and turned it into a lighthouse.
“Tomorrow,” she whispers.
“Tomorrow,” I echo, and for the first time in a long time, it sounds like a place instead of a delay.
On the walk back, my phone pings with a calendar alert I forgot I set months ago: Nashville – Report to camp. I stop under the streetlamp and stare at it. Bailey watches me watch it.
“You can say no,” she says.
“I can say not like that,” I answer, and swipe away the alert. “I can say I’ll come, but I will not leave.”
She links our fingers. “That’s a very Coral Bell Cove kind of sentence.”
“It’s a very you sentence,” I say.
Back at the lighthouse, the porch light burns steadily. We climb the steps, and before we go in, she stops and pulls me by my shirt into a kiss that feels like punctuation. Not a period—an em dash. A continuation.
“Lock the door,” she murmurs against my mouth.
“Deadbolted,” I promise.
We let the night have the town. We keep the lighthouse for ourselves. And somewhere between the second laugh and the third kiss, winding down stops sounding like an ending and starts sounding like the right kind of beginning.