Chapter 7 #2
The string lights overhead grew brighter as the sky bled from gold to rose and down into a deep bruised blue, and two docks over a band tuned up and slid into something with a fiddle at the heart of it.
Dash reached across the table and took my hand.
There was no production in it. Just his thumb moving slow across my knuckles while he talked, his eyes never leaving my face, and I let him.
The wine warmed me from the inside and the creek slid by underneath us and his hand was a heavy, certain thing around mine, and the whole rest of the world drifted off somewhere past the marsh grass and felt like nowhere worth going back to.
He talked. He just never talked about himself.
I watched the light move on the planes of his face, the scar along his jaw gone soft in it, and I thought, this is the most dangerous thing I have ever done. More dangerous than the cases I’d recently worked. I’d almost lost my life. But this man could take everything else if I wasn’t careful.
We split a slice of key lime pie, and then Dash paid and we carried a half-asleep French bulldog back down to the boat in the dark.
The run home was slow. There was no hurry in him.
The motor murmured low and the warm wind came off the marsh smelling of salt and mud and the green of growing things, and I sat close beside him in the cockpit with my shoulder against his bare arm because the night had cooled just enough to make me want to.
Chowder snored in his vest on the cushion behind us.
The lights of Grimm Island sat low on the black horizon.
“Where do you live?” I asked. “I’ve still never seen your house.”
It came out of me before I’d realized it. The wine, maybe. Or the dark. The dark makes people brave about things.
His hand stayed easy on the wheel. “We passed it not long after we left the island this afternoon.”
Did that mean he didn’t live on the island? Or did it mean he lived in one of the expensive waterfront homes hidden in the marsh with the private docks?
A channel marker blinked red, then dark, then red.
“You could see it,” he said, and his voice had dropped into something lower, warm as the wind off the water. “Tonight. If you wanted to.”
There it was, laid out between us, gentle as anything and twice as dangerous.
I wasn’t a girl. I knew that going to that house tonight had nothing to do with admiring his furniture.
I knew that once I crossed that threshold there’d be no more pretending, no more careful kisses on the piazza and good nights at the door.
My whole body leaned toward yes, same as the boat had leaned into the wind that afternoon, eager and reckless, and the wanting of it was so sharp it frightened me.
But underneath the wanting, quiet and stubborn as a stone in a shoe, sat the thing I couldn’t shake.
The boat I hadn’t expected. The key card at the marina gate.
The ease in his hands and the years it spoke of, none of which he’d ever explained to me.
A man who had lived in New Orleans and Seattle and who knew where else.
A man whose secrets were tucked into an envelope in my kitchen drawer.
I wanted him. God help me, I did. But I couldn’t give him my body while my gut sat in the dark whispering you don’t know him, you don’t know him, you don’t know him.
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to,” I said. “But I’m not the type of woman to give something like that without strings attached. And I’m not sure you’re at that point.”
I said it evenly, without any accusation in my voice. If I was going to give my whole self, I expected him to give his whole self too.
He was quiet a moment. I braced for the coax, the easy charm, the gentle push men give when they decide no is just a yes that needs talking into.
It didn’t come.
“Okay,” he said. Just that. He reached over and tucked a salt-stiff curl behind my ear, his fingers trailing down the line of my jaw, and there was no sulk in it anywhere I could find. Only that careful tenderness that undid me worse than wanting ever could.
He throttled down to nothing and let us drift. The marsh breathed around us, frogs and the small slap of water against the hull, and the last light bled out of the sky and left us in soft blue dark with the stars coming on thick overhead.
Then he turned to me and took my face in both his hands and kissed me.
It wasn’t like the kisses on the piazza, the careful ones that started slow and built.
This one started already burning. His mouth was warm and certain and asked for nothing and gave everything, and I rose into it without meaning to, my hands finding the bare warm skin of his chest, his heart slamming under my palm as hard as my own.
The wind moved over us. The boat rocked us together.
He made a low sound against my mouth that I felt clear to the soles of my feet, and his hands slid into my ruined hair and held me like I was the only thing keeping him fixed to the earth.
When he pulled back he didn’t go far. He kept his forehead against mine, both of us breathing like we’d run a mile, his thumbs moving slow along my cheekbones in the dark.
“You scare me,” he said.
“I scare you.” It came out shaky. “That’s a fine thing to say a woman.”
“I mean it.” His voice had gone rough at the edges, stripped of all that easy control he wore like a second uniform.
“I’ve spent a long time keeping my guard up.
About everything. About everyone. It’s what kept me alive.
And then you walked in with your red lips and your ridiculous dog and your whole stubborn heart, and you got right past it. ”
The water lapped against the side of the boat.
“I think I’m in love with you,” he said.
The words landed soft and hit hard. I hadn’t been braced for them.
“Dash—”
“Let me finish. I’ve been turning it over for weeks, trying to talk myself out of it, and I can’t.” His thumb moved against my cheek. “I didn’t come here looking for this. I came here to do a job and keep my head down and not get tangled up with anybody. And then there was you.”
I waited for the rest. For the but. There was always a but with Dash, the place where the story stops just short of the part that matters, where the wall should be and there’s only a curtain.
It didn’t come. He just looked at me, and that was somehow worse, because a man with nothing to hide tells you the whole of a thing, and Dash had handed me the front of it and gone quiet exactly where I’d learned to expect him to.
I sat there in the dark with his hands on my face and felt my eyes go hot.
He’d given me the truest thing he’d ever said to me, and I believed it down to the marrow.
That was the trouble. I believed the love and I still didn’t trust the silence wrapped around it, and I hated that the two could live in me at the same time without canceling each other out.
“Dash,” I whispered, and didn’t know how to follow it.
“You don’t have to say it back. I didn’t tell you so you would.” His thumb caught a tear I hadn’t felt fall. “And I didn’t tell you to get you into bed. I told you because I want you to know you’re important. And that this is worth waiting for.”
I kissed him then, soft, the only answer I could make, and he gathered me in against his chest and held me, and we stayed like that a long while with the island a low string of lights on the horizon and the whole sweet, impossible, half-lit shape of us rocking gently on the tide.
Then he started the motor and took us home, and I rode the rest of the way with my head on his shoulder and Chowder snoring behind us and my eyes on the stars, and the envelope in my kitchen drawer sitting in the back of my mind the whole way like a lamp I’d forgotten to turn off.
I was starting to wonder how long I could stand at a door he kept locked, hoping he’d open it before I had to.