Chapter 5
Josie
I break first. Of course I break first. I've never in my life been able to leave a thing unspoken once I've named it, and I named this one weeks ago, the night a winch slipped and a man who runs his yard like a closed hatch held my hand like it was made of glass.
He wiped the grease off my cheek and told me to shut the engine down and turned away, and I drove home shaking — not scared-shaking, full-shaking, the way you shake when something too big to hold is trying to get out of you — and I lay above the bait shop and I thought about all the careful reasons I'd built for doing nothing, the power dynamic, the checks, the best job I've ever had, and they were good reasons, they were real reasons, and they all turned to smoke against one plain fact.
He wiped the grease off my cheek with his thumb like it was the most important repair he'd ever made.
A man doesn't do that and not mean it. I've spent my whole life reading the truth of things by what they do instead of what they say, and Declan Harte conducts his entire interior life in actions — the cats, the light, the tool rack at my height, the three seconds across a bay, the thumb on my cheekbone — and every single action says the same thing, and I am done pretending I can't read it.
But I also know him now. I know that he will never, ever be the one to say it.
Not because he doesn't feel it — he feels it so hard it comes off him like heat off an engine — but because he's decided he's the one holding the line.
The older man, the boss, the one who tilts the floor if he reaches first. He's built a whole code around not being a fool about this, and the code will keep him silent until we're both old, until the wanting just calcifies into another ache he carries in his body like the shoulder and the lower back, a thing he never says out loud and lives with anyway because living with unsaid things is the only thing he's truly expert at.
I'm not going to let that happen. Not to him. Not to me.
So I wait until the yard's empty.
I do it on purpose, the timing — after hours, brothers gone, gate not chained yet, the old girl bobbing happy in her slip now and the dark coming down soft.
I find him in the office, doing the books, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead because he won't admit he needs them for anything but the small print.
He looks up when I come in. The hatch starts to come down over his face — the foreman, the what do you need — and I don't give it time to close.
"I'm going to say this once," I tell him. "So just — let me get it out."
He goes still. He takes the glasses off his forehead and sets them down, slow, and he watches me, and the office is small and the night is at the windows and somewhere out in the dark the old engine we resurrected sits quiet in the water.
"I have feelings for you," I say.
I watch the words land. I watch him not move.
"I know the age difference makes it complicated.
I know the work makes it worse — you sign my checks, I get that, I've thought about it more than you have, I promise you I've thought about it more than you have.
And I'm not standing here asking you to have it figured out.
I don't have it figured out. I'm not asking you to do anything about it.
" My voice does a thing, wobbles, and I steady it, because I came in here to be honest, not smooth.
"I'm asking you one thing. I'm asking you to be honest with me about whether this is just me.
Because I can do almost anything. I can do the age and the checks and the brothers and the whole town talking.
The one thing I can't do is be the only one feeling it and not know. So just — tell me. Is it just me?"
And then I stop, and I stand there in the worst thirty seconds of my life, because he doesn't answer.
He looks at me. He just looks at me, this big gray-bearded man behind a desk full of invoices, and the silence stretches and stretches and I feel the floor of my whole life tilt toward the answer I've been pretending I'm prepared for, yes, Josie, it's just you, you've imagined a man into the gaps where I never spoke, and I think I've made a catastrophic mistake, I've blown up the best job I've ever had over a thumb on a cheekbone, and I'm already rebuilding my life in my head, already packing the truck, already drafting the resignation, when he stands up.
He comes around the desk. Slow. The way he does everything that matters slow.
"It's not just you," he says.
His voice is wrecked. Low and rough and stripped of every defense, the foreman gone, the hatch off the hinges, just the man.
"It hasn't been just you," he says, "since the day you fixed your own damn roof."
And then I understand — the light, the very first morning, the forty-dollar shop light I wired in and the good fixture that appeared overnight with no note.
Since the day you fixed your own roof. He's telling me it started before either of us had a name for it, before the winch, before the cats, before any of it, that first day, when a stranger climbed his ladder and sealed his leaking seam and refused to be hazed out of his yard.
He's been carrying this since the first day.
He's been carrying it the whole time, in the only way he knows how to carry anything, in silence, in actions, in fixtures bought at his own expense and installed before dawn so I'd never have to ask.
He kisses me in the boat yard.
He's got grease on his hands — we both do, we always do, it's who we are — and he frames my face with those hands like he framed my fingers under the winch, careful, like I'm the thing he's most afraid of breaking, and there's uncertainty in his eyes even now, even doing it, a flicker of am I a fool, is this the thing they'll tell stories about — and I answer the uncertainty the only way I know how.
I kiss him back like a woman who knows exactly what she wants.
Because I do. I've never been more certain of anything than I am of this, of him, the most substantial human being I've ever stood next to, finally reaching for the thing he's wanted since the first morning.
He makes a sound against my mouth, low, like something giving way, like a seam letting go after twelve years of holding, and his hands slide back into my hair and the careful goes out of the kiss and it gets deep and real and a little desperate, two people who've been moving like one machine for weeks finally letting the machine do what it's wanted to do all along.
When we break apart we're both breathing hard. He rests his forehead against mine. His hands are shaking, just slightly — I feel it where they cradle my jaw — and that undoes me more than anything, that I can make this immovable man's hands shake.
"This is a bad idea," he says. But he doesn't let go.
"Probably," I agree. I don't let go either.
"You work for me."
"I know. We'll figure it out. Transparency, eventually, the right way. But not tonight." I press my palm flat to his chest and feel his heart going like a man half his age. "Tonight you just — let yourself have this. Can you do that? Just have it?"
He's quiet a moment. Then, gruff, almost shy, this enormous man being shy: "I'm out of practice."
"At kissing?"
"At having things."
And God, that breaks me a little, at having things, the whole sad architecture of the small defended life he built after Miranda laid out in three words. I kiss him again, soft this time, slow. "Then we'll practice," I tell him.
We make rules, after, standing in the dark office with the night at the windows.
We'll keep it private until we've thought it through — for the yard, for the brothers, for our own footing.
We'll do the work side of it right, eventually, the honest way, no hiding forever, just not blurting it into a clubhouse before we even know what it is.
And — his addition, gruff, careful, the older man's instinct still firing — we'll go slow.
"Slow," I agree.
"I mean it," he says. "You're twenty-six. I'm not gonna be the man who — we go slow. Properly. I'd rather do this right than fast."
"Slow," I say again, and I mean it too, in that moment, I genuinely do.
We last three days.