Chapter 6
Declan
We don't go slow.
I'd like to tell you we tried. I'd like to tell you the rules held longer than seventy-two hours, that two grown people who'd each separately decided to be careful managed to be careful for more than a long weekend.
But the truth is that the eighteen years between us turned out to mean nothing the second the door opened, because what's between us was never about age.
It was about a chemistry so close to the literal kind that I half expect us to give off heat you could read on a gauge.
Three days. Three days of the choreography turned electric, of handing each other tools and letting the touch last a beat too long, of catching her watching me across the yard and not looking away, of the most exquisite restraint I have ever exercised in my life, until the third evening, when the brothers are gone and the gate's chained and it's just the two of us and the old vintage girl rocking gentle in her slip, and Josie comes into the office to drop off the day's invoices, and she sets them on the desk, and she turns around, and she looks at me.
That's all it takes. She looks at me, and the restraint goes, all of it, three days of it, gone like a line parting under load.
I cross the office and I kiss her and it is nothing like the careful thing in the dark from three nights ago.
This is the seam fully gone, the hatch off and overboard, twelve years of a small defended life coming apart in the span of a breath.
She makes a sound into my mouth and her hands are already fisting in my shirt, pulling me in, and I lift her — easy, she weighs nothing to hands like mine — and set her on the edge of the desk, scattering the invoices we both stopped caring about, and she wraps her legs around me and pulls me in closer and I am lost, completely, a man who hasn't wanted anything this badly in a decade and is finding out he never stopped knowing how.
"Josie," I say against her throat, because I need to be sure, because even now, even gone, the older man in me has to ask. "Tell me to stop and I stop. Right now. Say the word."
"Don't you dare stop," she breathes, and her hands are at the buttons of my shirt, fast and sure, the same sure hands that diagnose an engine by feel. "Declan. I have wanted you since the day you welded that rack at my height and pretended you hadn't. Don't you dare."
So I don't.
I get her shirt over her head and she gets mine off my shoulders and then it's skin, finally, her bare chest against mine, the heat of her soaking straight through me.
Her palms drag down over my stomach, mapping, learning, nails grazing, and I feel every inch of it land like current.
My own hands are not steady. They're shaking the way they shook three nights ago when I framed her face, and she notices, she always notices everything, and she catches one of my hands and guides it up to cover her breast, pressing my palm flat so I feel her heart slamming under it and the tight peak of her against the center of my hand at the same time.
She arches into the touch and exhales like it cost her something.
"You're shaking," she says, soft, wondering, no mockery in it at all.
"I told you," I manage. "Out of practice at having things."
"Then have me," she says, and pulls my mouth back to hers.
I take my time even now, even desperate — that's the older man and I won't apologize for it.
I learn her by hand and mouth the way I learn everything, slow and thorough, finding what makes her breath snag.
My mouth at the curve of her neck, the spot below her ear, and she gasps and tilts her head to give me more, her fingers tightening in my hair.
Lower — the hollow of her throat, the rise of one breast, my tongue circling the peak until she swears under her breath — and lower still, my mouth tracing the soft line of her stomach while I work her jeans down over her hips and let them drop.
When I get my hand between her thighs she's already slick and hot for me, and the first slow drag of my fingers through her makes her hips jerk up off the desk.
I find the spot that makes her gasp and I stay there, circling, learning the exact pressure she wants, and then I slide two fingers into her, slow, feeling her clench tight around them, and she grabs my forearm — not to stop me, to hold on.
"Declan—"
"I've got you," I tell her, low, against her skin. "Let me. I want to feel it."
And I do — I work her with the same patient attention I'd give the most delicate repair of my life, my fingers stroking deep and curling, my thumb circling her where she's swollen and aching, reading every signal, every hitch and shiver, until her breathing climbs and her thighs clamp tight around my hand and her hips chase the rhythm I'm setting.
I feel her start to come apart from the inside, the slow clench going to a flutter, and I press in harder, faster, right where she needs it, and her whole body draws tight as a sprung line — and then it lets go, she lets go, clenching hard around my fingers and breaking apart with my name half-said on a sound I will hear in my sleep for the rest of my life, her forehead dropping to my shoulder, her breath ragged hot against my neck.
I work her gently through every pulse of it, my free hand spread wide and steady on her back, until she goes loose and warm and laughing — actually laughing, breathless and disbelieving — into the crook of my neck.
"Okay," she says, when she can talk. "Okay. That was — okay."
"Just okay," I say, and I feel her grin against my throat.
"Shut up and get the rest of your clothes off."
That's the first beat. There's a second.
Because the laughing tips back into wanting almost at once, and she's working my belt now, impatient, and I help her, and then there's nothing between us at all, and she pulls me in by the back of the neck and the desperate goes out of it for a moment, replaced by something slower and deeper and almost unbearable.
She holds my face in both her grease-stained hands and looks at me — really looks, the way she looked at the old vintage girl under the tarp, who'd let this happen to you — and whatever she's looking for she finds, because she nods, just barely, and breathes, "Come here. "
I do.
And when I push into her it's slow — God, the relief of it, the tight wet heat of her giving way around me inch by inch until I'm seated deep and we both go still, breathing, foreheads together, neither of us willing to move yet for fear of how good it already is.
Then she rocks her hips up against me and the stillness breaks.
I draw back and sink into her again, slow and deep, and her breath catches every time I bottom out, and we find the rhythm we always find, the choreography, only now there are no tools and no engine and no daylight, just the two of us moving like the one machine we've been all along.
I brace one hand on the desk and the other splayed at the small of her back, holding her exactly where I want her, working into her in long deliberate strokes, and she's got her ankles locked behind me pulling me deeper and her mouth at my jaw and she's saying things, half-words, yes and there, right there and my name, and I'm saying her name back like it's the only word I've got left.
It builds. It builds the way weather builds, the way I've felt it build in my bones since the first sunset with her résumé in my pocket, slow then all at once.
I change the angle, grinding against her on every stroke, and feel the moment it starts to take her — her nails dragging down my back, her breath going high and broken, her body gripping me tighter and tighter in slick pulses.
I hold the rhythm even as my own control frays, because I want this, I want to feel her come apart around me, and when she does — when she arches off the desk and clenches hard and breaks with my name on her lips for the second time, throbbing around me — the grip of her drags me right over the edge behind her.
I drive in deep and hold there, pressed as far into her as I can get, and let go, spilling into her in long shuddering waves, my face buried in her hair, undone, every careful defended wall of twelve years coming down at once in the wreckage of my own office desk.
After, we don't move for a long time. She's wrapped around me and I've got my face in her hair and her heart is slowing against my chest and the old vintage girl rocks gentle in her slip outside and the night holds the two of us in the quiet.
"So much for slow," she says finally, into my shoulder.
I huff the thing I do instead of laughing, except now it's a real laugh, low and easy. "Three days."
"Three days is a personal record for me, just so you know."
"Comforting."
She pulls back enough to look at me, and her hair's a wreck and there's a smudge of grease I left on her cheekbone with my own dirty hand, and she has never in her life been more beautiful, and the wanting's gone soft now into something steadier and more dangerous, something that's going to be much harder to walk away from than wanting ever was.
It should feel wrong. By every rule I numbered and recited — the years, the checks, the careful small life — it should feel like a catastrophe.
It feels like the most inevitable thing I've ever done.
The complications hit on the drive home, because of course they do. The body gets what it wants and then hands the bill to the mind, and my mind is forty-four years old and runs the numbers on everything.
She works for me. That doesn't go away because we want each other.
The club's going to have opinions, and a club's opinions have a way of becoming a town's opinions.
People will talk. They'll do the math the way I did it that first night, eighteen and twenty-six, and they'll decide what kind of man I am before they ask, and Josie — Josie will get the worst of it, the way women always get the worst of it, the girl who's sleeping with the old man who signs her checks, a sentence that would follow her up the whole coast.
I lie awake with all of it. And in the morning I drive to the yard early and I find that Josie does not, in fact, lie awake with any of it, because Josie's already there, already up the old girl's flank with a sander, and when I tell her — quiet, just the two of us — every consequence I cataloged at three in the morning, she listens, and then she sets down the sander and says, "I don't care about a single thing you just said. "
"You should care about some of it."
"I care about you caring about it," she says.
"That's different. You want to do this right — the work part, the honest part.
So let's do it right. But the town can have whatever opinion it wants.
I've been the girl people decided about before I opened my mouth my entire life, Declan.
I'm not going to start arranging my happiness around it at twenty-six. "
And there it is — the difference between us laid bare, the eighteen years right there in the open.
I carry every consequence. She carries none of them.
Not because she's naive — she's the least naive person I know — but because she's lived a whole life refusing to let other people's math decide her worth, and somewhere in the refusing she got free in a way I never managed.
So we decide on transparency. Not a clubhouse announcement, not a billboard — but no hiding, either, and the right people told the right way. Which means I tell Dominic.
I find him at The Crow's Nest and I sit down across from him and I say it plain, because Dominic's earned plain. "Josie and I are together. I wanted you to hear it from me before you heard it from Rhett's mouth, which gives me about a day."
Dominic looks at me for a long moment over his coffee. Then he says, "I know."
"You — of course you know."
"I knew before you knew, Dec. I handed you the résumé.
" The corner of his mouth moves. "She's the best mechanic you've ever had.
The work's better with her there, the yard's better, you're better — Maddox said you laughed.
Out loud. In daylight." He sets the coffee down.
"Don't screw it up. That's the whole speech.
She's good for the yard and she's good for you and if you let your own head talk you out of the first good thing in twelve years, I will personally throw you off the fuel dock. Are we done?"
"We're done."
"Good. Feed your cats." He's grinning now, the bastard, the same grin from the night at sunset. "You think I don't know about the cats."
Josie tells her mother that night, on the phone, and I'm there for it, sitting on the edge of her bed above the bait shop while she paces the little studio with the phone to her ear, and I can only hear her half, but her half is plenty.
"Mom. Mom, listen. No — Mom. I'm seeing someone.
" A pause. "He's — okay, don't freak out.
He's older." A longer pause, and Josie winces, and holds the phone away from her ear, and I can hear the tinny shape of a mother's interrogation across the room.
"Forty-four. Mom. Yes. Forty-four. He runs the boat yard, he's a founding member of the club, he's the best mechanic on this coast except me, and Mom—" she catches my eye across the room and grins "—he feeds stray cats every morning and pretends he doesn't."
Whatever her mother says next makes Josie go quiet and listen, and then she laughs — that big laugh, too big for the little room — and turns away from me, and says, "Mom. Mom. You have two questions. I can hear you lining them up. Just ask them."
A pause.
"Yes," Josie says. "He's good to me. He's the best man I've ever met, I told him so to his face, he didn't know what to do with it.
" Another pause, and she rolls her eyes, and answers what is clearly the second question, the only other thing that matters to a single mother who ran a charter business and a child on her own.
"Yes, Mom. He has health insurance. He owns the yard. He has health insurance."
And then she has to sit down on the bed next to me because she's laughing too hard to stand, this woman, laughing for a solid ten minutes at her mother's two questions — is he good to you and does he have health insurance — and I sit there with my arm around her and her head on my shoulder and her mother still talking tinnily into the phone, and I think:
I built a life I could keep. Small, defended, quiet. And I kept it for twelve years, and it was enough, the way one tired fluorescent light is enough to see by.
This is not that.
This is the whole bay flooded white.