Chapter 8
Declan
The old girl splashes on a Saturday in June, and half the town comes to watch.
We've named her — Josie's choice, painted in gold leaf across the transom in a hand that took her three tries to get right — Second Wind.
It's on the nose, and Josie knows it's on the nose, and she did it anyway, looking at me sideways while she laid the brush down, daring me to say something about a sixty-year-old boat brought back from the dead being named for a thing that comes after you thought the air was gone.
I didn't say anything. I just put my hand on the small of her back, in front of God and the whole yard, and let that be the thing I said.
The travel lift cradles her out over the water, and the slings groan, and the brothers go quiet the way you go quiet when something you watched die comes back, and then the hull touches and lifts and floats — clean, dry, sitting on her lines exactly the way her builder drew her sixty years ago — and the whole marina cheers.
Dominic's there, and Piper, and Rhett and Maddox and Toby who's grinning like he built her himself, and a crowd of marina people and townsfolk who came for the spectacle of a wooden boat that shouldn't exist anymore gliding into the bay.
Josie's mother flew up for it — she got in last night, a wiry sun-cured woman with Josie's exact laugh, who took one look at me and said, "So you're the one with the health insurance," and I knew right then where Josie got it all from.
Josie and I stand at the end of the dock, shoulder to shoulder, watching Second Wind ride at her new mooring with her topsides gleaming and her brightwork throwing gold, and I think about the night under the work lights when the engine first caught, when I cheered for the first time in a decade, when she told me I was the best man she'd ever met and I didn't know what to do with it.
I know what to do with it now.
"Driftwood Point," I tell her, low, while the crowd's still cheering. "Tonight. Just us."
She looks up at me. "What's at Driftwood Point?"
"You'll see."
Driftwood Point is the high ground at the north end of Anchor Bay, a clifftop of wind-bent pines and bleached deadfall where the land just stops and hands you over to the ocean.
There's no marina here, no dock, no work — that's why I picked it.
Everything Josie and I have is tangled up in the yard, in grease and invoices and an audience of brothers, and I wanted, just once, to be with her somewhere that asks nothing of either of us. Somewhere that's only ours.
I bring a blanket and a thermos and I don't tell her why, and we hike up in the long June dusk with the light going from gold to rose to the deep blue that comes just before the stars, and we sit on the bluff with the whole Atlantic spread out flat and darkening below us, and the air smells like salt and warm pine pitch and the day cooling off, and for a while we don't talk at all.
I've been carrying the words up the hill the whole way.
They're heavier than the blanket and the thermos combined.
I haven't said them in twelve years — not to Miranda at the end, not to anyone, the kind of words a man stops being able to find after he decides they cost too much.
I've turned them over all afternoon, looking for the right setting on them, and there isn't one, there's no spec for this, so I just turn to her in the blue dusk and I say it the way I say everything that matters.
Plain.
"I love you."
Josie goes still.
"I haven't said that to anyone in twelve years," I tell her, because she should have all of it, the whole weight, no skimming.
"I stopped being able to. I built a life where I wouldn't have to.
And then you climbed up on my roof your first day and fixed a leak nobody asked you to fix, and I've been losing the argument with myself ever since.
" The ocean breathes below us. "I love you, Josie.
I'm too old to say it and not mean every pound of it.
So that's — that's the truth. That's where I am. "
For a second she doesn't move, and the older man in me has half a heartbeat of pure terror, the same terror as the office that first night, what if it's too much, what if forty-four years of meaning it is more than twenty-six wants to carry —
"I love you too," she says.
And then she's laughing and crying at the same time, this woman, and she takes my face in both her hands the way she always does, and she says it again, fierce, like she's been waiting to: "I love you.
God. I've loved you since the tool rack, I think, since you welded it at my height and wouldn't admit it — I love you, Declan Harte, you impossible put-together man, and I'm not too young to mean it either, so we're even. "
I kiss her on the bluff with the last of the light going out of the sky and the first stars coming up over the water, and it's nothing like the desperate thing in the office three weeks ago.
There's no clock on this, no door anyone might walk through, no three days of held-back hunger snapping all at once.
There's just the two of us and the whole patient ocean and all the time in the world, and the kiss goes slow because for once nothing is rushing us, deep and unhurried, a kiss with no edge to it because we're not falling off anything anymore. We've landed.
We undress each other slow, in the blue dark, the warm June air moving over skin, and it's deliberate in a way the first time couldn't be — that first time was a line parting under load, all release; this is a thing built by hand, on purpose, with care.
I lay her down on the blanket with the pines whispering overhead and I take my time the way I take my time with everything that matters to me, and there's no audience and no clock and no reason on earth to hurry, so I don't.
I learn her all over again, slower, by starlight instead of work lights.
My mouth at the warm line of her throat, the pulse there, and she sighs and arches up into it, unhurried, meeting me.
My hands map every inch of her like I'm fairing a hull, palms flat, reading the shape of her, then closing warm over her breasts, thumbs brushing the peaks until they tighten and she shivers under the slow drag of them and says my name soft into the dark.
I kiss down the center of her, the sternum where her heart beats steady now instead of wild, the soft of her stomach, lower, and when I settle between her thighs and put my mouth to her — tasting her, slow, my tongue moving in unhurried circles against the slick heat of her — she gasps and her hand comes down into my hair, not pulling, just holding, anchoring herself to me.
I take my time. I've got nowhere to be and nothing I want more than this, so I work her gently with my tongue and then slide two fingers into her to feel her clench while I do it, learning the exact rhythm that makes her hips lift and her breath break into those small sounds she's loosing into the night air.
I draw it out, savoring every degree of it, until she's trembling and clenching and right at the edge — and then I take her over it, my mouth steady on her, feeling her pulse hot against my tongue and tighten around my fingers as she comes undone with a long shaking sigh and my name in it.
I stay with her through every slow wave, my free hand spread on her hip, holding her steady against the turning world, until she goes liquid and pulls weakly at my shoulders, wanting me up, wanting me close.
That's the first beat. The second is slower still.
I come up over her and she wraps around me, arms and legs both, reaching between us to guide me to her, and when I press into her this time there's no urgency in it at all — just the slow, exquisite stretch of her taking me in, her warmth closing around me inch by inch until I'm buried deep and we both go still, breathing each other's air.
Then I begin to move, slow, deliberate, drawing almost all the way out and sinking back into her by degrees, watching her face in the starlight, and she watches mine, and there's nowhere either of us looks away to.
The ocean breathes below. The pines move overhead.
And we find the rhythm we always find, the choreography, only stripped now of everything but tenderness — her hips rising to meet each unhurried stroke, her hands moving over my back, my forehead dropped to hers, both of us breathing the same breath, the eighteen years between us meaning exactly nothing because nothing about this is about time, it's about the two of us being the only thing on the whole dark coast that matters.
"I love you," she says again, against my mouth, while I move in her, and it undoes me more than any urgency could.
"I love you," I tell her, and I mean every pound of it.
It builds the way the tide comes in, no rush, inevitable, rising and rising until there's nowhere left to rise to.
I shift my weight to grind against her where our bodies meet on every slow stroke, and I feel it start to take her — her breath going ragged, her body gripping me in deep slow pulses, her nails pressing crescents into my shoulders.
I keep the rhythm steady, patient, working her through it, and she goes tight around me, a long deep wave instead of a snapped line, and breaks beneath me with a sound that's almost a sob, clenching around me in pulse after pulse that pulls me with her.
I sink in deep and stay there, pressed as close as two people can get, and let go inside her, spilling in slow shudders into the warmth and the dark and the patient ocean and the impossible fact of being loved at forty-four by a woman who chose me with her eyes wide open.
I bury my face in her neck and she holds me through all of it, her arms locked around my shoulders, her heart steady against my chest.
After, we lie tangled on the blanket under a sky gone thick with stars, and I think — clearly, the way I think about everything once the wanting's been answered — about the thing I told myself the night Dominic handed me her résumé.
That forty-four was an inventory I'd audited and found sufficient.
Boats, bourbon, the company of men who don't ask about feelings.
I had it backward.
Forty-four isn't a limitation. It isn't the thing I should be apologizing for, the gap I keep doing the math on.
It's the reason I can recognize what this is.
I am old enough to know the difference between wanting something and needing it, between a thing that fills a quiet evening and a thing that floods the whole bay.
I spent twelve years learning, in the hardest way, exactly what I'd never had — and that learning is the only reason I knew her the moment she climbed up on my roof.
A younger man might have missed it. A younger man wouldn't have understood what he was holding.
It took me every one of those forty-four years to be ready to recognize Josie Reeves when she finally walked through my gate with a roll bag of tools and a chip on her shoulder and refused to be hazed out of my yard.
"What are you thinking," she says, drowsy, her head on my chest, my fingers in her hair.
"That I'm glad I'm old," I tell her.
She laughs — that big laugh, even bigger out here with the whole sky to hold it. "That's the worst pillow talk I've ever heard."
"It's the truth, though."
"Yeah." She presses a kiss to my chest, over the heart that still goes too fast for her and always will. "Yeah, okay. I'm glad you're old too."
We stay on the bluff a long time, watching the stars wheel and the lighthouse out past the point sweep its slow beam across the water, the two of us wrapped in one blanket against the cooling night, and down in the bay, riding at her mooring with her gold transom catching the starlight, Second Wind rocks gentle on the flat calm.
A second wind. After you thought the air was gone.
On the nose. Josie knew it the whole time.