Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Dean
I catch the screen door before it bangs.
She doesn’t turn around. Her shoulders are tight, her hands white-knuckled on the railing, and I consider backing out. Pulling the door shut. Leaving her the dignity of falling apart without an audience.
Too late. She’s heard me. Her spine straightens, her chin comes up, and by the time she turns, the tears are gone. Or hidden. Her eyes are dry and her mouth is curved in the ghost of that camera smile, and the performance is good enough to make my chest ache.
“You okay?” It’s the only thing I can think of that doesn’t sound like pity.
“Fine.” Clipped. Professional. “Just needed some air. It’s warm in there.”
It’s forty degrees on this porch and her breath clouds in front of her face. She’s shivering. She’s also too proud to say so.
I shrug out of my jacket and hold it out. “Here.”
She looks at the jacket. Then at me. “I’m not cold.”
“Your lips are blue.”
“They are not.”
“They’re getting there.” I keep it extended. “Take it or don’t. Your call.”
The farm stretches out around us, dark fields and darker forest, the barn a solid shape against the stars. Something rustles in the grass near the steps. Noodle, probably, patrolling for trespassers. The kitchen noise filters through the screen behind us, muffled now.
She takes the jacket. Her fingers brush mine, cold against warm, and I don’t pull away fast enough.
“Thanks.” She pulls it on and it swallows her. Sleeves past her fingertips, collar folded up around her jaw. She buries her hands in the pockets and hunches her shoulders. “Better?”
“Marginally.”
She smiles. A flicker, there and gone, but it’s honest. No camera behind it.
We stand there. The silence stretches.
I’ve been watching her all night. Watching her chop potatoes because Shea asked her to.
Watching her follow a five-year-old around the table with a stack of plates like taking orders from Hazel was the most natural thing in the world.
Watching most of my family fold her in without a single question, no caution, no hesitation.
I wanted to hate it. I tried. But every time she laughed at an embarrassing story, the hate wouldn’t stick.
“Can I ask you something?” she says.
“You will even if I say no.”
“You’re right.” She turns to face me, and the smile is gone now. “Everyone in there let me in. Your whole family, inside of an hour. Even Bodhi softened a little bit. You haven’t, and I’d like to know what I did to make you hate me.”
“You didn’t do anything.”
“Then what is it?”
I should give her the easy answer. Malcolm. Bodhi. The permits. All true, all useful, all a door I can close without opening anything else. “You want the real one?”
“I’d prefer it.”
“You’ll make a spectacle out of us.” I turn to look at her.
“That’s what people like you do. Not out of malice.
It’s just the job. You find something that means something to the people living inside it, and you turn it into content, and you leave, and the people living inside it are still there afterward with the mess. ”
Her jaw sets. “That’s what you think I’m here for.”
“I think it’s what happens whether you mean it or not. Eight million people saw your post this afternoon about this island.”
“Including you.”
“Yeah, including me, because I need to know what the hell we’re in for. Some of those are going to come.”
“Why are you mad at that? Bodhi said you need a good tourist season.”
Jesus, she isn’t getting it. “Because some of them are going to dig holes on my brother’s land looking for a treasure that was never here.” I keep my voice level, which takes effort. “You’ll be gone by then. Onto the next place. And Port Haven’s the one that has to live in the aftermath.”
“So a story is worth telling only if nobody hears it.”
“That’s not—”
“No, that’s exactly what you said.” She steps toward me, and she’s not shivering anymore.
Anger’s warmer than cashmere. “You want the story told quietly. To the right people. In the right tone. Where it can’t do any damage.
” Her chin comes up. “Do you know what happens to stories like that, Dean? They die. Nobody remembers them. That fire I wrote about—do you remember the Marine’s name?
The one who saved the woman he loved by driving them off a cliff into a river? ”
I do. Donovan Scott. But I’m not going to admit it. “Scarlett—”
“You do know, because I told it loud.” Her voice cracks on it, and she doesn’t stop.
“Because their love story ran everywhere and it wouldn’t go away and people had to look at it.
And because of that, people saw the devastation of that fire and donations poured in for that town.
That’s not a spectacle. That’s the whole job.
And the alternative isn’t dignity, it’s silence, and silence is how a place gets forgotten while everyone in it congratulates itself on being private. ”
“You think this island wants to be famous?”
“I think this island is dying.” She throws a hand back toward the house, toward the kitchen where Bodhi’s laptop is still sitting on the sideboard.
“Your nephew just told the whole table you’ve got until Thursday or you lose the docks.
The diner’s breaking even. The bookstore’s underwater.
Your family is holding this place together with their hands, and you’d rather it sank quietly than let anyone outside look at it. ”
“That’s not what I’d rather.”
“Then what?”
“I’d rather know what it costs before we pay it.” I’m closer to her than I was. I don’t remember moving. “I’ve seen what happens when the wrong story gets loud, Scarlett. So have you. Hell, it happened to you. So forgive me if I’m not in a hurry to hand my family over to—”
“To what? To me? The disgraced talk-show host?” She spits the words like they taste bad. “Is that what you were going to say?”
I clamp my jaw shut. Because yeah, that’s exactly where the sentence was headed, and hearing it in her mouth instead of mine makes it sound uglier than I meant it.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“It’s exactly what you meant.” Her voice is shaking now, and not from cold. “You looked me up. You watched the clip. You decided who I am from three minutes of security footage, and everything since then has just been you looking for proof—”
I kiss her.
I don’t remember making the decision. I just want her to shut up and stop talking about herself with so much hatred, and so I wind a hand around the back of her neck and pull her toward me.
She makes a small noise of surprise against my mouth—half protest, half warning—but I don’t stop, and after a second her body slumps into mine like I’ve punched the air out of her.
She’s soft and tense at the same time, rigid in her shoulders, but her hands clutch the front of my shirt instead of pushing me away.
It’s messy. Too much teeth at first. My nose bumps hers, and I think I taste tears and anger and salt.
She opens for me, and I take it. I crowd her up against the porch railing, both hands caging her face, and I kiss her so hard I know it’s going to bruise.
I want it to bruise. I want her to remember it every time she talks shit about herself, every time she tries to turn herself into a fucking headline.
She kisses back. Hard. Like she’s trying to draw blood.
The jacket slips from her shoulders, and her hands slide under the collar of my shirt, nails digging in like she’s angry at it, at me, at something bigger than either of us.
I don’t care. I want more of it. Want her pressed close, want her hands and teeth and heat, want whatever the hell is happening here to burn off everything else.
She tastes like red wine and the salt of her tears. Her hair is everywhere. I slide a hand into it, grab a fistful at the base of her skull, get greedy with it, and she gasps into my mouth. It goes straight to my head, to every part of me that hasn’t woken up in years.
I should stop. I know. She’s the worst possible idea. Everything about this is wrong, and still, when she bites my lower lip, I nearly lose it. The railing is the only thing keeping us upright.
I pull away. Hard. The movement is so sudden her head knocks back against the porch’s support beam, and I catch it before it hits, hands gentling from fists to open palms on either side of her skull.
We’re both breathing like we just sprinted a mile.
She stands there, stunned, hands twisted in the front of my shirt, not letting go. Her lips are swollen, and there’s a smear of red along her chin from my stubble. The sight of it makes me want to go back in, to finish what I started, to get drunk on her heat and her anger…
But I don’t. Instead, I step back. Put two feet of cold air between us.
“This can’t happen,” I say, voice raw.
Her chin lifts, and she crosses her arms. “Agreed.”
“Good.”
“Great.”
Fuck. I wipe a hand over my face, trying to get rid of the taste of her lingering on my lips, and go back inside without looking at her again.
The kitchen swallows me. Dishes, laughter, Hazel chasing Mimi’s schnauzer, Sprocket, around the table legs with a spoon she is not supposed to have.
Bodhi catches my eye from the dining room and reads my face like a balance sheet. He does not look happy.
Colter grins at me and opens his mouth to comment, but Zade slaps a hand over his lips, keeping him silent.
Mimi appears at my elbow with a dish towel. “You look like hell.”
“Thanks.”
“What happened out there?”
“Nothing.”
“Dean.” Her voice drops. Just for me. “Don’t you lie to me, kid.”
The screen door creaks. Scarlett comes in with my jacket folded over her arm and hands it to me without a word, then crosses to Shea at the sink and says something that makes Shea laugh.
“I kissed her,” I say. “Then told her it was a mistake.”
Mimi closes her eyes. “Christ, Dean.”
“I know.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“I know that too.”
She pats my cheek hard enough to sting. “Don’t kiss her again unless you mean it.”
We say our goodbyes. Henry walks us out with a hand on my shoulder and that look he gets, the one that says he knows more than he’s saying and loves me anyway.
Hazel is asleep on Colter’s shoulder. Mimi presses a foil-wrapped brick of leftover pie into Scarlett’s hands and tells her she’s expected back.
Then we’re in the truck together.
Fifteen minutes to the marina. That’s how far it is. I’ve made this drive four thousand times, and I have never once been aware of how long it takes. Doug is unconscious across the bench seat between us, fed at last and finally quiet, except for his snores.
Which is fine by me because the alternative is awkward silence.
“Your family’s lovely,” she says, somewhere around the third mile. Flat. Polite. The voice you use with someone you can’t stand, but are forced to interact with.
“They are.”
“Thank you for the ride.”
“You’re not there yet.”
“I’m painfully aware.”
So am I.
Doug snores.
The heater ticks.
The headlights pick out the ditch grass and the reflectors and about forty feet of road at a time, and the dark closes back over everything behind us.
I meant what I said, but maybe I shouldn’t have said it the way I did.
And maybe I should tell her that now.
I keep my mouth shut.
The marina comes up on the right, the lot half-empty, her rental sitting under the one working light. I stop beside it and put the truck in park and don’t shut off the engine.
She unbuckles. Doesn’t move.
“For the record,” she says, still looking out the windshield, “you’re right that I don’t have to live here afterward. That’s a fair thing to hold against me.”
“Scarlett—”
“And you’re wrong about the rest of it.” She opens her door. The dome light comes on, and she finally looks at me, and her eyes are dry and steady and give me nothing at all. “Goodnight, Dean.”