Chapter 16 #2
The run back to the boat takes forever. The dinghy pitches and yaws.
Spray comes over the bow in sheets, cold and stinging.
Scarlett hunches in the center with her arms wrapped around her backpack, her hair plastered to her skull, her jacket dark with water.
She doesn’t complain. Doesn’t scream. She holds on and watches the horizon and keeps her face still.
The horizon is gone. The storm has swallowed it.
What was purple-black is now uniform gray, the water and the sky the same featureless shade, and the wind has doubled in the time it took us to cross fifty yards of open water.
Thirty knots. Maybe more. Wind that finds every gap in your clothing and fills it with cold.
We reach the boat. I cut the outboard, grab the swim ladder, haul myself up. Scarlett follows. I secure the dinghy in a hurried job, lines crossed, the knot something I’ll curse myself for later, and climb to the helm.
The instruments tell me what I already know. Wind: thirty-two knots and building. Barometer: falling fast. Visibility: less than a quarter mile and deteriorating. Port Haven is eight miles southeast. Against this wind, in these seas, with visibility this poor, it might as well be eighty.
I make the call. It isn’t hard. It’s the only call.
“We’re not going back.” I kill the main engine. The boat rocks violently, a wave hitting the starboard quarter hard enough to send unsecured gear sliding across the deck. “We anchor here. Ride it out.”
She stands in the companionway, dripping, backpack clutched to her chest. “How long?”
“Overnight. Maybe longer. Depends on the front.”
“The front that wasn’t forecast.”
“Yeah.” I’m already moving. Anchor chain. Secondary rode. The storm anchor goes over the stern, its weight dragging us backward into the wind. “NOAA missed this one. Happens.”
“Does it happen often?”
“Often enough.”
I work. She watches. The boat pitches. Something in the galley crashes.
A mug, probably. I should secure everything below.
I should check the bilge pumps. I should do a dozen things in a specific order that keeps us alive through the night, and I’m doing them, but part of my brain is tracking her.
She braces against the bulkhead. Her knuckles go white around the backpack straps.
She’s holding her face so still it hurts to watch, and underneath the fear I’m carrying for her there’s a low hum of something else, something I’ve got no right to, and it doesn’t quiet down just because I tell it to.
Twelve hours. Alone. In a space the size of a truck bed.
“Go below,” I say. “There’s dry clothes in the port locker. Sweatshirt. Pants might be too big. Change. Then sit on the bunk and don’t move until I tell you to.”
“I can help.”
“Not with this. Go.”
She goes. I stay on deck longer than I need to.
I finish securing everything. The dinghy is taking a beating, but it’ll hold. The anchors are set. The boat is riding the swell now, pitching and rolling but not drifting. We’re as safe as we’re going to get, which isn’t very safe, but it’s the hand we’ve been dealt.
Rain comes sideways across my face. I stand in it.
I let it soak through my collar and run down my spine, and I do not go below, because below there’s a woman in a six-by-eight cabin who ruined this town and made me laugh on my own dock and hasn’t asked me for a single thing she didn’t earn, and I have run out of ways to explain to myself why I keep looking at her.
Get it together, Kinsella.
I go below.
The cabin is chaos. Everything that wasn’t tied down is on the floor. Books. Tools. A coffee mug in pieces. Scarlett stands in the center of it wearing my sweatshirt, the sleeves rolled to her wrists, my spare pants cinched at the waist with a length of dock line. Her hair is drying in wild curls.
My clothes. On her. My name stitched over the pocket.
Something in me goes quiet and greedy and I hate it.
“I tried to clean up,” she says.
“Don’t worry about it.”
The boat rolls. Hard. Port to starboard, a deep, sickening swing that sends her stumbling. I catch her. One arm around her waist, my free hand braced against the bulkhead, and we’re pressed together chest to knee, her face in my collar, my nose in her hair.
She smells like salt and rain and warm skin. I’ve been trying not to notice it since the porch. I’ve been failing since the porch. Standing here holding her, I stop pretending the two are different.
I let her go. Step back. Put the table between us like a coward.
“Sit on the bunk,” I say. “Brace your feet against the opposite berth. It’ll help with the motion sickness.”
“I took the second dose an hour ago.”
“That was for six-foot seas. This is nine and building.”
She looks at me steadily. “Then it’ll be a long night for both of us.”
She sits down on the bunk and braces her feet exactly where I told her to, which is somehow worse than arguing.
I check the bilge pumps. Check the battery.
Check the VHF, though God knows who I’d call out here with visibility this poor.
I check things I already checked. The storm is fully on us now.
Wind screaming through the rigging. The boat heels with each gust, recovers, heels again.
Water pounds against the hull. Below the waterline, something groans. The keel, probably, taking the load.
I sit on the opposite berth. Our knees are six inches apart. The table is between us. It might as well be six miles.
“You were right about the chamber,” I say.
She looks up. The cabin is dim, lit by a single bulkhead lamp that swings with the boat’s motion, throwing shadows across her face. “I know.”
“Thomas was there. For years.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”