24. Salem
SALEM
Iwas more nervous than I expected to be as I stood in the apartment parking lot, waiting for Ethan’s truck. It didn’t help that Rowan was fidgeting beside me, still finalizing the outfit she’d assembled specifically to bring Paul to his knees. Her revenge-beach attire.
Rowan was gorgeous in a potato sack and genuinely dangerous when she put thought into it.
She’d pulled her blonde bob into a high, bouncy ponytail, her makeup clean, her lashes doing enough work on their own that she didn’t need much else.
White cropped tank top. A loose, flowy white button-up over it, French-tucked on one side.
Shorts that fit close enough to remind the entire Pacific Northwest exactly what it had been missing.
My best friend was the best, and Paul was going to spend the rest of his natural life regretting the moment he let her slip through his fingers.
She’d picked my outfit too. I would’ve reached for jeans and a shirt on instinct—old habits—but the black biker shorts and crop top she’d laid out were comfortable, sporty, and just enough coverage that I didn’t feel like an offering.
The sun sat warm against my skin, settling over me like a second layer of clothing.
Ethan pulled up right on time. His truck was midnight blue, freshly washed, gleaming where the morning light hit it, like he’d taken the extra ten minutes specifically for this.
Rowan and I climbed in.
“Hey there,” Ethan said, moving a tray of coffees from the passenger seat and onto the console. He pulled one free and passed it over. “Had to guess on your order. Alba helped. I think I got close.”
I looked down at the writing on the cup. Iced, Washington-style, white chocolate americano.
My favorite.
I had genuinely excellent people in my life.
I glanced back at Rowan, who was arranging herself against the far door like she was trying to merge with it.
Paul, for his part, was staring at her with the specific, undisguised devastation of a man who’d clearly not anticipated this level of difficulty, while she stared straight ahead and shot him daggers without so much as turning her head.
I bit back a laugh. The outfit was working. He looked like one of those old cartoon characters—eyes bulging out of the sockets, tongue unrolling somewhere near his shoes.
I buckled my seatbelt and thanked Ethan as he passed the rest of the coffees back.
“I got you a coffee too,” Paul said, holding one out toward Rowan.
She didn’t look at him. “I have one.”
“It’s your order.”
A beat.
“How do you know my order?”
“You told me. At the bowling alley.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Okay.” He set it in the cupholder between them, close enough that she’d have to look at it the entire drive. Which, I realized watching his expression, was entirely intentional.
Rowan’s jaw tightened. She stared out the window.
The cab went quiet once we pulled out. Gray Harbor thinned out behind us—the last gas station, the last stretch of shoreline shops with their windows still dark.
The road opened up along the coast, the ocean dropping away on one side in long gray-blue sheets.
Fog clung low over the water like it hadn’t decided to burn off yet.
Pine crowded close on the other side, dark and dense, breaking every so often for a glimpse of the water below.
The whole drive had that October feeling—the light a little colder, more honest than summer.
“Beach day in mid-October,” Paul said finally, breaking the silence. “Feels wrong.”
“PNW for you,” Ethan said with his eyes on the road.
“Thank you for driving,” I said.
“Sure.” His gaze flicked sideways, dragging down the length of me before finding my face again. “It’s a pretty drive.”
Heat climbed up my neck that had nothing to do with the coffee in my hands.
His sleeves were rolled to the forearm, one hand resting high on the wheel, and when his attention finally settled back on the road, I let myself look—really look, the way you only get to when someone isn’t looking back.
The muscle along his forearm shifted every time his hand moved, the kind of detail I had no business cataloging about a man I was supposedly only pretending to date.
A faint white scar near his elbow. He drove like his hands knew a wheel the same way I knew an engine.
I made myself look out the window instead. It didn’t help nearly as much as I wanted it to.
A few minutes later, at a stop sign that didn’t strictly require him to stop for as long as he did, his hand left the wheel and found mine instead, resting where I’d set it on the console between us.
He didn’t make a thing of it. Didn’t glance over to check how I’d take it.
Just laced his fingers loosely through mine like it was something we always did, something ordinary, his thumb moving in absent circles against the back of my hand.
He drove the rest of the way with one hand, the other staying exactly where it was, like putting it back on the wheel had never occurred to him.
Ethan doesn’t date.
The thought surfaced uninvited and sank straight through my chest. I’d been looking forward to today more than I wanted to admit aloud.
But this was PR. A performance. He didn’t do serious, for some reason nobody had bothered to actually explain to me, and none of that information had done a single thing to stop his thumb from moving against my knuckles like it had nowhere better to be.
It failed to slow the part of my brain convinced that this unhurried, unbothered hand-holding was more dangerous than anything that had happened in a hallway at the Den.
I was ridiculous. Genuinely, certifiably ridiculous, spiraling in the passenger seat of a truck over a thumb.
“You okay?” Ethan glanced over, his hand loose around mine.
“Fine.” I took a very deliberate sip of coffee with my free hand. “Thinking about tide charts.”
“Okay?” He clearly didn’t believe me.
He also didn’t let go.
Then, so quiet I almost missed it under the sound of the road, he said, “You look really good today, by the way.”
He said it like it was nothing. His eyes on the road, thumb still moving, like he was commenting on the weather and not dismantling my entire nervous system in the passenger seat.
I stared straight ahead.
“Thank you,” I said, at a volume that came out approximately thirty percent smaller than I intended.
The corner of his mouth moved. Just barely.
I took another sip of coffee and made a series of firm, private decisions about my behavior for the rest of the drive.
“Can we please put on music that isn’t whatever’s happening right now?” Paul said from the back.
Ethan put on some soft music.
“Wait, no, I’ve heard this exact song in every dentist’s office I’ve ever sat in. Can we play something more upbeat, please?”
“It’s a coffee shop playlist,” Ethan said. “It’s supposed to be calm.”
“It’s supposed to make you feel like you’re getting a root canal.”
“Speaking of root canals,” Rowan said, not looking at him, “I’d still rather get one than be in this car right now, so can we pick up the pace?”
“Good morning to you, too,” Paul said, undeterred.
“I didn’t say good morning. I said I’d rather get a root canal.”
“Noted. Filing that under things you didn’t have to say out loud but did anyway.”
“I say a lot of things I don’t have to.”
“Personality Plus. It’s really working for you today,” he said.
I caught the way his eyes dropped—just a beat—taking in the outfit before snapping back to neutral, like he’d been caught somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be.
Rowan turned to look at him very slowly. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Whatever that was. Don’t do that.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
She gestured vaguely at his face. “Just stop.”
“I genuinely don’t know what thing you’re referring to.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Rowan.” His voice dropped. Just her name, quiet and direct, the way you said someone’s name when you meant it. “I owe you an apology. A real one.”
They went still in the back seat.
Rowan’s jaw shifted. Something moved across her face—small and fast—and she looked back out the window. Her hand found the coffee he’d put in the cupholder between them. She picked it up without looking, took a sip, and set it down.
“The playlist is fine,” she said. “We should leave it.”
Paul said nothing. But in the rearview mirror, I caught the faint exhale that left him. Something that had been held tight was finally released.
I caught Ethan’s stare in the mirror, just briefly. The corner of his mouth moved.
His hand still hadn’t left mine.
We rode the rest of the way in the kind of quiet that meant several things were happening that nobody was ready to talk about. The coast unfolded gray and gold outside every window.
When we pulled into the lot, Ethan cut the engine and turned to me fully for the first time since we’d left. “Ready?”
I looked at him. At the easy certainty of him, the hand still loosely around mine, the morning light doing something unreasonable to the line of his jaw.
“Getting there,” I said.
He squeezed once before letting go.
I missed his touch the second it was gone.
That was new.