CHAPTER FOUR #3
Renz looked at the chair. Then he looked at her.
"You," he said, plain as anything, plain as a coffee order or a birthday remembered.
"It's for you. It's been for you a while now, if I'm honest, and I don't — I don't know how to say the rest of it without it turning into more than I've got a right to ask for. "
Pip didn't move for a moment. Down the beach the last of the gathering was folding itself up into smaller, quieter groups, and the fire cracked between them, and somewhere behind them, though neither of them saw it, Jax Carter stood a little way off with a beer in his hand and said nothing at all, and did not need to.
"Ask anyway," Pip said.
He didn't, not that night — not in words, not yet, because a man who'd never once expected to be chosen didn't cross that particular threshold in a single evening, no matter how plainly the invitation was standing right in front of him — but he reached over, slow, giving her every chance to move away, and took her hand, and she let him, and the two of them sat like that a long time, one chair still empty beside them, waiting, the fire burning down slow between them and the sea moving patient underneath the whole quiet, held moment.
? ? ?
Wes found them there a while later, on his way past with an armful of firewood for the pit, and stopped, taking in the sight of the two of them, hands joined, the empty chair beside them somehow no longer quite so empty in spirit even if nobody had physically sat in it.
He didn't say anything immediately, just set the wood down carefully so as not to disturb the fire's current burn, and settled onto a nearby stump with the unhurried ease of a man who'd known this whole crew long enough to read a moment without needing it explained.
"Tam reckons you two have been circling each other since the year Pip first turned up with Dom," he said eventually, conversational, no particular weight in it. "Four years, by her count. I told her that seemed a bit much even for you, Kowalski, but she's usually right about these things."
"Tam's usually right about most things," Renz said, not denying it.
"She is. Terrifying, honestly, how often.
" Wes glanced between the two of them, something warm in his weathered face.
"You know what she said to me, the year you two first met?
Said, mark my words, that one's going to take years, because they're both too careful with themselves to rush it, but it'll be worth the wait when it finally lands.
Been saying it every gathering since, like clockwork.
Getting a bit smug about it too, if I'm honest, now it looks like she might actually be proven right. "
"Feels a bit like being a science experiment," Pip said, though there was no real complaint in it.
"Feels a bit like being watched over by people who care whether you're happy," Wes corrected, gently, hauling himself back up off the stump to continue his errand with the firewood.
"Which, around here, amounts to roughly the same thing.
Anyway. Didn't mean to interrupt. Carry on doing whatever you're doing — looks like it's finally going somewhere, and about time too. "
He moved off toward the fire pit proper, leaving the two of them alone again with the small warm knowledge that whatever quiet thing was happening between them had, apparently, been an open secret to half the crew for years, watched over with the same patient care Renz brought to everyone else's lives, finally turned, gently, back toward his own.
"Four years," Renz said, once Wes was properly out of earshot, turning the number over like something unfamiliar in his hands. "Feels strange, having a number on it. Like something private just got filed away in the crew's collective memory without me knowing it was being kept."
"Feels less strange than I expected, honestly," Pip admitted. "Knowing they've all been watching, hoping, whatever the word is. Thought it might feel invasive. Just feels like being looked after, the way you look after all of them without them noticing half the time."
"Bit different, being on the receiving end of the looking-after." Renz watched the fire a moment, the flames throwing shifting light across the sand. "Don't know that I've ever properly noticed what that feels like before this fortnight."
"How does it feel?"
He considered the question with the same careful attention he brought to most things that mattered. "Warmer than I expected," he said finally. "And a bit like owing something I don't know how to repay. Which I'm told, apparently, by rather a lot of people lately, isn't actually how it works."
"It isn't," Pip agreed, settling closer against his side. "Turns out you're allowed to just receive a thing, Renz. No invoice attached. Wes isn't expecting a debt repaid for four years of watching us circle each other. He's just glad it's finally landing."
"I'm working on believing that."
"I know," Pip said, and pressed a kiss to his shoulder, the first small unguarded affection either of them had offered without an excuse or a joke to soften it, and felt him go still with the particular stillness of a man carefully, deliberately, choosing not to deflect a good thing for once in his life.