24. Emory
EMORY
I’m lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, having a one-sided conversation with Florida and the alien.
Sleep is finally starting to win when light flashes across the wall. Then it comes again.
I sit up.
Could he…
Six short flashes.
Morse code.
Hi.
He absolutely is.
I bounce up on my knees to look out the window. The light is coming from Jake’s, cutting across the water like it used to when we were kids who believed bedtime was optional and summer was forever.
I rifle through the nightstand for my old flashlight. It’s still here. It still rattles. It still acts possessed every time you turn it on. I shake it until the beam shines steady, then point it toward Jake’s.
On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off.
Pause.
On. Off. On. Off.
He responds with longer flashes.
I start digging through my mental Morse code storage, filed somewhere between recipes and every song lyric from the early 2000s, and come up with nothing except Dirt Road Anthem stuck in my head now.
I grab my phone.
I’m out of practice what was that one?
Come over.
A laugh escapes before I can catch it. I slap a hand over my mouth and glance toward Granny’s room.
Wouldn’t it have been easier to just text me?
Yes. But not nearly as romantic.
Awww on my way
I slip off his jersey and pull on his hoodie instead. It’s my attempt at romance.
It’s also so I don’t have to put a bra on.
I pull on some comfy shorts and grab my bkr because hydration and emotional support is still essential after midnight, then tiptoe downstairs like I’m thirteen again and not thirty, successfully navigating every creaky floorboard except—
“Stay out all night,” Granny calls from behind her closed door.
That one.
I was significantly better at this at thirteen.
I ease through the back door, brushing my fingers over the old dent on my way out. The Point is quiet, but I still race across from shadow to shadow the way we did when we snuck out as kids.
I’m an adult and still afraid this town might ground me.
The dock to Jake’s is dark except for the warm glow coming from his boathouse at the far end. The screen door is closed, so I tap out our special knock, the one we invented at eleven and never officially retired.
Hank answers before Jake does, nosing the door open and pressing his whole solid self against me. “Hi, baby,” I breathe, dropping to my knees.
He wiggles with his entire body, then rises and plants his front paws on my shoulders for a hug.
Jake is on a ladder when I walk in, stretching to change a light bulb in the ceiling. His shirt rides up, and I take a moment to admire the view of his abs and that narrow trail of hair disappearing into the low waistband of his jeans.
The happy trail.
Now there’s a trail I’d like to ride.
He looks down and catches me staring at his… everything. “Mo.” His mouth curves into a shit-eating grin. “You okay down there?”
“Eep,” I squeak, slapping a hand over my eyes.
Silence.
I spread two fingers just enough to peek through them. He’s still looking at me, his smile spreading.
“Nice hoodie.”
“You like it?”
“I do.” He looks back to the ceiling, twisting the lightbulb. “Just wondering if you prefer sleeping in it or the jersey?”
My whole body locks up. “How do you—“
He huffs a laugh. “Oh I know, Mo.”
I give him my best one shoulder shrug and stare anywhere other than at him. I’m not confirming or denying anything. But I’m absolutely having a conversation with Granny, because she’s the only person who could’ve ratted me out.
Then the rest of the room catches up with me.
It’s the first time I’ve stood inside this house in ten years.
We spent our days running in and out for snacks and drinks when we were kids, the screen door slamming behind us every single time, announcing our comings and goings to the whole bay like punctuation.
I’ve always loved this place. His dad converted it from a boathouse the summer before Jake was born, and it still holds that origin story in its bones.
Old beams crossing the vaulted ceiling, thick salt worn rope loosely wrapped around them.
The plank walls are dark and weathered, the kind that’s been through decades of storms.
The wall of windows faces the bay, and in the distance you can see the Atlantic. We used to sit here as kids and watch the summer storms roll in like we were the only two people in the world and the weather was performing just for us.
The wood burning fireplace is covered in oyster shells, rough and white and beautiful. His mom’s paintings hang on the walls and sit on easels vivid and warm like she was. Above the mantel hangs a painting of The Pinch of Tides I don’t remember seeing before.
Black and white photos cover the walls, and my stomach tightens when I realize how many of them include me. The summers. The dock. The grinning evidence of who we used to be.
They weren’t taken down.
This home holds everyone who ever mattered inside it.
It tells a story.
“The kitchen looks different,” I say, because if I say what I’m actually thinking, I’ll cry before we’ve even sat down.
“Mom updated it the year… a few years ago,” he says, climbing down from the ladder.
“Jake, I’m so sor—“
“It’s okay.” He moves to the refrigerator, the old one, the one that looks like it belongs in a different decade, and pulls the door open. “Whatcha want to drink? Beer, wine, sweet tea, water.”
“I’ve got water,” I say, lifting my bkr. “But I’d love a beer.”
He pulls one out as he gestures toward my bkr. “I’ve been meaning to ask about that.”
“Never seen an emotional support water bottle?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“It travels everywhere. Judges silently. Encourages hydration. Here.” I hold it out. He takes it and peers inside with one eye like he’s expecting something to peer back. “It’s not going to bite you.”
“Just checking.” He takes a sip. Pauses. “It’s like drinking from a beer bottle.”
I stare at him and blink. How have I never realized that?
He takes another sip, and that’s when I notice the stack of Southern Living magazines behind him.
I walk over and pick up the top issue. Then another and another. Issue after issue. Every single one with my recipes. “You really bought them all,” I say, holding the October issue from two years ago with my pumpkin slab pie on the cover.
He leans against the counter, watching me keep flipping. He even has the first one I was published in. “I confessed about the magazines,” he says. “Anything you want to confess?”
I make the mistake of looking at him.
He waits.
“Well. Somehow you already know my choice of sleepwear.”
He keeps waiting.
I pick at the corner of the magazine and say it before I can talk myself out of it. “IworethejerseywhenIwenttoyourgames,” I say fast enough to blur into one word. Just in case velocity counts as plausible deniability.
It does not.
“Mo.” His voice drops. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“There are a lot of things I don’t know why I didn’t say.” I look down at the magazine in my hands, at my own name printed there like proof I figured out at least one version of a life. “And one I don’t know why I did.”
He doesn’t press. He just starts rummaging through a drawer. “What are you looking for?”
“Bottle opener.”
I point. “The one hanging on the fridge.”
He turns around, grunts, grabs it, pops both bottles, then hangs it back in the exact spot he couldn’t find it.
We clink our bottles in a silent toast. “Wanna sit?” he asks.
The sectional swallows me whole when I drop onto it. It’s obscenely comfortable. “I didn’t think it was possible,” I say. “But this thing has gotten even better.”
“I probably sleep here more than my actual bed.”
Hank waddles in from somewhere, heaves himself onto the ottoman, and collapses with his chin landing squarely on Jake’s foot.
We sit looking at the water. The tide is moving and the moon is full, making the bay glow in a way that looks more like a painting than reality. In the distance, the outline of a cruise ship drifts past, lit up like a floating city.
We talk about small things first. Cruise ships and buffets and Hank’s current obsession with flexi Nylabones and blue bandanas. It’s easy in the way this has always been easy when we let it be.
“So,” I say. “Morse code.”
“I was feeling nostalgic.”
“It was sweet.”
He smiles. “Jake Wheeler,” I say slowly. “Are you blushing?”
“Men don’t blush.”
“Okay, mister man.” And then I notice his jersey hanging from a hook near the door. I hadn’t seen it when I came in.
Now I can’t look away.
Jake follows my gaze. Something in his face winces a little before he looks down. “My parents kept it there.” His voice is quiet. “I couldn’t bring myself to remove it.”
It cracks on the last two words, barely, but I hear it.
I turn toward him and reach for his hand. “Jake... I should have been here.”
“It’s okay.”
“No.” I shake my head. “It isn’t. I thought about calling. A million times. I’d pick up my phone and—“ I stop.
“Why didn’t you?”
“I didn’t want to open an old wound at a time you were already hurting.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “The wound never closed,” he says.
The words land like a punch in my gut.
“You’re here now,” he says, turning to look at me. “There’s so much you don’t know, Mo.”
“Tell me.”
And he does.
He tells me how he was celebrating the team’s win in the locker room one minute, his phone still buzzing with congratulations, and then Charlie’s voice was on the other end of the line, and then his whole world stopped.
“They were driving to Tampa,” he says, his voice going careful and quiet in that way people’s voices do when it still hurts. “For my game later that week.”
I take the beer gently from his hand.
“If I hadn’t been playing—“ He can’t get the rest out.
“Jake.”
“They’d still be here.” The words are barely sound.
“I always called them before a game. Warmups ran long that day. I didn’t call, Mo.”
I pull him into my arms, and he comes without resistance.
Hank puts his head in Jake’s lap, nudging his arm.
I don’t say anything. There isn’t a sentence in the world big enough for this or anything I can say that would take away his hurt or the guilt. So I just hold him and let the grief move through.
After a while, the shaking eases out of him. I lean back, wipe his cheek with my thumb, press a kiss there, then slip away for tissues. “Another beer?” I ask gently.
Hank is licking his face. Jake gives me a half smile that looks held together with duct tape and bulldog slobber.
I open the bottles and hand one over.
He tells me about leaving the league. About using his injury as an excuse to retire.
“Do you regret leaving?” I ask.
“Honestly,” he says. “I don’t know.”
Hours pass without either of us noticing.
We talk about almost everything. The way crabbing felt like relearning a language he’d been born to speak.
Trying to find himself as Jake Wheeler, not Quarterback Jake Wheeler.
I tell him about the apartment I never fully unpacked.
The city I can’t get to feel like home no matter how long I stay.
We talk about regrets.
Except one.
We don’t talk about thank you.
Not tonight. Tonight isn’t about fixing the past. Tonight is about showing up.
I’m so tired of not being here.
No fireworks. No epiphany music. Just the truth, finally sitting down in front of me.
I don’t go home.
Tonight, I stay.
Beside him.
In the quiet house that still made room for me.
I stayed.