Chapter 18 #3
The water knocks softly against the hull. The mast creaks somewhere above us. My pulse beats gold through my body, and Julian drinks from me with his whole enormous strength banked into gentleness.
Then he stops.
He pulls back quickly enough that an actual sound of complaint escapes me. His tongue moves once over the place and the sting vanishes, and then his forehead comes down hard against my shoulder.
“Whoa,” I say.
“Please do not say anything for a moment.”
“I have so many things to say.”
“I know.” His voice is wrecked. “That’s what I am afraid of.”
I turn enough to look at him and nearly lose what little remains of my ability to behave.
He’s a mess. His hair is disheveled, his eyes heavy-lidded and sparking red, and his beautiful controlled face has completely come apart at the seams. He looks at me as though he isn’t entirely certain what has just happened.
“Hi,” I say.
He closes his eyes and puts his forehead back on my shoulder. “Give me a moment.”
“Take one.”
“I am taking several.”
I lie back against him with my throat tingling and my whole body still full of warmth, and look up at a sky thick with stars.
Eventually Julian lifts his head and looks at me.
“What do you need?”
I start laughing.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just—” I wipe at my eyes with a sleeve that hangs four inches past my hand. “You’re sitting here in pieces and you asked me what I need.”
“It is the only question I have ever found reliable.”
“I need a cookie.”
“Thank God.”
He reaches for the bag with a hand that is not entirely steady, and that nearly starts me laughing again.
The dizziness arrives a minute later. It isn’t bad, more like the first ten minutes after a large glass of wine on an empty stomach.
Julian makes me eat a cookie and finish the chowder, and he sits beside me with two fingers resting on the inside of my wrist.
After a while I look down at them. “Are you taking my pulse?”
“I’m counting. I count most things.”
“You’re taking my pulse. I’m fine.”
“I know.”
“You can stop.”
“I know.”
He doesn’t, and I let him keep doing it. Eventually the dizziness passes, leaving behind only the pleasant hum of warmth under my skin and an increasingly serious awareness of the man sitting beside me.
I turn towards him, and his eyes narrow immediately. “No.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
“You’re about to.”
“I was going to kiss you.”
“That’s not all you were going to do,” he says, and he’s not wrong. I huff at him anyway.
“You can hear my heart. That’s cheating.”
“I have never claimed otherwise.”
I lean across and kiss him. There is the faintest trace of copper and salt on his mouth, and it’s mine, and I want it again. I slide a hand beneath his jacket and into the front of his shirt.
“Penny.”
“Mm.”
“We’re a half mile offshore.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“There is a great deal of standing rigging on this boat and you will damage yourself on all of it.”
I finally pull back. “That may be the least romantic sentence you have ever produced.”
“It’s a practical sentence.”
“You just drank my blood.”
“And I would like to remain alive long enough to do it again.”
“You’re already dead.”
“I am not having this argument with you while the tide is turning.”
I stare at him.
“Your position is that the tide is more important than what we could be doing right now.”
“My position is that we are anchored in the lee of the Sisters in December with the wind going northeast, and I have pulled two families off those rocks in my lifetime. I am not going to spend the next hundred years being the reason there was a third.” He straightens one cuff.
It does absolutely nothing for his dignity. “Also, I would like a bed.”
“You’d like a bed.”
“I have spent four hundred years acquiring an extremely good one, and I intend to use it.”
I consider this, then sigh. “Fine.”
“Thank you.”
“But I want it noted that you chose tidal safety over me.”
“I chose tidal safety for you.”
I shake my head at him. “That’s not better.”
“It is considerably better.”
He gets the anchor up and the boat around, and we come home with the moonlight stretching away behind us.
Black Harbor grows larger ahead, two hundred yellow lights on a dark hill.
I sit beside Julian with my head against his shoulder and his arm around me as he steers with the other hand.
I’m cold and slightly woozy and my throat is going to be a genuine problem to explain to Lucy, and I’m so happy I can barely sit still.
Halfway home, I say, “You said no immediately.”
“I did.”
“And then you told me the truth in under four minutes.”
“I did.”
“Do you know how long that would have taken you in October?”
Julian looks ahead at Black Harbor slowly taking shape out of the dark.
“I wouldn’t have told you at all,” he says finally. “I would have said no, and I would have been perfectly pleasant about it, and you would have gone home believing you had asked for something unreasonable.”
“And now?”
His hand tightens on my hip.
“And now I would like to be asked things.”
I turn my face into his shoulder so he can’t see what that does to me, which is pointless.
He can hear my heart from the road.