Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Sloane caught herself looking for him before she’d finished her first cup of coffee, and she didn’t like what that meant.
She’d walked out to slip eight the way she did every morning, poured her coffee, and stood at the end of the pier, and somewhere in the middle of the first cup she’d caught her eyes drifting to Pier Three, to the Sundancer, to the dark cockpit where a man was probably still asleep.
She’d turned her back on it on purpose and made herself look at the water instead.
It hadn’t helped. The wanting to look was its own information, and she’d been reading her own information for a long time.
She was forty-one hours into knowing what Ethan Vale was, and she had expected the knowing to change how she felt about him, to cool it, to put a professional distance between them now that she understood he was a man with a mission, or purpose, somewhere and a job that used her dock.
The knowing hadn’t cooled anything. If anything, it had done the opposite.
He had stood in her office and handed her the truth, or enough of it, and he’d watched her face while he did it, and he hadn’t flinched from what she might do with it.
That took a kind of nerve she’d stopped expecting from men.
And then he’d made her a sandwich.
That was the part that had kept her up. Not the investigation running through her marina.
Not the man in slip nine who’d been lying to her for months.
The sandwich. A man had noticed she didn’t eat and had walked across her boardwalk with grouper on good bread wrapped in wax paper, and had made a joke so he wouldn’t have to say what it meant, and she had laughed for the first time in longer than she could name.
She’d laughed.
She put her hand flat against her own sternum, where the laugh had come from, like she could still feel the place it had loosened.
Behind her, across the slip water, she heard a cabin hatch slide open.
She didn’t turn around. She finished her coffee with her back to Pier Three and her heart doing something foolish, and she made herself walk back up the dock without looking, and she was proud of that, and she knew exactly how small a victory it was.
Saturday was the busy day, and she was grateful for it.
The weekend boaters came down with their coolers and their kids and their long lists of small needs, and Sloane sold ice and fuel and sundries and two new dock lines and a chart of the back bay to a man who’d been coming for six summers and still got lost every time.
She pumped diesel. She talked a nervous first-time owner through backing his Bowrider off the trailer without bending the prop.
She found a lost flip-flop, refereed a dispute about a borrowed gaff, and sold a child a fifty-cent gum ball with the gravity the transaction deserved.
This was the part of the work she loved and never said so.
Her father had loved it the same way and never said so either.
A marina on a Saturday was a hundred small kindnesses dressed up as commerce, and she was good at it, and being good at it had kept her standing through years she’d otherwise have gone under.
George Halsey ran a charter out at seven and was back by noon with four sunburned tourists and a cooler of snapper.
He tipped two fingers at her as he passed the office, and she lifted her chin back, and that was a whole conversation between two people who’d known each other long enough to not need words.
Catherine came up from her houseboat around ten in a sun hat the size of a small umbrella and bought a lemonade she didn’t need as an excuse to lean on the counter.
“Busy,” Catherine said, approving.
“Saturday.”
“You look better than you looked Thursday.”
Sloane handed her the lemonade and made change. “It was a hard Thursday.”
“It was a fifty-knot Thursday.” Catherine’s pale eyes did the thing they did, the gentle disassembling look of a woman who’d been reading Sloane since Sloane was twenty-one. “And yet here you are on Saturday looking like somebody who slept.”
“I slept fine.”
“Mm,” Catherine said, and took her lemonade, and didn't say the rest of whatever she was thinking, which was its own kind of mercy and its own kind of pressure.
She paused at the door.
“He’s a good one, you know,” Catherine said, not turning around. “The tenant. Whatever he is under the part you can see. I’ve had a lot of years to learn the difference between a man who’s performing decency and a man who’s stuck with it. That one’s stuck with it.”
And she went out into the sun before Sloane could decide whether to answer, which was exactly the point of saying it that way.
Margo came by at two with a bag of cookies from the Sandbar and the specific energy of a woman who had heard something.
Sloane loved Margo and dreaded her in roughly equal measure, which was the correct way to feel about a best friend.
Margo and Jace ran the Sandbar together, and between the two of them they heard everything that happened in Blossom Springs within about ninety minutes of it happening, and Margo had never once in many years let a piece of information sit when she could bring it a block down to the marina and watch Sloane’s face while she delivered it.
“I brought cookies,” Margo said, setting the bag on the counter.
“I can see that.”
“They’re the good ones. The ones with the brown butter.”
“I can't pass up the good ones.”
Margo hopped up onto the stool on the customer side and propped her chin on her hand. “A little bird told me your new tenant carried his own self across the parking lot yesterday with a picnic.”
Sloane kept her face flat and rang up nothing on the register to have something to do with her hands.
“It was a sandwich.”
“A sandwich.”
“Grouper.”
“He made you a grouper sandwich.”
“He made two sandwiches. One of them was mine. There’s a difference.”
Margo sat back like she’d been handed a gift.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “There's no difference in that.”
Sloane opened her mouth and found nothing in it. Heat climbed up the back of her neck, which hadn’t happened to her in years, and Margo clocked it instantly, because Margo clocked everything.
“Margo.”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“You’re saying a great deal.”
“I’m saying,” Margo said, and the teasing went out of her voice, and what was left was the thing underneath it, which was the reason Sloane kept her around, “that I have watched you run this place by yourself for four years and turn down every decent man who ever worked up the courage, and I have never once seen you go pink at the back of your neck over a sandwich. That’s all. I’m saying that.”
Sloane looked down at the register.
“It’s complicated, Margo.”
“It’s always complicated. That’s not a reason. That’s just the weather.”
Sloane thought about everything she couldn’t say.
The mission. The investigation. The man in slip nine.
The piece Ethan was holding that he’d give her in two weeks.
All of it sat in her chest like a held breath, and none of it was Margo’s to carry, and all of it was the actual answer to why it was complicated, and she couldn’t give a word of it away.
So she gave Margo the only true thing she could.
“I like him,” she said. “I like him more than is sensible. And I don’t know yet if I’m allowed to.”
Margo’s face softened all the way.
“Nobody’s ever allowed to, sweetheart,” she said. “You just are, or you aren’t. The allowed part you figure out after.”
She slid off the stool, leaned over the counter, and kissed Sloane once on the cheek, quick and fierce.
“Eat the cookies. Both of them are yours.”
And she was gone, the bell over the door still swinging, before Sloane could throw something at her.
He found her at the end of the day, when the Saturday rush had bled off and the light had gone long and gold across the water.
She was on Pier Two replacing the soft board at the head of slip eight, the one she’d been meaning to replace for two seasons, the one she’d gone down on in the storm.
She’d finally pulled it up and was on her knees with the new board cut to length beside her, the old one gray and spongy in her hands, and she didn’t hear him come down the pier until his shadow fell across the planking.
“Need a hand?”
She looked up. He stood with the sun behind him, and she had to put a hand up to see his face, and when she did, she found him looking down at her with an expression she’d been trying not to think about since the bench.
“I’ve got it,” she said. Then, before she could stop herself, “Stay anyway.”
He sat down on the planking near her, his back against a piling, close enough to hand her a screw when she put her palm out and far enough that she had to reach for it, and he watched her work, and he didn’t fill the quiet with anything.
She set the new board, drove the screws, and tested it with the heel of her hand. It held. Slip eight had a sound board at the head of it for the first time in two years.
She sat back on her heels and looked at it. Then she said the thing she’d been carrying down the pier all afternoon without meaning to say it to anyone.
“I used to be afraid to fix things on this pier,” she said. “Like fixing them meant I’d decided he wasn’t coming back. Like a soft board was a place I was still holding open for him.”
She didn’t say Noah’s name. She didn’t have to. Ethan didn’t move, and he didn’t reach for her, and he didn’t say any of the useless things people said. He just listened, with his whole still attention, in a way that made her able to keep going.
“I fixed it anyway,” she said. “Just now. I don’t know what that means.”
“It means the board was rotten and you’re a marina owner,” Ethan said. “It doesn’t have to mean anything else today.”
She looked at him.
It was exactly the right thing to say, and the rightness of it undid something in her chest that years of well-meaning people had only ever made tighter.
He hadn’t told her the board meant she was healing.
He hadn’t told her Noah would want her to move on.
He’d let the board be a board and let her be a woman who fixed it, and left the rest of it where it belonged, which was hers to decide.
She stood. He stood. They were close now, on the narrow pier in the gold light, closer than the work needed them to be, and neither of them stepped back.
She could see the green fleck in his right eye.
She could see the day’s sun caught on his cheekbones and the place where his jaw needed shaving and the small white scar across his second knuckle she’d noticed the first morning and pretended not to.
She could see that he was looking at her mouth, and then made himself look back at her eyes, and the effort it cost him to do that was the most honest thing a man had shown her in years.
Her heart was beating hard. She was close enough to feel the warmth coming off him, close enough that all it would take was leaning, a few inches, the smallest decision she’d make all day and the largest.
She wanted to. God, she wanted to.
And some old careful part of her, the part that had kept her standing for four years by never wanting anything she could lose, put a hand on her chest from the inside and held her where she was.
Not yet. Not on the open dock with the light going. Not with the man in slip nine and the mission she couldn’t see and the piece Ethan still hadn’t given her. Not before she was sure she could survive wanting it and not getting to keep it.
She stepped back.
She watched him see her step back, and she watched him accept it without taking it personally, which was its own small devastation, because a lesser man would have pushed and he didn’t, and the not-pushing made her want him more, not less.
“Thank you for staying,” she said. Her voice came out lower than she meant it to.
“Anytime,” he said. “I meant that too.”
She gathered her tools and the rotten board, and she walked back up the pier, and this time she let herself feel him watching her go, and she didn’t hate that she liked it.
She drove home with the radio off and the windows down and the warm evening coming in.
Her house was small and quiet and hers, three rooms above the water on the east side of the inlet, the house she’d grown up in and stayed in when staying had been the only thing she could manage.
She let herself in and stood for a while at the kitchen window with the light off, looking at the dark line of the water.
She thought about what Margo had said. You just are or you aren’t. The allowed part you figure out after.
She thought about the few inches she hadn’t closed on the dock, and how they sat in her now like a held note, like something unfinished she’d have to come back to, and she knew with a certainty that frightened her a little that she was going to come back to it.
Not tonight. But soon. The wanting had a momentum now, and she’d spent four years being the most careful woman in Blossom Springs, and she was tired, down to her bones, of being careful about the one thing that had finally made her laugh.
Her phone buzzed on the counter.
She’d half expected it, and she hated how fast she picked it up, and she looked at the screen and felt the foolish thing in her chest turn over.
The board looked good. Sleep well, Sloane.
She stood in her dark kitchen and read it twice, and would probably read them twice for as long as he sent them, and she thought about a hundred things she could say back and the one true thing under all of them.
She typed Goodnight, Ethan, then deleted it because it wasn’t enough, and she wasn’t ready to send the thing that would have been enough.
She typed it again. She sent it that time.
Goodnight, Ethan.
Then she set the phone face-down on the counter, and she stood in the dark a moment longer with both hands flat on the cool tile, and she let herself, just once, in her own kitchen where no one could see it, smile all the way.
Tomorrow she would be the marina owner again. Tomorrow there would be the mission and the man in slip nine and the careful distance the work required.
Tonight there was a text on her counter from a man who’d made her a sandwich, and a few inches of warm air she hadn’t closed but was going to, and the unfamiliar, terrifying, long-forgotten feeling of having something to look forward to.
She went to bed thinking about the green fleck in his eye.