Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Ethan reread her text three times before he got out of bed.
Goodnight, Ethan. Two words, sent at nine seventeen the night before, and he had looked at the screen of his phone like a man looking at a small lit window across a dark field, trying to make out who was inside.
He told himself it was a goodnight. He told himself she’d typed it because polite people typed goodnight. But he told himself a lot of things he didn’t believe before he made coffee and carried it to the cockpit and stood at the gunwale waiting for her morning walk down Pier Two.
She didn’t come.
It was Sunday, which she didn’t open the marina for, which he had not realized until he’d been standing on his cockpit deck for forty minutes with cold coffee and a chest that had started doing something undignified at the sight of her every morning and now had no place to put itself.
The dock stayed empty. The kiosk light stayed off.
The Sundays of Sloane Mercer were apparently not his to know yet.
He went below and shaved.
He hadn’t shaved yesterday, hadn’t shaved the day before that either. He stood in front of the small mirror with a razor in his hand and looked at himself, and he tried to remember the last time he’d shaved because a woman might see him, and he couldn’t, and the not-remembering was its own answer.
He shaved.
Caleb called at one to give him news that wasn’t news yet, and Ethan was grateful for the company of his own voice on the line.
“The principal moved money on Friday,” Caleb said. “Twelve point three million through a chain of three shells. Forensics has it.”
“Friday.”
“Same day the Bertram ran the storm.”
“He’s clearing the books.”
“The shape of it says he’s expecting to be exposed, and he’s moving cash into accounts he can reach from somewhere he can run to. Which means we’re inside the window.”
“How long a window?”
“Hard to say. Ten days. Two weeks. Could be three if he’s patient. Could be eight if he panics.”
Ethan watched the water for a long count of breaths.
“Vale.”
“I’m here.”
“You’re going to have to give her the rest of it inside the window. The two weeks you promised her may not survive the timeline.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry, brother.”
The line went dead, and Ethan stood with the phone in his hand and the afternoon sun on the back of his neck, and the part of him that had spent the morning thinking about Sloane Mercer in his kitchen on a Sunday felt like a man who’d been told the ground he was standing on was on a clock.
He went below and changed into a clean shirt he didn’t need to change into, because he had nothing else to do with himself, and he sat at the dinette and tried to read, and read the same paragraph three times.
There was a spot on the gunwale he cleaned that didn’t need cleaning.
He thought about texting her. He didn’t.
She’d know if he texted just because. She’d been reading her own information for too long not to know.
So he sat with the want and let it be what it was, and the afternoon went slowly.
He saw her come around the corner of the office a little after seven.
The marina was quiet at that hour on a Sunday, the weekend boats gone, the long gold light going pink at the edges over the Gulf, and Sloane Mercer walked across the parking lot in a way he hadn’t seen her walk before, which was without anywhere obvious to be, in jeans and a soft gray shirt that wasn’t her work shirt, with her hair down and her hands empty.
She came down Pier Three.
He set the book he wasn’t reading face-down on the engine cover and stood, because a man who didn’t stand when Sloane Mercer walked down his pier was a man who’d misread the moment, and he hadn’t misread anything about her yet.
She stopped at the head of his slip.
She didn’t step onto the swim platform. She stood at the pylon with one hand resting on it and looked at him, and the light was on her face, and her eyes were the blue they were at this hour with the sun going, and she didn’t say anything for a count of about four breaths.
He waited. He’d learned by now that Sloane Mercer arrived in her own time.
“I’m off the clock,” she said.
“All right.”
“It’s Sunday. The marina is closed. I’m not the marina owner right now.”
“Okay.”
“I’m a woman who walked over to a man’s boat at dusk.”
She said it like she’d been practicing it on the way over, and her voice was steady, but her hand on the pylon was not, and he could see the white of her knuckles from where he stood, and the seeing of it did something to him he didn’t have words for.
“Sloane.”
“I’m not asking permission, Ethan. I’m telling you what I am tonight. You can tell me what you are.”
He looked at her.
Every careful sentence Caleb had ever taught him about asset distance and operational discipline and the difference between a friend and a file was sitting in his head in a small neat row, and every one of them was useless to him in this moment, because the woman at his pylon had walked over here by herself and named what she was doing and put it in his hands.
She’d come for him.
He thought, very briefly, about the window Caleb had named at one o’clock and the piece of file that still sat between them and the man in slip nine and the fact that he was going to have to tell her the worst sentence of her life inside two weeks, and he thought about all of it like a man thinking about weather he’d already decided to walk out in.
“I’m a man who has been waiting for you to walk over here for three days,” he said.
She let out a breath, and her hand let go of the pylon.
“Good,” she said.
She stepped onto the swim platform.
The Sundancer rocked once under her weight and steadied, the small private welcome a boat made when she accepted a person aboard, and Ethan stood on his cockpit deck with his hands at his sides and didn’t reach for her, because she had walked over here and named what she was, and she was going to be the one to close the distance, or it didn’t mean what it was supposed to mean.
She closed it.
She stepped up onto the deck and crossed the three feet of teak between them with the slow steady walk of a woman who had decided, and she stopped close enough that he could see the small lines at the corners of her eyes and the place at her temple where she’d been freckled by some long-ago summer, and she put both hands flat on the front of his shirt, and looked up.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“I’m going to kiss you, Ethan, unless you tell me not to.”
He could feel his heart against her hand. She could feel it too. He saw her notice.
“I’m not going to tell you not to,” he said.
She lifted up onto her toes and kissed him.
It was not a careful kiss. It was a kiss a woman gave when she had stopped being careful for one specific reason and was going to be careful again tomorrow, and it had the warmth and the deliberate weight of something decided in advance and committed to in the moment.
Her mouth was warm and a little dry from the wind, and she tasted faintly of coffee, and her hand was steady against his chest now, and he understood, somewhere distant in himself, that she had been bracing for him to pull back and was discovering by inches that he wasn’t going to.
He didn’t pull back.
He put one hand against the side of her face, the way he’d wanted to at her counter yesterday and hadn’t let himself, and the other low against her back where the soft gray shirt was warm with the heat of her, and he kissed her like a man who’d been undercover for three years and had not been touched by a person who knew his real name in any of them.
He kissed her like he’d been thinking about it every minute since she’d laughed at a sandwich on a sunny bench.
He kissed her like it counted, because it did.
She made a small sound against his mouth, half breath and half something else, and he felt it go straight through him.
Neither of them was quick about it. They had years of restraint between them, hers for grief and his for cover, and a kiss earned on that much restraint did not turn into something else inside thirty seconds.
He took his time. She let him. He learned the shape of her mouth and the way her free hand came up to fist lightly in the fabric of his shirt over his heart and the way her breath caught when he brushed his thumb along her jaw, and she learned the shape of his shoulder under her palm and the small involuntary movement he made when she rose up the half inch she had to rise to meet him.
It was the most honest thing he had done in three years.
She broke the kiss first, gently, the way she’d done everything since she’d arrived at his pylon, and she didn’t step back.
She stayed where she was, with her forehead against the line of his collarbone, breathing, and he kept his hand at the side of her face and rested his cheek against the top of her head, and they stood like that on the cockpit of his boat in the going light with the marina quiet around them and his pulse loud in his own ears.
“Ethan,” she said, into his shirt.
“Yes.”
“I have been very careful for a long time.”
“I know.”
“I’m not careful right now. I want you to know I’m not careful right now and I will not pretend I am.”
He held her a moment longer before he answered. He wanted to get the sentence right.
“I’m being careful with you,” he said, “because I have to be, and I’m going to keep being careful with you until I can stop. But I'm not being careful about how I feel. I’m not. You should know that.”
She lifted her head. Her eyes were close to his and very blue, and there was something in them he hadn’t seen before in any woman’s face, which was a person looking at him as if she was deciding she was going to count on him, and the decision was visibly costing her, and she was visibly going to make it anyway.
“Two weeks,” she said.
“Two weeks.”
“When you tell me the rest, I want it sitting in this kiss. Not after it. Inside it. I want to be able to look back at this moment and know you kissed me knowing what you knew.”
He thought about Caleb on the phone at one o’clock and the window narrowing and the piece of the file that was going to land on her like the end of the world, and he thought, with a clarity he hadn’t had since the day he’d signed onto this operation, that the only way to honor what she’d just asked was to mean what he’d just done.
“It’s in it,” he said. “All of it. I knew what I knew, and I kissed you anyway.”
“Good.”
She put her hand over his on the side of her face, and held it there, and closed her eyes for the count of a breath.
Then she opened them and stepped back.
She didn’t go right away.
She stood at the rail of the cockpit and looked at the water for a while with her arms folded and a small smile at the corner of her mouth that wasn’t for him to see, and he didn’t look at it directly because he had a sense it belonged to her alone.
“I came over here thinking I’d say more than I’ve said,” she told the water.
“What did you mean to say?”
“I don’t remember anymore. Most of it sounded sensible in my kitchen and ridiculous on the way down the pier.”
“That’s how it usually goes.”
“Is it?”
“In my limited experience.”
She turned her head and looked at him then, and the smile got a little fuller, and he could see her in the soft late light with her hair down and a flush at the side of her neck he’d put there, and he had to remind himself, deliberately and with effort, that he had a job to do and a clock running and that he could not, by any measure, ask her to stay tonight.
She seemed to know he was thinking it. Or she was thinking it herself.
“I’m going to go home,” she said. “I don’t want to. But I’m going to anyway.”
“All right.”
“Because if I stay, it’s going to be something I’m doing partly to outrun what’s coming. And I don’t want any of it to be that. When I stay, it’s going to be because I’ve decided to, with all the lights on.”
He felt that land in his chest with the small, hard thump of a sentence he was going to carry around with him for the next two weeks.
“Sloane.”
“Yes.”
“When you stay, the lights will be on.”
She laughed, just a little, the same laugh as the sandwich, the surprised one, the one he was discovering he would do almost anything to hear, and she stepped off the swim platform onto the pier with a hand on the rail and the small, careful balance of a woman who knew her way around a boat.
She walked back up Slip Seventeen and the boardwalk.
She turned once, halfway up, the way she had not turned the day she’d first walked past his slip, and looked back at him across the water and lifted her hand in a small wave that was not the wave of a marina owner to a tenant, and he raised his hand back, and she went.
He stood at the gunwale until he saw her truck lights come on across the lot, and then he stood there until the lights swung out onto Lake Road, and then he stood there a while longer with the marina dark around him and the taste of her still on his mouth and the heat of her still in his hand, and he understood with a kind of grim, grateful clarity exactly how much of himself she now had.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
He looked at it. It was Caleb, the second time today, which was never good news, but Ethan looked at the screen and could not, in that moment, make himself feel about it the way he should have.
He let it go to voicemail.
He called Caleb back in nine minutes, after he’d sat down at his dinette and put his hands flat on the table and made himself breathe like a man instead of a man in love.
“Vale.”
“Caleb.”
“Where were you?”
“On my deck.”
A pause.
“Vale.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not going to ask.”
“Thank you.”
“But you sound different.”
Ethan looked at the cabin ceiling and let out a slow breath.
“I am different,” he said. “What’ve you got?”
Caleb didn’t push. He gave him the update: the principal had moved again, the window had narrowed by two days, and the team would need Ethan back in operational tempo by the middle of the week. Ethan took it in cleanly. He wrote nothing down. He didn’t have to.
When the call ended, he sat for a long time in the dim cabin with the dinette light on and the water moving under the hull, and he thought about a woman who had stood on his swim platform and put her hands on his chest and kissed him with all the deliberate weight of a person making a decision.
He thought about the lights on.
And he thought about what it was going to cost both of them when he kept his promise and told her the rest, and he held that thought in his hands like something hot, and he didn’t put it down.