Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Ethan had four fenders rigged down the outboard side of a Grady-White at slip fourteen before the first real gust came through and told him the forecast had been honest.
It came off the southwest the way the radio had promised, a long shoving push that laid the halyards over against the masts up at the sailboat end and set every loose line on the docks talking at once.
He worked through it, hitching fenders at the waterline where they'd do some good, adjusting spring lines, taking up the slack that a day and a half of surge would otherwise turn into chafe.
The boats whose owners lived two counties away didn't know they had a man looking after them tonight, and that suited him.
A man who looked after other people's boats in a building wind was a man nobody questioned being out on the docks after dark.
Across the basin, Sloane worked the inboard side of Pier Two, and they'd fallen into the rhythm of two people who knew the same job without needing to discuss it.
She took a boat; he took a boat. She called a slip number across the water, and he answered with the next one down.
The wind ate half the words, and they filled in the rest from long practice neither of them actually had with each other, and somehow had anyway.
He clocked slip nine on the way past it. He didn't break stride. A man rigging storm lines looked at every boat on the dock, and the Bertram got the same half-second of attention as the Grady and the houseboat and the charter boat, no more, because more would have been a tell.
Doyle Pruitt was in his cockpit with the cabin light on behind him, not rigging anything.
His fenders were where they'd been Tuesday.
His spring lines hadn't been touched. A boatman who'd spent his life on the water was sitting through the front edge of a day-and-a-half blow without putting out a single extra line, which meant Doyle Pruitt was not planning to be tied to this dock long enough for chafe to matter.
Ethan filed it without slowing and moved to the next boat.
Caleb would have it off the camera angle inside the hour, and there was nothing to do with it tonight but see it.
The window was eight days at the outside, and Doyle's untouched cleats had just shaved a guess off the front of that, and the part of Ethan that ran the math noted the shave and kept it ready and stepped back, because the rest of the evening was not the math's to have.
He looked up and found Sloane watching him from across the green water, a coil of line over her shoulder and the wind pushing her hair across her face, and she lifted her chin at the last two boats on her side, a question, and he held up five fingers, and she nodded and bent back to the work.
Whatever he'd seen at slip nine went into the locked part of him where it lived, and he gave the rest of himself to the docks and the wind and the woman across the basin, and he was getting better at the handoff than he wanted to admit, because it was good practice for a man who was going to spend the next eight days doing exactly this.
Her house sat on the east side of the inlet where the land came up just enough to hold three rooms above the water, and by the time he'd showered the salt off and driven over, the rain had started in earnest, coming sideways in the headlights, drumming the truck roof in the gravel drive.
She opened the door before he knocked. The light behind her was low and yellow and the kitchen smelled like something with garlic in it, she'd changed out of the marina clothes into a soft gray shirt and jeans, her hair was down, still damp at the ends, and she stood in the doorway with the rain coming down behind him and looked at him for a beat before she stepped back to let him in.
“You found it,” she said.
“You gave good directions.”
“I gave you a mailbox and a turn. You found it.” She shut the door against the wind, and the room got quieter. “Sit. It's almost done. I made too much because I don't know how to make a little of anything, so you're going to eat like you mean it.”
He sat at the small table set for two and watched her move around the kitchen, and the watching pulled something tight in his chest, because he'd spent three years in rooms that were never his, eating off other people's docks under other men's names, and this was a woman cooking him dinner in a house she'd grown up in, and the ordinariness of it landed harder than anything dangerous he'd done in those three years.
She put a plate in front of him, chicken and rice and something green she'd done with lemon, and she sat across with her own, and outside the wind threw a sheet of rain against the window hard enough to rattle it, and neither of them flinched, because they'd both spent the day getting ready for exactly this and there was a quiet satisfaction in being indoors and dry while it arrived.
“This is good,” he said, and meant it.
“Don't sound so surprised.”
“I'm not surprised. I'm grateful. There's a difference.”
She looked at him across the table with the fork halfway up. “You do that,” she said. “You take a thing somebody says light, and you answer it true. It throws me every time.”
“Is that a complaint?”
“No.” She set the fork down. “It's the opposite of a complaint. I'm trying to tell you I noticed, and that I don't have a lot of practice telling a man I noticed something about him, so it's coming out sideways.”
The rain kept on. Somewhere off toward the Gulf, the thunder was still distant, more pressure than sound. He put his fork down too.
“Sloane.”
“Don't.” She said it gently, with a small lift at the corner of her mouth.
“Whatever careful thing you're about to say, about the clock, or the piece you're still holding, or the part where this is complicated.
I know all of it. I've known it the whole time.
I invited you to dinner anyway, and I didn't put an exit in the invitation, and I did that on purpose.
So don't hand me the exit now. I'm asking you not to.”
He looked at her for a long moment. The thing he was holding sat in him where it always sat, heavier tonight for the lamplight and the rain and the second plate, and he understood with total clarity that the honest move and the kind move were not the same move tonight, and that she had just asked him, knowing more than she could name and less than she deserved, to choose the one that let them have this.
He chose it. He'd answer for the cost when the cost came due. Tonight she'd asked him to stay inside the small lit room with her, and he was done finding reasons not to.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay?”
“No exit. I heard you.”
Something in her shoulders came down half an inch, the bracing she'd been doing without showing it, and she picked her fork back up, and the rain ran down the window, and for a while they just ate, and it was the most ordinary thing in the world, and it undid him more thoroughly than the wind ever could.
She washed the dishes, and he dried, because she handed him a towel without asking and he took it without being asked, and they stood at the sink hip to hip with the storm leaning on the house, and the not-touching had turned charged, every brush of her arm against his a small deliberate accident neither of them corrected.
She handed him the last plate. He set it in the rack. When he turned back, she hadn't moved away, and the few inches she'd refused to close on the dock the week before were right there again, the same few inches, and this time she looked up at him and didn't step back.
“I stepped back on the pier,” she said, like she'd read it off him. “That day with the board. You let me, and you didn't take it personally, and that's the day I knew I was in trouble.”
“Why trouble?”
“Because a man who lets you step back is a man you can't talk yourself out of.” She put her hand flat on the front of his shirt, the same place she'd put it on the boat, and he felt the heat of her palm come through the cotton.
“I'm not stepping back tonight. I want you to know I'm the one who's not stepping back. Whatever this costs later, I walked across the kitchen. Me.”
He brought his hand up and covered hers against his chest, and held it there, and looked at her, and let her see that he'd heard exactly what she'd said and what she'd taken on by saying it.
“Then don't step back,” he said, and closed the inches himself.
He kissed her slowly, the way the boat had ended and never gotten to finish, one hand still over hers on his chest and the other coming up to the side of her jaw, his thumb at the hinge of it, tipping her face up.
She made a low sound against his mouth, her free hand fisted in his shirt and pulled, and the slow lasted about as long as restraint usually lasted, which was until the other person stopped wanting it slow.
She backed him into the counter, and he let her, the edge of it against his spine, and she came up onto her toes and kissed him hard, and he got both hands into her damp hair and held her head and kissed her back until she had to break for air, her forehead dropping against his collarbone, her breath going ragged at his throat.
“Bedroom's the door on the left,” she said into his shirt. “I'm telling you now so I don't have to think of words later.”
He laughed, low, and felt her smile against his neck at the sound of it. Then he got an arm behind her back and another behind her knees and lifted her, and she made a startled noise and grabbed his shoulders, then he carried her out of the kitchen with the storm going hard against the windows.
He set her down at the foot of the bed and she pulled the gray shirt over her head and dropped it, and he stopped breathing for a second at the sight of her in the low light coming through the door, then he stopped thinking about breathing at all.
She reached for the hem of his shirt and he let her take it off him, and she put both hands flat on his chest, on bare skin this time, and ran them up over his shoulders, and the scar on his ribs she found with her thumb and didn't ask about, just pressed it once, gently, a question she was choosing not to make him answer tonight, and the not-asking went through him harder than any touch had.
He got his hands on her waist and turned them and brought her down onto the bed under him, settling between her thighs with his weight on his forearms, and kissed her again, deeper now, and worked his mouth down the line of her throat to her collarbone while she arched up into him and pushed her hips against his and made it very clear she had no patience left for slow.
“Ethan.”
“I've got you.”
“I know you do. That's not—” Her breath caught when his hand moved between them, found her, started a slow pressure with the heel of his palm that pulled a sound out of her she clearly hadn't planned to make. “That's not what I'm asking for.”
“Tell me what you're asking for.”
“You. Now. Stop being careful with me. You're the only one who's still being careful and I want it gone.”
So he stopped. He stripped the rest of what was between them and came back to her, and she reached down and guided him and they both went still at the first press of it, that held breath, her hand gripping his shoulder and his forehead dropped to hers, and then he pushed into her slowly and felt her open around him and heard the sound she made low in her throat and answered it with his own.
He moved. She met him. They found the rhythm fast because they'd been finding rhythms together across a basin all evening, and her hands were on his back and then in his hair and then gripping the back of his neck, pulling him down to her mouth, and he braced one forearm by her head and got his other hand under her hip and changed the angle and she said his name again, sharper this time, her heels pressing into the backs of his thighs.
“There,” she said. “Right—don't stop.”
He didn't stop. He watched her face in the low light, the way her brow drew together and her mouth came open, and he held the pace she needed even when it cost him to hold it, even when his own want was a hard insistent thing pushing him forward faster, because watching her get there was worth more to him than getting there himself, and that was its own admission he'd think about later.
She came with her back arched off the bed and her nails biting into his neck and a broken sound that wasn't a word, and he felt her tighten around him and let go of the holding, finally, and followed her over a few hard strokes later with his face pressed into the curve of her shoulder and her name caught somewhere in his chest that he didn't say out loud, because the saying of it would have meant more than even this did, and he wasn't ready to spend that yet.
They lay tangled and breathing while the storm went on outside, and he didn't move off her right away, and she didn't ask him to. Her hand came up and traced the back of his neck where her nails had been, soft now, an apology that didn't need making.
Later, they lay on their sides facing each other in the dark, the rain steady on the roof now, the worst of the front still hours from its peak.
He'd pulled the sheet up over them, and she had one hand resting on his chest, over the place she'd put it twice now through his shirt, and she was tracing slow idle circles with her thumb like she was confirming he was still there.
“I'm not going to ask you anything,” she said into the dark. “About the mission. About the piece you're holding. I want you to know I'm not going to, so you can stop bracing for it. Whatever it is, it'll come when you said it'll come, and tonight isn't that.”
He looked at her in the dark and felt the weight of what he was holding press up under his sternum where her hand was, and he was grateful she couldn't read the thing through her palm the way she seemed able to read everything else through it, because if she could, she'd have felt it kick.
“You keep doing that,” he said. “Giving me room I didn't ask for.”
“You gave me a board that got to just be a board. I'm returning the favor.” Her thumb went still. “Go to sleep, Ethan. The wind's going to do what it does whether we watch it or not.”
She tucked herself in against him, her back to his chest, and pulled his arm over her, and he lay there with her breathing going slow and even against him and the storm working the inlet outside and the thing he was holding lying quiet in him for once, not gone, never gone, but quiet, outvoted for one night by the woman asleep in his arms.
He stayed awake a while listening to the rain.
He'd promised her no exit, and he'd meant it, and he understood now that meaning it was going to cost more than the exit ever would have.
When the reckoning came, and it was coming inside the week, she'd have this night to set against it.
So would he. He held onto that, and the warmth of her, and somewhere in the small hours, with the storm still leaning on the house, he slept too.