Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Sloane woke to the weight of an arm across her waist and lay still for a while pretending she hadn't, because the pretending let her keep it a little longer.
The rain had settled overnight into the steady drone the forecast had promised, no longer throwing itself at the windows but leaning on the house in a low, continuous push that meant the front had come ashore proper and meant to stay through the day.
Gray light came around the edge of the curtain.
Behind her, Ethan slept the way she'd learned in one night that he slept, heavy and quiet and completely, a man who'd clearly taught himself somewhere to take rest where he could get it and not waste it being shallow about it.
His breath moved against the back of her neck.
His arm was a warm bar across her, his hand loose and open on the mattress in front of her, and she looked at that open hand in the gray light, at the small white scar across the second knuckle she'd noticed the first morning and pretended not to, and let herself understand that she'd done it.
She'd reached for the thing with both hands, and it hadn't dropped her.
He was here. The kitchen, the storm, the carrying her down the hall, all of it had happened, and she didn't regret a second of it, and the not-regretting was a sensation so unfamiliar she had to lie there a minute and get used to the feel of it.
She shifted to turn over, and his arm tightened before he was even awake, a reflex, drawing her back, and then she felt him surface, felt the breath change against her neck.
“Don't go anywhere,” he said, his voice rough with sleep. “Marina can wait ten minutes.”
“The marina is underwater, and so are you if you think I keep this schedule for fun.” But she didn't move, and he knew she didn't mean it, and she felt him smile against her shoulder.
“Ten minutes.”
“Five.”
“Eight.”
“You can't negotiate a number that's already going down; that's not how numbers work.” She rolled over to face him and found him watching her, his eyes soft and unguarded in a way she hadn't seen them before, the brown of them dark in the gray light and the green fleck in the right one catching what there was. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“You stayed.” She hadn't meant it as a question, and it came out partly as one anyway.
“I stayed.” He brought a hand up and pushed her hair back off her face, slow, like he had the time. “I'm not a man who leaves at four in the morning, Sloane. Whatever else I am, I'm not that.”
She caught the small flick at the edge of it, the whatever else I am, the door he left open a crack and didn't walk through, and she chose, the way she'd chosen at dinner, not to push it open for him.
He'd given her a board that got to be a board.
She could give him a morning that got to be a morning.
“Good,” she said, and kissed him, and the eight minutes turned into closer to twenty, and the marina was fine.
They drank coffee standing in her kitchen with the rain running down the glass, and it should have been strange, a man she'd known a short time filling her doorway in yesterday's shirt with a mug she'd pulled from the cabinet without asking which one he wanted, and it wasn't strange at all, and the lack of strangeness was the strangest part.
“I'll follow you in,” he said. “Separate trucks. Your lot's going to be empty in this, but Catherine's eyes work fine, and Margo will have us married off by Thursday if we roll in together.”
“Margo has us married off already. She put two forks in my salad bag yesterday.”
“Two forks.” He considered it over the rim of the mug. “That's a woman making a statement.”
“That's a woman who's been my best friend for a long time, and can read me like the tide chart.” She rinsed her mug and set it in the rack where his plate had dried the night before. “She's going to ask me. Today, probably. She'll come down with cookies and that face she does.”
“What'll you tell her?”
She thought about it, drying her hands on the towel he'd used.
“The true part I'm allowed to tell. That I like you.
That I stopped being careful. She won't need the rest, and she won't ask for the rest, because Margo knows where the edges of a thing are without anybody drawing them.” She hung the towel.
“She's better at that than people give her credit for.”
He went quiet at that, and she watched something pass behind his eyes that she couldn't name, gone before she could ask, and she understood it was one of the things that lived in the locked part of him, and she let it go where the other things went.
His phone buzzed on the counter. He glanced at it, and she watched him read whatever it was, and she watched his face do the thing it did when the work walked into the room, a settling, a flattening, the soft morning man folding himself away and the other one coming forward.
He typed a short answer and set the phone face-down.
“Work,” she said. Not a question.
“Work.” He looked at her, and to his credit, he didn't pretend it was nothing. “I have a friend coming through town in the next day or two. He may stop by the marina. Big guy, easy to talk to. If you see him, he's mine, he's fine, you don't have to do anything but be your normal self.”
“Does your friend have a name?”
“Graham.” He said it plainly, and she kept it, because she was building her own quiet record the way she'd built one for four years, and a name was a thing worth having. “He's a medic. Was a medic. He's good people. That's all I can give you about him, and you already know why.”
“I know why.” She looked at him a moment.
The clock again. The mission moving through her marina, picking up speed, sending men with first names and no last ones through her gates.
She could feel it gathering the way she could feel weather, a pressure change she had no instrument for but knew in her body all the same. “Ethan. Is this getting close?”
He didn't answer right away, and the not-answering was the answer, and he knew she'd hear it that way and let her, which she decided was its own form of honesty, the most he could give her standing in her kitchen on a Tuesday with the rain coming down.
“When it's close,” he said, “I'll tell you what I can, when I can. I won't let it land on you out of nowhere. That's a promise I can actually keep, so I'm making that one.”
It wasn't the answer. It was better than a lie, and worse than the truth, and she'd known both of those were the only two options on the table, and she'd walked across the kitchen anyway.
“Okay,” she said. “Go. I'll see you down there.”
The marina in a steady blow was a hushed, dripping version of itself, the docks dark with rain and the boats riding low and patient against their lines, and not a soul on the water who didn't have to be.
Sloane worked the morning in her foul-weather gear, walking the piers, checking the lines she and Ethan had set the night before, finding two that had taken a stretch and re-setting them, pumping a little rain out of an open cockpit on Pier One whose owner she'd be billing for the neglect.
The work was the same as it had been for years, but she was not the same inside it, and she kept catching herself smiling at nothing, at a cleat, at the rain, like a woman ten years younger than the one who'd been doing this alone since her father died and Noah went out and didn't come back.
She didn't stop at slip eight on the morning pass. She noticed that she didn't, and she let it be true, and she kept walking.
Across the basin, Ethan was on his own boat doing the small endless work of a man with a fixer-upper, visible and unremarkable, and twice he looked up and caught her looking and once he lifted his coffee an inch off the rail the way he had every morning, and she lifted her chin back, and the whole private language of it ran across the green water between them and nobody watching would have read a thing.
Doyle Pruitt's Bertram sat at slip nine with the cabin buttoned up.
She'd known Doyle a few years, a quiet man who paid his slip fee in cash and kept odd hours and had never given her trouble, and she'd put him in the part of her record that didn't have a name for itself yet, the part where the suspicious activity lived, the comings and goings at the wrong end of the night that she'd been writing in a notebook for four years without knowing what she was building toward.
She looked at the buttoned-up boat and felt the old prickle, the one that had nothing to do with Ethan and everything to do with the four years of watching, and she made herself keep walking, because watching Doyle Pruitt too hard was a way to get noticed and she'd learned a long time ago how not to get noticed on her own dock.
Margo came at one, in a yellow slicker with the hood down because Margo would drown before she'd flatten her hair, carrying a paper bag gone translucent at the bottom and an expression Sloane could have read from the far end of Pier Three.
“I brought soup,” Margo said, coming into the office and shaking off like a dog. “It's a soup kind of day, and you forget to eat when the weather's like this, and also I have questions.”
“The soup I'll take. The questions you can keep.”
“That's not how friendship works, and you know it.” Margo set the bag on the counter and pulled herself up onto the customer stool, dripping.
“You had a man's truck at your place all night.
In a storm. Don't even, Sloane, Doreen drove past on her way to her sister's and called me at seven this morning like she'd seen the second coming.”
Sloane took the soup out of the bag, two containers, and got two spoons from the office drawer, and the getting of the second spoon was a small confession all by itself, and Margo's whole face caught it.
“Oh,” Margo said, quieter. “Oh, honey. You did.”
“I did.”
“And?”
Sloane handed her a container and a spoon and sat down on her own side of the counter, and she thought about how to give Margo the true thing without giving her the thing she couldn't give anyone, and found that the true thing was bigger than the secret and didn't need it.
“And I haven't felt like this in so long I forgot it was a thing that happened to people,” she said.
“And it scares me to death, and I'm doing it anyway, and I need you to be happy for me and not careful for me, because I've got careful covered, I've had careful covered for years, and what I need from you is the other thing.”
Margo's eyes went bright, fast, the way they did, and she reached across the counter and gripped Sloane's wrist hard.
“I am so happy for you I could cry into this soup,” she said.
“And I'm not going to be careful; I'm going to be exactly the opposite; I'm going to be thrilled and nosy and completely useless as a source of caution. But.” Her grip tightened.
“You tell me if he's not what he seems. You hear me?
You've had enough taken from you on this dock.
I see a man hurt you, I will end him with a soup spoon. I'm not above it.”
Sloane laughed, and it came out wet, and she turned her wrist over and gripped Margo back.
“I hear you.”
“Good.” Margo let go, picked up her spoon, and pointed it across the counter. “Now tell me everything, and start with the truck, because Doreen said it was still there at six-forty.”
The rain eased toward evening into a fine blowing mist, the worst of the front grinding north up the coast, and the marina exhaled the way it did after a long blow, lines easing, water flattening, the whole place tired and dripping and intact.
Sloane was coiling a last length of line at the head of Pier Two when Ethan came down the dock toward her, and he didn't pretend to have a reason this time, didn't carry a tool or angle for a boat, just walked down the pier in the dying mist and stopped close to her, closer than the dock required, and the day had emptied the marina down to the two of them and Catherine's far-off cabin light, and for a minute neither of them said anything.
“Long day,” he said.
“Good day.” She finished the coil and hung it. “Wet, but good. The boats all held. Nobody sank. I had soup with my best friend and lied to her about half of it and told her the truth about the half that matters.”
“Which half matters?”
“The half with you in it.” She said it simply, looking at the water, and then made herself look at him when she said the rest, because she'd decided last night she was done saying the true things to the floor.
“I don't know how much time this has, Ethan.
Yours or mine or the thing you're holding.
I've stopped pretending I don't feel the clock.
But I had today. I had this morning, and I had this whole strange good day knowing you'd be down here, and whatever happens when your friend Graham gets to town, and the rest of it comes, I had today. Nobody gets to take today.”
He looked at her for a long moment in the mist with something working behind his face that she couldn't fully read, and she'd come to understand that the things he couldn't say lived right there, just behind his eyes, pressing, and that the cost of whatever he was carrying was written in the muscle around them even when the words never came.
“No,” he said finally, low. “Nobody gets to take today.”
He reached out and tucked a wet strand of hair behind her ear, his thumb tracing the line of her jaw, and the gesture was so unhurried, so unguarded out here in the open where anybody could have seen, that it undid her more than the night before had, because the night before had been the storm and the wanting, and this was a man touching her face on her own dock in the gray light because he wanted to and didn't care who saw.
“Come home with me,” she said. “Or I'll come to the boat. I don't care which. I'm just not done with today yet.”
“The boat,” he said. “You cooked. It's my turn, and I make a passable grilled cheese for a man who lives on one burner.”
“Sell it harder.”
“Good bread. Real butter. I'll open the good window so you can hear the water.”
“Sold.”
She gathered the last of her gear and they walked up the dock together, not touching, the marina dark and dripping and quiet around them, and across the basin the buttoned-up Bertram at slip nine sat with no light showing, and she clocked it the way she clocked everything on her dock, a half-second of attention and no more, and then she let it go and walked toward the boat and the man and the rest of the evening she'd decided to keep.