Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
brYNN
The rain sounds different against corrugated metal. Angrier. Like it’s offended by the shed’s existence and determined to prove a point about structural integrity.
The trawler sits on blocks in the centre of the shed, hull propped with timber shores, taking up most of the floor space.
I’m up on her deck, elbow-deep in the engine mount, oil under my fingernails, a spanner that’s slightly the wrong size slipping for the third time.
Ghost is asleep in a coil of rope by my camp bed, unbothered by the storm, unbothered by everything.
The single bulb on its cable swings when the wind gusts hard enough to lift the corrugated roof and whistle inside.
Working. Building. Turning the wreck I bought in Plymouth into the life I’m trying to piece together. Not thinking about Jude Harding’s hand brushing mine on the winch yesterday, or the way he walked away like the dock was on fire and his dignity depended on a clean exit.
Check you later, Trelawney.
Like we hadn’t just spent four hours in a truck together. Like his hand hadn’t brushed mine and made my breath catch.
I tighten the mount bolt and the spanner slips again. I swear, wipe my hands on my jeans, reach for the penetrating oil. The problem is the forward mount – corroded threads, salt damage, needs to be worked loose gradually—
That’s when I hear the footsteps.
Heavy. Determined. Pissed off.
Sounds like a Harding.
The hammering starts before I can even straighten up.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
‘Brynn. Open the door.’
His voice is hoarse, raw in a way that twists low in my stomach.
I set the spanner down on the engine housing – careful, always careful with tools, even when your pulse is hammering like you’re seventeen and useless – and swing myself down from the deck.
The drop to the shed floor is about four feet. My boots hit concrete.
The door protests when I yank it open, wood swollen from the damp.
And there he is.
Jude Harding, soaked through. Not just rained-on – drenched, like he’s been swimming in his clothes.
Hair plastered to his forehead. Mud on his hands, on his knees.
Jaw so tight I can see the muscle jumping beneath the skin.
His bad leg is braced like it’s screaming at him, and his eyes, Christ, his eyes.
They’re churning like the sea looks right before a storm takes it.
It’s fear. Barely contained, badly disguised as fury.
I lean against the doorframe. ‘Lost, Harding?’
He doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t even crack a smile.
Instead, he pushes past me into the shed, dripping rainwater onto the concrete floor, and I have to step back or let him walk straight through me.
He’s standing between the timber shores of the trawler, looking around the shed like he’s seeing it for the first time – the camp bed in the corner with its sleeping bag and pillow, the workbench against the far wall cluttered with tools and manuals, Ghost’s food bowl by the door.
Evidence of a life being lived in thirty square metres of stone and corrugated metal.
He’s breathing hard. Ragged. Like he’s been running and couldn’t stop.
‘I went to the cottage,’ he says.
I wait.
‘You weren’t there.’
‘No. Because I live here. In the shed. Which you know, because you’ve been here before, and we’ve had this conversation before, and I’m starting to think you need it tattooed somewhere visible.’
‘You weren’t there.’ He says it like an accusation. Like I’ve broken a promise I didn’t know I’d made. ‘It was dark and the storm was hammering and I didn’t know—’ He stops. Drags a hand through his soaking hair. ‘Then I came down here and the light was on and I—’
‘You were worried about me.’
‘I was—’ He can’t say it. Can’t admit it. His jaw works, grinding the words between his teeth. ‘I was angry.’
‘You’re always angry. That’s not new.’ I cross my arms. ‘And I’m sorry, are we doing this? Are you seriously standing in my shed, dripping all over my floor, because you panicked that I wasn’t in a building I’ve told you three times I don’t sleep in?’
‘It’s not about the cottage—’
‘Then what’s it about? Because you’ve got mud on your knees and you can barely stand on that leg and you look like you’ve been running through a storm for no reason, so either tell me what’s actually wrong or get out of my shed, Harding.’
That lands. I watch his jaw clench tighter, watch his whole face shift – and the air between us changes.
‘My dad,’ he says, gaze dropping for a moment before lifting back to mine. ‘He stood up in the pub tonight and told everyone you don’t have a boat.’
I blink. ‘I have a boat. It’s right there.’ I gesture at the trawler behind me, twelve tonnes of proof.
‘I know. I told him that this morning. He watched it come in. He was standing on the dock.’ Jude’s voice is very controlled now, very flat.
The voice of someone keeping it together with their fingernails.
‘He forgot. Or he didn’t – I don’t know – he’s been doing that, saying things that don’t – and then he told me to stay away from you, and he mentioned Kit, said he’d tell Kit to keep an eye on things, and Kit’s in New York, Dad, and I said that ten minutes ago—’
He stops. Swallows.
And I see it. The thing underneath all the anger, all the soaking-wet storm-chasing dramatics. Jude Harding is terrified. Not of me. Of what’s happening to his father. Of the growing catalogue of things that don’t add up. Of the word he can’t bring himself to say.
‘Jude.’
‘Don’t.’ His voice is rough. ‘Don’t look at me like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like you understand.’
‘Maybe I do.’ I uncross my arms. A hinge I didn’t know was rusted gives way. ‘My grandad forgot things at the end. Small things first. Then bigger ones. I know what that looks like from the inside.’
He looks at me. Really looks at me. The fear naked on his face, stripped of every layer of sarcasm and deflection and Harding stubbornness.
‘I went to the cottage first,’ he says. ‘It was dark and you weren’t there and I thought—’ A breath. ‘I just thought.’
‘You thought I’d gone.’
‘Everyone goes.’
Two words. Two words that crack him open wider than a whole speech could have.
His mother. Kit moving up the hill. Peter.
Everyone goes, and Jude Harding stays, and the list of people he’s losing gets longer, and he just climbed a cliff in a storm because for one terrible moment he thought I’d been added to it.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ I say, and I mean it in every possible way – the cottage, the harbour, the shed, this ridiculous village that doesn’t know what to do with me.
‘The roof’s fixed, since you’re so concerned.
Had the lead flashing done Tuesday. Ceiling’s dry for the first time in twenty years.
Second thing crossed off the list. I’m not exactly packing light. ’
He almost smiles. Almost.
‘You’re shaking,’ I say.
‘I’m cold.’
‘You’re scared.’
‘I’m cold.’
‘Jude.’
‘Don’t call me that like you know me.’
‘I don’t know you. But I know what scared looks like on a man who won’t admit it, because I’ve been looking at it in the mirror for twenty years.’
That’s the thing that does it. Not the anger. Not the argument. The recognition.
He crosses the space between us in two strides, and his mouth is on mine before I can think, before I can armour up, before I can do any of the sensible things I should be doing like pushing him away and telling him this is a catastrophically bad idea.
It’s not a kiss so much as a collision. All heat and hunger and the raw, desperate need of two people who’ve been holding on alone for too long. He tastes of beer and rain and underneath that, just him – salt and want and a loneliness that makes me fear it might not have a cure.
I should stop this. Should definitely not fist my hands in his soaking jacket and pull him closer. Should not be making that sound when his teeth graze my throat.
I grab the front of his jacket and haul him towards the boat. ‘Up. Come on.’
He follows me up the makeshift steps to the deck – two stacked crates and a plank that serves as a gangway. Up here, there’s more space: the wheelhouse stripped bare, the deck clear where I’ve been working. The engine housing is still warm from the work light I had clamped to it.
He crowds me against the wheelhouse wall and I let him, which tells you everything about my self-preservation instincts.
‘I still don’t like you,’ I gasp.
‘Good,’ he says, voice rough and wrecked. ‘Hate me harder.’
His palms slide under my shirt, up my ribs, and I jerk at his belt buckle, frustrated, fingers slipping on wet leather.
He catches my hands – not to stop me. To steady them.
His forehead drops against mine and for one breath, just one, we’re still.
Both knowing what this is. Both choosing it anyway.
Then his mouth finds my throat and the stillness detonates.
My shirt goes first – his hands, not gentle, pulling it over my head. The air is cold on my skin but he’s burning, and when his mouth finds my collarbone, I stop thinking. His teeth graze the bone and I hear myself make a sound I’ll deny later.
‘Brynn—’ he starts, and I can hear it – the crack in his voice, the thing he’s trying not to say.
‘Don’t.’ I yank his belt free. ‘Don’t make this into something.’
‘It’s already something.’
‘Then shut up and let it be this.’
He shoves my jeans down. I kick one boot off to get free and it’s graceless and awkward but neither of us laughs – it’s too raw, too heavy.
His jeans hit the deck, and then he’s pressing me back against the wheelhouse wall, his hands on my thighs, lifting, and I wrap around him because my body has already made decisions my brain hasn’t approved.
He drives into me and we both go still for a half-second – a caught breath, the shock of it, the reality of what we’re doing hitting at the same moment as the sensation.
Then he moves and I stop thinking entirely.
It isn’t gentle. We’re past gentle. We were never going to be gentle – that’s not what this is, not what either of us needs.
This is two people who’ve been holding themselves together for too long, finally letting go.
His fingers dig into my thighs, my nails score his back, and the boat rocks beneath us with every thrust, metal cold at my spine and his mouth hot against my jaw.
I want the bruises. Want to feel them tomorrow when I’m alone – proof that I wasn’t dreaming, that I let someone in, that my body still knows how to do more than work and survive.
He’s not talking. That’s the thing. Jude Harding, who always has a comeback, who deflects with words the way I deflect with lists – he’s got nothing. Just my name, once, broken in half against my neck. Just his breath, ragged and honest in a way he’d never allow himself to be upright and clothed.
He shifts, hits deep, and everything shatters. My teeth find his shoulder to muffle the sound. He follows seconds later, a strangled groan that might be my name or a prayer or a mistake.
After is worse than during.
During, I don’t have to think. During, it’s just sensation and heat and the brief, merciful silence of a brain that won’t shut up any other way.
After, there’s the cold. The reality. The slow, awful process of separating and finding clothes in the dim light of a work lamp that’s seen better days.
I’m shaking – from cold or adrenaline, or both. I push him back, slide away from the wall, yank my jeans up. Don’t look at him.
‘Before you spiral,’ I say, voice flat, clinical, the voice I use for diagnostic reports, ‘I’m on the pill. So you can stand down from that particular panic.’
He exhales. Nods. Doesn’t say anything, which is somehow worse than if he’d made a joke.
My shirt’s somewhere on the deck. I find it by the engine housing, pull it over my head. He’s getting dressed too, methodical and quiet. I can feel him watching me but I refuse to meet his eyes.
I jump down from the boat to the shed floor, grab a rag from the workbench and toss it in his general direction without looking. ‘You can put your shoes on. I’m not going to make you breakfast.’
He climbs down after me. Slower. I hear him pulling on his boots, the clink of his belt buckle, the small ordinary sounds of a man reassembling himself. But he doesn’t leave.
I busy myself at the workbench because I need something to do with my hands that isn’t touching him. Straighten a spanner that’s already straight. Wipe a surface that’s already clean. The shed feels smaller with him still in it – all that heat and silence taking up space I need back.
‘Brynn—’
‘Your shoes are on. That was the deal.’
But he’s at the workbench now. Leaning against it like he belongs here, like this is a conversation and not an evacuation.
His eyes are moving over the shed – the camp bed, the tools, Ghost watching from the top shelf with the expression of a creature who has seen quite enough – and I can feel him cataloguing it the way I catalogue engine parts. Taking inventory of my life.
Then I see what’s in his hands.
My notebook. Open. The one where I keep my lists, my plans, my supplier contacts and harbour fees and licensing requirements and the half-formed architecture of a future I’m trying to build from nothing.
My stomach drops through the concrete.
‘You’re reading my lists?’
He has the decency to look caught. Almost guilty. ‘It was on the bench. I just—’
‘That notebook is every plan I’ve made since I got here.
’ My voice comes out low and dangerous, which is better than the alternative – which is shattered.
‘Every reason I’m staying. Supplier contacts.
Harbour fees. The licensing application I’ve been filling in for three days.
The renovation schedule for the cottage.
That’s not pillow talk, Jude. That’s my life. ’
White-hot fury floods through me, burning away everything else – the softness, the vulnerability, the way my body still feels warm where he touched me.
‘You want my body? Fine. Take it. That’s just skin. But that?’ I rip the notebook from his hands. ‘That’s me. You don’t get to have that too.’
The words come out hard. Sharp. They land between us like a slap and I watch him flinch.
‘Brynn—’
‘Out. Go. Go be conflicted somewhere else.’
For a moment, he doesn’t move. Just stands there, shirt rumpled, hair wrecked, jaw working like he’s chewing on words he can’t quite spit out.
Then he steps past me, into the night. But he looks back and rubs his jaw like he can’t quite shake me off. Like I’m stuck to him now, oil and salt and the ghost of my mouth on his.
I watch him go. Watch him disappear into the rain and the dark.
Then I close the door and lean against it, eyes shut, heart pounding.
‘That was a mistake,’ I say aloud – to myself, to Ghost on the top shelf, to the universe at large.
A beat.
A mistake that’s singing in my veins. Burning in the pit of my gut.
I slide down the wall, notebook clutched to my chest, and stare at nothing.
Being naked with him was easy.
Letting him read my lists?
That felt like bleeding in public.