Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
brYNN
Here’s the thing about secrets: they’re intoxicating.
Like the first drink of the night – warm and sliding through your veins, loosening everything that’s been wound too tight. You know there’s a cost coming. You know the morning will arrive eventually, harsh and unforgiving. But right now, in this moment, everything feels possible.
That’s what the past week has been. One long, reckless drink.
Jude Harding in my bed at midnight, smelling like salt and engine oil because he came straight from the boat.
Jude Harding bringing me fish and chips at 10 pm because you forget to eat when you’re working, Trelawney.
Jude Harding learning the shape of my days – that I take my coffee black with one sugar, that I hum while I work and don’t realise I’m doing it, that I sleep on my left side with one arm tucked under the pillow.
He pays attention. That’s the thing that undoes me.
Not the sex – though Christ, the sex is good. It’s the attention. The way he notices things I don’t even notice about myself and files them away like they matter.
No one’s ever done that before.
My phone buzzes on the workbench. I wipe my hands on a rag and check the screen.
A message from Jude. What do you call a fish with no eyes?
I snort. Wait for it.
Jude: A fsh.
Me: That’s terrible.
Jude: You laughed.
Me: I didn’t.
Jude: Liar. I can feel you laughing from here.
Me: Prove it.
Jude: Come to the cove tomorrow. Sunrise. I want to show you something.
I stare at the message. Sunrise means 6 am. Means sneaking out while the village is still dark. Means another secret, another stolen moment.
I’ll be there.
I put the phone down and go back to the section of Betty’s hull I’ve been sanding all afternoon. The old gel coat is flaking in sheets, revealing fibreglass underneath that’s mostly sound but needs sealing before I can even think about paint.
I’m smiling. Can’t seem to stop.
I should know better by now. I don’t want to.
The cove is empty when I arrive.
Not the surfing cove – a different one, smaller, harder to reach. I had to climb down a cliff path that was more suggestion than trail, following directions Jude texted me at midnight: Past the old coastguard station, left at the split rock, down through the gorse. You’ll know it when you see it.
He was right. I know it.
The beach is a crescent of pale sand, sheltered on three sides by dark cliffs.
The water is impossibly clear, that blue-green you only get when the Atlantic decides to behave itself.
And the light – God, the light. The sun’s just cresting the horizon, painting everything gold and pink and impossible.
‘You came.’
I turn. Jude’s picking his way down the cliff path, a blanket under one arm and a thermos in his hand. He’s wearing an old jumper with a hole in the sleeve and his hair is doing that thing where it sticks up in seventeen directions.
He looks like morning. Like hope.
‘I came,’ I agree. ‘Though if this is where you murder me, I want you to know Nina will figure it out. She’s very persistent.’
‘No murders.’ He reaches me, drops a kiss on my forehead like it’s the most natural thing in the world. ‘Just wanted you to see this.’
He spreads the blanket on the sand. We sit, shoulders touching, and watch the sun climb.
‘I used to come here as a kid,’ he says, after a while. ‘When things at home got too…’ He trails off. Shrugs. ‘You know.’
I do know. Not the specifics, but the shape of it. The need for a place that’s just yours, where nobody expects anything from you.
‘Who else knows about it?’
‘Kit. He found it first, actually. Brought me here when I was about eight, made me swear a blood oath not to tell anyone.’ A small smile. ‘We were very dramatic children.’
‘And now you’re showing me.’
‘Now I’m showing you.’ He turns to look at me, and there’s a blink of vulnerability in his expression. My eyes sting and I think it’s the wind. ‘I’ve never brought anyone else here.’
Just me.
The weight of that sits between us. Not heavy – warm. Like a stone that’s been in the sun.
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘Because when I’m with you, I don’t feel like I’m performing. I can just … be.’ He says it simply, like it’s obvious. Like it costs him nothing, when I can see from the tension in his jaw that it costs him everything.
The words land somewhere soft. Somewhere I’ve been protecting for so long I’d forgotten it existed.
‘Jude—’
‘I know it’s fast,’ he says. ‘I know this whole thing is insane. But I keep thinking about what you said on the beach. About running, and stopping, and being afraid of ghosts.’ He takes my hand.
‘I’ve been running too. Just in a different way.
Staying in one place but never actually being present.
Going through the motions of a life I’m not sure I even want. ’
‘What do you want?’
He’s quiet for a long moment. The waves roll in, patient and endless.
‘There’s a prospectus,’ he says finally. ‘From the University of Plymouth Marine biology and oceanography. I’ve looked at it maybe a hundred times.’
I go still. ‘You want to study marine biology?’
‘I want to study something that matters. Conservation. Sustainability.’ He picks at a thread on the blanket, not meeting my eyes. ‘Peter used to talk to me about it – conservation corridors, rewilding the inlet margins. Making sure there’s still fish to catch in fifty years, not just next season.’
I’m watching him, mouth feeling like I’ve sucked a lemon as I watch this gorgeous man struggling to articulate his desires, his dreams. ‘So why haven’t you applied?’
He laughs, but there’s no humour in it. ‘Because Hardings are fishermen. That’s what we do. That’s what we’ve always done. And Dad—’ He breaks off. Shakes his head. ‘Dad would see it as abandonment. As choosing study over the family. Over him.’
‘Would it be? Abandonment?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’ He looks out at the water. ‘Kit found a way out. Built a life that is his – Jess and Maisie first, now Isla, a life that doesn’t always smell like fish. Even before New York, he’d already stepped back. His own house up the hill, his own world.’ Bitterness crosses his face.
‘And you don’t want to be the second son who steps away.’
‘I don’t want to be anything. That’s the problem.
’ His voice is raw. ‘I don’t want the boat.
I don’t want the business. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life hauling pots and managing accounts and slowly turning into my father.
But I can’t figure out how to chase it without blowing everything up. ’
I squeeze his hand. ‘For what it’s worth, I think you’d be brilliant at it. Marine biology. Conservation. Whatever you choose.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Jude, you explained wave refraction to me on a surfboard like it was poetry. You know more about fish populations than you let anyone see because it’s easier to pretend you don’t care.
But I’ve watched you – the way you talk about Peter’s work, the way you light up when it’s the sea and not the spreadsheet.
’ I pause. ‘You just pretend you don’t because it’s safer. ’
He’s quiet and I can feel his hesitation pulse in the air, then he sighs, breathes out deep. ‘The surfing helps. When I’m on a wave, I don’t have to be anyone. Don’t have to perform. I can just exist.’ He glances at me. ‘Being with you feels like that too.’
The sun is fully up now, warm on my face. The cove glitters like someone’s scattered diamonds across the water.
And maybe it’s the sunrise, or the confessions, or the way he’s sitting there with his guard so far down I can see every bruise underneath – but there’s a shift. A door opens that I’ve been pretending was locked.
‘Jude.’ I turn to face him. ‘What are we doing?’
He blinks. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean this. Us. The sneaking around, the midnight texts, the sunrise coves. What is this?’
He opens his mouth. Closes it. Looks at me, caught between terror and relief, like I’ve said the thing he’s been trying to say for days.
‘I don’t know what to call it,’ he says carefully. ‘I know what it feels like.’
‘What does it feel like?’
‘Like the first real thing I’ve ever had.’ His voice catches. ‘Like the first real thing I’ve ever had and I’m going to fuck up because I’m a Harding and we don’t do this well.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘It’s the most honest one I’ve got.’
I should leave it there. Should let the sunrise and the salt air smooth it over, file it under another beautiful moment that doesn’t quite commit to anything.
But I’m tired of beautiful moments that dissolve in daylight.
‘I need more than that,’ I say. ‘Not a label. I’m not a label kind of girl. Just— I need to know this is something. I’ve got all these squishy feelings and well, in case you can’t tell, I’m not really the squishy type.’
‘You’ve got squishy—’
My voice threatens to crack and I wrestle it steady.
‘I came back to Sea Salt Bay because I want to stop drifting, Jude. I want one place, one life, one thing I don’t have to walk away from.
And then you happened. And now I need to know if you’re part of the staying or part of why I might have to eventually leave. ’
The waves fill the silence. Rolling in, pulling back. Patient.
‘I’m part of the staying,’ he says. Quiet. Certain. Like he’s testing the words and finding them true. ‘You’re the realest thing in my life, Brynn. The only thing that feels like mine.’
I want to say words that deserve that, but life isn’t scripted, and these big emotions come when the moment is small.
‘Okay,’ I say.
‘Okay?’
‘Yeah. Okay.’ I lean into him, relaxing against his strength as his arm comes around me, his chin rests on the top of my head. ‘We’re doing this, then.’
‘We’re doing this.’ A pause. ‘Whatever this is.’
‘We’ll figure it out.’
‘Will we?’
‘Probably not. But we’ll try.’
He laughs. A real one, warm and startled, and I feel it vibrate through his ribs into mine.
‘We should do this more often,’ I say, after a while. ‘The sunrise thing. The talking thing.’
‘We should.’ He pulls me closer. ‘But we’d have to be careful. If anyone saw us before I’ve had a chance to talk to Dad…’
I tilt my face up to his, trying to ignore the small pulse of sharp electricity behind my sternum. ‘And are you? Going to tell your dad?’
He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. His fingers are warm, slightly rough.
‘Yeah.’ He leans in, kisses me – slow and soft, the kind that feels like a promise. ‘Yeah, I am.’
I believe him. I do.
It’s just that believing someone and trusting them to follow through are two very different things. And I’ve spent a lifetime learning the difference.
The almost-getting-caught happens the following Monday.
We’re behind the lifeboat station, which is stupid, so stupid, but training ran late and everyone else had left and Jude pressed me against the wall and I stopped thinking.
His mouth on my neck. My hands in his hair. The salt smell of him mixing with diesel and underneath it all, just Jude, a scent I’d know anywhere now.
‘We shouldn’t be doing this here,’ I manage.
‘Probably not.’
‘Someone could see—’
‘No one’s coming. Everyone’s gone home.’
‘Jude—’
He kisses me. I forget what I was going to say until footsteps echo, looming closer.
We spring apart so fast I nearly fall over. Jude catches my arm, steadies me, and we’re both breathing hard when Tom rounds the corner.
He stops. Looks at us. At Jude’s flushed face, my dishevelled hair, the foot of space between us that screams guilty.
‘Forgot my torch,’ Tom says mildly. ‘Left it in the kit room.’
‘Right,’ Jude says. ‘We were just—’
‘Discussing training,’ I supply. ‘Schedules. Very boring.’
Tom’s expression doesn’t change. ‘Must have been riveting. You both look very … flushed.’
‘It’s warm,’ Jude says.
‘It’s April.’
Silence. It’s a silence that says, I know exactly what I interrupted and I’m choosing not to comment.
‘Well,’ Tom says eventually. ‘I’ll just get my torch, then.’
He walks past us into the station. Doesn’t look back.
Jude exhales. ‘That was close.’
‘Too close.’ I push off the wall, start smoothing my hair. ‘We can’t keep doing this. Not here.’
‘I know.’
‘If he tells someone—’
‘He won’t. Tom’s not like that.’
But the thrill is curdling now. Less like excitement and more like shame.