12. Tilly
TWELVE
Tilly
Salvage: A mantel pulled from another house can be the right period, the right wood, and the right dimensions, and still be wrong in the room. Nobody can say why until they see it set in place.
"So it's an oyster thing," Trey says, turning his wineglass by the stem. "Like actual oyster money. One of those rich, old Charleston families."
"You've got it in your head wrong." I pull a piece of bread apart and dip it in the honey butter on my plate. "We own a lot of land. We're not fancy, and we're definitely not rich."
"Waterfront land in Charleston isn't cheap."
"That's the whole trap. It's called land-poor. The money's only real the day you sell it, and we don't sell."
"That's so cool. Do you guys still farm oysters, or do you hire it out?"
"I mean, my grandfather and my father run the business, but yeah, they have a crew. We all still go out and work the beds by hand, same as my family did a hundred years ago. My dad does a little development on the side. Nobody's got a yacht."
"Sounds like Outer Banks meets Yellowstone."
That makes me smile. I've never thought about it put that way, but it fits.
The candle throws a little wobble of light across the table. "I plan to go back after college and keep it going as long as our land can produce the oysters."
"You really love it, don't you?"
"I do," I say, nodding, as I look off, thinking about Grandbank and my dad out there in their waders, pulling shells.
And then, because my brain will not leave it alone, I count them. My father did it on the dock, Coop did it in my kitchen with a box in his hands, and Libba did it in my ear on the way to a meeting. Three people who love me, and not one of them will finish a sentence about that property.
I don't know what it is yet. I know it's something, and I know I'm going to be the last one told. Fine. I'm home at Easter, and I'll get it out of Grandbank in his own kitchen if I have to sit there until dark.
"What about you? How did you get into the water and working on boats? Were you born with the salt water in your veins, too?"
"Believe it or not, I'm not even a coast kid. I grew up in Ohio, only child, moved down after high school. I wanted a boat I couldn't afford, so I taught myself to fix up a junker, and never looked back."
I can't believe I didn't know he is from Ohio. He fits right in with the Bayou crowd.
"I love that."
"What about you, any siblings in Charleston?"
"A brother and a twin sister. My sister's in school there, and my brother was here in New Orleans, but is studying abroad at the moment."
He asks about them, warm and curious, a whole string of little questions, and it's nice that he's interested.
He's handsome in the candlelight, dark eyes, good forearms I already knew about from the boat. And those dimples are delicious. He listens with his whole face, which is sweet.
He ordered the wine without once looking at me to see if I wanted any, which I noticed. I'm guessing Jo told him, or it could be he realized I'm a big girl and would order a wine if I wanted it. Either way, I appreciate it.
But with all the positives about him, for some reason I'm not digging him.
Under the table, I turn my phone face-up on my thigh. Holy shit, it's almost eleven. Then a text comes in from Jo, the bubble making me smile.
fuzzies or no fuzzies???
I flip the phone back over without attempting to covertly answer.
"Okay, so," Trey says, leaning in, "you want to hear how I lost an entire outboard to a pelican?"
"I absolutely do."
I absolutely couldn't care less.
He tells the story, the kind with a build and a turn, the bird and the cooler and his uncle screaming from the dock. I can tell this is his go-to story, because he's really getting into it. Right at the end, Trey tips his head back and lets it go.
The laugh comes out of him like a goose being stepped on. It's loud, a honk and then another honk and then a wheeze that folds him forward over the table and rattles the silverware. The couple next to us turns to look.
I've known Trey for several months. How the hell have I never heard that? Oh, my god. Now I can't unhear it.
There is nothing wrong with him. I could kiss him tonight. I could probably do a good deal more than that. But I know as certain as a tide chart that I could not sit across a table from that laugh for the next forty years.
There's a lot of yapping, but I have no idea what he's saying because all I can think of is that laugh.
He wipes his eyes, still grinning, and says something I miss completely. I nod like I've been listening, although I haven't heard a word since the goose.
"That's a great story." I set my napkin down and give him a rueful smile. "Trey, I have to be honest, I'm running on fumes. We were up at four yesterday to go out to the reefs, and I've been buried in a make-up lab report all afternoon. Would you hate me if we called it a night?"
"No, not at all. I worked today, too, so I'm with you."
He motions for the server, who comes over and asks if we want anything else.
He says no and asks for the check. I reach into my bag to get my wallet, but he insists on getting this, referencing the fact that I paid for lunch on Tuesday.
I acquiesce, but I do feel slightly guilty letting him pay for such a nice dinner.
The drive back is short and easy. Trey talks about the reef boat's new bilge pump, and I say the right things at the right times. He drives with one wrist draped over the wheel, the radio on softly playing some country song I don't recognize. I watch the streetlights slide across the hood.
He pulls in behind my Cruiser and cuts the engine. The headlights go dark. That sudden hush after a truck engine dies always lands heavier than the noise did, and for a second we just sit in it.
"Hey, could I grab a quick glass of water before I head back?" He says it easy, one hand still on the wheel. "Long drive."
It isn't a long drive, twelve minutes at most.
I get what he's doing. He's not pushing, just seeing if the door's open, the real one and the other kind, and he's left me the room to say no. I'm too tired to read anything into it. "Sure."
We climb out. My keys jangle loudly in the empty street. It's eerily quiet for New Orleans in the Mardi Gras season.
The deadbolt gives easier than it used to, and we step into a dark foyer.
I don't hit the overhead, just the little light over the stove, which throws a thin wash across the counters.
The place is black and cool and still, the AC humming somewhere, and I know without checking that Rhodes is asleep down the hall.
"Kitchen's this way," I whisper.
I go to the water tank on the counter instead of the tap, pull a red plastic cup off the stack, and fill it. Water hits the plastic, loud in the hush.
Trey looks around while I pour, taking in the range that costs more than my car, the stone counters, the whole quiet money of the place. Then he looks at the cup in my hand.
"You've got, what, mountain spring water in a Solo cup." He grins. "In a mansion. That's a choice."
"It's what we've got." I hand it over. "The man owns nice things and drinks out of the cheap stack. Don't ask me."
He takes the cup and drinks, standing there in the dark kitchen in his good shirt, and I wait for something, a flutter, a pull, some small part of me leaning toward him because he's here, close, in the house where I sleep.
Nothing.
He's just a nice guy drinking water in a kitchen. I could stand here all night and feel exactly this much, which is nothing at all, and that blankness tells me more than the whole dinner did. My answer settled hours ago. This is only the proof.
"Good water," he says, and lowers the cup, and something about his own delivery gets him.
The laugh comes up out of him again, the honk, then the second honk, then that folding wheeze at the end. And it rolls right down the dark hallway toward the sleeping rooms.
The hall light doesn't come on, but I hear him before I see him, bare feet on the floorboards, slow and heavy.
Then Rhodes is in the kitchen doorway, one hand braced on the frame, squinting into the thin light over the stove.
He's got no shirt on, his sweatpants slung low, his hair wrecked and standing up on one side where the pillow got it.
He looks rougher than I usually see him, sleep-heavy and a little raw around the edges, but that's just what a man looks like when a goose honks him awake at eleven o'clock.
I look at him because he's standing there half-dressed and there's no reason I wouldn't. Broad chest, the ink running down over his ribs, the flat plane of his stomach.
My body files it the way it files anything true and obvious.
The sky is up, water is wet, Rhodes has a good chest. There's nothing to do about any of it.
"What's going on?” It isn't really a question. His voice is thick with sleep.
"Rhodes." Trey reads the room in about half a second and sets the red cup down on the counter with a soft plastic knock. "I should get going. Long day tomorrow."
I don’t say anything.
Trey lifts two fingers off the counter toward me. "Thanks for the water, Tilly."
"Yeah. Drive safe."
He goes. The deadbolt clicks behind him, then his boots on the steps, then the truck coughing to life outside and pulling away, the sound thinning down the street until it's gone.
I turn on Rhodes. "Okay. What crawled up your ass and died?"
He scrubs a hand down his face. "I don't love getting woken up by some guy honking like a goose in my kitchen."
"I thought it was my kitchen too."
"It is." He drops his hand. "But you have to admit the guy is loud."
That lands sideways. I open my mouth to fire back and instead the laugh comes up out of nowhere, because he's right. He's completely right. Trey sounds like something being murdered in a barn, and Rhodes stumbled out here half-asleep and got flattened by it. I start laughing, and I can't stop.
"He does," I get out. "God, he really does."
"Thank you."
"You're loud too, you know." I lean back against the counter. "You're not exactly a whisper."
"I don't sound like a goose."
"No. His is genuinely terrible." I wipe under my eye. "Which is a shame, because he's got a cute smile."
Rhodes shrugs one bare shoulder. "I think the guy looks goofy anyway."
That does it. I fold in half over the counter, wheezing, and it's worse because I'm trying to be quiet and I can't, and Rhodes is standing there in his wrecked hair with that almost-smile cracking open into a real one, and then he's laughing too, rough and helpless, both of us in the dark kitchen with that abandoned red cup between us, and yesterday is just gone.
It runs itself out the way laughing always does, in little aftershocks, both of us catching a breath and losing it again over nothing. Finally I wipe my eyes and push off the counter.
"Okay. I'm going to bed before I wake up the whole street." I grab the red cup and toss it in the trash. "Sorry I got you up. That's on me."
"It's fine."
"I promise to stop bringing home bad laughers after ten." I hold up a hand. "Scout's honor. Curfew on the geese."
"That's all I ask." He rubs the back of his neck, still half in sleep. "Set the bar low."
"It's practically on the floor."
We both turn for the doorway in tandem. It's a narrow gap, the arch between the kitchen and the hall, and I move left to let him through first. He moves left too.
I catch myself and go right. He goes right.
For a second we're just two people bobbing at each other in the dark like idiots, and I laugh again, short, and step to slide past.
He steps the same way.
We hit. It's not hard, just chest to chest, the bare front of him against me before either of us can stop it.
My hand comes up flat on his stomach on instinct, and there's the whole of him right there, all that warm skin, and I get a full breath of him before I can help it.
Soap gone soft from the pillow, sleep, the plain smell of a body that's been in bed.
Heat comes off him like a stone that sat in the sun all day.
Something low in me pulls tight, but it’s gone before I can name it. It goes up through my chest and takes the bottom out of my breath.
And I know exactly why. He's a good-looking man standing three inches from me wearing almost nothing at eleven at night. That's just what that is. My body's got eyes and a pulse. There's nothing to argue with there.
"Sorry," I say, and my voice comes out fine.
"Go." He steps back and flattens himself against the frame, giving me the whole doorway. "You first."
"Thank you."
I go. He doesn't move while I pass, giving me the room, and then I'm down the hall and into my own room, and I shut the door behind me with a soft click.
The bedroom is cool after the close little box of that hallway. The vent breathes down on me, and my arms prickle with cool air blowing down. I stand there a second in the dark, then cross to the bed and drop down on the edge of it.
My phone's face-down on the nightstand where I left it. I pick it up. The screen throws its blue-white light up into my face, too bright, and I squint at it. Jo's text sits there from an hour ago.
fuzzies or no fuzzies???
I thumb out the answer without having to think about it.
no fuzzies. none. zero.
The three dots start up right away. She was waiting.
NOOO he's so cute tho
he is cute! he's genuinely lovely. good guy. good on the boat. just no.
just no???
just no. can't explain it. there's nothing there. i'd know by now.
fair.
yup. going to bed. love you
love you. sleep well.
I set the phone down, screen first, and the room goes dark again.
That's done, then, and it was clean. Trey's a nice man, and there was nothing under it, not one flicker. I'm not going to sit here and manufacture a reason to feel bad about a physiological fact. I gave him a fair dinner and an honest verdict, and that's more than most people get from me.
I lie back and pull the sheet up and stare at the ceiling I can't quite see.
Somewhere under my ribs, that low pull is still going. After the entire night, that doesn’t show up until after he’s gone. What the hell?