Chapter 5 #3
Hard. Both hands, one at Theo's jaw and one fisted in the wet collar of his ruined shirt, hauling him in across the thwart, kissing him like the last twenty minutes of slack, like the one still thing before the world started moving again, and Theo made a sound into it — a low, broken, undone sound, nothing like the counter-smile, nothing performed, a sound that came from the wrecked seventeen-year-old under all the shine — and kissed him back like a man who'd been kissed a hundred times by people who wanted the show and never once, not one single time, by somebody who wanted him.
His hands came up into Rory's hair. The boat rocked hard.
Salt and cold and the taste of him and the whole harbor holding still one more minute, for Rory, as a kindness—
For one whole minute Rory let himself have it.
That was the thing he'd hold against himself after: not that he kissed Theo Vann, but that for one full minute he stopped being careful.
He kissed him and let the boat rock and let Theo's hands map the back of his skull and let himself, for the first time since he was twelve years old and watched a truck pull out of a driveway for good, want something out loud with his whole body and not brace for it to leave.
It was the best minute he'd had in years.
That was what made it the most dangerous.
And then Rory's own thought caught up with him, flat and cold as the incoming tide: one foot in Portland.
Blue light in the dark. You built your whole self out of being the one who stays, and you just reached for the one who leaves.
Again. Like your father was a thing that got done to you instead of a thing you'd spend your life walking straight back into.
Rory pulled back.
Too fast. Hard enough to rock the boat, hard enough that Theo's eyes came open startled and hurt and still half-drowned in it, his mouth still open, his hands still up where Rory's hair had been.
"Rory—"
"That was a mistake," Rory said.
The tide had turned. He could feel it running under the Carol now, full and certain, pulling everything back the way it came.
"Rory. Don't. Don't do the thing where you—"
***
"Take the oars." Rory was already moving to the tender, already putting the boat between them, already walling up brick by brick the way he'd learned to do at twelve years old in a kitchen with a dead man who wasn't dead yet.
"Slack's over. We row back now or we fight the tide the whole way. Take the oars."
The row back was the longest twenty minutes of Rory's life, and he'd sat through Eddie's funeral.
They took an oar each because the tide was against them now and one man couldn't do it, so they had to row together, matched, in time, their hands feet apart on the same rhythm, pulling the same water, and neither of them said a single word, and Theo's face had closed up finally, at last, the shield back but wrong somehow, cracked, and Rory pulled his oar and hated himself with a completeness he usually reserved for other people.
He could feel Theo's stroke through the boat.
That was the cruelty of rowing double against a tide — you couldn't hide in it, you had to match, so Rory felt every pull the other man made telegraph up through the thwart into his own body, the two of them locked into the same rhythm they'd found bailing, the same one they found at midnight over the quarts, the rhythm their hands kept insisting on even now, even after, even while the men attached to them sat six inches apart and said nothing and drowned.
He had kissed him. The taste was still in his mouth — salt and cold and that undone sound Theo had made — and the tide pulled them home stroke by matched stroke, and Rory understood he was going to spend the rest of the year not-thinking about that sound the way he spent every morning not-touching the board.
The town came back up out of the water in front of them, small and pretty and full of people who would want to know how it went, saving Eddie's boat.
They got the Carol tied off at the town float, safe, riding easy, saved.
They shipped the tender. And Rory stepped up onto the landing and Theo stepped up behind him, and there was a second — one second — where Theo drew breath to try again, Rory could hear it, could hear the Rory forming, the reach, the fix, the sentence Theo would build to put it back together because building sentences to put things back together was the thing Theo did—
"I've got the boat squared," Rory said, to the harbor, not to him. "Thanks for the second pair of hands."
And he walked up the landing toward the diner, toward the line, toward the four a.m. and the ledgers and the whole self he'd built out of being the one who stayed, and he left Theo Vann standing at the water's edge in a ruined shirt with the tide coming in behind him, and he did not look back, because looking back was how it started, and Rory Nash had just remembered, one kiss too late, exactly why he'd spent his whole life keeping his eyes on the grill.