Chapter 17
FINN
The Sunday library group lets out at four. It is three forty-one, and I am parked across the lot with the windows down, waiting for Darcy.
She doesn't know I'm here. The impulse to see her again after yesterday's kiss in the vineyard loft finally got the best of me, so I took my brothers' ball-busting about it like a champ then headed over to meet her.
Somehow, wanting Darcy Gable has stopped being a condition and has become a mission.
I have plans for tonight. Detailed ones.
They start with dinner because I want to watch her laugh over a table for two hours, and they end—if the universe has any decency left—with our clothes on the floor and my mouth learning her body from the throat down.
I'm half hard thinking about it in the vineyard’s old pickup truck outside a public library on a Sunday afternoon, which should embarrass me and doesn't. A man should know what he's about.
The last time I was in this parking lot, I left it like the building was on fire.
Today I showed up early and picked the spot with the best view of the doors.
At four on the nose the doors open and the library empties its teenagers into the afternoon.
Loud, all elbows and backpacks, bickering about something with the full-body commitment only sixteen-year-olds can bring to an argument.
And in the middle of them, herding without appearing to herd, is Darcy.
She's got a folder stack riding one hip and the snack tin under her arm.
She's wearing a sweet, floral-print dress today.
Soft-looking, the kind that moves when she walks, and her hair is down, all her glossy dark waves loose on her shoulders, and all I want to do is lose my fingers in those brunette strands while she's pressed beneath me on my bed.
Damn. The vision comes on so forcibly, I have to shift my stance where I'm leaning against the truck.
She says something that makes two of the kids groan dramatically.
Then she points at a third with the full teacher point, and gets a salute back.
She is completely, unselfconsciously in charge of her little republic, and they love her.
It's clear that she loves them back. It's written all over her.
She's the kind of teacher any kid would want.
The kind of woman who gives selflessly and wholly.
Not just when it comes to her students, but when it comes to the whole town and anyone else lucky enough to be near her.
Hell, she even cares about me. I never would've thought it possible after the way things were between us in school, or even as recently as a weekend ago when she put me through the wringer. But everything feels different now.
Especially me.
The kids race off and she lifts her head in my direction.
She stops for half a step, a look of surprise on her face. And then she smiles and heads my way.
"Are you loitering?" she asks.
"Just hiding from a seventeen-year-old overdue fee." I push off the truck, unable to curb my grin now that she's next to me. "How was the class?"
"Restless. Lisa wrote something so good even I got jealous." She shifts the folders. Her eyes do a quick, appreciative trip over me, and she doesn't hide it. "What brings you into town on a Sunday afternoon?"
"You do." No wind-up. No attempt to dodge. I'm past that now. "I was hoping you'd have dinner with me later tonight. Seven o'clock. Windows on The Bay."
Her eyebrows lift. "Fancy. On a weekend, I hope you made reservations."
"It's all handled."
"What if I have plans tonight?"
"Then I'll ask about tomorrow. And Tuesday. I've got a flexible calendar and one priority."
"One priority, huh?"
I nod. "After the last couple of times we've been together, it seems like I owe you a proper date."
"A date. With you."
"Yep." I step closer, mostly because I can't resist closing the distance. "What do you say, Darcy?"
The smile gets away from her entirely. "Seven," she says.
I nod. "I'll pick you up at your place."
"All right, Finn."
"Great," I say, grinning like I just touched down on terra firma after my first skydive.
She's still smiling, still looking up at me with those soft hazel eyes and a look in them that says she's been thinking about me at least half as much as she's been on my mind.
Then she pivots and walks to her car, and I stand there watching her go, savoring every shift of her hips as she crosses the lot.
Promptly at seven I roll up to the curb in my car, then position myself at the bottom of her stairs beside the bookshop.
She comes down before I have a chance to meet her at her door.
When she appears at the top of the stairs I take back everything I said about the sweet floral dress from earlier being the headline of my day.
This one is the color of the bay an hour before sunset, and it wraps and ties at her waist, its hem ending at a point on her thigh that I am going to be thinking about during dinner, through dinner, and for the rest of my natural life.
Her hair is still down. She's done something to her eyes that makes them look even bigger and deeper, and her mouth is dark pink and glossy.
"It has pockets," she says, flouncing her skirt and doing a small turn on the last step.
"I'll be honest with you, Darcy. I did not notice the pockets.
" I open the car door for her, and when she brushes past me her light perfume hits my senses, something warm and vanilla-scented.
She not only looks incredible, but smells temptingly edible too.
As she gets situated in the passenger seat, I give real, executive consideration to skipping dinner altogether. I don't. Barely.
The restaurant is in a weathered cedar shakes building on stilts at the end of a gravel lane, a deck over the water, white paper on the tables, gulls running surveillance from the railing.
The sun is low and throwing gold across the bay, and the hostess puts us at the corner table I reserved, where the water is on two sides, and when the wine list comes I don't open it.
"The Bardot Vista white," I tell the kid. "The one your manager hides."
It comes, and it's Dad's old east block, and I pour for Darcy myself because some things you don't delegate. She tastes it and closes her eyes for a second, and I watch her throat move when she swallows.
"Okay," she says. "That's unfair. You grew up drinking this?"
"I grew up sneaking it. Drinking it out in the open came later." When the server comes around again I place our appetizer order. "A dozen oysters. The locals." I look at her. "Do you like them?"
She nods.
"Good. You're about to learn a trade."
She laughs. "I know how to eat an oyster, Finn."
"Eating's the easy part." The tray arrives with the shucking knife and the towel, because this place lets you work for them, which is half the reason I picked it, and I hold up the knife and give her the voice, the one I use on stages.
"Ladies and gentlemen, the blade. Respect it.
The hinge is here, the wrist does the work, and the man or woman who muscles it loses the liquor and the dignity both. "
"Was that the safety briefing?"
"That was the whole certification course. You're licensed. Go."
She goes. Darcy Gable, who can spell anything ever printed, sets her jaw at a bivalve like it insulted her mother, works the knife into the hinge with surgical care, and then muscles it.
The shell skips out of the towel, skids the length of the table, and goes off the edge of the deck.
A gull drops from the railing and takes full credit.
The silence that follows is majestic.
"This is humiliating," she says. "I have a master's degree."
"The oyster doesn't know that." I move my chair around the corner of the table before I've finished deciding to. "Here."
I put my arms around her from the side, my hands over her hands, the towel and the shell and the knife bundled in our four hands together, and her hair is against my jaw and her shoulder is against my chest, and this was a tactical error, because now I can feel her breathing.
"Hinge," I say, quieter, no stage in it at all. "Wrist. There."
The shell gives. The top lifts clean, liquor intact, and she makes a small triumphant sound I'm going to be hearing at odd hours for the rest of the week.
She turns her face, inadvertently placing her mouth three inches from mine, and neither of us does anything about it, which is somehow more indecent than doing something about it.
I go back to my side of the table. It takes actual effort.
She's a natural after that, which annoys me and doesn't surprise me.
She shucks four in a row and eats them like she's getting away with something.
On the fifth, the brine gets the best of her, one bright line escaping the corner of her mouth, and her tongue comes out and catches it, unhurried, and my sentence dies in the middle of the word "trellis. "
Because I'm imagining that tongue on my cock. There's no dressing that up. It's seared into my brain now. I'm hard enough to pound nails at a family restaurant with paper tablecloths and a gull audience, and I can't summon one single regret even if I had a search party.
"You were saying?" she says. "Something about trellis wire."
"I have no idea what I was saying."
She holds my eyes and reaches for the next oyster, and when the brine escapes again, slower this time, she catches it with her tongue again, and suddenly I understand that I am dining with a hostile power.
"You're doing that on purpose," I say.
"Doing what?" she says, and sips Dad's wine, innocent as a hymnal, and under the table her knee settles against mine and stays.
My phone buzzes face-up on the table. Text message.
Wyatt: Still playing nursemaid to your brother, Bardot? Poker night's a snore without you. When are you coming back to the city?
Shit. I haven't thought about The Retreat or my life back in Manhattan for days. Longer than that, if I'm being honest. I'm definitely not thinking about it now.
Nor do I want to.
I turn the device and Wyatt's message face-down without answering and put my hand back where it was, which is on the table, near Darcy's. Close enough that our fingers keep conducting small negotiations neither of us acknowledges.
We stay through the sunset and then through twilight.
She tells me about Lisa's story and the Oakley twins' ongoing cold war.
I tell her about the time a client's llama unpacked our entire base camp in Peru, and she laughs with her head back, loud, over the water.
An older couple two tables down smiles at us the way you smile at a thing you remember being.
I know exactly how short my runway in this town is. I know it the way you know there's a drop on the far side of a ridge. I'm just not looking at it tonight, and I've gotten very good, this last week, at not looking at it.
Here's the truth I'd deny under oath to anyone: I've eaten dinners on four continents with views that make travel writers weep, and this shack, this paper tablecloth, this woman stealing the last oyster with zero remorse, is the best evening I can remember having anywhere on earth.
The breeze comes up off the water when the light goes, and she shivers.
I place my jacket around her shoulders and she pulls it close instead of protesting.
The sleeves swallow her hands. Something about Darcy wrapped in a jacket that's going to smell like her tomorrow does absolutely nothing to improve my condition, and the condition wasn't good to begin with.
The picture of her wearing my jacket and nothing else has moved in permanently, and tomorrow I'm going to put it on smelling like her and lose ten minutes of my morning to that too.
Worth it. All of it.
As we walk out the gravel lane to my car, her hand finds mine, or mine finds hers—I'm not sure which. It doesn't matter. I hold on to her like she belongs to me and I don't care who in this town knows it.
Deep down, it feels like she's been mine for a hell of a lot longer than just the past few days.
At the car I open her door and don't step back.
She turns in the space between me and the door, chin up, close, the jacket huge on her, her eyes gone nearly black in the darkness, and the pull between us is a physical thing. I watch her mouth, but I don't take it.
"Not yet," I say, mostly to myself.
"Not yet?"
"If I start now, we won't make it out of this parking lot." I can't tell if I'm warning her or inviting her to finish what we've started.
"Then we'd better leave now," she says quietly. "Take me home, Finn."
She gets in the car. I close her door and walk around the hood and give myself one breath of night air, which fixes nothing.
The drive back to her place runs along the water, and we make the whole trip with her hand on my forearm where it rests on the shifter, the radio low, the town lights coming up ahead one street at a time. Neither of us says a word about the night ending.
Or where we'll be afterward.
Tonight there's only us.