Chapter Four
The gas burner made a small hissing sound before it caught, blue flame stuttering up under a battered kettle that had seen better decades.
Avery watched from the doorway of the bathroom, towel-dried and dressed again in the borrowed shirt, and tried to figure out where to put his body in a room that clearly wasn't built for two people moving through it at once.
Hayes didn't look up. He had a loaf of bread out on the counter, a knife, a jar of something dark that might have been jam, and he was working through it with the kind of economy that came from doing the same four steps every morning of his life.
Bread down. Knife through it. Two pieces onto a battered pan set over a second burner.
"Coffee's instant," he said, not turning around. "Only thing that survives out here without power half the time."
"That's fine. I'm not picky."
"You look picky."
Avery opened his mouth to argue and then looked down at himself — at the shirt hanging off one shoulder, the sweatpants rolled twice at the waist and still threatening to slide — and decided he didn't have the ground to stand on.
He crossed toward the table, and Hayes turned from the counter at the same moment with two mugs in one hand, and for a second they were both moving through the same three feet of floor.
Avery stepped back into the counter's edge.
Hayes shifted sideways without breaking stride, mugs held up out of the collision zone, and they passed each other with maybe an inch of space and no actual contact, and Avery felt the whole thing register somewhere low in his chest anyway — the brief warmth of a body passing that close, gone as fast as it arrived.
"Sorry," Avery said, to no one in particular.
"You're fine."
They did it twice more before breakfast was actually on the table — Avery reaching for a chair at the same time Hayes reached past him for a spoon, Avery pressed briefly against the counter's edge while Hayes leaned across him to check the kettle.
By the third time neither of them apologized.
It had started to feel less like an obstacle course and more like choreography, something both of their bodies were learning without either of them deciding to teach it.
The toast came out slightly burned on one side.
Hayes set the plate down between them without comment, along with the jam and two mugs of coffee black enough that Avery could smell it from across the table, and folded himself into the chair across from Avery like the whole ritual was already finished as far as he was concerned.
Avery sat. Looked at the toast. Looked at the coffee. Reached for his phone out of habit before remembering it was dead, sitting downstairs in his coat pocket, and his hand hung in the air over the table for a second before he brought it back down and picked up the mug instead.
It hit him slowly, the way things did when he wasn't looking for them.
He hadn't checked anything yet. No inbox.
No group chat. No color-coded itinerary sitting open on a second screen while he ate something quick standing up at his kitchen counter, already halfway into the next thing before he'd finished the first bite.
He was just sitting. Eating toast that was burned on one side, across from a man who hadn't said more than a few dozen words to him total, in a room that smelled like machine oil even up here, two floors above the actual machines.
"You always eat like that?" Hayes asked, not looking up from his own plate.
"Like what?"
"Slow. Like you're thinking about something else."
Avery looked down at his toast, half of it still there, jam not even spread all the way to the crust. "I don't usually have time to eat slow."
"Mm."
"That wasn't an insult, for the record. I was agreeing with you."
"Didn't say it was an insult." Hayes took a drink of his coffee, set the mug back down in the exact ring of condensation it had left the first time, like the spot was assigned. "Just noticed."
Avery watched him do that — the mug returning to precisely the same place, the toast eaten in the same order every time, crust first, corner by corner — and understood, without either of them saying it, that there was an order to this whole apartment.
Small, quiet, unbothered by anyone else's schedule, but an order all the same.
Nothing like his mother's laminated itinerary.
Nothing that needed writing down. Just a life that had been repeating itself long enough to wear smooth grooves into every motion.
He wondered, distantly, what it would be like to have a life with grooves like that instead of deadlines.
***
When the plates were empty Avery stood and started stacking them before Hayes could reach for them first.
"I've got it," he said. "You did the cooking."
Hayes looked at him for a second — not arguing, just assessing, the way he'd assessed Avery's shoes in the gravel lot the night before — and then leaned back in his chair and let him.
The sink was barely big enough for two mugs at once.
Avery ran the water until it went from cold to lukewarm, which seemed to be as good as it got, and set to work on the first mug with a sponge that had clearly been through worse.
He was aware of Hayes moving in behind him with a towel, close enough that Avery could feel the shift of air when he reached for the dish rack, and he handed back the rinsed mug without turning around, and Hayes took it without a word and dried it in three efficient passes and set it in a cabinet Avery hadn't noticed yet.
They fell into it. Avery scrubbed, rinsed, handed back.
Hayes dried, put away, waited for the next piece.
Neither of them said anything for a while, and the quiet wasn't the strained kind from the car, or the charged kind from the middle of the night — it was just quiet, filled in by the small sounds of water and ceramic and a towel snapping once when Hayes shook it out.
"You wash like you're being timed," Hayes said eventually.
"I don't like leaving things half done."
"Noticed that too." He took the last plate, turned it once under the towel, checking a spot near the rim that Avery had already gotten. "You do that a lot. Circle back and check something you already finished."
Avery's hands went still in the water for a second. "I don't mean to."
"Didn't say it was a problem." Hayes set the plate in the cabinet, closed it, leaned back against the counter with his arms crossed, watching Avery finish wiping down the sink edge that didn't need wiping. "Just an observation."
"You make a lot of those."
"Not much else to do out here." The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, gone before Avery could decide what to call it. "Plenty of time to watch things."
Avery dried his hands on the towel Hayes handed him, and something in his chest had loosened somewhere between the first mug and the last plate, some low hum of tension he hadn't fully registered until it wasn't there anymore.
***
By the time they'd finished, the light through the one window had changed completely — the flat gray of dawn burned off into something sharper, and when Hayes crossed to check the window latch, Avery saw the sky behind him had gone a hard, clean blue, no trace of the storm left in it except for the wet gleam still sitting on the gravel lot below.
"Storm's done," Hayes said. "Gonna be hot today. Real hot."
He wasn't wrong. By the time they made it downstairs — Avery in his own clothes again, mostly dry now, though the shirt had a permanent water stain across one shoulder that no amount of ironing was going to fix — the heat had already settled into the boatyard like it had never left.
The gravel radiated it back up in visible waves.
The lake past the tree line had gone flat and bright, blinding where the sun hit it straight on, the kind of stillness that only came after a storm big enough to scare the wind off entirely.
Hayes made sandwiches without asking if Avery wanted one — meat, cheese, mustard, nothing complicated, wrapped in wax paper he pulled from a drawer that seemed to have an answer for everything — and nodded toward the dock without a word, and Avery followed him down to it because there wasn't anything else to do and because some part of him didn't want to go back upstairs into the heat trapped between four walls.
The dock boards were warm through the soles of his shoes.
They sat at the end of it, legs hanging over water clear enough to see straight down to a rocky bottom a few feet under, and Hayes handed him a sandwich still wrapped, and for a while neither of them said anything at all.
A dragonfly worked the reeds near the shoreline.
Somewhere across the water a screen door banged, faint, someone else's life going on in a cabin too far off to see clearly.
"How'd you end up running a boat shop by yourself?" Avery asked, eventually, unwrapping the wax paper in his lap.
Hayes didn't answer right away. Chewed. Looked out at the water like the question needed some traveling before it landed. "My father ran it before me. Grandfather before him." A shrug, more in the shoulders than anywhere else. "Never had a reason to leave. Tried, once. Didn't take."
"What happened?"
"City. For a while." He said it the way he'd said everything else — flat, no drama attached, like a fact he'd stopped having feelings about a long time ago. "Didn't like it. Came back."
"Just like that?"
"Just like that." He took another bite, chewed through it before continuing, unbothered by the silence in between. "Some people need noise around them all the time to feel like something's happening. I'm not built that way. I like knowing what a day's gonna look like before it starts."
Avery turned that over, looking out at the lake, the surface so still it looked solid enough to walk on. "That sounds nice, actually."
"You don't sound like you believe that."