Chapter 10
Rafe
The door swings in on darkness and the smell of a room undisturbed for a long, long time.
Old wood. Cold ash. The particular held-breath mustiness of undisturbed air, and under it, the mineral patience of stone.
I stand in the doorway with Neri on my arm, holding as much of her weight as I can to give her ankle a reprieve and give my eyes a second to adjust. Bit by bit, the cottage assembles itself out of the gloom.
The cottage consists of one main room. There’s a fireplace along the far wall, made of stone and looking relatively untouched by time.
An ancient table, simple but sturdy, thick-legged and covered in dust, with two chairs that appear solid enough at first glance.
A kitchen alcove sits off the side, shelf boards sagged into smiles, and past the hearth, nestled against the wall is a bed, still piled with quilts.
Two deep windows throw gray light in slabs across a plank floor with decades of dust on it, printed now with exactly two sets of footprints, ours.
Not exactly a room at the Ritz.
"Okay," I say, and my voice comes back off the stone all wrong, too loud, like the house is startled. "The listing said rustic."
"The listing said abandoned." She leans on the doorframe, ankle up like a flamingo, running surveyor's eyes over everything. "Structure first. Before we fall in love with it."
I blink repeatedly and look at her with fake outrage.
“Was that a joke? A joke from Doctor Nerissa Marsh, the most serious scientist in the entire country? Either I bumped my head harder than I thought or I’m dead and I’ve gone to Heaven.”
I gasp as she rolls her eyes, but the corners of her mouth lift in a smile that transforms her whole face. It softens those edges that she wears like a shield and dimples form on each side of her pretty, rounded mouth.
“I think we must both be dead.” That smile stays on her face as she keeps her gaze on me. “Because this place is bigger than my apartment.”
I chuckle and look down at her. For a moment, there’s no dusty abandoned cottage, no wreck, no ankle sprain or hunger or cold. I’m just a man lost in the teal-blue eyes of the most beautiful woman in the world.
Then she swallows and pulls her eyes away. And I return to reality.
I do the survey. This tiny cottage was built for the unforgiving weather of coastal Maine: the walls are dry and true, the roof sags in one corner, the boards under it stained dark and long dried, but it doesn’t look like it’s about to cave in.
One windowpane is cracked, and the other is empty, the glass long gone, shattered bits layered on the floor.
The chimney, when I crouch in the hearth and look up, shows me a coin of actual sky, unblocked.
The bed is a good surprise. The iron frame is narrow, its ancient mattress long gone to mice, but the frame is sound.
Even better, I find folded wool blankets in a wooden chest that the mice, by some miracle of oversight or respect, never breached.
They smell like mothballs and dust and decades past. They are the most beautiful textiles I have ever encountered.
And then the cottage starts handing us things.
It happens like a magic trick, like the room decided we passed some kind of interview.
Neri opens the alcove's lower cabinet and there's cookware, a thick-bottomed cast-iron pan, a dented pot that seems to be made of aluminum, a kettle with a rind of ancient lime.
I check the wall pegs and find tools, a hand axe with a gray but honest edge, coils of line.
Under the window bench: a wooden tackle box, hooks and lures and leader gone cloudy with age but intact, and folded beside it a fishing net with a torn belly, ripped in a long ragged mouth, fixable, maybe, by someone with patience and knowledge.
And on the mantel, a tin box that Neri opens like it might be full of bees, then her entire face transforms.
"Rafe!”
She holds out a fire striker, flint and steel, and a knot of char-cloth still folded in oilpaper. I look at that little kit and feel the way I felt the first time I looked at the night sky through a telescope. With wonder.
"We have fire," I say. "We have a pan. We have hooks and line.
" I turn in the middle of the little stone room, and the whole shape of our situation is pivoting under me, from bleak survival toward something approaching bearable.
Comfortable, maybe not, but bearable, certainly.
"Neri, we might just make it to a warm meal and a warm night.”
“It’s not much, but I’ll take it.” She lowers herself onto the standing chair like a queen claiming a disputed throne. “Don’t let it go to your head. We still have lots of work to do.”
So I do, and here's where the day divides itself.
Her ankle has vetoed walking, so the hearth is hers.
We’re lucky enough to find brittle-dry, old wood stored in a corner and I ferry in armloads of deadfall from the meadow's edge, spruce twigs, birch scraps off the one dying birch by the garden wall.
She gets to work and builds the fire, her face serious as she works on the flint and steel.
I don’t stay to watch her work. I take the outside and follow the most wonderful sound I ever heard. Water. Not the ocean, but trickling water.
Behind the cottage, tucked into ferns and moss like a secret, there's a basin. Stone-built, clearly human-made, catching a thread of spring that comes down off the hill through a mossy channel. It's full, and it drips a steady overflow. And when I taste it, it's cold and sweet and clean.
Better and better. We have water and shelter. With a bit of luck, we’ll have warmth, too.
Now all we need is food. I set out to explore some more.
The garden's gone to riot but the riot has survivors: a stand of rhubarb like a green explosion, mint gone overgrown in one whole corner, and, when I dig where the old rows would have been, the unmistakable papery necks of onions, gone half-wild, small and fierce.
I pull three, and the smell off them is so sharp and so much like food that my stomach files an emergency motion.
The cove seals it. Down the meadow path, the crescent beach is calm and peaceful, and the northern headland runs out in black ledges that go under at half-tide.
And those ledges, when I climb down to the waterline, are shaggy with mussels.
Blue-black, fist-clustered, thousands of them, a whole protein sector, free for the picking.
I fill my folded fleece and a nostalgic corner of my heart springs to life, because my father used to say the coast feeds anyone humble enough to bend over.
He certainly was and I’m grateful for it.
I come back up the path at golden hour with my arms full of the island's bounty, and see the cottage chimney smoking.
Smoke. From the chimney. Neri got the fire going pretty good by the sight of it.
I stop on the path and look at it for a second, that gray thread going up soft against the evening, and something enormous and unscheduled moves through me. Hope, stubborn and bubbly, fills my entire chest cavity.
I’ve often been accused of being an incorrigible optimist. Of disregarding the dangers and the negative sides of things. But right now, standing with my arms full of food and the prospect of a full belly, I can’t find a fault in it.
We’re going to be okay tonight. Let tomorrow bring what it brings.
Inside, the cottage has changed states. Firelight everywhere, shadows breathing on stone, the musty smell already losing ground to woodsmoke and warm rock.
She's still in the chair, foot up on the second chair. The fire is burning with smug cheerfulness, blazing hot and bright, casting a red glow over Neri’s pale skin.
"First strike," she says, before I'm even through the door. "The char-cloth took on the first strike."
"Of course it did. All that thing needed was a stern look from you and it got down to business.” I unload the haul onto the table: mussels, onions, a fist of mint, the rhubarb I picked on a hunch.
"Dinner deliveries have begun. I'd like to formally apologize to the ecosystem, I took everything that wasn't bolted down. "
And then I get my second education of the evening, because she takes over.
She goes through the mussels one by one, quick expert fingers, tap-testing the open ones, discarding the ones that don't close, the cracked ones, the suspiciously light ones, a triage so fast it looks like card-sharping.
"Closed or closes when tapped, keep. Open and lazy, dead, toss.
Smells wrong, toss." She debeards the survivors while she talks with her thumb and a knife I assume she found somewhere.
"Rinse them in the fresh water, they'll spit their grit. Then fill that pot with seawater and we’ll put all this to a boil.”
I do as she says. By the time I’m back with the pot filled with fresh water, she’s done cleaning the mussels. We let them soak in the freshwater for a good thirty minutes, or however long we can bear to wait. I’ll bet it’s not thirty minutes.
Then I toss the freshwater along with the grit, rinse the whole thing once more and fill it with fresh seawater and it all goes on the fire.
Soon, the cottage fills with a smell that reorganizes my nervous system.
I don’t think I’ve ever been this hungry in my life before.
The onions are going soft in mussel steam, salt and sweet and mineral, mint torn in at the end.
We eat at the thick-legged table by firelight, out of one pan with two forks she found in a drawer and boiled on principle, a hill of blue-black shells growing between us.
Neither of us talks for the first ten minutes.
There's just the fire, and the small clatter of shells, and the sea keeping its low murmur down past the meadow.
"Okay," she says finally, wrecked hair gone copper-and-teal in the firelight, cheeks flushed, pointing her fork at me with lethal seriousness. "This was the best meal of my entire life.”
I laugh at that and I’m rewarded with another true smile from her. For a moment, I forget to breathe as I stare at her. Her teal-copper hair wild and tangled, her eyes shining, her cheeks flushed. She’s so beautiful, so ethereal, I’m almost afraid to blink and discover she was just a mirage.
“Duly noted. This is the best compliment I ever received from a lady after taking her to dinner.”
She laughs, tired and real, and the firelight plays on her face like the hands of a lover, caressing that porcelain skin in a way that makes me jealous. I catch myself rubbing my fingers together, wondering if her cheeks are as soft as they look.
The complete inappropriateness of it shocks me, so I stand and turn towards the bed.
I take the blankets from the chest and carry them outside to shake them out, nearly choking on the dust. I keep going for longer than necessary, but I need some distance to get a grip on my thoughts.
It’s only the nerves. It’s what getting stranded on a desert island does to people. Just don’t let it get to your head. Nerissa Marsh is definitely not interested in you.
The self-scolding works. Somehow. Not very well, but reminding myself that I’m at least a decade older than the mesmerizing beauty waiting for me inside the cottage calms me down.
I’m back in control when I come back inside and drag the iron frame near the hearth, where heat can actually reach it. I’ve already dragged the mattress out, but I layer the frame thick with folded wool, a pillow engineered from bundled grass. It ends up, if I say so myself, close to cozy.
Then I build the second nest, the floor one, by the fire, two blankets and a pile of grass for my head. I'm arranging it with real hospitality-industry pride when I feel her watching and look up into narrowed eyes.
"You're a foot taller than me,” she says. "The bed's yours, I fold smaller."
"You have one working ankle.” I put the last fold in the blanket and stand. "Neri. Take the bed. Let me have this. It's the only chivalry I've got the budget for."
She stands too, up on her good foot, steadying on the table's edge, and she's close, so close. Her chin is set for battle but her eyes have gone somewhere else entirely, somewhere with no armor.
"You keep doing things for me.” Her voice is a whisper. “Why?”
"I contain multitudes.” I joke because I don’t trust myself right now. Not when her eyes are on me like that and her mouth is plump and pink and inviting. “It's mostly baked goods and stubbornness."
"Muffins. Water. Food. The bed." Her escaped hair is a halo of firelit chaos, and she has a smudge of ash on her jaw shaped like a comma. And I have never in my adult life wanted so badly to be holding something so I could do something with my hands. "I keep waiting for the catch.”
“There’s no catch here,” I say. “Unless you count the mussels, but they didn’t put up much of a fight.”
Then she kisses me.
Up on the toes of her one good foot, one hand fisting my collar for balance, quick and fierce and half-desperate, like an argument she's decided to win by other means.
The world goes down to firelight and salt and the taste of her mouth.
My hands move, one at her waist, one in that impossible hair.
She makes a small sound against my mouth that will be with me on my deathbed, and I kiss her back like my life depends on it.
The fire ticks. The kiss slows, deepens, stops being an argument.
That's the moment I feel it, the exact seriousness of this situation.
And I want this. I want it with a specific gravity I have not felt since before I devoted my life to science. Which is exactly why I can’t do this.
I gentle it down. Slow the kiss to a halt and take her face in both hands, and set my forehead against hers, both of us breathing like the trek uphill.
"Goodnight, Neri," I say, wrecked and quiet, into the inch between us.
She goes very still. “You don’t want this?”
"I want this more than you know.” I make it as plain as I know how to make anything, no jokes anywhere near it. “But you're hurt, you're exhausted, and you’ve been through a traumatic experience. We both have. I'd rather you kiss me on a day you didn't almost die in front of me."
A long pause. Firelight moving on stone.
"That was two days ago," she says, but there's no bite in it.
"Bed," I say. "Doctor's orders. I'm not that kind of doctor, but the island has a shortage. And I want to be clear that I’m not rejecting your kiss. I’m postponing it until we’re both in a sane setting.”
And she goes, hopping, regal, refusing assistance with one raised hand. She looks back at me for a moment with an expression I wish I could read.
“You’re a good man, Rafe," she says.