Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
Ikissed Hollis on a Tuesday, which should tell you everything, because by then Tuesdays and I had a history.
It was not on the schedule, which should also tell you something, because almost nothing about that summer was unscheduled by then except the things that actually mattered, and I had begun to notice the pattern and resent it.
The rebrand had been Friday. By Tuesday, the island had finished litigating me and moved on to other business, which was worse than the litigation, because being forgiven on Sugarberry feels exactly like being managed, and I should know.
I’d had two public failures in two weeks.
I had lost Odette, embarrassed Hutchins, and tried to amputate a cone, and I had done all of it for reasons I could still, infuriatingly, defend.
I could not sleep. So I did the thing I’d started doing on the nights I couldn’t sleep, which I had not admitted to anyone, including myself in any sentence I let finish: I walked down to the marina.
He was there. He was often there at night, it turned out — Hollis sleeps the way he does everything, on his own schedule, asking the world’s permission for nothing — sitting on the gunwale of the Margaret Ann with a beer and no light on, watching the water do nothing, which is his favorite thing to watch.
He didn’t act surprised to see me. He didn’t act anything. He just moved over a few inches on the gunwale, which on Hollis is the equivalent of throwing a parade. I sat down. For a while we didn’t talk, and the not-talking was, as ever, the most restful conversation I’d had in twenty years.
The marina at night is a different country.
The boats knock and settle. The water does the thing it does in the dark, which is hold the last of the light long after the sky’s let go of it, so the channel glows faintly when nothing else does.
Somewhere out in the marsh, a heron complained about something and went quiet.
I could feel the warmth of him along my left side, a hand’s width of dark between us, and the particular animal fact of sitting next to a person who wanted nothing — not my opinion, not my help, not even my conversation — and finding that the wanting-nothing did not feel like neglect.
It felt like the first room I had been allowed to simply exist in since I was twenty.
I had spent the whole summer engineering reasons to be on this dock and calling them foot traffic, and I sat there in the glowing dark and let myself feel, for exactly as long as I could stand it, how much I did not want to leave.
I hadn’t planned to talk. I’d planned, insofar as I plan anything, to sit in his silence for ten minutes, steal a little of the only peace I’d found on this island, and go home before I did something I’d have to put in a column.
But the dark, the water, the two failures, the not-sleeping — all of it had worn through some seal I keep maintained at considerable cost, and when he finally spoke, I found I’d been waiting to be spoken to all night.
Then he said, “Heard you tried to straighten the cone.”
“I heard you heard.” I put my head in my hands. “Go ahead. Everyone else has.”
“Nah.” He took a pull of the beer. “I straightened it too. In my head. First month I ran charters past it, I thought, that thing’s an eyesore, somebody ought to fix it.” He shrugged. “Took me a few years to figure out the lean was the whole point. Some of us are slow.”
I looked at him. It was the kindest thing anyone had said to me in two weeks, and he’d disguised it as a confession, because Hollis knows the only comfort a certain kind of person can actually accept is the news that someone they respect was once a fool too.
He had handed me my own dignity back the way the island hands everything back — sideways, with no receipt, denying it was a gift.
“Why are you being nice to me?” I asked. “You don’t even like me. You think I’m a—“ I gestured at myself, the whole apparatus, the clipboard I wasn’t holding and somehow still was.
“I never said I didn’t like you.” He looked at the water. “I said you were hard at relaxing. Those aren’t the same thing.” A pause, the patient kind. “I like you fine, Brooke. That was never the problem. I just think you’re at war with the one part of you worth surrendering to.”
And that — not a sunset, not a slow song, not one single thing I could have put on a schedule — that was when I kissed him.
I would like to report it was a decision.
It was not a decision. I have made every significant decision of my adult life with a pen in my hand, and I did not make this one; it made me, the way the dolphins came, unpromised and unearned and entirely outside my jurisdiction.
One second I was being told I was at war with myself, and the next I had a hand in a weathered man’s collar and was finding out he tasted like salt, cheap beer, and the one thing I hadn’t let myself want in so long I’d forgotten it had a flavor.
He kissed me back. He did it unhurried, like he does everything, with no sense that the world was going to end if it took its time, one hand coming up to the side of my face like he had all night, which he did.
For about four seconds, every running list in my head stopped mid-item, all at once, for the first time since 4:40 on a Tuesday.
There was no plan in it. There was no next item.
There was a weathered man and the dark water and the single uncomplicated fact of being kissed by someone who had not, at any point, required me to earn it — and for those four seconds I was not managing one thing on this earth, and it was the closest to peace I had come since I was somebody’s mother and somebody’s wife and, somewhere underneath all of it that I’d stopped checking on, a person.
Then the lists came back on, every one of them resuming exactly where it had paused, and the first thing they said — in my mother’s voice, in my own voice, in the voice of a woman who has just done a thing she did not authorize — was what are you doing.
I stood up so fast I nearly went off the boat.
“Okay,” I said. “No. That was—” I was already three steps up the dock, already reaching for the clipboard that wasn’t there, already converting the most genuine thing I’d done all summer into a problem to be contained.
“That was a long two weeks, and I’m not sleeping, and you were being kind, and I don’t— I have a plan, Hollis.
I have a four-page plan, a marriage I just finished mismanaging, and exactly zero free hands, and I cannot, I cannot?—”
“Brooke.” He hadn’t moved. He was still on the gunwale, unhurried, leaving me the whole dock like he leaves everyone everything. “I didn’t ask you for anything.”
Which was true. Which was the entire problem.
He had not asked me for one single thing.
I had spent my whole life being loved exactly to the extent that I was useful, and a man who wanted nothing from me was the most destabilizing thing I had ever stood on a dock in front of — more than a storm, more than a divorce.
So I did what I do. I fled toward the work.
I went home and did not sleep, and at six the next morning I was at the parlor with the four-page plan and a brand-new determination to execute every page of it as fast as humanly possible — because the one reliable cure I have ever found for the terror of wanting something is to bury it under a great deal of work I can justify.
Cam had asked whether I still knew how to want anything at all. It turned out I did. It turned out I’d kissed it on a dock and then run for my life. And I was going to make absolutely certain it never happened again by becoming, effective immediately, far too busy.