47. My Arms Died Along Time Ago -Finn
Forty Seven
My Arms Died Along Time Ago -Finn
The sun had set hours ago.
I couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment, only that it had still been light when I pushed the kayak from shore.
Then, the sky was a washed-out gray, the water choppy but visible.
Now, the world had gone black. The sky stretched overhead like a void, starless behind a thick layer of clouds.
The water beneath me ran darker still—a shifting, formless nothing I could hear but not see, lapping against the hull in steady, rhythmic slaps.
These had become the only proof I hadn’t drifted off the edge of the earth entirely.
My arms had stopped belonging to me hours ago.
My shoulders rolled through the stroke without input from my brain. My hands gripped the shaft. Years of training, which I’d hated at the time and now owed my life to, had reduced me to something simpler than thought—just the motion, an engine running on fumes, stubbornness, and nothing else.
Pain had burned through me for the first few hours—my shoulder screaming with every stroke, the cuts on my arms and hands lighting up each time saltwater splashed across them, my back seizing in spasms that made me gasp and clench my teeth.
But that had passed. Somewhere around the third hour, the shoulder stopped screaming and started simply grinding, a dull mechanical sensation, like a hinge working loose.
Even that had faded until my arms were just things attached to me, pulling water, pulling water, pulling water, with no more feeling than lengths of wood.
“Just keep moving,” I muttered, my voice raw and cracked, scraped hollow by salt air and dehydration and hours of breathing through my mouth because my nose had clogged with dried blood and snot somewhere around mile ten.
The kayak rocked beneath me, cutting through the water in slow, steady strokes that barely seemed to make progress against the current.
Now and then, a swell would rise from the darkness and slap the side hard enough to send a sheet of cold spray across my face and chest. Each time, the shock of it jolted through my nervous system like a defibrillator—three seconds of sharp, electric awareness before the numbness rolled back in and swallowed everything again.
I didn’t stop.
Didn’t think about stopping.
Because if I stopped—if I let the paddle rest across my lap for even thirty seconds, if I allowed my arms to go still and my muscles to cool and the exhaustion to settle into my bones the way it kept threatening to—
I wouldn’t start again. I knew that with absolute certainty. If I stopped, I would stay stopped, and the ocean would do the rest.
So I kept pulling—left, right, left, right. The most basic rhythm in the world, stripped down to its simplest components. I fed myself into it one stroke at a time, refusing to think beyond the next one.
Doc Fluffbutt had fallen silent in the carrier wedged between my knees, either asleep or in a state of feline zen. He accepted his circumstances with the stoic resignation of a creature who had already survived hell today and couldn’t be bothered to panic about anything else.
Then, a break in the darkness: the island.
A dark shape rising against the darker water, barely distinguishable from the sky except for the faint suggestion of light it blocked along the horizon. A solid, fixed mass in a world that had been nothing but liquid and darkness for hours.
I almost laughed. The sound that escaped was somewhere between a breath and a groan, too exhausted to qualify as anything else. But the relief behind it ran so deep and so sudden it nearly broke me right there in the kayak.
I let out a breath. “Yeah… alright…” My arms found one more stroke, then another, then another.
Closer.
I could make that distance.
Just keep moving. Just keep pulling. Don’t think. Don’t calculate.
The dock materialized out of the darkness ahead—faint, a slightly lighter shade of gray against the black water. The posts rose like fingers, the planking stretching out from shore in a shape I knew by heart because I’d built half of it myself.
Home.
I could smell the island now—earth and pine and salt grass and something green and alive that cut through the ocean brine and made my throat tighten in a way I hadn’t expected and couldn’t quite explain.
And then I saw a shape.
Standing on the dock.
Still.
Watching.
Gun raised.
“Fuck,” I whispered.
Of course. Of course someone stood on that dock with a weapon. Of course, the one time I needed the universe to hand me something simple—pull up to the dock, tie off, collapse, done—it threw one more obstacle in my path just to see if I’d crack.
My heart kicked hard against my ribs, and the adrenaline hit my exhaustion like an unearned second wind, just enough to sharpen the world at the edges again. My vision focused. My knuckles went white on the paddle.
Who the hell is on my island?
Where are the girls?
Where is Libby?
I shifted slightly in the kayak, letting my right hand drift toward the gun still holstered at my side—still there, still loaded, still an option.
Twenty rounds. Dead arms that might not be able to hold steady enough to hit anything.
No food in my system. No sleep. A shoulder that had stopped working properly somewhere around mile eight.
“Perfect,” I muttered, my jaw tightening. “Final boss fight.”
Before I could even formulate an approach—angle of attack, distance to cover, odds of hitting anything in the dark with arms made of overcooked pasta—a voice cut across the water, sharp and clear, carrying the unmistakable authority of someone who meant every single word.
“Turn around and go back where you came from before I shoot you.”
I froze, paddle suspended mid-stroke, dripping above the water. That voice.
I knew that voice.
I knew it the way I knew my own name, from years of family dinners and childhood fights.
No way.
No goddamn way.
“…Callan?” I called out, my voice cracking so badly the name barely made it across the water in one piece.
A beat of silence.
One second. Two.
The figure on the dock shifted, the gun lowering by a fraction.
Then—
“Finn?”
Everything in me just… let go.
“Yeah,” I rasped. “Yeah, it’s me.”
The kayak drifted the last few feet on its own momentum as I stopped paddling entirely, the hull gliding through the dark water with a soft hiss until it bumped against the dock pilings. A gentle, hollow thunk that sounded like the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard.
Callan dropped the gun immediately and moved fast, crossing the dock in three long strides before dropping into a crouch at the edge, one hand already reaching down.
“Jesus Christ—” He grabbed my arm, his grip locking around my forearm like a vice, and hauled me upward with a strength that made my exhausted body seem weightless. “What the hell—how did you—in a kayak?”
“Take the Cat,” I said, shoving the carrier toward him with my free hand before he could finish any of the twelve questions clearly competing for priority in his brain. “Get the cat first.”
He blinked.
Looked at the carrier.
Looked at me.
Looked at the carrier again.
Then barked out a laugh—short, sharp, edged with disbelief—that echoed across the water behind me.
“Of course you saved the cat,” he said, taking the carrier. “Of course you did. You paddled a kayak across the open ocean in the dark, and you brought a cat.”
“Shut up,” I said, my voice rough as I gripped the edge of the dock and tried to pull myself up with arms that had all the structural integrity of wet rope. “Shut up and help me onto this dock before I fall in and drown three feet from shore.”
He set the carrier down, grabbed me with both hands, and hauled me up and over the edge like a sack of potatoes.
The moment my boots hit solid ground, my legs gave out.
Both knees buckled simultaneously, every shred of energy draining as my body registered it no longer needed to balance, paddle, steer, or fight.
I dropped hard, sitting right where I landed, my back against a dock post. My chest heaved, and my arms, hanging at my sides, trembled in long, rolling waves I couldn’t have stopped if I’d tried.
Saltwater dripped from my hair, clothes, and hands.
The wood beneath me creaked, groaned, and held.
Its unmoving, unwavering, fixed solidity—something that didn’t rock, drift, or threaten to tip—almost made my eyes sting.
“Girls?” I managed, the word a strangled sound.
“They’re here,” Callan announced, without hesitation or preamble. “Arrived a couple of hours ago. They’re up at the house. Safe.”
Relief washed over me, a wave starting in my chest and radiating through my entire body. My eyes closed, and I tipped my head back against the post, simply breathing.
“Thank God,” I managed, my voice broken. “Good. That’s… good.”
Callan crouched before me, studying my face in the dim light.
“You look like shit,” he observed.
“I know,” I replied, my voice flat.
He pulled me into a rough, tight embrace, one arm around my back, the other gripping the back of my neck.
It was a hug devoid of sentiment, a visceral acknowledgment of survival.
He held it for three seconds longer than either of us would ever acknowledge.
I returned it as best I could, one arm barely cooperating, the other hanging uselessly, shaking.
“Thought you were dead,” he murmured into my shoulder. His voice carried a raw weight I’d never heard from him before, a vulnerability he’d never repeat.
“Not yet,” I said. “Working on it, though.”
We pulled apart, and I leaned back against the post, studying him.
The same face, but harder, thinner than I remembered, with a new scar along his jawline.
He looked like someone who’d been surviving, not just living.
Yet, his eyes still held that sharp intelligence and quiet steadiness that had always made him the one person I trusted to watch my back when everything went sideways.