Chapter 6
brOCK
The hell of it was, I was having a good time.
I couldn't have told you the last time I'd been able to say that and mean it. Somewhere along the way, good times had stopped being something that happened to me and turned into something I watched other people have from across a room, the way you'd watch a fire you weren't allowed near.
But sitting in that rental on the causeway out to Folly, listening to a woman in a wedding dress talk herself the rest of the way out of a life, I felt something loosen in my chest that had been clenched so long, I'd forgotten it could do anything else.
Because here was the thing I kept turning over. Who runs out on a wedding?
Not a crazy person. That was the first idea my head went to and I threw it out, fast, because crazy has a smell to it and she didn't have it.
I'd sat across tables from genuine crazy, the kind that smiles wrong and means it, and this wasn't that.
Her eyes tracked clean. Her sentences landed where she aimed them.
She'd negotiated a ride out of a stranger she'd accused of being a pervert in the space of about ninety seconds, which is not the move of a woman who's lost the thread.
It's the move of a woman holding the only thread she's got and refusing to let go of it.
No. Not crazy. Something rarer than that.
And the second thing, the thing I kept circling back to with something close to respect: I wasn't sure I'd have had the stones to do what she'd done.
Walk out. In front of everybody. A big crowd of people in their good clothes and a church full of God and a family that had clearly spent money they didn't throw around, and she'd stood up in the middle of all of it and said no with her feet.
I'd walked into rooms knowing I might not walk out. I'd done it more than once. And I wasn't certain, sitting there, that any of that was harder than what it had taken her to turn around in that aisle.
The third thing—
Hell with the third thing. There didn't need to be a third.
I wanted the details. Of course, I did. I wanted to know what she was running from and who'd been waiting at the end of that aisle and what had finally tipped her over.
But I'd been on the asking end of enough conversations to know that the fastest way to close a person up is to come at them with questions, and I had exactly nowhere to be.
Tommy could wait another hour. The thing in Charleston, whatever it was, would still be there when I got to it.
Bad things are patient. They keep.
So, I'd let her run it. Drive where she pointed, stop when she said stop, and there was no version of this where I let her walk off alone to a pier in a wedding gown with that look still ghosting around the edges of her face.
I've done things that'd keep a priest up nights.
I'm a killer, and I've stopped pretending to myself I'm anything else.
But there's a floor, and leaving a woman in trouble to fend for herself was below it.
I might be the worst thing in most rooms I walk into. I'm not a piece of shit.
Besides. I could count on one finger the number of times I'd spent an afternoon with a gorgeous runaway bride.
I tried not to land on gorgeous. Tried to keep my eyes on the road and my head on the terrain.
But even buried in mounds of silk, she came through it—the line of her neck, the set of her jaw, dark hair coming loose now that the veil was gone and lying against skin that had been kept out of the sun.
I caught myself and put my attention back where it belonged, and had a short, hard word with the part of me that doesn't take direction.
Stay in your lane. She might not be married, but she was sitting in a world of trouble up to her chin.
The last thing she needed was one more man looking at her like she was something to want.
She was talking the whole way out.
Not to me, exactly. More like she'd had the volume turned down on something her whole life and had finally found the knob.
Choices, she was saying. How you make a thousand small ones and never feel yourself making the big one until you're standing inside it.
Obligation—the word came up more than once, turned over like a stone she was checking for the soft underside.
She talked about the Church, about being raised inside a set of words that never changed and how there was comfort in that and also a kind of cage, and how she'd only just figured out you could love a thing and still need out of it.
I just listened. Drove and listened and wondered where she was steering all of it, whether somewhere in the middle of the talking she'd hit a turn and tell me to take her back.
People do that. They get a hundred yards down the road of a hard choice and the size of it catches up and they run for the familiar.
But that's not what was happening. The longer she went, the clearer it got.
She wasn't talking herself out of leaving.
She was talking herself the rest of the way into it—setting each piece down where it went, building the case not to undo the thing but to be sure of it.
It wasn't a woman wavering. It was a woman pouring a foundation.
And for whatever this hour was worth, I was standing on it with her.
She had me park near the pier and was out of the car before I'd finished braking, bending to strip off a pair of heels that brick and now sand had already finished off.
Left them by the tire. Walked out onto the planks barefoot in that enormous dress with her chin up and her shoulders square, and I sat behind the wheel for a second and watched her go like she was walking toward a lifeline only she could see.
That was when I quit doing the math on her. Right there.
Because whatever she was, she had nerve.
Bone-deep, the real kind, the kind that doesn't announce itself and can't be faked.
I'd served beside men who wore courage like a costume and folded the first time the world pushed back.
This woman had no costume left. She'd left it in a church. And she was still walking forward.
I got out and followed at a distance, far enough to give her the pier to herself.
The wind was up out over the Atlantic, cooler than the land had let on, snapping the hem of that ivory dress out sideways and carrying salt and the green animal smell of the ocean.
The new planks gave a little under my boots, that fresh-lumber spring an old pier loses.
She walked to the middle of it and put both hands on the rail and looked out at a gray-green sea running white at the caps, and she breathed like she'd just remembered she was allowed to.
I came up beside her. Left a respectful foot of rail between us. Looked out the same direction she was looking, because there are conversations that only happen when nobody's facing each other.
For a while, neither of us said anything.
The surf came in and pulled back. A gull worked the wind without moving.
And something in me went quiet—the low static that's run under everything I do for as long as I can remember, the noise I've only ever found one way to shut up.
For the length of a few breaths on that pier, it had nothing to say.
I didn't stop to ask why. I just stood in it.
Then, she turned her head and looked at me like she'd half forgotten I was a real person and not part of the scenery.
"You probably think I've completely lost my mind," she said.
I shook my head. Slow. Serious as a grave.
"No," I said. "Just a pervert or something."
It took her a second. I watched it land—watched her eyes go wide, watched her catch it—and then she broke.
Laughed. Not a polite laugh, not the kind women in nice dresses are trained to do at men.
A real one, doubled over the rail, one hand pressed flat to her stomach like it hurt, and it pulled mine right out of me behind it.
The two of us stood out over the cool Atlantic laughing like a pair of idiots while the wind tried to take it apart.
Who'd have thought? A runaway bride with a sense of humor.
She got her breath back in pieces, wiping at the corner of one eye. "Oh," she said. "Oh, I needed that."
"Figured you might."
"Thank you." She straightened up and looked at me, and the laugh was still in her face but under it, she'd gone earnest. "For the laugh. For the ride. For—being wherever you were, at exactly the moment I needed somebody to be there. I don't know what I'd have done, if you hadn't been there."
And I went and said the thing.
"No place I'd rather be."
It came out of my mouth before I'd cleared it through anything, and I'd have given a year of pay to reel it back, because that is not a thing I say.
I don't talk like that. I don't pine, don't reach, don't waste words dressing up a feeling—I've never had the time or the use for it, and the women who've passed through the edges of my life could tell you I'm about as romantic as a tire iron.
Flowery talk is for men with something to sell.
And here, I'd handed this stranger a line straight off a greeting card and, worse, meant every syllable of it.
She held my eyes a beat. Didn't make anything of it, mercy of mercies. But something flickered there.
Then, it changed—a slow, dangerous shine coming up in her face that I didn't have a category for yet.
"Can you swim?" she asked.
I looked at her. "...Come again?"
"Can you swim?" She nodded at the water like it was the most reasonable follow-up in the world.
"Yeah. Of course."
"And you're not afraid of heights?"
"No."
"Good." She turned to face me square, that shine going to a full grin now, reckless and bright and lit from somewhere I'd have bet the church had spent years trying to put out. "Unzip me."
Every coherent thought in my head went out like a snuffed match. The hell?
"The dress," she said, already turning her back, gathering the loose hair off her neck and holding it up out of the way. "I can't get it myself. It took two people this morning. Come on."
I'm a man who has defused devices with steadier hands than the ones I put to the back of that dress.
The zipper was small and hid under a flap of silk and a row of little covered buttons I had to work through one at a time.
My fingers—my big, scarred, good-for-killing fingers—fumbled every one of them like I'd never undone a thing in my life.
The dress came open down her spine. I kept my eyes high and my breathing level and reminded a certain part of me, again, with feeling, to stay in its lane.
She stepped away the second it gave. Shrugged and twisted and worked herself loose of all that silk, and I turned my head and gave her the privacy of the horizon while she did it.
When I looked back, she'd folded the whole heavy thing over the rail in a neat ivory drape.
She smoothed it once, flat, almost gentle.
One pat. A goodbye, maybe. To what, I couldn't have said.
Then, she looked me dead in the eye, down to whatever she'd had on under it, salt wind whipping her hair across her face, fearless as anything I have ever seen.
"Last one in the water buys dinner," she said.
And before my brain could so much as file an objection, she was up on the rail and over it—gone, with a scream coming up out of her that was pure roller coaster, pure terror and joy welded together, the sound a person makes the first time in their life they've jumped instead of being pushed.
I looked at the dress. I looked at the long drop and the gray Atlantic chewing at the pilings below.
There was no version of this where I let her hit that water alone.
I went over the rail after her.