Chapter 14 #2
“He didn’t send it to you,” Jess said. “He gave me the money and made me buy it. He said if it came from him you’d have to think about it, and he didn’t want you to have to think about a kettle.
” She put her glass down. “I hate this. I want it noted that I hate this. For nine years I have said he doesn’t deserve you, and I have been right. ”
“Jess.”
“But he keeps showing up,” Jess said. “Every Saturday. At five-thirty. To be bad at swimming in front of you. He fired his brother. He stood in front of the whole world and said it was his fault.” She rubbed her face. “And he didn’t want you to have to think about a kettle.”
* * *
Scarlett drove to the house on Saturday night.
She told herself it was for the SwimSafe files she’d left in the study. That was true. She also told herself she wouldn’t go down to the water, and that wasn’t.
The house was hers. That still felt strange.
She had asked Ryan, on the phone, in August, to keep living there until she decided what to do with it, because a big empty house on the bay with a gate code everyone knew was a bad idea.
He’d said yes, whatever you want. He lived in the study and the kitchen. Ramona said he never went upstairs.
She let herself in with the gate code. She got the files. And then she walked out the back door, across the patio, and down the lawn toward the dock, because she had known the whole drive that she would.
He was sitting at the end of it.
* * *
He was on the wooden bench at the very end, facing the water, with his elbows on his knees. The dock lights were on. The bay was black and flat. The lights of the city ran all along the far shore.
He heard her on the boards and turned around. His face did the thing it always did now, when he saw her. It opened.
“Hi,” he said.
“I came for the files.”
“Okay.”
She sat down on the other end of the bench.
They talked until two in the morning.
Not about the Halcyon. Not about Alexis, or Luke, or Kerr.
They talked about nothing, the way they used to talk when they were young.
About the swim team kids banging on the door on Saturdays.
About Dr. Moss and her running shoes, which made Scarlett laugh.
About Troy, who had kept his job, and who had come to Ryan’s office and asked, stiffly, if Ryan wanted to keep the Halcyon, and Ryan had said no, sell it, and Troy had said good.
About Cooper.
She told him. She hadn’t planned to. She told him about the grant, and the island program, and she told him that Cooper had said for me, plainly, once.
Ryan went quiet.
“Do you want to go?” he asked finally.
“Part of me does,” Scarlett said. “A big part.”
He nodded. He looked out at the water. His jaw was tight, and she watched him hold himself still.
“Then it’s real,” he said. “It’s a real choice.
It should be.” His voice was rough. “I’m not going to tell you not to go.
I’m not going to fight a man who pulled you out of the ocean.
I just—” He stopped. “I just need you to know I’d live anywhere.
If it was ever a question. I’d live in a tent on that beach and be bad at swimming every single day. ”
* * *
She didn’t decide to move closer to him on the bench. It just happened, over the next hour, the way the tide comes in.
At some point her shoulder was against his. At some point his arm was along the back of the bench behind her, not touching. At some point she turned her head, and he was already looking at her.
This time she let him kiss her.
It started the way the pool had, slow and careful.
But it didn’t stay there. It had been four months since the kitchen.
It had been eight weeks of watching water run down his chest in the next lane.
Her hands went into his hair. His hand came up to her jaw, and then down her throat, and she made a small sound against his mouth, and something between them caught fire.
She climbed into his lap on the bench.
He made a low, broken noise and pulled her against him, and his mouth went to her neck, the place under her ear that had always made her knees go weak.
She tipped her head back and gasped at the stars.
Her hands were under his shirt, on his warm stomach, his ribs, his chest. She could feel his heart slamming.
She could feel how much he wanted her, hard under her, and she rocked against it without meaning to, and he groaned into her throat.
“Scarlett,” he said. “Scarlett.”
His hands were on her hips. Then under the hem of her shirt, on the bare skin of her waist, and she arched into it.
His thumbs moved up her ribs. He was shaking.
So was she. The dock lights blurred. The water slapped gently against the posts beneath them, and for once, the sound of water didn’t frighten her at all.
His hand slid up her back.
It stopped, carefully, just below her shoulder blades, and stayed there, flat and warm.
And it was fine. That was what stopped her. It was his hand, on her back, and she wasn’t in the black, and she wasn’t at the rail, and she wasn’t afraid.
She was about to give him everything, right here, on a bench at the end of a dock. And she didn’t know yet if she was choosing him or just falling back into him.
She pulled back.
She put both hands flat on his chest. Her hands were shaking so hard he could feel it. She could see him feel it.
“Stop,” she said. “I need to stop.”
He stopped instantly. He took his hands off her. He held them up, a little, in the air, the way he had in the closet.
“Okay,” he said, breathing hard. “Okay. We stopped.”
* * *
She climbed off his lap and sat down on the bench beside him. They both stared at the water until they could breathe normally.
“I need to tell you something,” she said. “And I need you to hear all of it before you say yes.”
“Okay.”
“There’s a condition. If there’s ever going to be anything.
If I ever come back.” She turned to face him.
“When I call you, you answer. Every time. Whatever room you’re in.
Whatever you’re doing. If you’re in a board meeting, you walk out of the board meeting.
If you’re in a closing, you walk out of the closing.
If you’re on a plane, you call me from the ground before you do anything else.
You don’t text me back. You don’t say give me ten minutes.
You don’t say I’m in the middle of something. You answer.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment. She watched him understand it. She watched him understand exactly what it was, and where it came from. The sky deck. The stars. Give me ten minutes.
“It’s not about money,” she said. “It’s not about the house or the company. It’s about the one thing you never gave me. You were always somewhere else. You were always in the middle of something. I want to be the thing you’re never in the middle of.”
Ryan looked at her.
“Yes,” he said.
No pause. No bargain. No what if.
“Ryan. It’s not a small thing. It means your whole day belongs to a phone call that might come. It means you don’t get to be in control of your own time. Ever.”
“I know.”
“You’ll walk out of things that matter. People will think you’re crazy. You’ll lose deals.”
“I know,” he said. “Yes. Tomorrow morning I’ll tell my assistant. If it’s you, I leave. Whatever it is. Whoever it is. I’ll put it in writing if you want. Scarlett, I spent nine years being in the middle of something. I’d give every one of those somethings back for one of your calls.”
* * *
She drove home at three in the morning with the windows down.
She didn’t sleep. She sat on her balcony in the dark with the plain white kettle whistling in the kitchen behind her, and Destiny’s drawing on the refrigerator, and her laptop on her knees.
She had been thinking about it for weeks. Ever since the pool. Ever since the first time she had put her face in the water and not gone into the black.
There was a charity swim in November. Open water. One mile across the bay, for a children’s hospital. She had swum it every year for six years before the Halcyon.
She hadn’t been in open water since the night in the Exumas. Not once. Not a lake. Not the ocean. The pool was one thing. A pool had walls. A pool had lights, and a bottom you could see.
She opened the registration page.
She typed her name. Scarlett Walsh. Her age. Her estimated time, which she left blank, because she honestly didn’t know anymore.
Then she texted Jess. I need a kayak escort. Training swim. Two weeks from Sunday. Dawn. Off the dock at the house.
The reply came thirty seconds later, even though it was three in the morning.
You’re insane. Obviously yes.
Scarlett sat on the balcony and watched the sky go gray over the ficus tree, and pressed Submit.