Chapter 5 — While He Steers
Cole didn’t ask her to the wheelhouse. He put a hand on the small of her back as she passed the companionway with Nia’s midmorning tray and redirected her the way he redirected weather.
“Tray stays. You come.”
Elias was at the wheel in his open shirt and the cap that never sat straight, talking before they were all the way through the door.
“There—you see that line? That’s her telling you she’s happy. Not a wrinkle in it. I could cut this heading with my eyes shut. Come look, both of you. Cole, tell me that isn’t the prettiest wake on this coast.”
Cole made the noise of a first mate agreeing with his captain.
He steered Mara left, out of the slice of glass where Elias might have seen her if Elias ever looked at anything that wasn’t water.
The unused stool stood two feet behind the helm, where a relief helmsman would sit if Elias ever wanted relief.
Under the console there was a cave of wiring and shadow and the warm animal smell of a man who had been standing in one place since dawn.
Cole pointed at the deck plates under the console.
Mara went to her knees.
The yellow dress hiked itself. The bruise on her hip pulsed when the fabric dragged over it.
Cole unzipped with one hand and set the other on the back of her head as if he were steadying a chart.
He was already hard. He had been hard walking her up the ladder.
She opened and took him the way he had told her to that first morning—start a watch clean—and the first wet sound she made was covered by Elias laughing at a bird.
“Look at that tern. Mara, you should see this. Where did she go?”
“Galley’s got her,” Cole said. “She’s around.”
Mara had both hands on Cole’s thighs. The bow slapped a trough and shoved him into her throat and she gagged around him, a thick choked click he killed by holding her there until the boat settled.
Spit ran off her chin onto the painted deck in a small dark coin.
Cole’s fingers tightened in her hair and set a rhythm that used the roll of the hull: out on the lift, in on the fall, her nose in the cotton of his work shirt every time the *Merrily* found a wave she liked.
Elias talked.
He talked about the heading. He talked about a green he had seen at fourteen off a jetty that didn’t exist anymore.
He talked about the way a good boat felt under your hands when she trusted you, which was the way he talked about love when he thought he was talking about seamanship.
His boots were in Mara’s peripheral vision, scuffed, planted, happy.
She could have reached out and tied his lace.
Cole fucked her mouth in short quiet strokes and watched the back of his captain’s head.
“Coffee,” Elias said suddenly, bright. “Christ, I forgot I was human. Cole—you want? Mara’ll bring it if she’s below. Mara?”
Cole’s fist kept her on him for one more second, then eased her off with a thread of spit still connecting her lower lip to the head of his cock. He thumbed the thread onto her tongue.
“She’s got it,” Cole said.
Elias, to the bow: “That’s my girl. Thermos is on the hook. Two sugars if she can stand to ruin it. I know, I know, but it’s a gift day and I’m taking the sugar.”
Cole pointed at the door with his chin. His cock stood out of his fly, wet from her, ignored.
Mara crawled out from under the console on hands and knees because standing up into Elias’s sidelong glance felt like a worse idea than the picture she made.
Spit on her chin. Knees printed again. She came up into a crouch behind the stool, then to her feet, and went down the ladder with her mouth shining.
Nia took one look at her in the galley and reached for the thermos without being asked.
“Two sugars,” Mara said.
“I heard him.” Nia poured, dumped, screwed the cap. She took a tea towel, considered Mara’s chin, and then handed her the towel and the thermos separately, a choice. “Wipe or don’t. If you go back up like that and he turns around, that’s your religion, not mine.”
Mara used the towel once, badly. She left the rest. She climbed.
Elias did not turn. Cole was standing where a first mate stands, one hip against the console, fly still open in the shadow the helm cast. He took the thermos out of Mara’s hands, unscrewed it, and passed the cap-cup forward. Elias took it without looking, drank, made a noise of stupid pleasure.
“Perfect. Tell her it’s perfect.”
“She knows,” Cole said.
He set the thermos on the console. Then he turned Mara to the unused stool, put her hands on the seat, and bent her over it.
The geometry was obscene in its smallness.
Elias’s boots. The stool. Mara’s ass bared when Cole rucked the dress to her waist.
Two feet. She could see the stitching on her husband’s heel.
She could smell the coffee she had just carried.
Cole dragged two fingers through her, found what the kneeling had done, and pushed into her in one hard seat that made the stool’s rubber feet chirp on the deck.
Elias went on about the wake.
Cole fucked her in short brutal strokes timed to the slap of the bow so the sounds hid in the sounds the boat was already making.
One hand on her hip, thumb in the bruise he had put there.
The other braced on the stool beside hers.
He did not talk. He didn’t need to. Every drive shoved her an inch toward her husband’s legs and every roll of the hull shoved her back onto him.
She bit the vinyl of the stool and breathed through her nose and watched Elias’s ankle flex when he shifted his weight to point at something only he could see.
“Cole. Come look at this. She’s laying down a path like drawn silk. I mean it. Look.”
Cole did not come look. He bottomed out in Mara and stayed, throbbing, and said, in the calm voice he used for bearings, “I see it, Cap. Best I’ve seen on this run.”
“That’s what I keep saying. People think a heading is numbers. It’s not numbers. It’s a relationship. You have to listen. You have to—” Elias laughed, helpless, in love. “I’m going to sound like a priest.”
“Sound how you want.” Cole pulled almost out of her and shoved back in hard enough that Mara’s teeth clicked on vinyl. “Nobody up here but us.”
“And Mara, when she comes back. You think she sees it? I want her to see it. I want her to understand why I can’t come down at night. It’s not that I don’t—you know I do. It’s that this is the hour she talks. The boat. You know.”
“I know.”
Mara came with her husband’s name for the sea in her ears and Cole’s cock pinning her to a stool two feet from the man who had written LOVE on a locker note.
She shook and soaked him and made a thin broken sound the engine and the bow-slap ate without effort.
Cole rode it, mean and steady, and only then put his mouth against her shoulder and said, almost inaudible, “Quiet. He’s right there.”
She was quiet.
Elias drank his ruined coffee and hummed.
He tapped the compass. He told a story about a night transit from before he had a wife, when he had steered by a single light on a headland and felt chosen.
Behind him Cole’s rhythm broke the way it had broken on the chart table.
He hauled out, dragged Mara to her knees again by the hair, and came across her tongue and her chin and the neckline of the yellow dress in thick stripes she had to swallow around or wear.
He held her jaw until she swallowed. Then he painted what was left on her lower lip with his thumb and pushed the thumb into her mouth.
“Good,” he said, still in the bearing voice.
He zipped. He picked up the parallel ruler he had not been using. He became a first mate standing at a console.
Mara stayed on her knees until she trusted her legs.
She pulled the dress down over the wet and the come on her chest that the cotton wicked into a map Nia would clock from the galley hatch.
She used the stool to stand. Elias, at last, half-turned—not enough to see the floor, enough to catch her in the corner of an eye that was still full of wake.
“There you are. Did you hear me going on? Cole’s too polite to tell me to shut up. Come here. Feel this.”
She came. He took her hand and put it on the wheel beside his, the way he had the morning after Cole, the wood humming, her fingers still smelling like what she had just swallowed.
“You feel her? That’s joy. That’s a boat in love with her own speed. I told you this run would be beautiful.”
He squeezed her waist, an inch above the bruise, husbandly, unused.
“You look winded. You been running stairs? I keep saying this crew will put you to work if you let them. Sit. Sit on the stool. That’s what it’s for.”
Mara sat on the stool.
It was warm from her own hands. It was slick in the center from her mouth. She sat in Cole’s come and her own slick and the print of her teeth in the vinyl and folded her hands in her lap like a woman invited to enjoy the view.
Elias pointed at the wake.
“Drawn silk,” he said again, softer. “I could watch that until the sun dies. I could watch that instead of eating. Don’t tell Nia.”
“I won’t.”
Cole, behind them both now, made a small notation on the log.
His face gave nothing. When Elias asked him for a depth he gave the depth.
When Elias asked him if he wanted the wheel for twenty minutes so the captain could stretch, Cole said, “She’s yours, Cap. I wouldn’t take her today if you paid me.”
Elias glowed.
Mara watched the line of the wake because that was what she had been told to look at.
It was beautiful. Everything he loved was beautiful and none of it had ever once turned around.
Two feet in front of her his boots stood in the same scuffed happiness they had stood in while another man finished on her tongue.
The stool stuck to the back of her thighs when she shifted. She did not shift again.
“Stay,” Elias said. “Stay and watch it with me. I like you up here. Makes the whole place feel like a life and not just a job.”
“I’ll stay.”
“That’s my girl.”
Cole closed the log. He glanced once at Mara on the stool, at the shine still on her mouth in the wheelhouse glass, and then he went down the ladder to be a first mate on a deck that already knew.
Elias never turned around.
He steered. He hummed. He named a cloud. Mara sat in the wet evidence of the last twenty minutes and held the rim of the stool and watched her husband love a line of white water as if it could love him back.
The *Merrily* ran true. The heading held. Below, someone laughed, and the laugh did not come up the ladder far enough to matter.