Chapter 22
Morning Without Mercy
Morning entered the bedroom with no romance at all.
It came as a white stripe through the curtains, a lawn mower somewhere down the street, a delivery truck backing up with three cheerful beeps, and Nathan's own mouth tasting faintly of coffee, salt, and too little sleep.
For a moment, before memory arranged itself, he thought he had dreamed the whole thing.
Then Marissa shifted beside him.
She was awake.
He knew it from the quality of her stillness. Married stillness had varieties, and he had learned most of hers. This one was not sleep. It was waiting.
"Morning," he said.
She turned her head on the pillow. No makeup, no moonlight, no blue dress, only his wife with her hair spread across the pillow and an expression so open it made him ache.
"Morning."
They looked at each other for a long time.
Nathan expected shame to arrive now. He had prepared for it in fragments during the last hour before dawn: shame for wanting, shame for watching, shame for not stopping, shame for finding beauty in the exact thing he had once imagined would destroy him.
Instead what arrived was hunger.
Not only physical, though that was there too, immediate and startling. It was a hunger to know what she remembered first. What image had followed her into sleep. Which part of the night lived closest to the surface of her skin.
Marissa reached for his hand under the sheet.
"I dreamed about the cliff path," she said.
"Not the kiss?"
"The cliff path first." She threaded her fingers through his. "Being between you and him. Your hand behind me. His hand ahead of me. I kept thinking, this is dangerous, but neither of them is letting me fall."
Nathan closed his eyes. The image had been waiting in him too.
"I dreamed about the marina," he said.
"After?"
"Yes. The handshake. Which is stupid."
"It wasn't stupid."
"It felt like signing a treaty with a country I had just discovered existed inside my own house."
Marissa laughed softly, then covered her face with her free hand. "We are ridiculous."
"Completely."
"And yet."
"And yet."
The laughter faded. Something warmer remained.
Nathan rolled onto his side. "Coffee?"
"Soon."
The word held him where he was.
Marissa moved closer, slowly enough that he could have misunderstood it if he wanted to. He did not want to. Her knee touched his. Her hand left his fingers and rested on his chest.
"I want to be close to you before we become analysts of our own marriage," she said.
"That may be the most attractive sentence you've ever said."
"Don't joke."
He softened at once. "Sorry."
"I don't mean don't be funny. I mean don't hide."
Nathan looked at her hand on his chest. "I'm here."
She kissed him.
There was no captain in the room. No lantern.
No cove. But the night was present in the way the kiss opened.
Marissa did not kiss him like a wife returning to safety after a mistake.
She kissed him like a woman who had carried a new fire home and wanted to see whether it could warm the bed they already shared.
Nathan answered without restraint.
The kiss deepened. His hand moved to her waist, then stopped, not because he did not want more, but because stopping had become part of wanting well. She noticed. Her eyes opened.
"You can touch me," she whispered.
The permission broke something tender in him. He touched her as if re-learning a familiar shoreline after the tide had changed. Her shoulder. Her back. The curve of her hip beneath the sheet. Nothing was new and everything was new because he was no longer pretending he knew all there was to know.
Marissa's breath caught. She pressed her forehead to his.
"Last night made me want you more," she said.
He had not known he needed to hear it until the sentence entered him.
"Say that again."
"Last night made me want you more."
He kissed her hard then, and she laughed into it, a low, breathless sound that turned quickly serious. For a while they did not discuss rules, or Dane, or what came next. They let their marriage remember it had a body.
Later, in the kitchen, sunlight filled the room with almost insulting innocence. Nathan made coffee. Marissa sat at the island wearing his old gray T-shirt, bare legs folded beneath her on the stool, hair damp from a quick shower. She looked younger and older at once.
He set her mug in front of her.
"Morning truth," he said.
She wrapped both hands around the cup. "Morning truth."
He leaned against the counter. "I don't want to pretend it was only a fantasy."
"Good."
"I also don't want to sprint into the deep end because the shallow water felt amazing."
"Also good."
"I want rules before contact."
Her eyes lifted. "Contact with him?"
The word him had mass. It sat on the counter between the coffee mugs.
Nathan nodded. "If we contact him."
Marissa looked down into her coffee. "I wondered if you would want to erase him today."
"Part of me does."
"And the other part?"
"The other part keeps seeing you on that boat."
Her cheeks colored. Not like embarrassment. Like memory.
"What does that part want?" she asked.
Nathan took a sip of coffee to buy time. It was too hot. He swallowed anyway.
"The other part wants to know what happens if we don't run from the map."
Marissa's hand trembled slightly around the mug.
"Then we make rules," she said.
Outside, the neighbor's mower moved on to the next yard. The house smelled like coffee and soap and ordinary life.
The sea was nowhere in sight.
Still, Nathan felt the tide turning under the floor.