Chapter 42
No Apology for Wanting
Marissa was the first to laugh.
It came out shaky and embarrassed, the kind of laugh that escapes after a storm passes close enough to rattle every window but leaves the house standing. She covered her mouth with one hand, then dropped it, as if refusing to be ashamed of any part of herself now.
"I don't know what I'm supposed to say," she admitted.
"Then don't say the supposed thing," Dane replied.
Nathan looked at him. "That sounds like something you say often."
"Only to people who are trying very hard to lie politely."
Marissa leaned back against Nathan again. The small weight of her there steadied him. Her hair brushed his jaw, carrying salt and her perfume and the faint smoky sweetness of the cabin candles.
"I don't want to lie politely," she said.
Dane nodded once, accepting the sentence as if it were a heading on a chart.
"Then start with what is true."
Marissa took a long breath. Nathan felt it travel through her body into his hands.
"I wanted that kiss," she said.
The cove did not change. No cliff cracked. No wave rose up to punish them. The simple truth stood there under the moon, smaller and larger than Nathan had expected.
"I know," he said.
"I want you to know I wanted it before it happened," she continued. "Not because I stopped loving you. Not because I forgot you were here. Because you were here. Because you looked at me like you could finally see the part of me I kept hiding from both of us."
Nathan could not answer immediately.
Dane looked away toward the water, giving them privacy on his own deck. It was an oddly gentlemanly thing after an ungentlemanly kiss, and Nathan disliked how much he respected it.
"I was scared," Nathan said.
Marissa turned fully inside his arms.
"Of him?"
Nathan glanced at Dane, then shook his head.
"Of what I felt when you wanted him."
The admission made his ears burn. He had said humiliating things in the dark before, but this was worse because it was clean. No joke. No drink. No late-night fantasy safely hidden behind a screen. Only him, his wife, the captain, and the water.
Marissa's expression softened.
"What did you feel?"
Nathan almost lied. He almost reached for a version of himself more acceptable to daylight.
Then he remembered the driftwood burning blue. The rule Dane had given them. No pretending.
"I felt jealous," he said. "And angry. And small."
Marissa flinched.
"But not only that," he added quickly. "I also felt... awake. Like I was standing at the edge of something I had always been afraid to name."
Dane turned back then, not intruding, simply present.
"Watching her choose," Nathan said, the words scraping out of him. "That did something to me."
Marissa's eyes filled, not with hurt exactly, but with recognition.
"It did something to me too," she whispered.
Dane walked to the small table near the rail and poured water into three glasses. Champagne sat unopened beside it, suddenly too bright a thing for the heaviness of the conversation. He brought the water over and handed one glass to Marissa, one to Nathan, then kept one for himself.
"This is the part most people skip," he said.
Nathan let out a quiet laugh. "You have a lot of experience with people kissing in hidden coves?"
"With people wanting things they think make them monsters? Yes."
Marissa studied him over the rim of her glass.
"And what are we?" she asked.
Dane's mouth curved, but his answer stayed serious.
"Married," he said. "Curious. In over your heads. Honest enough to be dangerous."
Nathan looked at Marissa.
She looked back, and something unspoken passed between them. A vow not to reduce the night to a mistake in the morning. A vow not to make desire smaller because fear was easier to explain.
"No apology for wanting," Nathan said.
He did not know where the words came from, only that Marissa needed them.
Her face changed. She took his hand and kissed his knuckles, softly, reverently.
"No apology for staying," she said.
Dane lifted his glass.
"To both, then."
They drank water under the moon as if it were something stronger. The cove held them without judgment. The boat turned gently at anchor. And Nathan understood that the night had not asked him to be less of a husband.
It had asked him to become a braver one.