Chapter 8
The text came Friday morning.
I don't work the weekend anymore.
Beck was on the couch at the rental with Hudson across his legs and a coffee on the table that was still hot.
Since when?
Since last night.
He set the phone down. Picked it back up.
And you owe me a story.
I do.
Be at my house at seven.
Where am I taking you?
To my beach.
He didn't know she had a beach. He didn't know what it meant that she was showing it to him. He knew it meant something.
Hudson rolled over and put a paw on Beck's chest.
"Yeah," Beck said. "I know."
He spent the day not thinking about it. He took Hudson to the facility and threw with Brady for an hour, just easy work, nothing scheduled.
Brady didn't mention the release. He didn't mention Thursday night.
He said "arm looked good" and "same time Monday" and that was Brady being Brady, which was exactly what Beck needed.
He showered at the rental. Stood in the closet for too long. Pulled on a gray henley and jeans. Looked in the mirror. Put the hat on. Took it off. Put it on again.
Hudson was sitting in the hallway watching him.
"Don't judge me."
Hudson's tail moved once.
He took the hat off and left it on the dresser.
He loaded Hudson in the Land Rover and drove to the other side of the island.
Past the strip, past the harbor, past the elementary school, into the part of Ellery Cove where the live oaks closed over the road and the pavement ended.
Gravel under his tires. A circular drive appeared in the headlights.
Porch lit up. A house tucked back into the trees, well-kept, the kind of place someone had put real time into.
He parked. Hudson pressed his face against the window.
"Easy," Beck said. "We're guests."
The front door opened. She came down the porch steps in jeans and an oversized flannel with the sleeves pushed up and no shoes. Her hair was down. She wasn't wearing anything that should have stopped him, but it did.
She saw Hudson in the passenger seat.
"You brought him."
"He doesn't stay home alone on Fridays."
"Nobody should."
She opened the passenger door. Hudson jumped down and went directly to Kirstin and sat at her feet and looked up at her with his chin raised.
"Hey, buddy," she said. Quiet. Just for the dog.
Beck grabbed the six-pack of Dos Equis he'd brought. She picked up a cooler from the porch. He took it from her with his free hand. She let him.
He followed her around the side of the house. Hudson followed him. The yard opened up into something Brady had clearly touched, the landscaping careful, the path down to the water graded smooth. They walked through palmettos and sea grass and the trees thinned and the sand started and Beck stopped.
The beach was small. Tucked in. Completely hidden from the rest of the island.
A wooden deck with a roof, strung with lights that were already on.
Tiki torches in the sand, unlit. A small table with a paperback on it, face down, spine cracked halfway through.
Lanterns on posts along the path. The water right there, low and steady, twenty feet out.
"Brady built this?"
"The deck. I did the rest."
Beck set the cooler on the deck. She lit the torches with a lighter from the back pocket of her jeans. The flames caught and the whole space changed, warm and golden, the light moving on the sand and the water.
"Come on," she said.
They sat on the edge of the deck. Legs hanging off. Close enough that her knee was against his. Hudson explored the beach for thirty seconds, sniffed the torches, decided they weren't food, and came back to the deck and lay down behind them with his chin on his paws.
She opened the cooler. Sandwiches. Containers of fruit. A bag of chips. Two vodka sodas in cans.
"You brought food," he said.
"You expected a restaurant?"
"I didn't know what to expect."
"Good." She handed him a sandwich. Turkey, provolone, something green. "Eat first. Then you talk."
They ate. The ocean was steady in front of them. The torches threw light across the sand. Hudson was asleep behind them, his breathing slow and even, the particular sound a golden retriever makes when he's decided the world is fine and there's no reason to stay awake for it.
"So," she said. She set her sandwich wrapper in the cooler. "You owe me a story."
Beck took a drink of his beer. Set it on the deck beside him.
"I had a coach in high school," he said. "Coach Dawson. Ran the program at Forest for twenty years. Old school. Hit fungoes until his hands bled. Knew more about the game than anyone I've met since, including Luke."
"Don't tell Luke that."
"He'd agree with me."
She pulled her knees up. Her shoulder pressed against his arm.
"Dawson always told us, 'There's gonna come a day when they tell you you can't play anymore.
'" He picked at the label on the Dos Equis.
"I took it serious. All these years later, I carried that with me every season.
Opening day, I'd think about it. Last game of the year, I'd think about it.
Every time I ran out to center, part of me was counting. "
"Counting what?"
"Games. Catches. Throws. The things you don't get back."
The torches moved in the breeze. Somewhere behind them Hudson sighed in his sleep.
"Trevor called yesterday. In the facility lot. Right after the best session I've had since the surgery."
He didn't say the words. He didn't need to. She already knew.
"The shoulder was good, Kirstin. It was actually good." He turned the bottle in his hands. "I sat in that lot for fifteen minutes staring at the steering wheel."
"I know," she said.
He glanced at her.
"I saw the texts on your phone last night. At the booth. Your dad."
He was quiet for a second. Then he nodded.
"I wasn't going to say anything," she said. "Because you needed to tell me yourself." She picked up her vodka soda. "You just did."
The water kept moving. The torches kept burning. His knee was still against hers. Her shoulder was still against his arm.
"Is it okay to be sad?" he said.
She put her head on his shoulder.
"Yeah," she said. "It is."
His arm went around her. She fit there. The flannel and the hair and the weight of her against his side. He could smell the salt and the torch smoke and the soap on her skin from the shower she must have taken before he got there. Hudson was breathing behind them, slow and steady.
They sat like that for a while. Long enough for one of the torches to gutter and catch again. Long enough for the beer to go warm in his hand. Long enough for the counting to stop.
"You know," he said. "I'm not a baseball player anymore."
She didn't lift her head.
"I don't care what you are, Ethan. It was just an excuse."
The words came out quiet. Into his shoulder. Into the henley. Into the space between them that had been closing since Wednesday and had finally run out of room.
She lifted her head. He turned toward her. Her face was close and the torchlight was on it, catching the brown in her eyes, the line of her jaw, the mouth that had been telling him no for ten days.
He kissed her.
Slow. Careful. The kind of kiss that asks permission halfway through and gets it. Her hand came up to the back of his neck and stayed there. His hand moved from her shoulder to her jaw. Hudson shifted behind them on the deck, his tags jingling once, then settling.
When they pulled apart she stayed close. Her forehead against his. Her breath warm.
"I knew you were trouble," she said.
"You told me that the first night."
"I was right."
"You were right."
She kissed him again. Shorter. Certain. A period at the end of a sentence she'd been writing since he took his hat off at her bar.
Then she leaned back on her hands and looked at the water. He did the same. Their shoulders touching. The deck solid underneath them. Hudson asleep behind them.
"I've never brought anyone here," she said.
"I figured."
"Not Morgan, not Addison. They know about it because Brady built it, but they haven't been here. This is where I come when I need to not be anyone."
"I get that."
"That's why you're here." She turned her head toward him.
He looked at her. The torchlight and the flannel and the bare feet and the woman who'd poured him a Dos Equis before he'd sat down and made him take his hat off with a rule that didn't exist and danced with him at the Pit Stop and took his hand in her bar and kissed his cheek at the lighthouse and the parking lot and texted him on a Sunday morning because she couldn't let his words go.
"I'm glad I turned right," he said.
"What?"
"Nothing." He picked up his beer. "Tell me about the book you're reading."
She told him. Some novel she'd found at the used bookstore on the mainland.
She said there was a line in chapter four she'd read three times and still didn't fully understand but couldn't stop thinking about.
He asked what it was. She told him. He didn't understand it either, but he liked listening to her try.
They stayed on the deck until the torches burned down to nothing. Hudson woke up at some point and moved between them and put his head in Kirstin's lap. She stroked his ears while she talked.
"Stay," she said.
"On the deck?"
"On the island."
"I'm not going anywhere."
She scratched Hudson's ear. "But I wanted to say it."
He leaned over and kissed her temple. She closed her eyes.
The torches went out. The lights on the deck stayed on. Hudson slept in Kirstin's lap. Beck's arm was around her. The ocean kept moving in the dark.