Chapter 6
Below the Waterline
For four days they were very professional about it, which fooled exactly no one, least of all the boat.
Roan threw himself into the haul-out season because the haul-out season was there to be thrown into.
It was the busy stretch of the yard's whole year — Gil's fleet coming up the railway one after another, fifteen boats and then Gauthier's makes sixteen, each one hauled and pressure-washed and blocked and gone through, bottoms scraped, zincs swapped, the odd guardrail or exhaust or shaft put right — and the new winch gear Roan had cut held under every load, took the strain and the scream both, and hauled clean, and Hollis had run a thumb along the fresh-cut teeth the first time it pulled a full boat up dry and said "huh," which from Hollis was a standing ovation.
It was good work. It filled the hands and most of the head.
It did not fill the part that had been kissed on a boat and could not stop knowing it.
He'd wake in the Petrel's cold cabin twelve feet off the ground with the taste of that kiss still on him and lie there in the dark running the numbers, the way he'd run numbers his whole life — the Camden delivery long gone but there'd be another out of Rockland by the tenth, the garboard cured and the topsides nearly there, a man could be splashed and provisioned and hull-down past Monhegan inside three weeks if he left clean.
He was very good at the numbers. He'd been doing them so long they ran themselves.
And every single morning the numbers came out the same, and every single morning he got up and pulled his boots on and went down the ladder into the yard to spend another day standing too close to the reason the numbers had stopped feeling like freedom.
Because the thing was, they were good together at the work — had been from the first day, but now it had a charge in it, and every time Hollis handed him a tool their fingers had a conversation the rest of them was pretending not to have, and every time Roan braced a boat and Hollis leaned in past him to check the block, there was a half-second where neither of them breathed.
Dee saw it, naturally. She'd taken to bringing supper out to the yard in the evenings — two men who forgot to eat, she said, was more than the town could afford to lose — and on the third night she set the containers down on the bench and looked from one of them to the other and back, slow, and said not one single word, which from Dee was an entire front-page editorial, and left with a small private smile on her that made Roan want to sail directly to Portugal.
Four days of it. Four days of a big careful man being scrupulously decent, giving Roan room the way he gave everyone room, waiting — Roan understood, with a lurch, that Hollis was waiting, that he'd handed Roan the tiller on this the same as everything, put the helm in Roan's hands and stepped back to make room and would wait there forever if that was what Roan needed, because giving people the out was the only way Hollis knew how to love, and he'd give Roan this out too, right up until Roan sailed through it.
That was what did it, in the end. Not the wanting, though God knew there was enough of that.
It was the waiting. It was standing in the yard on the fourth evening, the last boat blocked, the light going long and gold down the harbor, watching Hollis coil the air hose Roan had left uncoiled — Hollis doing the small thing for him, again, still — and knowing that this good man had decided somewhere in his battered heart that he wasn't allowed to reach, that a man like him got to make boats sound for other men to sail off in and didn't get to ask anybody to stay, and would stand in his own yard wanting and wanting and never once cross the ground to take it.
And Roan, who had spent seven years being the one who left, found he could not stand there and watch somebody get left this patiently.
"Hollis."
Hollis straightened, the hose in his ruined hands.
"I'm going to be gone by fall," Roan said.
It came out level. It was the truest and worst thing he had, and he laid it down between them because Hollis of all men deserved to decide with his eyes open.
"You know that. The boat splashes, I go.
That's — that's the whole shape of me, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't, not to you.
So if that's a thing that's going to cost you more than it's worth, you tell me right now and I'll keep my hands to myself and we'll finish your fleet and I'll sail off a stranger and it'll be the kindest thing I ever did for anybody. "
Hollis looked at him a long moment, the gold light on the side of his face, the hose forgotten.
"Or?" he said.
"Or you take me up the hill," Roan said, "and we stop being professional about it."
Hollis set the hose down. Carefully. Squared, on the bench, the way he did everything he couldn't afford to fumble.
"I've spent my whole life," he said slowly, "watching things I built sail off to somewhere better.
I know how that ends. I've had a lot of practice at the dock.
" He wiped his hands down his thighs, that gesture that never cleaned them.
"I'd rather have had the thing and watched it go than kept my hands to myself and be able to say I was smart about it.
I've been smart about it for twenty years.
I'm tired of being smart about it." He looked at Roan, and there was nothing hidden in it, nothing held back, a plain man saying a plain enormous thing. "Come up the hill."
Roan crossed the yard to him. It was, he'd think later, the shortest passage he ever made and the one that cost him the most — thirty feet of gravel in the gold light, past the blocked boats and the railway and the shed that smelled of tar, toward a man who'd just said the truest thing anybody had said to Roan in years, which was that he'd rather be hurt than be careful.
Roan had spent his whole life being careful.
He'd made a religion of it, a seamanship of it.
And he walked across his own better judgment and took Hollis's face in both hands and kissed him under the last of the light, in front of God and the fleet and the whole judging harbor, and did the single reckless uncareful thing, and it felt less like falling than like finally, after seven years, standing still.
***
The house was small and square and spare and smelled of woodsmoke and coffee, a bachelor's house kept clean the way a shop is kept clean, everything to hand and nothing extra, and Hollis felt every inch of its plainness as he brought Roan Mercer through his own front door — felt the terror of being seen in the place where he lived, which was worse than being seen in the yard, because the yard was what he did and the house was only what he was.
Roan didn't look at the plainness. Roan looked at him.
And then Hollis stopped thinking about the house, because Roan crossed the small room and took Hollis's face in both scarred hands and kissed him, and it was nothing like the suspended, wind-hung, careful thing on the water.
This was land. This was a man who'd decided, and Hollis felt the decision in it, felt the leaving-machine in Roan go quiet for once, and he got his own hands into Roan's jacket and pulled and heard the man make a low sound against his mouth that undid another twenty years of Hollis's good sense.
"Bed's — " Hollis got out.
"I know where a bed is in a house this size," Roan said against his jaw, half a laugh in it, already walking him backward, and Hollis went, big and unsteady, letting himself be moved, which he never did, he was the immovable thing, the anchor, and here he was being walked backward through his own house by a man who wanted him and it was the best thing that had ever happened to him and it hadn't even started.
"Slow," Roan said against his mouth, though his own hands weren't slow.
"We've got all night. Nobody's hauling a boat at three in the morning.
" He pulled back just far enough to look at Hollis in the lamplight, his thumb moving along the line of his jaw, and the leaving-machine really was quiet in him now, gone, and what stood in its place was a thing Hollis had built no defenses against, which was tenderness.
"I want to do this like it matters. Can we — is that all right. Like it matters."
"I don't know how to do it any other way," Hollis said, which was true, and was the least sophisticated and most naked thing a man could say, and Roan's face did the raw thing again, the thing it did whenever Hollis accidentally told the truth.
They got the jackets off, and the shirts, and Hollis had a bad moment in the lamplight — his own body, forty-six and thick and scarred and used, a working man's body that had never once been looked at like a thing worth looking at — but Roan looked.
Roan put a hand flat on his chest, over the old white burn scar there, and looked at him like the surveying he did of a hull, slow and total, reading him for where he was sound, and what Roan found in the reading made his face do something raw.
"Look at you," Roan said, low. "All this.
Nobody's — " He stopped. Started over, quieter.
"You've been standing right here the whole time.
Haven't you. Whole life. Right here where anybody could've just — " and he didn't finish that either, he just bent his head and put his mouth to the burn scar, and to the adze scar under his collarbone, and to every place the work had marked him, like a man reading a boat's whole history off her planking, and Hollis, who had spent two decades being the thing nobody crossed a room for, had to shut his eyes against how much it was.
"Open your eyes," Roan said, low, against his skin. "I want you looking. You spend your whole life looking at everybody else's boats. Look at somebody looking at you, for once."