He's watching me. He left his jacket on the deck and his shirt is untucked, his sleeves still rolled up from however many hours he spent at his desk. He looks, in the flat gray light, like a man who has been holding onto weight for so long he has forgotten what it feels like to put it down.
I reach up and put my hand against the side of his face. His jaw is tight under my palm. He closes his eyes.
I feel him exhale. Not a release. The first one.
I step closer and pull him down to the sand.
He folds downonto the sand without arguing. That's what gets me. Phoenix Crawford who manages every variable, who came home tonight with his father's call still running through him and having not finished processing it, who usually needs a half-second to shift from managing to letting go. Tonight, there's none of that. He just goes where I lead him, his weight settling against mine without resistance.
The sand is cool against my back and the air tastes like salt and the gray fog-light makes everything the same pale shade. He braces above me on one arm, his other hand at my hip, and looks at me.
"Hey," I say.
"Hey." His voice is low, rough at the edges.
I pull him down the rest of the way.
There is no grace in sand. We've been together long enough that neither of us expects grace. There's the awkward negotiation of fabric and the scratch of sand finding its way into places where it shouldn’t be. We smile and laugh but when his hands start to move, I stop laughing.
His mouth finds my throat and I tilt my head back and look up. I feel him press me into the sand, his chest against mine, the warmth of his body against the cool air at my sides. My fingers curl into his shoulders. His hands know where I want them and go there without direction.
This is different than what had happened in the shower. That was urgent, borderline desperate, two people coming back to each other. But what is happening now is much slower.
I pull his face up to mine and kiss him and he makes a low sound against my mouth. The sand shifts under us.
He takes his time. He moves slowly down my throat, my collarbone, his mouth finding every place that makes me press up against him, his hands learning me like he has all night and intends to use it. My fingers tighten in his hair. He makes a low sound when I do that, his breath warm against my skin, and I feel it in my chest and lower.
His hand slides down my stomach and I stop thinking entirely.
I stop thinking about Richard Hale and the handwritten note and the sixty-two million sitting frozen somewhere. There is just Phoenix's mouth and his hands and the cold sand at my back and the dark pressing down on both of us, the night contracted to this fifteen feet of beach.
He moves over me and I pull him closer, my leg hooking around his hip, and he makes that low sound again, lower this time, against my ear. I turn my face into his neck and feel his pulse under my mouth, fast, and I bite down softly and feel him react—his hands gripping harder, his hips pressing into mine with a directness that makes me gasp against his skin.
He says my name once. Just once, in the tone he uses when he means it.
I arch up against him and he understands immediately, adjusting, and then everything sharpens into a single point of focus. His mouth finds mine again. His hands are everywhere. The sand is cold at my shoulders and warm at my lower back and the night is loud enough to cover every sound I make.
When I come it hits me fast and hard, my whole body tightening around him, and I hear myself make a sound the dark swallows. He follows not long after, going still against me, his mouth at my neck, his breath uneven and then slowing.
He stays there. I keep my fingers in his hair.
The cold comes back gradually, the night air finding the edges of us, and I can’t move because I'm not ready to.
Eventually he rolls to his back beside me. The sand shifts under him and his body presses against mine.
The fog is thicker now than when we came down, pressing closer to the sand, and the light from the house behind us falls in a long rectangle across the beach and stops before it reaches the water. I look at the sharp edge of it. The dark beyond.
His hand finds my stomach and rests there, flat and warm.
“Hale's been in our walls for years," Phoenix says. He’s speaking out loud but it doesn’t feel like he’s talking to me exactly. "My father doesn’t know how long."
“Uh-huh.”
"He knew Hale was there and still didn't know the scope of it." He pauses briefly. "Thirty years since her death, and the guilt around it, and it got heavier every year that he didn't deal with it. And now it's inside everything he built."
I cover his hand with mine. His fingers are cool, the warmth from before gone into the night air.
"Your father knows more than most people ever will about what he's facing," I say. "Not knowing everything isn't the same as not being prepared."
