It wasn’t like the kisses on the piazza, the careful ones that started slow and built.This one started already burning.His mouth was warm and certain and asked for nothing and gave everything, and I rose into it without meaning to, my hands finding the bare warm skin of his chest, his heart slamming under my palm as hard as my own.The wind moved over us.The boat rocked us together.He made a low sound against my mouth that I felt clear to the soles of my feet, and his hands slid into my ruined hair and held me like I was the only thing keeping him fixed to the earth.
When he pulled back he didn’t go far.He kept his forehead against mine, both of us breathing like we’d run a mile, his thumbs moving slow along my cheekbones in the dark.
“You scare me,” he said.
“I scare you.”It came out shaky.“That’s a fine thing to say a woman.”
“I mean it.”His voice had gone rough at the edges, stripped of all that easy control he wore like a second uniform.“I’ve spent a long time keeping my guard up.About everything.About everyone.It’s what kept me alive.And then you walked in with your red lips and your ridiculous dog and your whole stubborn heart, and you got right past it.”
The water lapped against the side of the boat.
“I think I’m in love with you,” he said.
The words landed soft and hit hard.I hadn’t been braced for them.
“Dash—”
“Let me finish.I’ve been turning it over for weeks, trying to talk myself out of it, and I can’t.”His thumb moved against my cheek.“I didn’t come here looking for this.I came here to do a job and keep my head down and not get tangled up with anybody.And then there was you.”
I waited for the rest.For thebut.There was always a but with Dash, the place where the story stops just short of the part that matters, where the wall should be and there’s only a curtain.
It didn’t come.He just looked at me, and that was somehow worse, because a man with nothing to hide tells you the whole of a thing, and Dash had handed me the front of it and gone quiet exactly where I’d learned to expect him to.
I sat there in the dark with his hands on my face and felt my eyes go hot.He’d given me the truest thing he’d ever said to me, and I believed it down to the marrow.That was the trouble.I believed the love and I still didn’t trust the silence wrapped around it, and I hated that the two could live in me at the same time without canceling each other out.
“Dash,” I whispered, and didn’t know how to follow it.
“You don’t have to say it back.I didn’t tell you so you would.”His thumb caught a tear I hadn’t felt fall.“And I didn’t tell you to get you into bed.I told you because I want you to know you’re important.And that this is worth waiting for.”
I kissed him then, soft, the only answer I could make, and he gathered me in against his chest and held me, and we stayed like that a long while with the island a low string of lights on the horizon and the whole sweet, impossible, half-lit shape of us rocking gently on the tide.
Then he started the motor and took us home, and I rode the rest of the way with my head on his shoulder and Chowder snoring behind us and my eyes on the stars, and the envelope in my kitchen drawer sitting in the back of my mind the whole way like a lamp I’d forgotten to turn off.
I was starting to wonder how long I could stand at a door he kept locked, hoping he’d open it before I had to.
CHAPTEREIGHT
I slept until seven.
I want that on the record, because in ten years I had not once slept past five.Not through grief, not through fever, not through the dead of winter when there was no earthly reason to be up.My body kept tea shop hours whether I asked it to or not.
And here I’d gone and slept till seven on a Sunday like a woman with no conscience, and I knew exactly whose fault it was.A whole day on the water.A confession under the stars.The long warm dark of the ride home and a man’s mouth that I could still feel if I let myself.
Chowder was a lump under the spare pillow, one back leg sticking out, snoring with the deep commitment of a creature who had never once felt the pull of organized religion.He cracked an eye when I sat up, took the measure of the situation, and burrowed deeper.Sundays were not his concern.Chowder was a heathen, and he slept in like one.
“Lucky,” I told him, and went to make myself presentable in half the time I usually allowed.
There’s no leisure in a rushed morning.I did my face faster than I liked and pinned my hair while the curls were still damp, praying for the best.A navy shirtwaist with little white buttons because it forgave a hurried woman and didn’t need ironing.Pearl studs.And red lipstick, which I would not skip if the building were on fire.
I made it to St.James Baptist Church at four minutes past nine, which on Grimm Island is a scandal all its own.The doors were already shut.I slipped into a back pew while the congregation was still settling, and Mrs.Pinkerton turned clear around to mark the time of my arrival for whatever ledger she kept.
Dash was already there.He never sat with me.He stood at the back with his arms crossed, the way he had the first Sunday I ever noticed him, watchful even in the house of God, and when our eyes met across the sanctuary his mouth tipped just enough to tell me he’d clocked that I was late too.
Pastor Bruce preached on the parable of the talents, the one about the servants and what they did with what they’d been given.I thought about Henry Wainwright the whole way through.He’d been a deacon in this church, had worn out a spot on one of these same hard pews, a left-handed man with terrible handwriting and a soft place for people who couldn’t pay him.
We sang “Amazing Grace,” and I knew every word without the hymnal.Through many dangers, toils, and snares, I have already come.I caught Dash watching me from the back, and I looked away before my face could give anything up.And then I thought about the kiss and his declaration of love, and I knew there was nothing I could do to keep those thoughts off my face.I was a walking billboard for lust.
I used the bulletin to fan myself, and waited like I had ants in my pants for the final “Amen” so I could escape quickly.
