He went up first—and I noted that, too, the courtesy of it, the practical calculation in it—hauling himself up the rungs with an ease that indicated this was not a man who found ladders challenging. He reached back down for me with one large, open hand.
I took it.
He pulled me up in a single motion, the way you'd lift something half your weight rather than twice the expected effort. We climbed.
I came over the top of the railing and found my footing on the pier planks. His hand was still around mine for a second longer than the task required. His grip was?—
There was no good word for his grip. It was complete. It was the grip of a person who, when they held on to something, meant it.
He let go. Stepped back. Looked at me with an expression that was doing several things at once, none of which he was going to say out loud. I looked back at him in all his soaking, hat-less, undone-by-the-Atlantic reality and felt the thing I'd been trying not to feel for the last thirty minutes arrive in full.
He was extraordinarily attractive. And I was in a great deal of trouble.
The guilt moved through me again—Daniel's face, my father's face—and I let it. It was honest guilt and I owed it the space. But I also let myself sit, just for a moment, in the astonishment of it.
That I could have walked out of that church earlier today and be standing wet on a pier now, feeling something I hadn't felt in—possibly ever. That this was a version of a day I had not planned for. That I had been with Daniel Whitaker for three years. Not once had my hand on his arm felt like that.
That was its own kind of answer to a question I hadn't known I was asking.
Brock picked up the dress from the railing with both hands, carefully—more carefully than I expected—and held it out to me. It was damp now from the spray. It would never be what it was. But he held it like it was still worth handling with some respect.
"Thank you," I said again.
He nodded once.
"For the record," I said, wringing water from my hair, "I wasn't actually going to hitchhike."
"I know," he said.
"You didn't know. You went full—" I gestured vaguely at him, at the breadth of him, at the expression he'd worn. "You went very serious very fast for a theoretical conversation."
"I take theoretical threats seriously."
"Is that a military thing?"
Something moved across his face. Brief. "What makes you say that?"
I looked at him. At the posture and the stillness and the way he'd read every turn of the street when we drove and positioned himself at the end of the rail where he could see both directions. At the way he moved through space like it was a problem he'd already solved.
"Lucky guess," I said.
He said nothing. Which was, by this point, its own form of confirmation.
I wrapped the dress around my shoulders like an extravagant, overpriced towel and looked out at the water one more time. I thought about New York and Dublin and Wentworth Street and a gallery owner who hadn't pushed and a canvas that had been waiting in the dark of a studio for me.
"I do need somewhere to go," I said. "Tonight. I have my studio—there's a sofa. But I'm going to need—" I paused. "I'm going to need a plan. I've never not had a plan."
"We'll figure it out," he said.
We.
He'd said it like it was nothing. Like it was simply the natural pronoun for the situation, as if two people who had just met in an alley had always been a we working on a problem together.
I looked at him sideways, this stranger who'd jumped off a pier after me and told me I wasn't hitchhiking and held my hand for one unnecessary second at the top of a ladder.
"You don't have to do that," I said. "You have your own—you came to Charleston for something. You aren’t from around here. I can tell?—”
"It'll keep," he said.
