“It accepts coffee.”
“Coffee has diplomatic immunity.”
He set the tablet down. “You’ll be irritable by ten.”
“I’m delightful at ten.”
“You called a chart plotter a vindictive little bastard last week.”
“It kept dropping the transducer.”
“You threatened to bury it.”
“It needed consequences.”
Reid finally looked at me.
His eyes were the color of deep seawater beneath cloud—gray, green, and impossible to look away from. Even after five years, being the full focus of his attention made something in me tighten.
“Eat,” he said.
At work, that voice could stop an argument halfway across the yard.
At home, it usually made me want to either obey him or drag him back to bed.
Sometimes both.
In the beginning, being his employee and his boyfriend had felt precarious. I had worried the two versions of us would bleed together until there was no room to breathe. Reid worried about it too, though he rarely admitted fear in words.
So we built rules.
In the yard, he assigned the jobs, signed the invoices, and expected the same standard from me that he expected from everyone. Upstairs, I stole his blankets, criticized his grocery choices, and reminded him regularly that owning a boatyard did not make him sovereign over the kitchen.
Five years later, the balance felt less like a negotiation and more like muscle memory.
I lifted the toast.
“Good,” Reid said.
“You’re intolerable.”
“You’re eating.”
“That doesn’t make you right.”
“It usually does.”
I bit into the toast and glared at him while chewing.
He picked up the tablet again. “The Halvorsen trawler lost shore power overnight.”
“The blue boat at North Quay?”
“The freezer alarm woke several people.”
“That electrical system belongs in a museum.”
“You told Halvorsen you could keep it running until haul-out.”
