Page 17

It’s still there, taped shut. There’s no reason it can’t stay taped up.

I sit down on the floor in front of it anyway.

The tape’s old. It peels off in strips, taking cardboard fuzz with it. The flaps come up to reveal my sentimental items. A shoebox of photos. My grandmother’s favorite teacup, wrapped in three towels. A folder I don’t open, because I already know every line in it by heart.

And at the bottom, folded the same way it’s been folded for fifteen years, the flannel shirt.

Red and black, gone soft and thin at the elbows. The kind of soft that only happens to a shirt that got worn hard by somebody bigger before it ever got to me. The collar’s frayed. The third button doesn’t match the others.

Fifteen years, and I can still feel the exact weight of it landing on my shoulders.

It was August.

I was thirteen years old. Cold water in my nose, a dock full of laughing strangers, and me dripping and humiliated in front of every one of them. Then a boy’s voice cutting through all of it, telling the whole dock to go to hell and stop gawking.

Like standing up for a stranger after he pulled me out of the water with one strong arm cost him nothing at all. Then he took off his shirt, warm from his body, and hung it around me, swallowing me whole.

He crouched down to my eye level. Asked if I could breathe okay, and looked at me while I answered, like it really mattered.

He forgot me by dinner. I know that now. Knew it this week, standing in that office, watching absolutely nothing move behind his eyes when he looked at me.

Doesn’t matter. That’s what I tell myself, sitting on the floor of a crooked apartment I moved my whole life for, holding a shirt that stopped smelling like him a decade ago.

The want I felt in that bathroom tonight has roots that go all the way down.

I didn’t drive four hundred miles for a job, or even for a debt, though there’s that too. I drove to Maine for a boy with a flannel shirt, and tonight the man that boy grew into stood in my doorway with his eyes on my mouth, and oh, I am in so much trouble.

The bottom drawer of the dresser is empty. The flannel goes in alone and the drawer slides shut. I turn the lamp off and slide into bed, listening to the rain on the roof and the dog snoring at the window.

The harbor’s waiting for me the minute I fall asleep.

Green water, cold and heavy, closing over my head. Then a big, callused hand closes around my arm, hauling me up into air and light, and they’re not a boy’s hands. They’re the hands I watched work tonight, rough, certain, huge, and it’s Aiden’s chest I’m dragged against. Aiden now.

Rain-wet, solid, furious about something, holding on like the water might argue with him. His fist gathers up my soaked hair, his mouth lands hot on my throat in all that cold, the water going warm around us while he pulls my legs around his waist.

I can feel everything. The hard press of his cock against me, the sound he makes when I move, the words he growls into my neck that I can’t hear and understand anyway. That’s when I wake up.

Tangled in the sheets. Heart slamming. Thighs slathered with my want and wound so tight it hurts.

I lie there in the dark and don’t touch myself, because twice in one night for a man I’m lying to feels greedy.

Which leaves just me and the ceiling, doing what I do every night.

Counting what I owe.

Chapter 4

Vanessa

Iwake up with my hand already moving.

Not resting somewhere innocent. Moving. Slow, certain, well into a job nobody consulted me about, and it takes a few seconds for the rest of me to catch up.

Then the dream comes back all at once. His mouth landing hot on my throat while the whole harbor heats up around us.

I take my hand back. Lie there with my arms resting on either side of my head like a woman being arrested.

Diesel lifts his head off the floor.