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The table’s quiet.

I make myself look up from my plate. Vanessa’s looking at my mother with an expression I can’t place, and my mother’s looking at Vanessa’s hands.

“That’s…” She stops. Starts again. “That’s awful.”

I hate the thought that she’s feeling sorry for me. I’m fine. They didn’t break me.

“He rebuilt the dock himself,” my mother says. “That winter. Alone, mostly.”

Vanessa clears her throat. Her voice has gone somewhere and she’s hauling it back by hand. “That’s a lot of work for one person.”

“It changed him.” My mother says it simply, to me now, no heat in it. “You were a different boy before that dock.”

“I wasn’t a boy, I was a man of twenty-nine.” I put my napkin on the table. “And I’m sitting right here, so you can quit talking about me like I’m at the bottom of the harbor.”

But it lands wrong even as I say it, too sharp, and I catch Vanessa flinch at harbor. The smallest thing, a tightening around her eyes, gone as fast as it came.

I don’t want or need her pity.

“It’s an old story. Everybody up here’s got a storm story. We got the roof back on, we’re still open. No need to keep on about it.”

“Aiden-” my mother starts.

“I’m getting the check.”

I flag the waitress. Vanessa doesn’t argue and doesn’t look at me, and I read that as her being polite about the pity, letting me off the hook, and I’m grateful for it in a tight ugly way.

Chapter 6

Vanessa

The first batch of muffins dies at dawn.

Blueberry. The stove waits until my back's turned, then takes them from golden to charcoal in the time it takes me to brush my teeth.

Batch two survives because I stand guard over it like it owes me money, and by the time I'm driving to the yard the whole truck smells like a bakery and my pitch is sitting on the passenger seat in a folder.

One page. Rewrote it three times last night. Practiced it in front of the bathroom mirror until it sounded smooth, and in the bathroom, it did.

The crew falls on the muffins like men who haven't been fed this decade. Tommy eats three standing up and asks if this is a weekly thing now, and Marcus wraps two in a paper towel for Carol without asking, which I take as the compliment it is.

Aiden's in the workshop, half inside somebody's engine.

Baked goods are not enough to tempt him. He’s made of sterner stuff. I should have known.

He doesn't look up when I come into the workshop. Just puts a handout for the coffee I’m carrying like we've been married twenty years. I put the mug in it and stand there holding my folder and losing the plot completely, because he's got his sleeves shoved up and his forearms are streaked black and he works a stuck bolt loose with two fingers, casually, the way other men turn a page.

The want doesn't build. It's just there, instant and heavy, wet heat gathering between my legs while I watch those fingers, imagining them slicked up with me instead of engine grease, imagining him working me open with the same unhurried certainty, no wasted motion, listening to what my body tells him the way he listens to an engine, finding exactly what's seized up and freeing it.

My pussy clenches around nothing, greedy, and I stand in a working boatyard at eight in the morning wanting my boss's hands so badly my knees consider a career change.

"You need something or are you decorating?"

"Both." The folder's slightly damp where I've been gripping it. "Got ten minutes?"

"No. You can have five."

I was expecting that, which is why I left a margin. It's a four-minute pitch in the bathroom.