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My chest does the thing again. The thing that can't be good for it.

Downstairs, somewhere on the street, a truck engine starts. Gulls pick up where the rain left off. The harbor is waking up. The whole town is waking up and I'm lying in Vanessa's bed with her warmth against my side and I have no plan for this. Every plan I ever made involved not being here.

She shifts in her sleep, and her hand moves to my chest. Palm flat, fingers spread, right over my heart. Like she's checking.

It's still going. Faster than it should be. Faster than it's got any right to, for a man just lying still.

Chapter 14

Vanessa

The client is a pediatric dentist from Portland who named his boat Plaque Off and asked me to make it "festive" for the parade. So I did. Six days of bunting and paper lobsters and a hand-painted banner that took me until two in the morning because the stencils bled, and now the thing looks like a patriotic seafood restaurant exploded across a thirty-eight-foot cruiser.

Tommy contributed a stuffed lobster in a captain's hat from a gift shop in Rockland. It's zip-tied to the bow rail and its eyes point in slightly different directions. Nobody's been able to talk him out of it.

Nobody's tried very hard.

Dr. Rourke loves the boat. His wife loves the boat. His five-year-old, Owen, is sobbing into his mother's collarbone because the harbor is loud and the PA system keeps screeching feedback and there are too many people and the stuffed lobster is, apparently, staring at him. Which is physically impossible unless he’s standing on both sides of the boat simultaneously.

"He's fine," Lisa Rourke says over the screaming. "He just needs to warm up to it."

Owen does not warm up to it.

The parade launches at noon and the docks are packed. Lawn chairs and coolers and somebody's golden retriever wearing a lobster bib. Thirty boats in the lineup, all ridiculous, half of them trailing inflatable sea creatures. Aiden's at the helm because it's his client's boat leaving his yard, and the look on his face says he'd rather be sanding a hull in the rain.

I climb aboard and my sandal catches the edge of the gunwale, causing me to stumble sideways into the console. Aiden's hand lands on my elbow without his eyes leaving the channel.

"Wear real shoes."

"These are shoes."

"Those are flip-flops with ambition."

I want to argue but my foot's still sliding on the fiberglass, so I grab the rail and keep my mouth shut, which is a first for me and he knows it. The corner of his mouth twitches and I ache to kiss the spot.

Dr. Rourke hands Owen up over the side of the boat to his wife and the volume on the crying doubles. Lisa bounces him, points at the other boats, tries a granola bar, tries a juice box. Owen is unmoved by all offerings. He wants off the boat. He wants off the harbor. He wants to go home and never see the ocean again, and honestly, I'm starting to respect his commitment.

We pull out into the channel and Aiden's hand settles on the throttle, the other loose on the wheel, and something shifts in him that I've never seen before.

On land he's always braced for something to go wrong. The next problem, the next bill, the next idiot who'll scratch a gel coat. Out here, with nothing to fix and nowhere to be except moving forward through flat water, his shoulders drop. His jaw unclenches. He looks like a man who used to enjoy his life before he forgot how. The way I’ve only seen once before, when he spent the night in my tiny bed.

My chest aches just watching it.

Which is stupid. It's a man driving a boat. But standing close enough to feel the warmth coming off his arm while the harbor fans out behind us, knowing everything I know about the way he sounds in the dark, while the whole town watches from the docks, the want and the guilt are both here, same as always, sharing the same square foot of my body, and I'm so used to them cohabiting that fighting either one feels pointless.

Owen's crying has escalated from sad to furious. Lisa's trying to get him interested in the other boats but he's arching his back and kicking, and her arms are shaking from holding him.

"Hey." I crouch down next to Lisa's chair. "Can I try?"

She hands him over so fast I almost drop him, which makes for a great start. Owen stiffens in my arms, red-faced, snot everywhere, fully prepared to hate me. I settle him on my hip and point at the water.

"See that buoy? The red one?"

Owen pauses mid-howl. Suspicious, but listening.

"That one marks where the lobsters live. And if you watch really carefully, sometimes you can see them waving."

He stares at the buoy. The crying stops. He wipes his nose on my shoulder, which is disgusting, and leans forward.