We all need this.
“You’re okay,” he rasps. “You’re so fucking okay.”
“I know,” she gasps. “With you. With both of you. Don’t stop.”
We don’t.
The pleasure builds wild and fast, catching all three of us in the same rip current. When she finally snaps—body bowing between us, a raw sound tearing out of her throat—Conrad holds her and curses against her hair. I’m right there too, dragged over the edge by the sight and sound and feel of them both shuddering around me and Phoenix’s pussy gripping me until there’s nothing left for me to do except empty my balls into her waiting body.
For a few seconds, everything is heat and shaking muscles and panting breaths. No ship. No metal walls. No past.
Just Phoenix between us, held from both sides.
Eventually the world filters back in: the hum of the fan, the tick of the old clock, someone laughing low and wrecked. Might be me.
Conrad eases his grip, hand smoothing over Phoenix’s stomach like he’s checking she’s still there. I brush damp hair back from her face. Her eyes are heavy, satisfied, no ghosts in them for once.
“Color now?” I ask.
She smiles, slow and sated. “Sleep,” she says. “That’s my color.”
Conrad huffs a quiet laugh against her shoulder. “I can work with that.”
We settle without really talking about it—Conrad staying at her back, me at her front, her hands fisted in both of us like she’s notletting go. The door stays cracked. The room stays warm. The past stays where it belongs.
And for the first time since we were idiots who let her go in high school, I know exactly what question we were trying to answer back then.
The answer would always be her.
22
Phoenix
Morningin this house smells like coffee, salt, and something warm baking in the oven. The light off the marsh comes in low and patient, painting the kitchen table in quiet stripes. Spencer is already there when I pad in—paper folded in halves, reading glasses perched on his nose, a mug that says TYBEE across it like the island printed its name on him for safekeeping.
“Morning,” he says, the word unhurried.
“Morning,” I answer, and it isn’t small talk. It’s a check-in. I am here. You are here. The world didn’t tip us off the deck in the night.
He rises without making it a fuss and pulls out a chair for me, old-school courtesy that might make me flinch on another day. Today it lands exactly right. There’s a plate near my elbow—eggs, a piece of sourdough toast with butter, a few slices of tomato.
“Atticus already got the coffee started,” Spencer says, pouring. “All I had to do was show up with a mug.”
I take a sip, then look around for cream and sugar to dilute it. It makes me remember something my father used to say—that’s strong enough to put hair on your chest.I’d always giggle.I don’t want hair on my chest, Daddy.
“Thank you.”
We eat in a companionable quiet that I never learned at home. We rarely ate a meal together, and silence was usually not a good thing. It meant Dad had been drinking, or he had lost money.
Here it feels like space you’re allowed to fill or not. Zeus thumps his tail under the table and takes up more legroom than he has a right to; his cast nudges my ankle. He doesn’t beg. He watches me eat with great interest, which is different.
After a few minutes, Spencer closes the paper and sets it aside like he’s choosing me over the latest thing that doesn’t matter. “You slept?” he asks.
“In pieces,” I say. “But I did.”
“Pieces count,” he says, and then, after a beat: “You can ask me anything you want, you know.”
It isn’t performative. He doesn’t lean forward like a therapist or freeze up like a man bracing for a landmine. He just opens the door.
