“I liked it,” Ty offered into the silence. “Being read to. Even though I didn’t understand the thrillers very well.”
Hmm, actually … “I could read some of my book to you,” Morgan offered. “It’s calledWolf Dictionary. It’s by a woman named Jane Wodening; she was a hermit who lived in the mountains of Colorado for years and wrote a lot about the animals she lived near up there.” It was the sort of book Bentley had teased Morgan relentlessly for liking: “Literary bullshit, you ought to be reading scientific journals so we don’t get surprised in the market,” but even when he was living the high life, a part of Morgan had always longed for nature.
Ty smiled, a broad, happy smile this time. It was so beautiful on his face that it took Morgan’s breath away. “I’d like that.”
“Okay, then.” He retrieved the book from the duffel bag himself, groaning a little at the stretch in his shoulder but glad he was able to bend down—that was a big improvement from even a few days back. He sat down at the table again, stopped to sip his tea, and then moved back to the beginning of the book for Ty’s sake. He cleared his throat and began. “Night. The moon half full. An inch or two of new snow on the mountains …”
Morgan got through the first chapter and expected to stop there, but when he finally looked up, Ty’s eyes were wide, his expression open and entranced. For a second, his eyes almost seemed to flicker, like his pupils didn’t know whether to be big or small, but then he blinked, and the illusion was gone. “Will you keep going?”
Morgan glanced back down at the book. “You like it, then?”
“It’s beautiful.”
Oh. That was nice to hear—almost too nice to believe, honestly. It had been a long time since Morgan had bothered sharing his likes or dislikes with someone, outside of a puff-piece interview, but if he could rely on anything right now, it was that Ty was being honest. He had no reason to pretend otherwise; the man didn’t seem to get bored. “Sure, I’d be happy to.” He bent his head and read another chapter, then another, and finally stopped once his voice was hoarse, and his cup was empty.
Ty refilled it with water without Morgan having to ask, and they sat in companionable silence for a bit until he said, “Have you ever been to the place in the book?”
“What, Colorado?” Morgan shrugged. “A few times. Not this place specifically, but I’ve been skiing there, and I collaborated with some researchers in Boulder before when I—” He cut himself off, not wanting to get into anything to do with his former life, but Ty didn’t even seem to register the blip.
“I’ve never seen mountains before.”
Morgan stared at him. “What, really? But they’re so close.” Not the Rockies, obviously, but the coast wasn’t that far from the Cascades.
“I don’t like to be away from the water,” he said, finally looking away.
Questions piled up behind Morgan’s teeth, his interest in Ty taking a sharper turn now that he could keep his thoughts straight. He bit them back, though. He wasn’t going to repay the stoic silence he’d received when it came to his own past with being invasive about Ty’s.
“My sister’s kind of like that,” he offered after a moment. “She hates to travel. I don’t remember the last time she came to visit me out here; I think it’s when I was still in college.”
Ty gradually reoriented on him, and Morgan silently congratulated himself on finding a way back into conversation that Ty could tolerate. “Is that … Katherine?”
“Yeah, but she goes by Katie,” Morgan confirmed.
“She only came to the island, mmm, once. Right?”
“Right, when she was fifteen, and I was ten.” And Katie wouldn’t have come back then if she and Dad hadn’t been fighting so badly their mother was afraid to leave them alone in the house. Apparently, he found her making out with her boyfriend, overreacted, and threw the kid out with a few punches for good measure, and then the kid’s parents called the cops. It turned into a whole CPS investigation that Morgan barely remembered the outline of, but hedidremember how tough his mother took it all. Hence the trip, which Katie complained about the whole time. “She’s happiest in the place she’s made a home,” Morgan finished.
“Mmm. Like a sea urchin.”
Unbidden, the image of his sister, with her wavy brown hair transformed into needle-like black spikes, came into his head, and Morgan started to laugh. “Yeah.” He chuckled. “A lot like that, actually. She’s—she’s nice, she’s good to me, she’s a good person. But she isn’t made for leaving home base very often.”
Ty smiled. It was the first time Morgan had seen him smile, and it was … transfixing. It took a face that was handsome but cold and turned it into something bright, like the moon reflecting off water. Not warm, exactly, but welcoming.
Ty was actually a really good conversationalist once you found the right topic. He put up with Morgan rambling about his family and the things he used to do here as a kid and added his own anecdotes about Phil or the wildlife on the island. He could go on and on about patterns of migration and the perils of overfishing and even kept a rough count of the number of baby murrelets born on Parrish Island each year.
“Birds aren’t my specialty,” he admitted on their fourth night together as Morgan ate boxed mac and cheese by himself after Ty waved him off and told him he’d already had something.But what? When?More questions Morgan wasn’t willing to ask, not quite yet. “But one of the groups I work with tags them every year to keep a handle on the population, and the work goes a lot faster if I can point them toward the new nests when they arrive. It’s, mmm, challenging to get inland here, though.”
“Oh, I noticed,” Morgan said dryly. “That’s why I tried to go around, and look at what that got me.” He gestured to his shoulder with his good hand.
To his surprise, Ty reached out and patted his other shoulder. “We’ll work on your swimming.”
“I’m a good swimmer.”
“Mmm, sure.”
“I am!” Morgan protested. “I was the captain of the swim team in high school. I just wasn’t prepared for the waves to be as big as they were, and the water is …” He shivered involuntarily. “Cold.”
Ty looked a bit surprised for a moment before his face smoothed out again. “I forget how cold people can become,” he murmured.
