“We can go into town, rat off someone’s Wi-Fi,” Nick says. “Do some research into this restaurant our guy’s running, who might have a problem with him. But no logging into your emails or anything. We gotta stay clean while we’re here.”
“Oh,” I say. “Okay.”
“I mean it, Harvard, you can’t—”
“That’s not what I…forget it. Sounds good.”
Nick squints at me. “What did you want to do?” Comprehension dawns on his face. “Fuck?”
“Jesus, Nicky.” This might be the very first time the two of us arenoton the same page when it comes to sex. I lean against the kitchen counter and look out the window so he doesn’t see my irritation. The kitchen overlooks the backyard, the bluffs, and the ocean, which is a mesmerizing and sparkly blue and white temptation. “I thought we could, you know. Go for a walk. The path to the bluffs starts just on the road there, through the scrub. It’s a state park, the area beyond. Did you know that?”
“You read those tourist pamphlets cover to cover, huh?”
I roll my eyes. “God. It’s a nice day out, we’re here at the beach, no one knows where we are and we have nothing weneedto do until tonight. So I just figured…” I run a finger around the rim of my coffee cup and give Nick my best puppy-dog eyes, which I have to say is not an expression I’m accustomed to using. But they seem to work on Nick.
He shakes his head, a slight smile sneaking onto his lips. “Alright. Fine. I guess we can take a walk, then go into town.”
* * *
The bluffs arewindy as fuck, but the path is some way from the edge and semi-guarded by a driftwood fence. That sandy dirt path runs parallel and there are markers along the way, information plaques that tell us all about “nature’s sculptures” and how the bluffs are made by wind, rain, and sea. They’re called hoodoos, and apparently the very land we’re standing on was deposited by a glacier over 22,000 years ago. It’s extremely interesting, I’m sure, but the whole walk I can’t take my eyes off Nick.
He seems different outside the city. God knows he’s compelling enough dressed in a suit, even the nondescript ones he favors, but in blue jeans and a white tee that hugs his muscles as tight as I like to do myself, he can’t hide his powerful physique. His forehead smooths out as the stress leaves his body. His eyes aren’t so hooded and his shoulders aren’t so bunched up.
We walk the path until the wind becomes too much, then return to the beach house and explore more thoroughly the backyard overlooking the ocean. There’s a raised wooden deck with a patio set of chairs and a table, although the umbrella that’s supposed to stick out of the middle of the table is missing. Underneath the deck is a jumble of materials—plastic sheets, metal bars and old bricks, fence palings, gardening equipment. The yard itself is kind of dangerous, a chain strung between a few crooked poles the only thing keeping us from the sheer face of the bluffs.
“Jeez, I wouldn’t want a dog here,” I comment to Nick as we creep forward, trying to see over the edge. “Or a kid,” I add as an afterthought, and he laughs at me.
“Guy told me when I booked, he’s looking to put up a fence. That must be his stuff under the deck. This was his own place for years before he turned it into a guest house. Guess he never had kids around…or dogs.” He takes my hand and pulls me over to the landing of some rickety private stairs built from the yard down to the beach below. We climb down with an excitement I haven’t felt for a long time. Down the beach we see a few other staircases, but the beach itself is deserted. The sand is a deep yellowish-brown and the water has left behind little tufts of seaweed here and there. An old rowboat is tied to the bottom of the staircase, covered in a tarp, but it doesn’t look like it’s been used for a long time, sand piling up in the folds of the plastic.
It’s much less windy down here, so we walk along the beach, and I pick up the odd piece of driftwood, wondering what my life might have been like if I had grown up next to the ocean instead of in a city.
By the time we’re a half-mile away from where we started, I can’t even remember what we’ve talked about this whole time, but Nick is smiling and laughing more than I’ve ever seen him, even at my dumbest jokes. As for me, I can feel the worry of everything that’s passed over the last few days beginning to lift—right up until it occurs to me that this stretch of water is the same one in which Nick got rid of Gatti’s body.
“What’s wrong?” Nick reaches out for my arm as I slow my pace, staring down the beach.
“I just thought about what happened that night,” I admit after a moment. “You know, some days I even forget it happened? Just for a second. Does that make me a monster? That I don’t even remember sometimes?”
“Nope. It makes you human.”
I take a deep breath of sea air and breathe it out again, tasting the salt on my lips. I’m alive. I’m alive and I can still taste, still breathe, still see. Stillfeel. If Nicky hadn’t done what he did, I wouldn’t be here right now. It could bemydead body sitting there at the bottom of the Atlantic.
I reach over and take Nick’s hand, tangling my fingers into his. I pull him on further down the beach and lean in intimately to say, “I’ll always be grateful to you, you know.”
He lets my hand go, but only to pull me closer, pressing his lips to my temple.
My heart throbs hard in my chest for a moment. “Maybe we could have a bath before we go out tonight.” I’m still talking as though we’re two guys on a dirty weekend, instead of two guys looking to take down a potential blackmailer and attempted murderer. But I don’t care. I want to enjoy the parts of this that I can.
I want to enjoyNickwhile I can, because who knows what will happen when we get back to New York.
* * *
I’mas good as my word when we get back to the beach house. The bathroom off the master bedroom is the one room that the owner has renovated so far, and it has a nice view over the bluffs from the window next to the bathtub. I run water into the large stone tub shaped like a half-egg and add some of the bubble bath left on the side, because why the hell not.
Then I strip off, slide in, and call Nick up.
He stops in the doorway to look at me, and I can’t decipher the expression on his face. It’s soft, vulnerable. “Comfy in there?” he asks.
“Waiting for you. What’s keeping you, Nicky? The water’s perfect.”
