“Define ‘good’.”
“Honest. On time.” She tilts her head.
“Always.”
At the door, I do the thing I’ve been practicing all night: I ask. “Can I touch you?” The words feel like they cost something and buy everything.
Her chin lifts. “Where?”
“Your waist,” I say, voice dropping without my permission. “For two seconds.”
She thinks about it like a jeweler, like a captain, like the woman she is when she’s deciding whether to open a door and let a man inside her house and her life. “Two seconds,” she says.
I step closer, set my palm lightly at the warm place between the sweater hem and the pants, and the universe changes shape. I don’t pull. I don’t push. I just learn the temperature of her bare skin. One. Two. I drop my hand and step back before I make a menace of myself.
“Good night, Crew,” she says, soft and seismic.
“Good night, Bailey,” I say, and it tastes like belief.
Outside, the air is cooler, the fog gathering itself into a low, thoughtful animal. I stand on the porch long enough to memorize the sound of her turning the lock and the way the lamp inside paints gold into the doorway like she’s made of it. My truck engine coughs awake. I pull out and don’t turn on the radio because I want to hear the world think.
Halfway home, at the overlook where the road shoulders out, I park and kill the lights. The newer lighthouse throws its beam across the bay, slow and steady, like a promise practiced into muscle memory, while Bailey’s smaller lighthouse shines a beacon barely discernible to any passing boats. I take out my phone. Her name sits there, simple and dangerous. I typeI can still smell the book pages. And you.The letters gleam back like they want to be history.
One tap would do it.
I don’t tap. I watch the words breathe on the screen and then erase them, letter by letter, a small act of worship to abigger thing—patience, maybe, or respect, or the way my mother told me to show up with my whole chest and not my highlight reel. The message box goes blank. The want doesn’t. Good. Let it live. Let it make me better or make me wait or both.
The night air is cold enough to bite. I roll the window down and breathe until the ache settles into a bearable shape. The light sweeps the bay, again and again like a heartbeat. When I finally pull back onto the road, I say it to the dark, to the water, to the boy I was and the man I’m trying to be, a line that’s been sitting inside me like a compass. “Stay gold, B.”
I don’t send anything. I don’t need to. The light’s already carrying it.
Chapter Seven – Bailey
The smell of tea haunts me.
It’s in the rug, the kettle, the memory of him sitting too close. I try to pretend it’s just plain tea, but it’s not. It’shim—his laugh low in his throat, his knee brushing mine, his stupid, perfect smile when he realized I’d made rules.
I pull the blanket over my head like it might erase him. It doesn’t. It just makes the air smell more like salt and him and last night.
The lighthouse creaks as the wind picks up, the same way it always does, but everything sounds different today. The tide feels higher. The light sweeps slower. Even the gulls sound smug.
I groan, roll over, and stare at the ceiling. “You’re not sixteen,” I tell myself. “You are a grown, emotionally stable woman with a mortgage and a business license.”
The ceiling, traitorous, says nothing back.
By the time I drag myself downstairs, the shop smells like vanilla and ocean air. Sunlight slants through the front windows, hitting the shelves like a spotlight.A Page in Timelooks beautiful this morning. Unforgivably romantic. Even the damn books look like they’re conspiring.
The bell above the door jingles as I flip the sign to OPEN. “You,” I mutter to the novels in the front display, “are not allowed to look smug.”
Jane Austen doesn’t respond, but she’s definitely judging me.
I brew a fresh pot of coffee, open my ledger, and try to focus on anything other than Crew Wright’s hands. It’s hopeless. Everything reminds me of him. The way he carried those boxesas if they weighed nothing. The way his voice wrapped around my name like it had been waiting a decade to repeat it.
There’s a knock on the side door before I can spiral too far. I don’t have to check who it is—only one person knocks like they’re trying to summon the dead.
Lila strides in holding a pastry box the size of a toddler. “I come bearing muffins and judgment.”
“I’m not on trial,” I say even though I absolutely am.
