Afternoon drops a quiet over the cove. The shop grows that amber hush I like best, the kind that makes you lower your voice without knowing why. Bailey brews tea and pretends not to watch as I reach for the jar of honey without flinching when the shoulder pulls at the far edge of my reach. I catch her pretending and make a face. She rolls her eyes like she isn’t fond enough to go soft around the edges.
“Dinner at my mom’s,” I say a little later, when the day has collected itself toward evening. I don’t plan it. The words just…arrive. “Lila will be there. Dean. Maybe Ivy and Rowan if she’s done threatening journalists. Come. Please.”
Her shoulders go up, then down. Fear, then the calm right after a wave breaks, and you realize you’re still here. “That’s a lot of Wrights.”
“It is,” I agree. “We can take my truck. We can bail at any second. We can sit on the porch and make faces. It’ll be—” I search for the right thing and land on honesty. “It’ll be them loving whoever sits at the table and me being an idiot and you laughing.”
Her mouth tugs. “And your mother trying to send me home with jam like she’s recruiting me for her army.”
“She is recruiting you,” I say. “We’re at war with anyone who alphabetizes historical romance by cover color.”
She gasps in mock horror. “Someone did that?”
“Savage,” I say grimly.
She thinks, the way she thinks about everything—with her whole face for a second and then with her eyes only. Then she nods. “Okay. I’ll come.”
“Yeah?” I try to say it like a normal person. It comes out like a sunrise.
“Yeah.” Her gaze softens. “Stop smiling like that. People will think you won the lottery.”
“I did,” I say before I can remember to be cool.
She looks like she wants to argue with that and also like maybe she doesn’t.
As promised, I help Bailey into my truck. My hand lingers a bit too long as I click her seat belt buckle, inhaling her sweet scent because I just can’t get enough.
As predicted, dinner is chaos—in the precise way I promised and in a few I didn’t. Mom insists Bailey sit next to her and keeps refilling her plate, as if to prove hospitality is a performance art. Lila interrogates me with eyebrows. Dean rescues me by asking Bailey about a book he pretends he finished. Ivy shows up late with cupcakes and a halo of perfume that smells like stage lights and sugar, kisses Bailey’s cheek, and whispers, “Glow level: illegal.” Bailey threatens to revoke her library privileges. Ivy vows to go underground with a fake mustache. Rowan follows shortly after doing a round about the farm. Everyone talks over everyone. It’s a hymn I forgot I knew the words to.
Somewhere between salad and dessert, the room shifts around a smaller sound—Bailey’s laughter at something my mom says about the first week she moved back after her parents decided being childless was easier. The laugh is bright enough topush back a shadow I didn’t know she still kept. Mom reaches without thinking and touches the back of Bailey’s hand for just a second. Bailey squeezes once, quick. It is the most intimate thing that happens all night, including the part where Ivy absolutely corners me at the sink and says, “Break her heart, and I will write a five-minute pop song with your whole legacy in the chorus.” I assure her this is off the table. She narrows her glittered eyes as if to sayI know where you sleep.I love her a little for it.
After dinner, Bailey and I drift to the porch while the house digests and the family continues to argue whether football is a metaphor or merely a convenient scheduling excuse for snacks. The night air is summer’s last sigh. The pecan trees stitch dark lace against the sky. The part of the bay that touches the far end of the property shines on its own. We sit on the steps because chairs would formalize a thing that doesn’t want suits. Steps let your knees knock by accident and make space for silence.
“I’m around families all the time, but I forget how loud they are,” she says, not unhappy about it.
“Mine particularly,” I admit.
“It feels like being inside a weather pattern,” she says. “You just…lean.”
“You can go whenever you need to,” I offer, meaning the evening and not meaning only that. “Anywhere. Anytime. You say the word, and the truck starts. You say the word, and the lighthouse goes dark for a night. You say the word, and I shut up.”
“You’re doing good,” she says, like I did something brave by speaking little.
We fall into one of those quiets that is all wideness and no withdrawal. Crickets chirp like they’re on salary. An owl tries a thesis from the pecans. Her bare toes land on the next step down, and I track the tiny movement like it announced a plottwist. Without thinking, I turn my palm up on the step between us. A space. A question. Not a pressure… a possibility.
She looks at it without looking at me.
It takes her a full minute. I count every second and put each one carefully on a shelf. Then she slides her fingers into mine, palm to palm, the way yeses sometimes prefer. Our hands fit as if they’ve been practiced. We don’t look at each other. We look across the fields, at the tree line, at the night. The moment is full of the kind of heat that needs air to keep from burning wrong.
When I walk her to the truck later, my family shouts twelve things about leftovers and borrowing Tupperware. Bailey pretends not to hear, laughing into her shoulder. Lila texts a photo from the window—the two of us on the steps, hands under the rail—and addsIvy’s album cover. I send her a single ghost emoji, and she replies with seventeen knives and a heart.
The drive back to the lighthouse is a ribbon of dark road and low talk of tiny stories we haven’t told yet, with no stakes and somehow mattering anyway. My shoulder is quiet in the way injuries get when you forget to be mad at them. I park, and I walk her up. We stop at the porch because rules and because I want the next time I cross her threshold to be a choice we make after we say the things that belong out loud. I know I need to take my time with Bailey. She’s still too skittish around me despite every ounce of my body yearning for just another taste of her.
“Thank you,” she says, arms crossed like she’s cold, but I know it’s a shield she hasn’t bothered to lift all the way.
“For what?”
“For inviting me,” she says. “For the porch. For the…hand.” She flushes at her own vagueness and shakes her head. “You’re bad for my sentences.”
