“I’ll buy you more,” I say. “Whole boxes. Fancy ones.”
She huffs a laugh. The pencil is back in her hair. It’s a better moon than the one over the bay. “You’re not kissing me,” she says, and it’s not a complaint, it’s an observation charged with 10,000 volts.
“I want to,” I say. “Too much.”
“Good,” she says, so soft I almost miss it. She steps in the smallest amount closer, and that inch is a field of wildflowers in my chest.
She reaches up—slow, asking without words—and curls her fingers at the back of my neck. Just the warmth of her hand, and I’m a goner. I lean in, but only enough to share breath, to memorize the exact point where our mouths are not yet kissing, and our bodies think they are. Two seconds. Three. She lets go. I step back. We both look like we almost did something wrong and instead did something holy.
“Good night, Crew,” she says.
“Good night, Bailey,” I answer, and walk backward down the step like distance is a trick I have to do facing her so I don’t forget how.
I don’t start the truck right away. I stand by the rail and look up at the lantern room where we invented patience and broke and remade it under rules we wrote with shaky hands. The light sweeps, the rope sings against the wind, and I realize I’m not afraid of the quiet between moments anymore.
Back home, when the house sleeps and the stars do their bright, stubborn thing, I go inside, pull open the dresser, and take out the note I have no business still owning.Stay gold, C. —B.I lay it on my palm, then press it flat on the table, and I write another line beneath it—not touching the letters, just sharing the page:Trying like hell.I don’t know who I’m telling—her, myself, or God. Maybe all three.
When I finally fall asleep, it’s with the sound of her laugh braided into the rain that isn’t falling and the knowledge thatwe have moved, together, fromnot yetto the narrow bright shoreline ofalmost now. The difference is one decision and a breath. I hold both like they’re a breakable treasure because they are.
In the morning, I’ll bring her a breakfast sandwich I burned on purpose because I’m a menace, and she’ll make fun of me and eat it anyway, and we’ll argue about whether the mystery section should live near the stairs, and I’ll watch her decide yeses like a captain. In the evening, I’ll stand in the lantern room and not kiss her until she saysnow, and when she does—because she will—it will be because we built something steady enough to hold it. The light will turn. The town will gossip. The bay will keep our secrets and sell them at the market, marked up as legend.
For the first time since the hit that took my season and the laugh that took my boyhood, I’m not lost. I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
Chapter Eleven – Bailey
The lighthouse wakes up before I do.
It creaks and settles and hums like it stretched in its sleep and decided to forgive me for everything I confessed to the ceiling last night. Downstairs, the shop smells like paper and lemon oil and the ghost of pie, which is rude, because I was trying not to think about his mouth.
I open early because my hands and mind need something to do. The kettle hisses. The bell chimed when I flipped the sign to OPEN, but now it’s quiet enough that I can hear gulls heckling the tide. I tell myself I’m fine. I’m an adult woman with budget spreadsheets, a broom, and a very reasonable collection of boundary rules. I am not a teenager who got kissed in a storm and is now floating around her own house like a balloon.
I do inventory. I restock romance—alphabetical by author, not by “vibes,” which is how Holt shelved an entire shelf last week when I let him help (“look, Bailey, these allfeellike yellow”). I rearrange the display because the spine onStay Goldis showing at a dangerous angle, and my heart is made of poor choices.
By nine, the front doorthunk-thunksopen with a bustle of sunshine and perfume. Lila sails in, one hand on a tray of muffins, the other dragging Ivy, who is in leggings, sunglasses, and a sweatshirt that says LOCAL MENACE across her chest in glitter.
“Intervention,” Lila declares.
“Good morning,” I say, suspicious, because nothing good ever follows that tone unless it’s pie. “Is there pie?”
“Muffins,” she says, sliding the tray onto the counter. “And judgment.”
I glance at Ivy. “Do you bite?”
“Only paparazzi,” she says, lifting her sunglasses and beaming. “Hi, lighthouse. You look like romance lived here last night and forgot its earrings.”
“Get out,” I say, but my mouth betrayed me with a smile before my brain could veto it.
Lila leans over the counter, chin on her hands. “How’s the ‘not yet’ going?”
“It’s… fine,” I say, which is the kind of lie you tell to the TSA and your best friends. “We’re—taking it slow.”
“Slow like a glacier?” Ivy asks. “Or slow like thunder where you can count the seconds and feel it shaking the windows anyway?”
I aim a muffin at her. She catches it without looking. Popstars are unnecessary.
Lila unwraps a blueberry muffin and takes a bite, eyes all sisterly knives and soft edges. “Did you kiss him?”
I stare. The kettle clicks off. The cat appears on the counter because rules were invented to be ignored. “There was… weather.”
