This was their morning. Clara teaching Jack to handle a boat. Or more accurately, Clara discovering in real time that the man she was sleeping with had the nautical instincts of a golden retriever.
He couldn't tie a proper cleat hitch. He couldn't coil a line without it tangling. He steered too hard, over-corrected, and nearly took out a lobster buoy on their third pass through the harbor. When Clara tried to teach him to read the wind—"feel it on your face, which direction is it coming from?"—he'd squinted into the breeze and confidently pointed the wrong way.
"That's south,"Clara said.
"I knew that."
"You pointed north."
"I was testing you."
The thing was, Jack wasn't actually this bad at physical tasks. His hands knew how to work. Could build a mortise-and-tenon joint blindfolded, could set a hinge by feel, could read the grain of a board the way Clara read the water. Wood made sense to him. Had rules he understood, properties he could predict.
Water didn't give a shit about his rules.
Water moved. Changed. Responded to forces you couldn't see—current, tide, wind—and expected you to adjust in real time instead of planning ahead. You couldn't measure twice and cut once with the ocean. You just had to feel it and react, and Jack's instinct for reaction had been dulled by years of working with materials that stayed where he put them.
Clara, on the other hand, was in her element. Literally.
Jack had seen her confident before—at her drafting table, in her kitchen, navigating the politics of her town. But on the water she was something else entirely. Commanding. Sure-footed. Reading the wind and current the way he read wood grain, making constant micro-adjustments to the throttle and wheel that keptthe boat gliding smooth even when the swells picked up.
She was also, he noted, enjoying his incompetence way too much.
"Left is port," she called from the helm, watching him fumble with a bumper. "Right is starboard. If you can't remember, port and left both have four letters."
"That's actually helpful."
"I know. I'm an excellent teacher. My students, however, leave much to be desired."
"Student. Singular. And he's doing his best."
"His best is alarming." But she was grinning when she said it—that full, unguarded grin he'd been seeing more of lately, the one that made her whole face change. "Come here. I'll show you how to dock without destroying municipal property."
Jack crossed the deck to stand behind her at the helm, and because he was already there—because she was right there, warm and windblown and smelling like salt and sunscreen—he wrapped his arms around her waist and rested his chin on her shoulder.
"I'm trying to teach you something," Clara said, but she leaned back into him.
"I'm a hands-onlearner."
"Your hands aren't on anything instructional."
"Depends on your definition of instructional."
She elbowed him lightly, laughing, and Jack pressed a kiss to the side of her neck just to feel her shiver. This—the softness of it, the laughter, the way their bodies had learned to fit together in the space of a few weeks—still caught him off guard. He kept waiting for it to feel temporary. Kept bracing for the moment it would sour or fade or become something he needed to escape from.
It hadn't happened yet.
Tim's lobster bake was, by all accounts, the social event of the summer that nobody had officially planned.
It started because Tim had gotten a deal on lobster—"My cousin's friend's boat came in heavy, I've got thirty pounds I need to move before they go bad"—and had texted the group chat that he was cooking on the beach behind the restaurant and everyone should bring sides and beer.
By the time Clara and Jack arrived, the beach had transformed into an impromptu party. Tim had dug a pit in the sand, layered it with seaweed and rockweed over hot stones, and was loading lobsters, clams, corn,and potatoes with the intensity of a man performing surgery.
"Don't touch the pit," Tim warned as Jack approached. "Don't look at the pit too long. Don't breathe on the pit. The pit has a process."
"Noted," Jack said.
"He's been like this for two hours," Lena reported from a beach blanket nearby, where she was sketching in a notebook with a beer balanced on her knee. "He made Evan cry."
