“Okay, but why is it shimmering?”
“Ask the color of your eyes.”
My stomach flips.“Have you ever had ice cream?”
“Once.Frankie made me try it during my first week in Sitka.”
“Which flavor?”
“Vanilla.”
“And?”
“It was…” His thumb teases my nipple through the bikini top, his confidence quiet and coaxing.“Too vanilla for my tastes.”
I expect nothing less from my dark, dirty wolf.
Tucking my knee under his, I keep my voice soft so it stays just ours.“Tell me about your first day in Sitka.”
He exhales slowly, almost smiling, his eyes softening with gratitude or nostalgia or disbelief that someone wants to know this from him.
“All right.”He leans his head back against the cushion and stares out at the water, remembering.“When the yacht docked, I didn’t understand anything I saw.I had no sense of how big a city was supposed to be.No scale for any of it.I mean, the harbor looked massive.Like a whole new continent.”He laughs under his breath.“All those retail shops by the water… I didn’t know if I walked into a booming urban jungle or the saddest patch of nowhere on Earth.”
“Truly?”
“It felt huge.”He looks at me, eyes bright with memory.“And alive.People everywhere.Cars.Traffic lights.Music spilling out of doorways.The smell of coffee and gasoline.My senses were overloaded, like someone had taken the world off mute.”
“When did you realize how small Sitka actually is?”
“Brace yourself, Trouble.I’m about to blow your mind.”
“We’ll see.”
“Sitka is the largest city in the United States.”
“What?No way.That’s not—”
“It’s the largest by land area, covering 2,800 square miles.”
“Whoa.”I shake my head, officially mind-blown.“But population-wise…”
“It’s small.So small it only has fourteen miles of road.But that first day?It felt fucking magical.Like standing inside a dream and finally seeing a place I’d only heard stories about.”
“Like Disney World.”
“Alaska’s low-budget, soggy, fish-scented Disney World.”He huffs a laugh.
I laugh with him, but it breaks at the end.Because I can envision it, the wild man he was, shaking, overwhelmed, stepping into sunlight after a lifetime of darkness and meeting a new world that didn’t know his name or what he’d survived.
Lost in our thoughts, we lapse into a weird little hush that feels like a hallway between rooms.
Inside the cabin, Kody and Monty argue about how much lime juice constitutestoo much.
Frankie returns to the railing with a drink in hand, one of Kody’s mint mocktails that he makes just for her.
“Your turn.”Wolf pulls me onto his lap, his mouth at my ear.“Give me something real.Doesn’t have to be big.Doesn’t have to be about pain.Just something you’re willing to share about your history with Jag.”
Funny how I haven’t heard from Jag in days, yet he manages to worm his way into most of our conversations.
