Maps on his kitchen table by noon. Mug on his granite counter by one. Toothbrush beside his sink by two. I didn’t ask where to put anything. I just put it, and he moved around me, adjusting, making room in a space that had clearly never had to make room for anyone.
He made sandwiches at some point. Thick bread, tomatoes from a neighbor’s garden, cheese that wasn’t the cheap kind.We ate standing at the counter without talking, which felt more intimate than it should have.
His boathouse was exactly what I’d expected and nothing I’d expected. Reclaimed heart pine floors glowing warm gold in the afternoon light through salt-hazed windows. Minimal furniture. Clean lines. A single bookshelf with field manuals and tide tables shelved in order by spine height. Confederate jasmine climbing the dock railing outside, sweet enough to taste through the open door. The creek moving under the floorboards with its own slow tidal rhythm, and I could feel it through my bare feet on the wood, a pulse beneath the house.
A space stripped to essentials. A man who kept his world small on purpose. And I was spreading my research across his table like an invasion he’d signed up for.
* * *
We dove the adjusted coordinates that afternoon on Beau’s backup gear, which he’d inspected three times and I’d inspected once more after him because trusting someone didn’t mean turning your brain off.
At the eastern edge of the anomaly zone, where the bathymetric ridge curved toward the deeper channel, I saw it.
Timber. Protruding from the sand at a forty-degree angle, half-buried, encrusted with decades of marine growth but unmistakable in its geometry: a curved rib, a structural member of a wooden hull. And beside it, still holding two planks together after a hundred and sixty years in salt water, an iron fastener green with oxidation.
I hovered above it with my heart in my throat and my hands shaking inside my gloves and thought: there you are.
Two years. The Lady Defiance. Right where the data said she’d be, right where Beau’s father’s fishing knowledge had pointed us, real and solid and mine.
I documented everything. Photographs, measurements, GPS coordinates transmitted to my surface unit. My hands steadied, the trembling converting itself into focus, the emotion channeling into documentation, because that was what I’d trained for. What nobody could take away.
Beau hovered at the edge of my peripheral vision, watching the water, watching me, and when I turned to signal that I had everything, he gave me a thumbs-up, and even through his mask I could see it. He got it. Not just the data. The meaning. What this timber sticking out of the sand represented. All those months of being called reckless and obsessed and delusional, and here was the proof that I’d been right.
We surfaced into late-afternoon sun that turned the water to copper, and I pushed my mask up and laughed. The sound came out raw, half-sob, half-triumph, and I didn’t try to contain it. The sky was enormous above us and the water was warm and the air tasted of salt and victory and I was so happy I couldn’t find words for it, which might have been a first.
* * *
The boathouse was golden with evening light when we got back, the last sun throwing long rectangles across the floor, the open door letting in the creek and the heat. My printouts were still spread across the table. Beau set the gear in the rack by the door, his then mine, side by side in an order I’d normally resist but couldn’t argue with today.
I was standing at the kitchen counter with my back to him, running through the documentation checklist in my head, when he said, “You were right.”
Two words. Low, matter of fact, carrying the weight of what I’d been waiting to hear someone say.
I turned around. He was standing by the table, still in his wetsuit, the day’s sun drying white on his shoulders. The light through the window caught the shrapnel scarring at hiscollarbone, raised and pale against tan. The stubble along his jaw. And his mouth, which had a shape I’d noticed the first day and failed to stop noticing since.
I crossed the room and kissed him.
He tasted of salt and sun and the warmth of someone who’d spent the day in the water. His lips were still for one beat, surprise, not reluctance, and then his hands came up, one at the back of my neck, fingers sliding into my hair and gripping, the other at my hip, pulling me flush. The sound he made was low and rough and real.
I’d meant it to be quick. A punctuation mark. I kissed you, now we deal with it.
He didn’t let it be quick.
He tightened his grip in my hair and slowed the kiss, turning it thorough, deep, his tongue finding mine while his hold on my hip shifted me closer. The counter at my back. His body warm against my front. Damp heat of neoprene on neoprene, and my brain went blank for three full seconds, which was approximately three seconds longer than I’d gone without a thought in my entire adult life.
“Rutledge.” It came out into his kiss, barely a breath.
“Yeah.” He moved to my jaw, my neck, found the spot below my ear and stayed there. His stubble scraped my skin and I shivered, hard, and he felt it and made a low sound in his throat that was pure satisfaction.
“This is a terrible idea.”
“Probably.” He kissed lower. His hand slid from my hip to my waist, thumb tracing along the edge where neoprene met bare skin, and my whole body flushed hot enough to settle the terrible-idea debate on the spot. “You want me to stop?”
“If you stop I’ll kill you.”
His laugh was low, pressed into my collarbone, vibrating through me. He drew back far enough to look at me. Gray eyesgone dark, careful control cracking open. His thumb brushed my cheekbone, tracing the line of freckles there.
“You’re so fucking beautiful,” he said. Not smooth. Rough, almost angry about it, as though he’d been holding it back since that first morning on the dock. “You know that? Standing on that boat, telling me where to file my paperwork. I’ve been wrecked since then.”
