"I'll clear the slip," I said again.
She laughed. Low, easy. "You said that already."
"Wanted to make sure you heard me."
Her fingers tightened in mine. The tide turned beneath us. The light held, and so did I.
Epilogue
Marley
THE COMPASS WAS ONthe nightstand.
I noticed it first because I never took it off—hadn’t since my grandfather pressed it into my palm at sixteen and told me the water would always bring me home. But last night Beau had unclasped it while I was half-asleep, his fingers warm at the back of my neck, and set it on the nightstand beside his dive watch. The silver against the scarred wood, the chain pooled in a loose circle. It belonged there, the same as everything I owned had found a place in this house without anyone drawing up a diagram.
Morning light came through the salt-hazed windows in long gold bars, catching the dust motes above the bed and turning the heart pine floors the color of dark honey. The creek was running full beneath the floorboards. I could feel it through the soles of my feet when I shifted, that low tidal rhythm I’d stopped noticing and started needing. Outside, an osprey was working the channel, and down the dock, Reckoning sat in a slip that had been empty for three years before Beau cleared it.
My boat. At his dock. Tied off with lines he’d spliced himself, because of course he had.
I stretched and my hand found heat in the sheets where he’d been. The bed was empty, but I could hear him in the kitchen. A skillet on the burner, the quiet confidence of a man who turned breakfast into an operation. The smell of stone-ground grits and garlic butter reached me. He’d started making real breakfasts since I’d moved in, without comment, the way he handled everything else that mattered to him: pay attention, then do the thing.
The boathouse looked different now. Better. My charts covered the wall above the bookshelf. The bathymetric surveys, the dispatch, the cargo manifest with Vik’s margin notes in three colors of ink. My flip-flops lived by the door next to his boots. The gear rack held two wetsuits instead of one. His single bookshelf had absorbed my stack of photocopied harbor records and a paperback I’d abandoned on the arm of the chair. His space had been clean, spare, self-contained. Mine had arrived like weather, and what remained looked like two people actually lived here.
I pulled on his T-shirt—faded navy, soft from a hundred washes, hanging to mid-thigh—and padded out to the kitchen.
He was at the stove. Cargo shorts, no shirt, the scars at his shoulder catching the early light. He was stirring grits on one burner and sautéing shrimp in the cast iron, the kitchen warm with garlic and Old Bay. His hair was still flat on one side from the pillow. He looked up when I came in, and his expression—unhurried, entirely certain I’d be there—did something to my chest that I’d stopped pretending I didn’t feel.
“Morning, Doc.”
“Morning.” I leaned against the counter. “You’re making breakfast again.”
“Somebody has to feed you. Left to your own devices you’d skip meals until you passed out over a chart.”
“I ate a peach yesterday. That counts.”
His mouth pulled at the corner. He filled a bowl, set it on the counter in front of me. Then he reached over, hooked a finger into the collar of the T-shirt I was wearing, and tugged me toward him.
“That’s mine,” he said. Low, close, his eyes on my mouth.
“It’s comfortable.”
“Didn’t say I wanted it back.”
He kissed me. Slow and warm, with nowhere to be. His hand settled on my hip, thumb drawing across the bare skin above the waistband of my underwear, and the kiss deepened until I pressed into him and his other arm came around my waist, pulling me flush against his chest. The counter dug into my lower back. I didn’t care.
“Breakfast is getting cold,” I said against his lips.
“Don’t care.” He lifted me onto the counter. Granite, cool under my thighs, and his hands pushed the T-shirt up while he kissed my neck, my collarbone, the spot below my ear that made my breath hitch. His stubble dragged on my skin. I wrapped my legs around him and he pressed forward, and the hard length of him through his shorts sent heat pooling low and immediate.
“Beau—”
“I’ve been thinking about this since you fell asleep.” His voice was rough, his mouth at my throat. “Since about two in the morning. Possibly earlier.”
“You should’ve woken me up.”
“You were drooling on my shoulder. Didn’t want to interrupt.”
“I do not drool.”
