Selma reached out and gave Jenna anotherhug, and Jenna closed her eyes and absorbed every second of it. She wasn’t sure she’d ever have another Selma-hug, and the thought of that made her much sadder than it should.
The crack of thunder snapped Jenna out of her melancholy thought, and the rain that began pouring in buckets from the sky cut their goodbye short as Deacon and Jenna raced to the SUV with promises of Facetime calls and visits.
As they drove along the coast, on the way to the airstrip, the rain came in sheets, so dense that even the SUV’s wipers at max speed could not keep ahead of the flood. On the other side of the windshield, the world turned to watercolor, a hundred shades of gray and blue with headlights smeared into glowing comet tails.
Deacon’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. He didn’t speak, but Jenna could read his anxiety in the way his jaw clenched and unclenched, the occasional sideways glance at her as if to check that she was still okay, feeling safe. She wanted to tell him that she loved this, the cocoon of the car, the warmth of his presence, the sense of being carried through the violence of weather by someone who would never let anything happen to her. But she didn’t know how to put it into words that didn’t sound like the confession of a stunted adolescent.
A call came in, and Deacon pulled over to the side of the road to answer it. It was brief, Captain Morse was clipped and to the point: no flights out tonight, ceiling zero, standby for possible windows in the morning.Deacon nodded, thanked the pilot, and then sat for a long moment with the engine idling. Jenna could tell he was running calculations in his head, always three or four moves ahead, never yielding to the uncertainty of chaos even when chaos—in the form of thunder and lightning—was pounding at the gates.
He looked over at her, a question in his eyes. “We’re not going anywhere tonight. Hotel, or?—?”
“Anywhere is fine,” Jenna said, and then, before she could stop herself, added, “I trust your judgement.”
He made a quick call to Poppy, and she sent a quick text to Blake, who had already planned on staying at her dad’s after cheer tonight, just letting her know she wouldn’t be home till the next day. She also let Robbie know to reschedule her clients, at least all her morning clients, and she’d keep him updated on the afternoon. Which meant she’d miss Yaya again. That was the third week in a row. She hadn’t seen her since her wedding day, and she missed her.
They pulled back onto the road and drove in silence. Jenna felt herself soothed by the regularity of the rain. For all the uncertainty of the day, she felt safer than she had in months. It was as if the storm outside had built a wall around them, a little bubble of time and space where nothing could intrude. She would have been content for the drive to last forever.
After a few miles, Deacon veered off at the blinking lights of a roadside sign: “Bluewater Inn & Grill—VACANCY.” It looked like a relic, all faded clapboard and neon, the kind of place that had once catered to summering families and now mostly served long-haul truckers and lost souls in off-season. The parking lot was half-flooded, the only other car was a battered Camry parked beneath a listing pine.
Deacon pulled up in front of the lobby and turned off the engine. “Wait here,” he said, as if she were likely to bolt, but she nodded and watched him jog through the downpour, head lowered against the wind, shoulders squared as if daring the elements to try him.
He returned after a few minutes, hair wild and dripping, holding a key card and a battered takeout menu. “Room’s ready. Restaurant’s open. You want to eat or—?” He paused, then handed her the menu. “The special is locally famous for being not immediately fatal.”
Jenna laughed, grateful for the flicker of humor. “I’ll roll the dice. I’m starving.”
He opened her door and held his jacket over her head as they splashed through puddles to the lobby, which was mostly plastic plants and a bowl of saltwater taffy on the counter. The woman at reception gave them a once-over and winked at Jenna, as if she could read every line of their history on her face. Or maybe she was projecting and the woman just thought Deacon was hot.
The restaurant was attached to the hotel by a short breezeway that was all nautical kitsch, model ships, photos of famous anglers, and a case of trophy fish mounted with dates and lengths. When they walked into the eatery itself, Jenna felt like she was in Punk’d or The Twilight Zone. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought this was a joke, that the storm was planned and Deacon had set it up so that they had to stop there.
“Everything okay?” he asked when she stood, frozen in place.
“Great, yeah.” She nodded as she took it all in.
The restaurant was an exact replica of The Icehouse from the showDawson’s Creek,which gave the entire day an even more surreal atmosphere. She felt like she’d just walked onto the set. The bar in the center, the tables, theoutside deck surrounding it, the windows that looked out on the water, and the dock that led up to the public entrance, where the storm had churned the bay into whitecaps.
There were only two other diners, both absorbed in their phones, neither interested in the strangers who had blown in with the weather. A waitress walked by and instructed them to sit where they liked.
Deacon led her to a booth in the back, where the view of the bay was best, and shrugged off the jacket he’d used to shield them from the elements, which gave Jenna a glimpse of how the rain had plastered his thermal to his chest, the darkened fabric clinging to muscle and bone, and she felt a sudden, unaccountable wave of hunger that had nothing to do with food.
“Thank you for today.”
Jenna blinked, caught off guard by the earnest gravity in Deacon’s voice. He said it with a kind of quiet finality, as if he were closing the door on some decades-long chapter of his life.
“Thankyou,” she said, quietly, feeling a little guilty for lusting over him when he was clearly having a moment. “I mean it. That was… I’m really happy you let me be there. That I got to witness your reunion, or I don’t know what to call it—but it was beautiful.”
“I don’t think I would have been able to do it,” he said, his voice hoarse, “to even go up to the door, if you hadn’t been there.”
“Yes, you would have,” she assured him, and it wasn’t a platitude. “You would have.”
A sail caught her attention out of the window, and she glanced out half expecting it to be the True Love docked. It wasn’t.
“Is something wrong?” Deacon leaned forward andlowered his voice, despite no one being around. “You’ve been acting weird since we got here. We can go somewhere else for dinner.”
“No! I love it. I seriously love it,” she rushed out.
He stared at her as if she were protesting too much.
“No, I do, seriously, this restaurant looks exactly like The Icehouse, which is a restaurant on my favorite TV show,Dawson’s Creek. Like exactly the same.” She pressed her fingers to the glass, squinting through the beads of rain. “And that pier even looks the same. I was just thinking the True Love was going to be docked out there.”
