His jaw does the thing. The tightening thing,where the muscle flexes and his eyes get that particular shade of exasperated that I find deeply, enormously, not-at-all-attractively satisfying.
I don’t find it attractive. I want to be very clear about that. Paul Spencer’s jaw and what it does when I irritate him is completely irrelevant to my life. The fact that he’s standing there in a faded gray T-shirt with his sleeves straining and his forearms doing whatever forearms do when they’re tanned and capable?—
Irrelevant. All of it.
“It’s a safety hazard, Emma.”
“You’ve mentioned.”
“Because it’s still not fixed.”
“And I’ve heard you because my ears work. It’s on my list.”
“Where on your list?”
“Between ‘keep three children alive’ and ‘build a photography business.’ So, you know. Top priority.”
Something flickers across his face—something that might be sympathy or might be heartburn, hard to tell with Paul—and for half a second, his expression softens. Then it’s gone, replaced by the Great Wall of Grump.
“I can fix it,” he says, andthe words come out like they’ve been extracted under duress. Like each syllable costs him money. “If you’d let me.”
And there it is. The thing Paul does that makes me absolutely insane. He offers to help, but he does it like it physically pains him, and then I feel guilty for either accepting or refusing, and somehow I’m the unreasonable one no matter which direction I go.
“I don’t need you to fix it.”
“I didn’t say you need me to. I said I can do it.”
“Those are the same sentence.”
“They’re really not.”
Behind me, Dawson appears on the deck of Paul’s boat, shirtless and already tan, looking like a younger, less grumpy version of his father, which is to say he looks like a sixteen-year-old who’s already bored with both of us.
“Hey, Jenna,” he calls. “Finch is bringing donuts when he gets off the boat.”
“Cool.” Jenna’s voice is so aggressively casual it circles back around to obvious. “Whatever. I mean, that’s fine. I wasn’t even hungry.”
I’m not supposed to know about the Finch thing. But I do.
Dawson and Jenna have spent this summer becoming the thing I never expected—genuine friends. Not romantic or awkward, just twoteenagers who bonded over the shared trauma of watching their single parents bicker every morning like it’s a competitive sport.
“Dad,” Dawson says over his shoulder. “Stop flirting. You’re scaring the pelicans.”
Paul’s coffee mug freezes halfway to his mouth. “I’m not?—”
“You kind of are, though.” Dawson drops onto the dock, bare feet, and heads toward Jenna, who is very casually positioning herself where she’ll have a clear sightline to Justin’s shrimp boat when it comes back in.
I check my watch. “Millie, Aidan—carpool. Now.”
The younger two head up the dock—Millie with her nose in a book she pulled from somewhere (the child is a magician), and Aidan trailing behind, regaling no one in particular with a story about a kraken who lives under the marina and only comes out during full moons. I wave them off to the Andersons’ minivan in the parking lot and head back down the dock.
Paul and I stand in the silence they leave behind. Well, not total silence—Dawson and Jenna are already arguing about something at the end of thedock, and a pelican is making sounds that suggest it’s personally offended by the morning.
“I wasn’t flirting,” he says.
“Obviously.”
“I was discussing maritime safety.”
