“Emma —”
“You came after me in your boat, Paul. In a storm.” She holds my gaze. “Tell me why.”
The rain gets louder. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe everything else just gets quieter—the excuses, the deflections, the ten years of silence I’ve been building one careful day at a time. The machinery of not-feeling that’s been running so long I forgot it was running.
It stops.
Not gradually. Not in stages. It just stops, the way the rain started—all at once.
Well. Here we go. Paul Spencer’s decadeof emotional avoidance, ended by a woman in a lighthouse who won’t stop asking reasonable questions. My therapist—if I had a therapist, which I don’t, because Spencer men don’t go to therapists, we go to hardware stores—would be weeping with joy right now.
“Because I can’t sleep when your light is out,” I say. “Because your son drew on my neck with a stick and I let him, and you held a water bottle to my mouth on a beach and I felt it for three days afterward.”
I’m crossing the room. I don’t remember deciding to move but I’m moving, the way I moved on the beach—body overruling brain, instinct ahead of reason.
“Because I went to a coffee shop and watched my father call a woman by her first name and I thought,I want that.I want to say someone’s name like it matters and bring someone coffee without being asked and stop pretending that fixing things in the dark is the same as telling someone how I feel.”
I’m in front of her. She’s standing now—I don’t know when she stood up, but she’s on her feet, her back against the curved wall of the lighthouse, her camera hanging at her side, her face tilted up.
“Because you’rethe first person who’s made me want to lean in instead of away,” I say. “And I’m tired of standing on the other side of the dock pretending I don’t.”
“Paul —”
“And I know I’m out of practice and I know the timing is terrible and I know we’re stuck in a lighthouse in a storm and this is probably the least romantic —”
She kisses me.
Not me kissing her. Her. She puts her hand on the side of my face and she pulls me down and she kisses me, and the rest of the sentence dies somewhere between my mouth and the rain on the windows and the hundred-year-old lighthouse walls that have seen storms worse than this but probably nothing braver.
Her mouth is warm. Her hand is on my jaw and her fingers are in my hair and she tastes like the salt air and the coffee she had this morning and something underneath that’s just her—just Emma—the thing I’ve been pretending I don’t notice every time she walks past me on the dock.
I kiss her back.
My hand finds the curve of her waist. The other braces against the wall behind her, and I’m aware of everything—the cold of the brick againstmy palm and the warmth of her under my other hand. The rain and the thunder and the iron staircase ringing with some vibration I can feel through the floor. Her heartbeat under my fingers, fast and certain.
My brain, which has been useless for the last five minutes, offers this contribution:You are kissing a woman in a lighthouse. This is objectively the most dramatic thing you have ever done. You once replaced a transmission in a nor’easter and that was less intense than this.
Noted. Thank you, brain. Very helpful.
This is nothing like the last time I kissed someone. Holly’s kisses were familiar—warm and safe, the kind of kiss that saidI know youandI’m hereandcome home.This kiss doesn’t say any of that. This kiss saysfinally.This kiss sayswhat took you so long.This kiss saysI’ve been standing right here.
She pulls back. Just enough to breathe. Her forehead against mine. Her hand still on my face.
“Hi,” she whispers.
“Hi.”
“That was —”
“Yeah.”
“You were in the middle of a sentence.”
“I don’t remember what I was saying.”
“You were saying something about this being the least romantic —”
“I was wrong. I was wrong about that.”
