Page 39 of The Seascape Between Us

Carter stood a little behind her, wide-eyed and helpless.

“Um… nothing,” I said, unless you counted a blow job that left both of us like melted wax, followed by an emotional revelation about how our relationship ended nearly twenty years ago. Since I was pretty sure she didn’t mean either of those things, I just waited.

“This one,” she jerked a thumb in Carter’s direction, “told me Daniel was hurt working in one the rooms, and you took him to the hospital but didn’t bring him back.”

“I didn’tkidnaphim,” I said, sounding more defensive than I would have liked. “He fell while he was working in one of the bathrooms, cut his arm and hit his head. Ididtake him to the hospital, where he got some stitches in his arm and the doctor thought hemighthave a mild concussion, so he said Daniel should rest for a few days. I knew if I brought him back here, there was no way he’d rest. So, I brought him to my father’s place.” After hearing that last part, maybe Ihadkidnapped Daniel, after all.

June’s narrowed gaze drilled into me as if she were trying to see inside me to assure herself that I was telling the truth. She was small and round, the top of her hair barely reaching my shoulder, white hair curling under her chin. Without knowing her, I would have thought she was someone’s grandmother, and she should have been baking cookies or something. But Ididknow her, and she terrified me.

“You’re not wrong,” she finally conceded with a slight nod. “He wouldn’t have taken it easy if he were here.”

“I’m picking up our things from our rooms,” I continued, uncertain why I felt compelled to explain my plans,ourplans, going forward. “The construction crew will be starting on therooms on the second floor, so since the tenants are out of my father’s house, Daniel and I will be staying there. We’ll still be here through the workday, and you can reach us at any time if there are any problems.”

June’s thin brow lifted, disappearing under her softly curled white bangs. “How long do you really think you can keep Daniel from the hotel?”

“I’m hoping at least today,” I told her, honestly. He’d been sleeping still when I’d left this morning.

She nodded. “Well, you can only do so much. You’ll look after him?”

“Of course.”

“Of course,” she agreed. “You remember what I said to you?”

“Testicles. Blender. I remember.”

She flashed that sweet, grandmotherly smile, and a shiver slithered up my spine. Honestly, if she turned out to be a serial killer, I wouldn’t even be surprised.

“I’m off, then.” She slipped out from behind the front desk. “Have a good day, Carter.”

“You too,” Carter told her, sounding as uncertain as I felt. Once she’d left, he added, “Man, I wouldn’t want to be on her bad side.”

“You really wouldn’t.”

I went over anything Carter needed, and since the hotel had no guests, there wasn’t much. The hotel was booked to capacity from the opening all the way to mid-September and with more to the end of the year.

I took that as a good sign and probably the result of my marketing team’s hard work. Now, I just needed to be sure that the hotel was ready to open as planned. I’d give Finn a call. Maybe get the crew back down here working on the rooms, since the roofers couldn’t work in weather like this.

Having gone over everything I needed to with Carter, I made my way to my room, then showered and changed into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt before packing up the rest of my things. There wasn’t much. Not surprising since I’d only been staying here a few weeks, and the hotel was not my primary residence. However, when I started packing up Daniel’s room and saw he didn’t have much more than me, that was far more disconcerting.

I packed up his clothes—mostly a collection of battered jeans and old T-shirts that he no doubt used while making repairs around the hotel and a much smaller collection of khakis and button shirts for when he interacted with the guests—in an over-sized duffel bag I found in the closet. Aside from his clothes, he had a cardboard box of old photos on a shelf in the closet and a couple of tattered sci-fi novels he’d taken out from the library. He’d taken minimalist to a whole new level.

Once I’d grabbed his things from the bathroom and tossed them into the bag, I did a final sweep around the room, but I’d packed up everything in under twenty minutes. God damn, Daniel was living like a guest in his own hotel, his own life.

It was as if he put so much of himself into the hotel that there was nothing left of him for himself. He was existing, not living, and god damn it, I was going to change that for him.

Last night, after going over my father’s letter, Daniel stated he didn’t think we could be anything more than business partners with benefits. I stopped pushing. Instead, I’d ordered food while Daniel had collected his underwear and jeans from the laundry room, so he wasn’t wandering around the house naked—despite my encouragement otherwise.

We didn’t talk anymore about my father, or us, for that matter. It may have been seventeen years since Daniel and I had been together, but I remembered how stubborn he could be. Howonce he’d set his mind to something, getting him to change it was like working a miracle.

Of course, that didn’t mean I would just let him decide we couldn’t be together because of some imagined idea that he’d never accomplished anything with his life.

If he’d told me he didn’t care about me anymore, that he didn’t want me, I’d have left the past in the past, but he hadn’t said either of those things. Instead, he’d said he didn’t belong in my life, which was absolute bullshit.

As infuriating as it was to listen to Daniel, I knew better than to argue when he’d made up his mind. If I were going to convince him we should be together, I needed to show him how good it could be.

It’s not that I was blind to everything he’d been going through. He’d been managing on his own for so long, he didn’t trust that help from anyone else could last. I needed to show him he didn’t have to do everything on his own and that keeping the hotel going while facing everything he had was its own kind of success.

He hadn’t ended ourbusiness-partners-with-benefitsarrangement yet, so I considered that a good sign.

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