Page 29 of The Captain
“What?” She grinned. “I like poetry.”
I took a slow drink and didn’t argue with any of it. A gull strutted along the railing and considered our hushpuppies. I flicked a piece of cornbread off the edge into the water, and it dove after it. We applauded like idiots. Humanity returned to my bones, inch by inch.
We lasted almost thirty minutes without talking about strandings. It felt like a record. The second pitcher arrived. The light slid down the river and turned everything that wasn’t beautiful into something that could at least masquerade. My shoulders found a lower setting.
I tried on generosity toward the Navy the way you try on a dress a friend swears will suit you. It pinched in places I didn’t want to admit I was soft, but it didn’t make me itch. Parts of it even felt right—McGuire’s quiet competence; the way a nineteen-year-old sailor would obey a power-down call froma scientist he’d never met because his chief told him to; the memory of my father’s dictionary open at the edge of a spec book.
Maybe the villain wasn’t a uniform.
“What if,” I said slowly, tasting the words like a foreign spice, “they are not the ones this time?”
Tamika lifted her glass. “Then we slay the right dragon instead of the nearest.”
I clinked hers with mine and let the taste of the beer sit on my tongue.
Suddenly, the door banged open—bar-style, a little too hard. Warm night air followed the stranger inside. For a beat, the deck quieted, then the chatter surged back.
I looked up because I am a coward with a stubborn streak and I wanted to prove to myself that I had not been waiting.
He stepped in like gravity remembered him.
Jacob.
Black T-shirt, the same boots as last night, hair damp like the water had just had its say.
He stopped for half a breath at the threshold because the room did what it always does when a certain kind of man walks into it—it rearranged itself. He let it, then moved. Not to the bar. Not to the jukebox. Toward the space where I was trying to be a woman drinking beer with her friends on a weeknight.
Tamika’s knee touched mine under the table in a question. I didn’t shift.
He saw me the way a compass sees north—inevitable, unstartled. His mouth did that thing it had done under the portico at dawn, the smallest curve that felt private even when it happened in public.
“Shit,” Becca whispered, delighted and appalled. “He’s real.”
Miguel’s laugh was low and approving. “Of course, he is.”
Jacob stopped at the rail, and looked at me. Not past me. Not through me. At me.
“Evening,” he said, voice roughened by salt and wind and whatever he’d done with both since I’d left him at dawn.
My pulse did the thing I told it not to do.
The hush of the deck gathered and lifted. Behind me, Tamika swore softly in a way that counted as a blessing.
I did the only thing the day hadn’t bullied out of me: I inhaled slow, let it touch the places that had gone tight, and found I could hold both things at once—the work and the want, the science and the sin of being a person with a man friend who had just walked into my evening like he’d been invited.
12
JACOB
TheEclipsehad dropped me at the dock with a duffel full of gear for Camille’s team, Marcus’s parting wink still burning in my head. Atlas’s guys had a bead on her—quiet shadows trailing her like ghosts, ten paces back, just as they’d promised. I’d caught sight of them as I’d stepped off the yacht, their nondescript SUV idling near the marina, eyes on the world but not on me. It didn’t surprise me they knew where she’d be.
What did surprise me was that she was back at Salty Mike’s. Was this her usual haunt, or was she looking for me? I hoped the latter, the thought sparking heat low in my gut, but I kept my face blank, my stride steady as I crossed the parking lot.
The neon “Open” sign buzzed in the window, the deck lights casting a warm glow over the weathered wood. The air smelled of fried fish and tide, the Ashley River lapping at the pilings below. I was running on fumes—too little sleep, too much whiskey last night, my mind churning with Marcus’s cryptic hints about family, Caleb’s silence, and the Navy’s mess with Camille. I should’ve been headed to bed, crashing in the cheapmotel until I could call my brother and figure out what the hell Dominion Hall wanted.
But when I pushed open the door, the sight of her stopped me cold.
Camille sat at a high-top near the rail, her dark hair loose and free, spilling over her shoulders like ink. She was laughing, a throaty sound that hit me like a shot of Jack, her head tilted back as one of her colleagues said something I couldn’t hear.
