by Sonya Blake
She sat again and Sam took a seat too, leaving one stool between them. Harvey set a pint of Sam’s favorite IPA on the bar in front of him.
“So that’s… you I’ve been emailing all these years?” Kaia asked, a hint of a smile tugging at her full lips as her eyes took on that mischievous sparkle again.
“Yeah, that’s me you’ve been emailing,” Sam said.
“Hm.”
As she frowned in puzzlement at her beer, Sam took a second to admire her profile, the sweet upturn of her nose, the curve of her freckled cheeks. Her skin had the texture of a peach. He looked up at the TV. He didn’t give a shit about football, but he needed to get her out of his gaze for a moment, maybe just so he could look at her again.
“Well, it sure is nice to finally meet you in person,” she said decisively.
“I wasn’t expecting you to come up here now,” he replied, still watching the television. “I think I might’ve left some stuff in the house.”
Her laugh made him look.
“You mean like all your painting things?” Her sly smile brought a flood of heat to his cheeks.
“Shit, sorry.” Sam felt his palms begin to sweat.
“What kind of stuff do you paint?” she drawled, crossing her legs toward him and leaning closer with interest.
He smelled her shampoo and laundry detergent and gripped his thighs to resist the sudden urge to touch her. He hoped his beard would hide most of his blush, and ducked his head.
“Nothin’, nothin’ really,” he said, staring at the bubbles rising in his beer. “I just mess around.”
“I wanna see,” Kaia said with the eagerness of a child as she nudged him in the shoulder.
“How long you here for?” he asked.
She sat up an inch taller, pert and eager. “Does that mean you’ll show me your paintings?”
He laughed, despite himself. “No. How long are you here for?”
Kaia shrugged. “I’ve got nothing to get back to in Nashville,” she told him with a sideways glance, perhaps waiting to see if he’d ask why that was.
He didn’t. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to know. He did. He wanted to know everything there was to know about this woman. He just didn’t think he could pull it off, asking her something so personal so quickly after just meeting her without seeming like he wanted to get her into bed. And he wanted to ask her why she’d decided to sell the house on Foley’s Point, too, but he thought that was simply none of his business, so he left it.
Kaia fidgeted. Pushed her plate away. He knew his quietness was making her feel awkward, as it did certain women—the intelligent kind who wouldn’t fill the space with their own mindless prattle. Matty came out of the kitchen with Sam’s burger and Sam ate half of it, before turning to Kaia again to find her now reading a book. She tilted it so he could see the cover, which featured a willowy woman in the arms of a bare-chested man.
“I don’t always read trashy romance, I swear,” she told him in her cute southern drawl. “It’s something I only do when I’ve got too much on my mind, you know? When I need an escape from reality.”
“I get it,” Sam said, shrugging. His whole life was about escaping reality.
“So, what do you do the rest of the time, when you’re not taking care of the house or… painting?”
Sam darted his gaze around to be sure no one had heard her talking. He kept his painting a secret these days, though he supposed that was about to change, if he was going to have that show in the gallery Violet had pushed him to try for.
“I fish,” he said.
Kaia suddenly reached across the space between them and grabbed his left hand. She opened it in her own. Her tiny thumbs ran over his calloused palm; fingertips touched the bloody cuticle where he’d slammed his finger in the cooler earlier, traced a white scar across the pad of his thumb where he’d gouged himself with a fishhook years ago. He expected her to say something about his meaty mount of Venus and tell him he’d live a short and confused life.
“Looks like you do a lot of fishin’. Must be a hard livin’,” she said, pressing her little fingers into his callouses.
“Yep.”
Her own fingers felt rough, too, and Sam took hold of her hand, looking down at it.
“You’ve got a few callouses yourself,” he observed.
“Guitar and banjo,” Kaia said, smiling.
“Is that what you do for a living?”
She drew in a long breath and let it out in a sigh. “I used to wish it was, but now I’m not so sure. I tend bar to pay the bills. Had a band and we toured a bit”—her voice wavered and she flicked a stray curl away from her eyes—“but we broke up a while back and I just got fired from my job at the bar, so you could say I’m untethered at the moment.”
It was the first moment he’d seen a break in her flirtatious bravado, and he felt something tug at his heart. “Sounds good to me,” he muttered.
She blinked at him.
“I—oh, I’m sorry,” Sam said. “I shouldn’t’ve said that.”
“No, no, not at all.” Kaia put her hands on the bar like she was bracing herself for a blow. “You’re right! It’s a good thing. Or it could be, if I let it.” She looked thoughtful.
Sam nodded, chewing his last bite of burger.
Harvey came up to them with a round of fresh drinks. “On me, friends,” he said. “Hey, she tell you she plays guitar and sings? Look, she brought her instruments in with her.”
Sam glanced into the shadows under the bar at the foot of Kaia’s stool and saw two black cases side by side.
“I didn’t want to leave them in the car. It’s too cold out there,” Kaia explained. “Bad for the wood.”
“Play us something.” Harvey leaned over the bar. “Come on, we’re bored to tears in here and it’s just us.”
Kaia smiled reluctantly. Sam wanted badly to hear her sing, but he wouldn’t pressure her.
“Only if you want to,” he said when she cast a questioning glance at him.
Kaia’s smile widened. She did have one hell of a smile.
“Beers on me rest of the night,” Harvey declared in celebration.
Kaia slid off her stool and bent to open her guitar case. Matty had made a keen observation of her hindquarters, too, Sam had to admit.
“You might regret that offer, Mister Bartender Man,” Kaia said to Harvey with a wink as she resurfaced with a guitar. “I sure can put ‘em away.”
And so Kaia Foley began to play and sing a song that sounded kind of country, kind of Celtic, about a sailor that had been gone at sea for seven long years.
“Well met, well met, my own true love,” she sang. “Well met, well met, cried he. I’ve just returned from the salt, salt sea and it’s all for the love of thee…”
Her voice was tender and pure, and though it was smooth as a river flowing over rounded stones, it was somehow raw at the same time. Sam felt her voice stir the wildness in him, sending him somewhere he hadn’t been in a long, long while. Listening to her, he felt himself surrounded by the ocean’s salty embrace as he had once been. Kaia’s voice rang straight into his heart and made him feel as though that part of himself he had buried years ago—the wild part, the good part—was now just at the edge of his reach.
“Six ships, six ships, all out on the sea, seven more on dry land,” she sang. “One hundred and ten, all brave sailor men, will be at your command.”
The sea shanty wrapped Sam in the memory of swimming through water like silk running over his form. It made him long for the sea so badly it hurt. He wriggled in his seat, wanting to get up and get away from her, but he was rooted in place. Grounded by gravity and his heavy, immobile limbs. Tears came into his eyes, washing over him in a wave of something he struggled to define but eventually did.
Relief. It was a relief to know that the best of him was still in there somewhere, alive within. He’d ignored it for so long, and yet here it was—his true self resurfacing.
Kaia’s gaze lit on his and Sam k
new she saw his tears. She kept singing anyway, a small smile on her lips. Did the woman enjoy making him cry? Hell, the tears felt so good, maybe he enjoyed her making him cry. He angled himself sideways at the bar so at least Harvey and Matty wouldn’t see. Kaia went on and on for verse after verse, looking up at his teary face now and then, as if they were all alone. He was pretty sure she even repeated a verse or two, just to give him a chance to pull himself together. There was something so intimate about it; he felt like she knew everything there was to know about him by the time she was done with her song.
“There ya go,” she said, when she was finished and Sam was dry-eyed at last. “Don’t worry about the free beer,” she told Harvey amid the applause of the three men now enamored with her, “I’m still working on this one and I think I’d better make it an early night. I’ve been on the road since before dawn.”
Sam was instantly disappointed that she wouldn’t be sticking around. Apparently so were Matty and Harvey, who both made their disappointment known. Loudly. Still, Kaia put away her guitar, finished her beer in two gulps, and got up to go.
“Nice meeting you, Sam,” she said. She zipped up her coat and gave him a conspiratorial wink as if to say that that his tears would be a secret between them, and that she somehow understood. She touched his arm and gave it a soft squeeze. “Maybe you can come by and pick up your painting stuff sometime.”
Sam found himself tongue-tied, as usual, and watched her walk toward the door with two instrument cases weighing her down. When she got there and couldn’t easily open the door, he jumped to his feet to open it for her.
“Thanks.” Her big smile hit him like a wave of warmth.
“You got it,” he said, now grinning like a loon. “Let me help you out.” He grabbed his jacket from the hook by the door and took one of her instrument cases.
As they walked out into the howling wind and a squall of snow, she said, “Would you be a darlin’ and open my car for me, too? Keys’re in this pocket here.” She gestured to her right coat pocket.
“Nasty night,” Sam said as he unlocked the car.
Kaia put her instruments in the back of her small, cluttered ‘87 Corolla. By the looks of it, it was a wonder she had made it from Nashville to Quolobit. “You sure you know your way to the Point?”
“Yep, I’m good. I was already out there, remember, Picasso?”
Sam blushed again and was glad for the darkness of the night. To his surprise, Kaia extended her arms for a hug. He was startled for a second, then bent to embrace her. She was so tiny, yet she gave him a powerful squeeze. Something he could sink into. She hugged him with her whole body, in a way that felt like they’d known each other always. He sensed that, despite their radical difference in size, they somehow fit each other perfectly. The animal in him wanted to take her mouth with his, to crawl into that tiny car with her and pull off those cute jeans of hers and—
Catching himself thinking things he should not be thinking, catching his body reacting to her with shocking force, Sam pulled away.
Had she felt it, too? She stood there a second, staring at him like maybe she had. Sam squinted into the icy precipitation, watching as she enclosed herself in the car and put the key into the ignition, his heart pounding.
The car gave a choking wheeze—but that was it. Kaia’s face, lit by the yellowish light of the parking lot light, crumpled. She sighed visibly, then hung her head. She tried the ignition once more, with even less of a result.
“I knew this piece of junk was on its way out,” she told him as she climbed out of the car again. “I’m honestly surprised I got all the way up here without some kinda catastrophe.” She turned that smile on him again, her dimpled cheeks glistening. “D’you think you could give me a ride?”
Sam patted his pockets. “I, ah, left the keys to my truck at home,” he said. “You don’t get seasick, do you?”
Chapter Three
“We’re here,” Sam shouted over the wind as he dropped the anchor.
“You sure this is a good idea?” Kaia braced herself on the wheelhouse doorframe of the Angeline.
It had seemed like a good idea outside the pub, after that hug when she’d caught a brighter glimpse of the chemistry she had already sensed at the bar. But it sure as hell didn’t seem like it now, as the sky spat out an unholy mix of rain, ice, and snow. The wind howled at such a speed it made her face sting, like it was being pricked with a hundred needles all at once.
Ya don’t get seasick, do ya? Sam’s words seemed to taunt her now. She almost laughed at the memory, but reckoned her southern drawl must sound as funny to him as his Downeaster accent sounded to her.
Kaia thought of the moment he had walked into the bar carrying a crate of fish, looking like a god of oceanic abundance, his dark hair and beard slick with rain, the scent of seawater coming off him. And then, when she had sung, Sam had cried. Quietly, discreetly. This big, silent man shedding tears no one saw but her. It was like they had shared something deeply personal, something secret. So she hadn’t said yes to the boat ride just because she wanted to get the man into bed—she trusted him for some reason, even now as he was telling her to get into the itty-bitty rowboat he had towed with them across the harbor and north to Foley’s Point.
“I’m scared,” Kaia called to him, squirming as water gushed around her ankles, colder than she had expected, cold enough to make her bones hurt. She tightened her grip on the doorframe when another wave struck the Angeline.
“Stop,” he yawped. Stahp. “C’mon.” He waved her toward the stern.
Kaia gripped the polished wooden edge of the boat and worked her way towards Sam, gripping his hand desperately once she got there. She looked down into the little rowboat tossing in the rough water.
“Really?” she protested. “If things go south you’ll make it, at least. You look like you were born in the sea.”
He stared at her oddly a moment, then leaned over the stern of the Angeline to pull the rowboat closer. A breaker collided into the land, leaving churning trains of gossamer hissing in its wake, exposing black rock, jagged with barnacles and coiled weeds.
“Don’t you have a life vest?” Kaia asked, grappling with her jacket to make sure her phone and wallet were still safely zipped into the pockets. She had wisely decided to leave her instruments locked in the office at the Hook and Anchor, and had stupidly—or perhaps fortuitously—forgotten her overnight bag altogether.
Sam, still hanging on to her, opened his mouth and closed it again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t. I should, I know, it’s illegal—”
Even the best swimmer could drown in that Maine water, Kaia’s father had told her, time and time again, whenever she asked how her mother had died, and why.
Kaia shook her head hard and stood taller. She was exaggerating the gravity of the situation. The waves were hardly as bad now as they had been a moment ago. The wind had died down. Sam was confident they would get from the Angeline to shore without incident.
She got into the rowboat and for a terrifying moment was alone in it. It bobbed as she scrambled her way to the bench, and she let out a little whoop as Sam’s weight sank in a moment later. He took up the oars with broad, powerful strokes, leaping over waves that crashed into the small boat and soaked through Kaia’s jeans, so cold she began to shiver. She could hardly see anything but stared at Sam’s darkened face, frowning out at the horizon.
He was the last thing she saw before she was in the water, the rowboat capsized by a frothing breaker. Where there had been cold, blustering air, briny water now filled her mouth and burned her nostrils, choking her. Her muscles seized in reaction to the frigid temperature and for a moment she couldn’t even move to swim to the surface.
Eventually, when she found the will to kick and got to the air, she shouted. “Sam!”
Her mouth filled with saltwater as a wave smacked into her. The powerful tide took her next breath and Kaia became helpless as a piece of driftwood, tumbling violently underwater.
Fully submerged, she opened her eyes. She couldn’t even see the surface. Water ripped at the edges of her nostrils, needled its way into her eye-sockets and plowed into her ears and mouth. Her insides itched with the immediate need for air. Arms and legs twitched involuntarily.
Kaia opened her mouth and screamed, releasing the last of the breath she’d been holding inside. Pearls broken from their string, the bubbles left her mouth and floated away, upward.
I’m going to die.
She felt the descent of her diaphragm. The dangerous, fatal pull, the final human gesture. It was too strong to resist. Water entered her nostrils and her mouth, burning like molten metal as it filled her throat and lungs. Pain shot from the crown of her head to her groin and through her limbs. She exploded from the inside out and heard herself let out a scream that sounded as though it spread its vibration through the whole harbor. As it happened, she thought she heard another in response. An echo, perhaps, or just her brain shorting out. Then came total quiet.
Something isn’t right.
The itch for air was gone. Kaia saw Sam above, face down. She arched her spine and reached her hands upward, propelling herself away from the edge of darkness with one motion of her lower half. Water seemed to course through her like air, but she didn’t have time to think about that.
She found Sam limp and heavy with the weight of death. His skin shone pale and glossy; his lips were an unnatural blue. Holding him close with one arm and trying not to let him slip out of her grasp, she pulled him away from the rocks and the breaking waves.
Dragging him through the water, she entered the relative safety of a cove to the northern edge of the Point. What frightened her now was not the merciless hunger of the ocean, but the rubbery cold of Sam’s neck, the mortal heaviness of his limbs, and the creeping certainty that, despite her ability to swim, something had broken inside her.