by Aubrey Irons
Special Agent Riley smirks. “You done?”
“Oh, I could write a tour book on Dublin, Agent Riley.”
His grin fades. “I bet you could, Hart.” He tucks his badge into his back pocket and crosses his arms over his chest.
“How’s your uncle?”
I smile. “Cantankerous? Still full of shit?”
I know what this is. It’s an intimidation game. Agent Riley here doesn’t actually have anything on me or that night eight years ago or I’d be in handcuffs right now on my way to Boston.
But he’s not clueless either, that much is obvious.
We stand there another full thirty seconds, not speaking, before I finally throw my hands up and shrug. “Well, look, Agent, if you still want that drink, the bar opens at two.”
He nods slowly, his eyes never leaving mine. “I’m good. Just wanted to come by and see how my favorite ex-pat is doing back at home.”
“Aww, am I your favorite?” I clasp my hands over my heart. “That- gee, Agent Riley, that really means a lot. Thank you.”
He raises a brow at me as I grin right back at him. “I’ve got my eye on you, you know.”
Fuck him. Again, if he had something concrete, I’d already be in an interrogation room asking for a lawyer. I’m not entirely sure what he’s playing at showing up like this, but I do know damn well that the Federal statute of limitations was over three years ago.
“Just make sure you get my good side, okay?”
I wink as he shakes his head at me, his arms still crossed over his chest.
“Welcome home, Silas.”
“Enjoy our lovely town, Agent Riley.” I call back over my shoulder. “Try the lobster rolls down on Commercial Street.”
I wait until I’m a block away and around a corner before I almost drop to my knees, the wind leaving me in a whoosh.
Fuck. Welcome home indeed.
Chapter Thirteen
Ivy
I leave my sandals on the beach as I head down onto the rocky shore. The water is cold, as it always is in New England, even in the summer.
I shiver as I let just the tips of my toes into the lapping waves, feeling somehow comforted by the feeling of the Atlantic against my skin.
Shelter Harbor doesn’t get big surf-type waves. That’s out on the breakers around the mouth of the harbor itself. Here in the protection of the bay though, we just get little lapping ones - the ebb and flow of the water teasing endlessly against the shore.
Tickle waves, my mom calls them.
I grin as I let them tickle my feet, feeling centered - feeling at home.
Of course, I’m also grinning because these tickle waves are about to become a $5,000 Instagram picture.
I push the little bottle of skin cream down into the soft brown sand and black pebbles of the shore, pushing it just enough in, right next to my toes, so that the water just splashes gently across it.
Perfect.
This week’s skin cream product placement apparently specializes in minimizing high-heel-related calluses. Or, something. This one I’m not actually that familiar with, but my management team made sure it was part of the “to shoot” product bag - along with the sandals up on the beach, the sports bra I’m currently wearing, and of course the yoga pants that carry my brand - that I was supposed to come home with and photograph
“Make sure you really get enough of that quaint Cape Cod charm, okay, Ivy?”
I frown at Lori, my immediate manager. “Shelter Harbor isn’t actually on Cape Co-”
“Hon?” She looks down over the top of her tortoise-shell glasses at me from behind her wide, glass desk. “It doesn’t really matter, okay?”
Here in decidedly not Cape-Cod-located Shelter Harbor, I bring the phone up and point it down at my feet, framing it just right. Some people who do this kind of work hire a team, but polls have shown that people really dig my “home shot” aesthetic. They like that I’m “au naturale” and don’t use pro photographers. They like that I’m “so genuine” in my selfless quest to highlight-reel my life of endless yoga retreats, active wear, and goji-berry cleanses.
Right.
I mean, I’m going to Photoshop the shit out of these pictures later on my laptop, but sure - “au naturale” it is.
The sun’s perfect right then too, the light great for that mid-afternoon summer dazzle. I swap to a video, shooting a quick one with sound that I’m sure will get 300,000 likes by dinner time if I can get it up in time.
The skin cream along with my toes captured in about fifty shots, I make my way back up to the beach, slipping back into my sandals and climbing the wooden stairs back to the piers. My eyes dart across the harbor scene I could probably still navigate with my damn eyes closed. The smell of Halstead’s lobster-roll take-out window, the sounds of mechanical winches down on the docks loading empty nets onto trawlers or full ones off.
The cool wind of the Atlantic blowing through my hair.
I snap a few more random shots, getting that “New England charm” aesthetic I know the management team is looking for. I might’ve run away from this place a long time ago, but I will hand it to this town, charm it’s got by the damn bucketful. There’s a reason ferries and tour buses bring tourists by the truckload to this place between May and September. It’s charming, and quaint - picturesque enough that they’ve even shot movies here over the years.
I head down to the lower piers, following them almost aimlessly.
Of course what the movies don’t show and what the tour buses skip is the darker side - the part of town that behind the veneer of it’s adorable little main street. Beyond the charm and the little shops selling plush whale stuffed animals and keychains with founding fathers’ names stenciled on them, there’s the other side of Shelter Harbor.
Silas’s side.
The edgier side, home to the boy from across the tracks.
The one I wanted to save.
The one I thought I could save.
The one I married, before he proved how silly and wrong I could be.
The one who-
“You lost, Slimy?”
I jerk my head up, right into his grinning, cocky face.
Silas.
I’ve walked further down the piers than I thought, lost in my own head. I’m down by the resident slips, and he’s standing a foot above me, perched on the edge of a dilapidated looking tug-boat of some kind.
Yeah, the years have been good to him - ridiculously, unfairly good to him.
He looks older of course, but in that staggeringly handsome way. The lines by his eyes are a little deeper, but only in a way that makes him look better somehow.
Dick.
But there’s the same shadow across his eyes, the same dark hollows in his cheeks. That same perfect nose, and those deep, Atlantic-ocean-blue eyes.
I shake those thoughts away as I hold a hand up and squint through the afternoon sun at him.
“I told you not to call me that.”
Silas grins. “Aww, but I like it.”
I scowl.
“C’mon, you used to like it.”
“When we were ten.”
He chuckles as he shakes his head.
“Enlighten me how I keep running into you like this?”
Silas straightens, raking his nails across the stumble of his chin. “Could ask you the same thing, Hammond.” He winks. “And anyways, you’re trespassing.”
“What?”
He steps back into the low boat moored to the docks and spreads his arms wide.
“You’re on my lawn.”
My brow jerks up as I realize it’s not a tugboat he’s standing on, it’s a houseboat. A very junky, very beat-up, very I-can’t-actually-believe-it’s-floating houseboat.
My nose wrinkles. “You live here?”
“Yep.”
“Here. On a boat?”
Silas rolls his eyes. “It’s a houseboat, yes.”
“It’s a boat.”
He chuckles as he runs his fi
nger thorough his hair. “Yeah, well, it’s home.”
I cross my arms over my chest. “Since when?”
“Since…” He glances down at the watch on his wrist. “Since about an hour ago. Rented through the month.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “You’re staying in Shelter Harbor? Why?”
Silas groans. “You know, you ask a lot of questions in the morning. How did I not remember that?”
I swallow the lump in my chest.
“Because I probably didn’t before,” I shrug. “Whatever, I’ve changed a lot.”
“I can see that.”
His gaze lingers, and I feel the heat before I can stop it. The same sort of forbidden heat from the night before.
My face goes red as I shake my head.
“Listen, you want coffee? I can’t do question-time before coffee.”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
He grins. “C’mon, Sl-” he stops himself, clearing his throat. “C’mon Ivy.”
God the way he says my name. It’s like a lover’s touch all over again - the same velvet sound of his voice from that throat, tugging something inside of me like I’m hardwired to his sound.
“Come on in, I’ve got some brewing.”
I raise a brow skeptically. “You want me to come into your house?”
He laughs. “Oh, so it is a house now?”
I give him a look.
“It’s coffee, Ivy. I think we’re adult enough to have coffee together. I’ll behave.”
His face hardens. “Look, there’s some things I should tell you-”
“There are things you should have told me,” I toss out before I can stop myself.
“Eight years is a long time, you know,” he growls out, moving towards me with his eyes suddenly steely and locked right on me.
I bark out a mirthless laugh. “Believe me, I know.”
“What I mean is, eight years does a lot to change people, Ivy. I’ve changed.”
I swallow thickly. “Well so have I.”
“Yeah you have,” he says darkly, his eyes flicking across my face. “But you’re exactly the same too.”
My mouth tightens, feeling my anger rising at the gall he has to assume he knows a single damn thing about the person I’ve become in a post-Silas world.
“You don’t know anything about me, Silas,” I say tightly. “I am not-”
“You still have it?”
He nods his chin at the place beneath my breast to the side, and I blush.
“No.”
He arches a single brow, and suddenly I’m caving.
“Yes,” I grumble out. “Yes, I still have it.”
His lips pull into a white grin. “Me too.”
He reaches down and snags the hem of his t-shirt, lifting it over that chiseled body. Sure enough, it’s right there, in the same place it was drawn nine years before at the place in Cambridge that only glanced at my ID.
It was my first that night, his fourth or fifth. He’s added more since that night, it appears - much more, in swirls and images and lines of text across his skin. But it’s still there. The tiny outline of a key, with plenty of space around it from the other, newer tattoos.
I shake my head. “We were young, and stupid.”
He grins. “Young, yeah.” Silas shakes his head as he drops his shirt back down. “Not stupid, though.”
“What are you doing here, Silas?”
The question comes tumbling out yet again. Because past all this banter, past this little sugar-coated jaunt down memory lane, it’s the only question that matters right now.
He shrugs again - that same effortless easy and easing motion that hasn’t changed at all as he’s gotten older.
“Told you, Rowan invited me to see your dad’s-”
“Yeah, that’s actually another thing,” I say coolly. “ You and Rowan all buddy-buddy.”
“The guy’s my best friend, Ivy, despite what happened.”
“Well he’s my brother, Silas. Even after what happened.”
I hold his gaze another second before the words come tumbling out.
“He doesn’t know, does he.”
Silas frowns.
I shake my head, raking my fingers through my hair. “No, he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. I’d have heard about it.”
“Doesn’t know about what?”
“About us.”
Silas raises a brow but I shake my head. “No, not about us being together, I mean…” I take a big gulp of air before looking up into his eyes, my own narrowed. “Your best friend doesn’t know you fucking married his little sister before you ran out on her does he.”
His mouth goes tight, and I bark out a small laugh. “Yeah, he doesn’t know about this, does he?”
I suddenly reach into my loose beach shirt and yank out the thin silver chain, with the pendant that was once my wedding ring hanging from the end.
Silas stares at it, his mouth hanging open.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” I mutter. I’m the idiot who kept it.”
“Ivy-”
“Stupid, I know.” My gaze darts from his bare finger to his eyes. “I’m sure yours is long fucking gone.”
Slowly, Silas shakes his head, his eyes never leaving mine as he swallows. “Eight years later and you still don’t know me, huh?”
Before I can say anything, he suddenly reaches down, grabs his shirt, and whips it off his body.
“There.”
And suddenly he’s right in front of me, the manly smell of him invading my senses, and his bare, chiseled and inked body right in front of my eyes. And right there, laying against his chest on a small silver chain…
The silver ring.
The one I slipped onto his finger eight years ago in the back rectory of the church in Stoborough.
He kept it. It’s not tossed into the ocean, or flushed down a toilet, or hocked, or whatever I imagined he did with it after he left. It’s right there, laying across his heart on a chain that practically matches mine.
“It’s not long fucking gone, Ivy,” he growls, so close to me, his words a warm tease across my upturned lips.
“It’s been right here,” he growls, tapping his chest as his eyes pierce right into mine. “For eight. Fucking. Long. Years.”
I nod, my eyes dropping again to the little silver band dangling from his neck.
“Did it hurt?” I say quietly. “All those years?”
He nods, his jaw fighting. “Yeah, it fucking hurt, Ivy.”
I take a deep breath as I look him full in the face.
“Good.”
Somehow, I manage to pull myself out of the gravity of him, taking a step back from the proximity of him.
“Now multiply that by a hundred, and you can get a taste for what I went through not even knowing if you were alive or dead.”
He shakes his head. “Ivy, hang on.”
But I don’t hang on. I don’t “wait” - not anymore.
Instead, I turn my back to him, step back onto the dock, and walk away.
Chapter Fourteen
Ivy
“Can I borrow your car?”
Sierra looks up from the book she’s reading in the big armchair in the living room.
“I’m going to go down to the train station and grab Blaine.”
Sierra raises a brow. “He finally get on one?”
I scowl.
Yet another reason I’ve been in a sour mood the entire afternoon and evening. Because if running into Silas Hard, again, wasn’t fun enough, my boyfriend is apparently incapable of making a damn train to come see me.
She puts the book into her lap. “Look, I’m sure he just had stuff to do that he got caught up in.” She shrugs her shoulders. “You know how you get when you’re sucked into those conference calls with marketing or whoever.”
“He missed four trains today,” I mutter out, pouting.
Sierra purses her lips. “Hey, you okay?”
“Fine.”
I haven’t told
her about bumping into Silas earlier. I’m also trying to convince myself that doing so has had zero effect on me. I’m trying tell myself that the sole reason for my sour mood is Blaine missing trains, not Silas bringing up the past.
Sierra nods. “Keys are in my purse by the front door.”
“Thanks.”
By the time the parking lot is totally empty at the train station across town, I know I haven’t somehow missed him.
He’s just not here.
I can feel the heat rising in my face as I dial his number for the eighth time in as many minutes, letting it ring and ring until it goes to voicemail. Again.
I slump in the seat, blowing air out through my lips and drumming my fingers across the steering wheel. I glance down at my dark phone, as if watching it will miraculously get Blaine to call and let me know that, yes, I have somehow missed him. Yes, he’s waiting at home with my whole family, waiting for me to get there so he can tell me everything is normal, and calm, and on track, and that the past is going to stay there.
But it doesn’t. I check my call settings for the third time, to make sure I’m getting service or on the right network or whatever. But I know at this point I’m just fishing in the dark.
The train’s long gone, and Blaine’s not here.
I drive in silence back across Shelter Harbor to my parents’ place, letting the streetlight trail across the windshield and my thoughts trail across my mind until I pull the car back into their driveway.
Then the phone rings.
And I know I should let him wait. I should hold off until the very last ring to pick up. But I of course answer halfway through the first damn ring.
“Hey!”
Blaine clears his throat. “Hey.”
“Did you miss the train?” I hate how eager, how needing my voice is.
There’s a silence for another few seconds before he answers.
“No, Ivy.”
I let out a sigh. “Oh my God, I can’t believe I missed you then! I’m so sorry!” I grin, reaching for the keys. “Hang on, I’ll come back to the station and get-“
“No, Ivy, I mean I didn’t miss the train because I never took it.”
I blink in the darkness of the car, my brow wrinkling. “What?”