by Marni Mann
I’d come looking to talk to him anyway. I guess now I’d have what I wanted.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
WE COULDN’T GO BACK to the Coswells’ house; Shane and Brady would still be working there for a few more hours. And I didn’t want Brady to see us walking to or from Saint’s boat, so I didn’t think that was the right place to go, either. I locked my car, opened my purse and dropped my keys inside. “Take me wherever you want, except my house or yours.”
He didn’t hesitate. It didn’t even appear as though he needed to think about where the destination would be. His fingers clasped mine and he led me back toward the restaurant, around the building and down the dock, until we reached the dingy. I could smell the lobster on his hoodie; there was mud caked on the thighs of his jeans. He probably wanted to take a shower, but there was no way I’d ever let him do that. I wanted him as dirty, raw, and honest as he could be.
He stepped into the boat first, balancing himself before he reached for me. I gripped his fingers and took a seat on one of the boards while he started the engine. He sat on the plank near the motor and we slowly glided out and into the open water. Several docks, residential and commercial jetted into the ocean, and as we traveled by different drivers, Saint waved.
This was the first time I was observing the scenery from the water’s perspective in full daylight. The mountains in the distance were just as colorful as the view from the Coswells’ backyard, but from here they were even richer. My senses took it all in: the scent of the salt, the swishing breeze of freshness, Saint’s eyes that periodically covered my body. The combination was exhilarating. And if I hadn’t had so many questions, I would have even been turned on.
I didn’t ask where he was taking me, or how long we’d be on the boat, or when he was going to tell me what was happening between him and Rae. I just let it all go for the moment. Being on the water was almost as good as being in it. I was feeling everything around me.
And I was sober.
We moved into an inlet where the water was so dark I couldn’t see the bottom. There were many boats parked nearby, but we weren’t near the shore or a dock. This was a floating harbor where the other boats appeared to be anchored. Saint wove around several of them before coming to a stop. The boat in front of us was white, bright and gleaming with a blue, yellow and red stripe close to the bottom.
“Is this one yours?” I asked.
He nodded. “I have a few, but this is the one I drive.”
Once we were aligned with the back of the boat, he turned off the motor and tied the dingy with rope. Holding my hand, he helped me step up onto the deck.
“The rail is where we haul the traps,” he said, pointing to the side of the boat. Then his finger moved toward the middle where there were several tables set up with buckets, rope, and other devices. Most of the items looked complicated and beyond my knowledge. “We do the baiting and prepping here. And over there,” he pointed to opposite side of where we stood, “is the live-tank.”
This was his place…his home. And I could tell that by the tone of his voice, in the way his eyes roamed over each spot he pointed at, by the briefest of smiles that danced over his lips. He was so comfortable here.
My questions could wait. First, I needed to meet this side of Saint.
“The live-tank,” I said, “is that where you keep the lobsters?”
“While we’re fishing, yes. Then I unload them and bring them to the restaurant.”
“So where are the traps?”
He laughed, his hands gently pressing down on my shoulders. “Your questions are cute.”
“Cute?” I felt my face blush. That was a word I never expected to hear him say. I was glad I got the chance.
“I’ve done this for so long, I forget not everyone is familiar with lobstering.” With every passing second, he was becoming even more at ease, almost carefree. “We drop the traps at the beginning of the season. They stay there, then each morning and throughout the afternoon we empty them, re-bait, then drop them again to soak.”
I leaned over the side of the boat trying to view the traps. If there were any in the area, I wasn’t able to see them. The water was too deep, too dark. “So if every fisherman does that, how do you know which traps are yours?”
“We all have different colored buoys.” He left me briefly to open one of the compartments along the side of the boat. He removed a buoy and held it out for me to observe. “They float on top of the water right above the trap.”
“And no one steals each others’ lobsters?”
With the sun reflecting off his face, his eyes seemed to lighten to a sandy hue. His hair was so dark, I could see glints of navy on his locks. My gaze fixed on his lips, how they moved so fluidly, how they grinned when he described something extra special to him.
“Stealing happens every year,” he said, “but the thief is usually caught. The guys around the Gulf of Maine are a pretty tight group. We watch each other’s backs, even though we’re really competitors.” He set the buoy back in the compartment and led me farther down the boat and through the only door. “This is called the wheelhouse.” There wasn’t much in this closed off section besides a row of seating, a steering wheel, and lots of computer equipment and monitors. A windshield covered the opposite wall. “And down here is the cabin.”
He opened a small hatch and three steps followed. He went down first, waiting for me at the bottom, holding my hand the whole way.
“Kitchen, bathroom…and there’s a bed back there, too,” he said.
It was small down there, but with enough amenities that he could stay the night if he wanted, without having to return to shore to eat or use the restroom.
We went back up to the wheelhouse and took a seat on the bench. He kept the door to the outside shut as it was even breezier on the water. I turned my body toward him and just as I was about to cross my legs in front of me, he caught the heels of my boots and pulled them onto his lap. I could feel the warmth from his fingers as they rubbed my toes.
I hadn’t bothered to dry my hair after my swim. I’d braided it, the long twist hanging over my shoulder with a baseball hat covering my head. The tiny pieces that usually framed my face had escaped the elastic and tickled my cheeks. A few were even fighting against my lip gloss. Saint lifted the bottom of the braid and flicked the strands over his fingers.
Being as close as I was, I had the chance to really study his profile. The gel in his hair had long worn off and the locks on the top of his head had started to curl, sticking in different directions. His scruff had grown even longer than this morning, long enough to pull; the thick black spikes covered his cheeks, his chin, and rimmed his top lip. The tanned skin of his neck peeked out of his hoodie; the collar let out hints of the waves tattooed on his shoulders.
I let my eyes drift away from him and to this little room we sat in. This was his place, yet I felt just as comfortable, just as buoyant as he appeared. The boat gently rocked against the short surges of sea and the vibration relaxed me. Saint’s presence quieted everything in my head—everything except the lingering questions I’d had from earlier.
He leaned his back against the boat and tilted his neck toward me. “Ask me whatever you want.” It was as though he’d heard what I was thinking.
I stared into his eyes like it was the first time I had ever been in his presence. His irises had darkened back to caramel. They gleamed at me, his pupils changing size every time he blinked. It wasn’t just the color that I recognized from this morning. It was the look of being lost that so closely resembled his father’s. I knew the answer, but I had to ask anyway.
“So Dennis is your dad?” He broke our stare to look out the window of the wheelhouse. I rested my hand on the back of his neck, my fingers running through his hair. “You can trust me.”
He nodded. “He’s my father; it’s just been a long time since he’s acted like one. He’s…the whole situation is fucked up.” He pushed his head against me, sending my fingers deeper into
his scalp.
I didn’t want my nails to dig into his skin, so I pulled away. He clamped down on my arm. “Don’t stop,” he said, so I didn’t. Sighing into the air, he continued, “He’s a drunk, a drug addict. He lost everything… including me. I had no idea that Marilyn used to help him out. I never really talked to the Coswells that much—the few times I did, Marilyn was fairly nice, but her husband was a real asshole.”
The Coswells was a conversation I wanted to have with him later. Right now I really needed to learn more about Saint and his family.
“Are you in touch with him at all?” I asked.
He shook his head. “He doesn’t have a cell phone or an address.” The muscles in his jaw tightened. “I know you think I spend my nights with tourists. That’s not the truth. I have in the past, I can’t deny that, and you saw me kissing that girl the other night, but it really doesn’t happen as much as you think. Hardly ever, actually.” He turned his head toward me again, showing me the honesty in his eyes, in his expression. “I’m really out looking for my dad every night. He needs help, and I want to give it to him. A week or so ago I’d heard he was all the way down in New Hampshire so I drove there. Couldn’t find him anywhere, and I haven’t been able to…until this morning.”
That must have been where he’d gone after our first kiss, when he didn’t return to his boat for almost two days. He had been carrying a duffle bag; I had thought he’d spent the night with a tourist. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I won’t let anyone else leave me again, Drew. No one. I won’t let another fucking door get slammed in my face.
Those words of his had haunted me ever since he’d spoken them.
“Was your dad the only one who left you?” I asked.
He brought my hand down from his neck and placed it on his chest, resting his fingers on top of mine. “My mom, too. She got into a fight with my dad after they’d been drinking one night, and she decided to cool off and go for a swim. She never came back. I was twelve years old when that happened.” He squeezed my fingers. “It destroyed my dad. He blamed himself, and he couldn’t handle raising me, running the boat and delivering the lobsters. So he started taking uppers to stay awake longer and everything for him just fell apart.”
“You have no idea where your mom is?”
He tightened his grip on my fingers as he stood from the bench and led me outside. We leaned against the side of the boat, our clasped hands resting along the flat edge, and looked down into the water. “I know exactly where she is.” He took a deep breath, his eyes lifting to the horizon. Then he faced me. The pain was spreading to his lips, his hands. I could feel it flowing into me. “She drowned in that water, Drew. They found her body the next morning, floating near the public beach. The tide brought her in.”
Everything started shifting into place. The reason he had taken the bottle of wine out of my hands, why he didn’t want me to go swimming after I’d had a couple drinks, why he had warned me of the vices I might reach for, was because of how his mom had died. He wasn’t just trying to protect me; he was trying to prevent the past from happening again. His parents, the people who were supposed to keep him safe, had completely abandoned him. It was no wonder he didn’t want a relationship with any of the women he’d been with. He wasn’t able to trust that they wouldn’t leave him, too.
Brady had made it seem like Saint was a whore, though he never told me why. Saint wasn’t even close to that. He was emotionally fractured. His foundation had crumbled and he’d been shielding himself from getting hurt again. I couldn’t blame him for that. I would have done the same.
In fact, I had been doing the same since my parents had died.
It had demolished me and everything around me.
Beside my friendships, the only thing I had really committed myself to was the water. It was what I used to unleash my emotions. I opened my cage and let the current make me feel alive again.
Caged.
“Your tattoos,” I said. “The ones on your back...”
He nodded as if he knew exactly what I was asking. “They’re lobster traps. They’re more than that, though. There was a time in my life—not too long ago—when I was trapped. Pulled beneath the waves, into the hole I had climbed into. It was a dark, damaging place. That ink reminds me of how I never want to visit there again.”
I understood that completely. I even knew what that hole felt like; I’d been pulled into one of my own, through the neck of a bottle that didn’t seem to have a bottom. Alcohol was something I never would have normally reached for unless I was out socializing. But after the incident, it was something I depended on. I was fully aware of that now.
“What happened to your parents is…horrific. There isn’t anything I can say to make it pretty.” I would never have told him I was sorry for his mom’s death or his dad’s disease. I hated when people said that to me as if they were apologizing for something that wasn’t their fault.
He lifted my hair out of my lip gloss and tucked it behind my ear. “As fucked up as this sounds, I’m glad you get it. Someone who hasn’t experienced what we have, they don’t understand that kind of pain, or the things we do to defuse it.” He turned around, leaning his back against the boat and steering me to the front of him. He gripped my hands and held them at his sides. “I have to tell you something, and I need you to look at me—really look at me—when I do.”
Something in my stomach began to flutter.
“I heard you on the phone the other night. I don’t know who you were talking to, but you were outside on the lawn,” he said.
He’d heard my conversation with Gianna. And the noise I’d heard in the woods, the one that had freaked me out enough to go inside… it was him.
“You said you didn’t want my hands to stop touching you and that it had been a long time since you’d felt that way. I feel that way, too.” He rested my fingers on his lower stomach and palmed my sides, letting them travel up slowly and stopping just below my ribs. “And when you touch me, it feels different. Different from anybody else.”
My breath was caught in my throat. My whole body was throbbing under his grip. Wind whipped past our faces, but my skin was flushed.
His fingers rose once more, landing on my cheeks. He tilted my face toward him, his lips pausing several inches above me. “I know you heard the argument I had with Rae. She was the girl I told you about, the one I dated before she got all crazy on me. Things are over between us and they have been for months, long before you came into town. And there isn’t any competition between Brady and me—at least not on my part.” With the pad of his thumb, he circled my mouth. “No more leaving, no more slammed doors. For either of us. I want you, Drew, but I want you here. In Maine.”
No words came out of me. Just a soft, sweet sigh that sounded just like a moan. It probably was…my lungs had emptied; my muscles had tightened as his body pressed against mine.
His eyes went to my lips, his thumb parted them. He licked his, teasing me, showing me what he was able to do. “Tell me you want me, too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I WANTED HIM.
My entire body was screaming for him.
Even more than that, I believed him—it was his word against Brady’s, and something about his reluctance to share it with me from the start made me trust Saint more.
Tell me you want me, too.
It seemed like the answer he was hoping for wouldn’t only confirm my feelings for him; it would confirm that I was also committed to staying here. That was a lot to promise.
Too much, actually.
Maine wasn’t my home. I didn’t truly know anyone here other than Saint and Brady, and Brady’s motives were questionable at this point. I definitely couldn’t trust Rae after what I’d heard her tell Saint. Gianna and her parents were my only family, and they were in Florida. I couldn’t stay here just because of Saint. I needed to want to live here, to feel comfortable here, and with everything I was learning about my mom and my grandmother,
I didn’t know if that would be possible.
But staying would at least give me more of an opportunity to learn the truth.
I wrapped my fingers around his hands, which were still pressed on my cheeks, and I closed my eyes. The way his body curved around mine felt right. His touch warmed more than just my skin. When he didn’t just come from work, his smell reminded me of the freshness my mom had always described. I had wanted this moment…waited for it, even. But when I opened my eyes, I couldn’t give him the answer he was waiting for.
“I want you, too.” His thumb left my parted lips as if he was preparing the space for his tongue. “But I can’t promise you that I’m going to stay in Maine.”
“I won’t say I’m not disappointed.” His eyes moved to my mouth, then back. “That doesn’t mean I’m not going to try to persuade you.”
Since Saint had first kissed me, I had wanted more from him than he’d been willing to give. I liked this new side of him, the one that was demanding things and pursuing me. I didn’t know if it would be enough to make me change my mind.
“I hope you do,” I replied.
He was growing, hardening against me. My body was reacting to him as it always did. But his eyes did something to me, too. They pierced my soul.
His lips moved a little closer. “So you won’t stop me if I try to kiss you?”
I shook my head, a grin spreading across my face as I moved to meet his mouth. His tongue slowly caressed the inside of my lips, circling my tongue. Goose bumps rose on my skin. As he deepened the embrace, I pulled his lip between my teeth and gently bit down. His eyes burst open. And when he smiled, my cheeks turned red.
“Will you bring me back here again?” I asked, finally pulling away.
His tongue swiped over his bottom lip as though he were trying to taste me one more time. “Are you asking me to share this spot with you?”