Page 67 of Lost and Found

“A hug? For your birthday? Have a little faith.”

He tightens more. His head tucks down into the crook of my shoulder, and mine angles reflexively and I—shit. I take a deep sniff of his neck like he’s my last meal. Mint, salt, maybe a hint of vanilla. Something rich and complex but refreshing.

“Sorry,” I mutter, stepping away.

“I snuck a whiff, too,” he says conversationally. Probably it’s just too early for us to keep up pretenses.

“You gonna be warm enough in this?” He reaches over and zips up my windbreaker.

“I think so.”

He shakes his head.

“I won’t?”

He shakes his head again.

“I’ll go grab another layer?”

He nods.

We make the thirty-minute drive out to the bay in companionable silence, stopping at a gas station for some appalling breakfast sandwiches that neither of us can choke down, and packs of waxy chocolate doughnuts that we devour. Silas says he looked up the conditions and that they should be calm, but we both take some precautionary meds for motion sickness anyway, as approved by Dr. Moseley. I am inexplicably nervous about Silas’s birthday gift, so I’m hoping they’ll curb the stomach flutters from that, too.

The wind is bracing when we climb out of the truck at the docks. I let out a little surprised yelp at the bite of it on my cheeks, and he tosses me a thick, shearling-lined vest he had the foresight to grab. I throw it over my thickest flannel jacket and pull on the blue beanie I borrowed from him, too. He yanks it down on one side with another admonishing headshake for me.

“Who doesn’t own a single hat?” he says.

“They’re against my religion,” I explain.

“Which is weird, because I think most religions specifically feature a special hat,” he observes.

“I have great hair. And I can’t pull them off.”

He tugs on his mustard-yellow beanie, and it’s ludicrous how he manages to make the stretch of some fabric over part of his head look sexy. A muscle flickers in his jaw and the laugh lines around his eyes crease. “Bea, I promise you can pull off anything you want to when you’re with me.”

Absolutely flirting. I don’t mind his nicknames, but damn, it’s potent when he says my name.

It’s now been nineteen days since our night on the couch, not that I’ve counted, and unfortunately, time has only sharpened and exaggerated the memory of it and made a hundred other moments feel weighted in between.

At this point, though, even if his flirting is a little torturous, I’m doing my best to quit overthinking it. Overthinking equals more thinking, which only equates to morewantingat this point, anyway. Plus, it’s not as if I’ve been the paragon of modesty 100 percent of the time. It slips out of me naturally, too, and I’m tired of wrestling with that part of my nature. I’m trying to interpret it as a sign that I’m doing well. A little bit of my old self resurfacing.

And it’s his birthday, so, screw it.

“If I did start pulling things off, I might never get them back,” I say.

I regret it the instant I see the look on his face. I’ve got no idea if he found my underwear after our night together. Maybe he did find them and didn’t even know whose they were. He would have been well within his rights to possess an entire cache of other women’s forgotten panties.

Either way, he has no clue what I’m talking about.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

I laugh again and turtle into my vest. “Nothing. Don’t even worry about it. Seriously.”

We come upon the marker for our meeting spot, a cement table under a light pole glowing through diaphanous fog. I shamelessly huddle closer to his warmth while we wait for more people to arrive, and my pulse spikes when I see part of his birthday gift walking down the pier our way.

“That looks like my brother.”

He frowns at me before he stands up and greets Wren and Ellis, quickly hugging them both. “What are you doing here?”