Page 25 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

“Two years, the job was clean,” he says. “Boats. Weather. Nothing living to defend. Then Rafi hands me a folder, and there’s a woman in it who filmed the wrong boat, and I thought—” A breath moves through him. “I thought, I can hold a perimeter around a stranger. That’s arithmetic. I’m good at arithmetic.”

He stops there. The pie sits untouched between us. And here’s where the old me—the one who narrated her way through every silence like silence was a fire to be extinguished—would have rushed in with something. Instead I do the thing he taught me without teaching me: I hold the quiet and let him verify it’s safe.

“The part I can’t file,” he says finally, slower now, “is that I’d make the same calls again. That’s what the review board couldn’t fix. Every decision was right, by everything I knew when I made it, and it still ended in that hold. So you can’t even promise yourselfnever again, because there was no lesson. There was just the world being wrong about itself for one night, and me being the instrument.” His hand flattens on the table. “You asked why I do boats. Boats are honest about what they are. That’s the whole answer.”

“And people aren’t?”

“People are the paperwork the world files under one heading and turns out to be another.”

“Noah.” I wait until he looks up. “What heading am I filed under?”

The rain fills a long pause.

“Pending,” he says, so quietly it’s almost the storm talking, and my heart does something that has no business being this loud in a kitchen.

He looks at me then. All the way. No wall, no lighthouse intervals—just a man at a table with everything showing, and the rain roaring softly on the roof of my little house at the end of the lane.

“You were never arithmetic, Doc. Not by the muffin. I want that on the record.”

“Noah.” My voice comes out half its usual size, and the rain holds the roof down over both of us, this one small lit room in all that weather.

“I don’t know how to do this.” Quiet, steady, terrifying. “The thing you do—doors open, everything out on the table, soup for strangers. I’ve watched you all summer like it’s a language I used to speak. And I keep—I catalog you. It’s the only way I know how to—I know the note order in the junk drawer. I know the parrotfish argument you lost to sleep in the middle of. I knowyour three seconds of quiet before you win. I’m not—men like me don’t get to want?—”

“Finish that sentence and I swear to God I will fight you in this kitchen.”

It startles a sound out of him—not the exhale, not the almost. A real one, short and rough and shocked, like something breaking open, and I’m out of my chair without any recollection of standing, and the kitchen is very small and the rain is very loud, and I stop exactly where I stopped two nights ago. One arm’s length. The spot where the something stands.

“Here’s my record,” I say, and my heart is absolutely deafening. “For the file. I came here for turtles. I had a plan—season, dataset, publish, leave. And then Rafi sent me a grumpy wall who reads beaches like I read reefs, who eats soup with old ladies at gunpoint basically, who rewired nothing buttoleratedme rewiring the porch for hatchlings he’ll never see, who keeps my dumb notes in his kit bag—Delgado told me, don’t you dare be mad at Delgado—and every single morning this summer, the best data point of my day has been finding out you’re still here. So the question is not whether men like you get to want things, Noah. The question is what you want.”

His chair scrapes back. He stands up slow, the way the tide comes in, both of us in the red dark, and one of his hands comes up and tucks a piece of escaped hair behind my ear with a precision that dismantles me completely. His hand doesn’t leave. It settles along my jaw like it’s been briefed for years on exactly where to hold.

“Say the stop word anytime,” he murmurs. “There’s no protocol after this.”

“Okay,” I whisper. Once for the world. And then, softer, for me: “Okay.”

“Good,” I say. “I’ve read your protocols. They’re very boring.”

The last thing I see before his mouth reaches mine is the almost-smile losing the almost.

Chapter 10

Noah

She tastes like the joke she was halfway through making.

That’s the first intel of the new world: Abby kisses the way she does everything—all in, no perimeter, laughing into it. Her mouth opens under mine and the sound she makes, half hum, half sigh, goes through me like current through seawater, and eight years of discipline reorganizes itself on the spot around a single new priority. Her fingers are already in my hair. Her glass of water is abandoned somewhere behind us, and the rain is coming down like applause.

I walk her back one step, two, until she’s against the counter, and lift her onto it because the height difference has been an open logistical issue for weeks and I am, at the end of everything, a problem-solver. She laughs, bright and breathless, right against my lips, and hooks her knees around me and pulls me in like I’m the one being rescued.

“Hi,” she says, glowing, absurd, her nose an inch from mine, like we’re being introduced at the world’s smallest conference.

“Hi yourself.”

“Just confirming this is happening. For the record. Timestamped.”

“Noted for the record.” I kiss the corner of her jaw, the spot below her ear, and feel her whole body answer, a shiver that starts where my mouth is and ends in her heels at the small of my back. “Countersigned.”

“Oh, he does paperwork jokes now—” and then my teeth find her earlobe and the sentence dies somewhere lovely.