Page 39 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

Noah Vance laughs during sex. Full, helpless, from the sternum, his forehead dropping to my shoulder, the whole bed shaking with it, and the laugh turns into a groan and the groan turns into my name, and we come apart together laughing, which I did not know was a thing bodies could do, and which I am never, ever going without again.

Afterward we’re a tangle in his wrecked regulation bed, my head on his chest, his fingers running slow through my hair. The drawer’s still open. The fish is watching us. Somewhere across the hall, Adaeze’s TV murmurs like the ocean.

“Okay, logistics,” I say, drawing a supervisory circle on his chest. “The apartment’s a write-off. No offense, but the couch faces the door, and I need you to know that as your girlfriend now, not your client, so we’re allowed to fix that. The cottage lease runs through September, and Mrs. Pruitt already asked if you’re coming back, and by asked I mean she made pie and left it on your side of the fence, which in Pruitt is a summons?—”

“Doc.” Fond. Doomed. He knows the momentum I carry.

“—and nest 41 is going to hatch inside seventy-two hours, I’ve seen the depression, so you need socks you can run in, because when it goes it goes fast, and Delgado’s bringing his own headlamp with the red filter, hebought his own?—”

“Abby.” His hand stills in my hair. When I tip my chin up, he’s looking down at me with the sunrise face, the unbudgeted one, item eight, and his voice comes out quiet and certain as a bearing. “I’m coming home. That’s the logistics.”

“Oh,” I say. Once for the world. And then, quieter, just for me, because some things you have to file twice to believe them: “Well. Yeah. Motion carries. Unanimous.”

I put my ear back over his heartbeat, steady as an engine, and start planning out loud—the hatch, the fall, the drawer situation, all of it—and he listens the way he’s listened all summer, the way nobody else ever has: like every word is intel.

“Hey, Noah?” I mumble, at the blurry edge of it, one last transmission before the tide takes me. “For the file. Best data point of my day. Still you. Every day it was you.”

His arms tighten. In the dark, against my hair, almost too quiet to log: “Countersigned.”

Somewhere in the middle of my five-year projection, I fall asleep mid-sentence.

He’ll tell me where I left off in the morning. He keeps track of everything.

Epilogue — Noah

Nest 41 goes at 2213 on a Thursday, and for the record, entered into evidence over my strenuous objection: I cried.

Not much. It was dark; there were extenuating factors. Eighty-seven hatchlings came boiling up out of the sand like the ground itself had decided on the ocean, this churning little stampede of determined idiots the size of poker chips, all of them hauling for the surf line under a sky with no moon because Abby chose this beach for its lighting ordinance, which she wrote, which the county passed because it was cheaper than continuing the meetings.

She ran the whole hatch like a boat crew. Delgado on the north flank with his personally purchased red headlamp, weeping openly, zero shame, exactly as forecast. Mrs. Pruitt in a lawn chair above the wrack line calling encouragement to individual turtles. Marnie, Gus, Kayla in her cleats—right feet this time—the knee-replacement charter captain, half of Flamingo Bingo. Every one of them recruited over one summer by one woman with a pamphlet supply and no concept of a stranger, all of them standing quiet in the dark, exactly where she put them, guarding a mile of open beach.

Turns out you can hold a mile with volunteers, if you’re her.

The last hatchling cleared the swash at 2251. Eighty-seven for eighty-seven. She stood in the tide line with her clipboard against her chest and watched the water take the final one, and then she turned around looking for me—first, before the data, before anybody, me—and that’s the frame I keep. Her face by red lamplight, the whole town behind her, the sea full of her life’s work swimming for the Gulf Stream.

“Status?” she called.

“All hands away,” I said, and my voice did something onaway, and Delgado blew his nose like a foghorn and ruined the moment, and she laughed the laugh, the full-tilt collapse, and came up the beach and into my chest, sandy, salt-smelling, mine.

Later, after the crowd dispersed and Mrs. Pruitt’s lawn chair was stowed and the beach was just beach again, the two of us walked the tide line alone, red lamps off, night vision earned. She was quiet—her version of quiet, which is a lower word count, not an absence—and at the pier she stopped and looked back at the dark dune line, the empty crater of nest 41, sixty-some days of her summer emptied into the sea in thirty-eight minutes.

“They won’t remember any of it,” she said. “That’s the part that gets me every season. The lights, the volunteers, the ordinance, the—none of it. They’ll just be out there for thirty years, and one night the females come back to this exact beach like it’s written in them, and they won’t know a single name of anybody who stood here in the dark making sure the door was open.”

“That’s not a complaint,” I said, because I know her grammar now.

“No.” She leaned back into me, my chin finding the top of her head, the fit of us settled law by now. “It’s the whole point. Best things I’ll ever do, nobody’s going to remember either.” A pause,and then, because she can’t not: “Except the water tower. Gus says the mural guy comes Thursday.”

I’ve seen the sketch. There’s a turtle on it the size of a Buick. There is also, allegedly, a small figure on the pier that Gus swears is “generic maritime personnel” and is wearing, unmistakably, tactical pants.

That was three weeks ago. This morning, the last Saturday of summer, she’s on our porch at dawn—cottage lease renewed through the year; Mrs. Pruitt cried, then denied it, then made pie—wearing my sweatshirt and a t-shirt of unknown content underneath, drinking her coffee, watching the light come up over the dunes.

Her grant closed out yesterday. Final report filed: reef recovery documented, cache-dump damage assessed and already healing, one smuggling network entered into the permanent scientific record asanthropogenic disturbance, resolved. The journal wants the coral paper by Christmas. The court wants her twice next spring; the federal prosecutor calls her “our best witness” in the tone of a man who has learned to just let the staghorn testimony happen.

And the Gulf Coast Marine Conservation Alliance wants her as their new field research director, based out of a two-room office above the bait shop, starting October 1st.

She said yes Tuesday. She told me Wednesday, casual, mid-dinner, between the salad and an anecdote about Carl—“oh, also, I’m staying forever, can you pass the bread”—because she’d known for a month she was staying and assumed I’d worked it out from context. Fromcontext.I’d spent August quietly pricing what it would cost to move a maritime security career towhatever coast her next grant landed on. Had a folder. Had a spreadsheet, three tabs.

She found the spreadsheet Thursday. She’s framed the first tab. It’s in thehallway.