Page 46 of Pull Me Under

During, I don’t have to think. During, it’s just sensation and heat and the brief, merciful silence of a brain that won’t shut up any other way.

After, there’s the cold. The reality. The slow, awful process of separating and finding clothes in the dim light of a work lamp that’s seen better days.

I’m shaking – from cold or adrenaline, or both. I push him back, slide away from the wall, yank my jeans up. Don’t look at him.

‘Before you spiral,’ I say, voice flat, clinical, the voice I use for diagnostic reports, ‘I’m on the pill. So you can stand down from that particular panic.’

He exhales. Nods. Doesn’t say anything, which is somehow worse than if he’d made a joke.

My shirt’s somewhere on the deck. I find it by the engine housing, pull it over my head. He’s getting dressed too, methodical and quiet. I can feel him watching me but I refuse to meet his eyes.

I jump down from the boat to the shed floor, grab a rag from the workbench and toss it in his general direction without looking. ‘You can put your shoes on. I’m not going to make you breakfast.’

He climbs down after me. Slower. I hear him pulling on his boots, the clink of his belt buckle, the small ordinary sounds of a man reassembling himself. But he doesn’t leave.

I busy myself at the workbench because I need something to do with my hands that isn’t touching him. Straighten a spanner that’s already straight. Wipe a surface that’s already clean. The shed feels smaller with him still in it – all that heat and silence taking up space I need back.

‘Brynn—’

‘Your shoes are on. That was the deal.’

But he’s at the workbench now. Leaning against it like he belongs here, like this is a conversation and not an evacuation. His eyes are moving over the shed – the camp bed, the tools, Ghost watching from the top shelf with the expression of a creature who has seen quite enough – and I can feel him cataloguing it the way I catalogue engine parts. Taking inventory of my life.

Then I see what’s in his hands.

My notebook. Open. The one where I keep my lists, my plans, my supplier contacts and harbour fees and licensing requirements and the half-formed architecture of a future I’m trying to build from nothing.

My stomach drops through the concrete.

‘You’re reading my lists?’

He has the decency to look caught. Almost guilty. ‘It was on the bench. I just⁠—’

‘That notebook is every plan I’ve made since I got here.’ My voice comes out low and dangerous, which is better than the alternative – which is shattered. ‘Every reason I’m staying. Supplier contacts. Harbour fees. The licensing application I’ve been filling in for three days. The renovation schedule for the cottage. That’s not pillow talk, Jude. That’s my life.’

White-hot fury floods through me, burning away everything else – the softness, the vulnerability, the way my body still feels warm where he touched me.

‘You want my body? Fine. Take it. That’s just skin. But that?’ I rip the notebook from his hands. ‘That’s me. You don’t get to have that too.’

The words come out hard. Sharp. They land between us like a slap and I watch him flinch.

‘Brynn—’

‘Out. Go. Go be conflicted somewhere else.’

For a moment, he doesn’t move. Just stands there, shirt rumpled, hair wrecked, jaw working like he’s chewing on words he can’t quite spit out.

Then he steps past me, into the night. But he looks back and rubs his jaw like he can’t quite shake me off. Like I’m stuck to him now, oil and salt and the ghost of my mouth on his.

I watch him go. Watch him disappear into the rain and the dark.

Then I close the door and lean against it, eyes shut, heart pounding.

‘That was a mistake,’ I say aloud – to myself, to Ghost on the top shelf, to the universe at large.

A beat.

A mistake that’s singing in my veins. Burning in the pit of my gut.