Page 58 of On Dry Land

“You don’t have to unpack or explain anything to me, Spencer. This is your house; you can live here as you please.”

He holds eye contact, chewing on his lower lip. I don’t step further inside, having every intention of turning right around and going back to my house. If I move in here with him, it will ruin everything.

“Come in, Dry. Plenty of room for your stuff in the wardrobe. And I’m going to need help putting all this away.”

He waves a hand at the bag of food sitting at his feet before beckoning me inside. No, I think, unable to say the word out loud even though I should. Turn around and leave, I urge myself. And then, like every other lovesick idiot I abhor, I do the opposite of what is best for me.

The guest cottage is roughly eight hundred square feet of space—a single large room divided into a small living area, a kitchenette, and a queen-sized bed. The bathroom has both a shower and a tub taking up the majority of the space, and a small washer/dryer unit next to the linen closet. It’s a good size for one person.

It’s not the best size for two people and a cat. Two people, it has to be said, who are probably equally bad at sharing space. It’s been a long time for both of us since we’ve had to live in such close proximity with another person and, at least for me, a long time since I’ve shared a bed with anyone. Spencer himself, on the few nights he has slept over with me, was the first person I’ve done that with in years. It’s possible we won’t even last through the night before I’m back up at my half-wrecked house and crawling alone into my own bed.

I swing my foot idly where it’s propped up on my ankle, watching Spencer in the kitchen from my vantage point on the bed. I’d shoved my clothes into the wardrobe and helped him put away the food we’d taken from my house, gotten annoyed by how little food Spencer already had here, and am now lying on the bed resting at his urging. I don’t need rest, but I can see the appeal of being made to do so and having everything all in one room. I have a perfect view of Spencer making pasta in the kitchen and have an equally unhindered view of him when he goes to twitch back the curtain on the front window and peer out. When he does it for a third time, I clear my throat.

“Spencer, what are you doing?”

“Keeping an eye on the movers,” he says immediately and with not a single ounce of embarrassment. I very nearly smile. Even in Siren’s Point, home to the nosiest bastards I’ve ever met, people wouldn’t so boldly admit to spying on each other as he just did.

“Why?”

“Because they’re in your house,” he replies, pulling the curtain back into place and spearing me with an incredulous look, like I’m the one being ridiculous. “They’re here, and we’re here, so we have to keep an eye on them.”

“The Reeds have been married for thirteen years. They have an unholy amount of children, who all have alphabetically consecutive names. Every time Tanner sees me in town, he asks me how the lobsters are behaving. Two Christmases ago, Mia made me a wreath for the front door.”

“There’s no way of knowing who people actually are, Dry. They could still be murderers, no matter how many holiday ornaments they make you.”

I twitch my foot back and forth, the motion languid enough that Demon, chewing on her own foot in the opposite corner, isn’t tempted to attack it.

“I suppose,” I allow, while privately thinking that if the Reeds are secretly a crime duo, then I’ve really lost my touch on reality and cannot be trusted to make judgments of others.

“I know they’re not actually criminals,” Spencer says, eye roll clear in his voice as he turns off the boiling water and pulls a jar of pasta sauce from the cupboard. “I still want to check and make sure they’re not up to anything nefarious, though.”

Demon, yawning so widely she tips backward, scrambles to her feet and steps awkwardly across the mussed bedspread toward me. It’s funny how she’ll run around the room, chasing toys and zooming up anything she can stick her claws into, but then look so ungainly doing something as simple as walking. I hold a hand out to her to sniff once she’s close. She ignores me with a meow and uses her claws to climb up onto my belly.

“Ouch,” I tell her, but my suffering is ignored. Yawning again—which comes out with a squeak I refuse to find adorable—she turns in a tight spiral, spinning around and around before finally settling down in a ball. She sighs as though her life is nothing but problems. I watch her, amused when she appears to fall asleep the moment her eyes are closed.

“Aw,” Spencer says, leaving the stove and the sauce heating up to come look down at the kitten sleeping on my stomach.

“I have to pee,” I tell him.

“Too bad,” he replies, bending down and hovering his face barely an inch above mine. I tilt my chin, and he closes the distance, the kiss as soft and weightless as the kitten.

The kissing surprises me. Actually, nearly everything about Spencer surprises me. Had I been made to guess, I would have assumed kissing was firmly in the category of things not allowed. But, I suppose, as I’m learning, it’s going to depend on the person. I’ve never kissed Ryan, any of the times we’ve been together, and kissing Shiloh had always left me vaguely uncomfortable. It meant nothing to me, but I could feel it meaning something to him, and I hated it. Even Dylan, who so often weaponized affection as a way to coerce me or to win arguments, became someone I kissed out of duty and not desire.

Spencer offering it had been a surprise in that he’d offered it at all, but also in that I enjoyed it. And will continue to enjoy it, apparently, as Spencer kisses me again before retreating to the kitchen. He’d been adamant that he was to make dinner tonight, and when I’d told him we could just order food and pick it up, he’d repeated, more firmly, that he wanted to make it and that I could relax. From what I can see, all he’s doing is boiling pasta and pouring a red sauce on top, yet it’s far more effort than I usually put into cooking. Gently, I brush my fingers across the crown of Demon’s head and down her knobby spine.

“Why are you looking at me so seriously?” Spencer asks, carefully setting two plates of pasta on the mattress before scooting in next to me. He’s close enough that our arms will rub together and probably make it a little difficult to eat. I push into a less reclined position, Demon meowing in outrage as I jostle her, before tucking her nose back into her tail and lapsing once more into sleep.

“Thinking about kissing,” I admit, which makes Spencer laugh softly. He hands me my plate. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Weirded out that I kissed you, but I won’t let you touch my dick?”

“Curious,” I admit, twirling noodles around the tines of my fork. “And possibly misinterpreting. I’d rather understand than make a mistake.”

“Mm.” He hums around a bite of pasta, one eye squinted shut as he thinks. “Well, I don’t kiss everybody, I can tell you that much. It’s a situational thing, for me, I suppose. Someone kissed me really…enthusiastically, once, and I don’t think they meant it to be a bad thing. They were just being…passionate. But it wasn’t nice for me. To me, it felt like they were raping my mouth or something, I don’t know.”

I pause, fork held above my plate, and look over at Spencer, frowning down at his food as he thinks. He makes an aborted shrugging motion.

“I guess with kissing, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what I like or don’t like. I kissed you because I wanted to be close to you; show you how I felt. I wanted to give you something.”