Page 46 of Harbor Me

Friday morning the sky goes the color of a bruise. The forecast's been talking about it since yesterday. A big system rolling in off the water, the kind that empties the harbor of anything that isn't tied down and lashed tight. Marcus has been checking lines since dawn. Tommy's securing the tarps on the dry-stored boats. Aiden's been on the phone with three different owners about getting their boats pulled or repositioned, and his voice on those calls is the most I've heard from him in two days.

I'm at the window watching the water turn from dark green to deep gray when he comes through the office door without knocking.

"Storm's coming in faster than they said. I need you on the dock."

My stomach drops. Not from fear of the storm.

He's standing in the doorway filling it the way he fills every doorway, and his T-shirt is already damp across the shoulders from the first spitting rain. The cotton is pulled tight across his back. I can see every line of him, the way the muscle runs down from his neck to his shoulder, the way his arms look when they're wet.

My body answers him before my brain gets in on the action. Three weeks of watching those large, capable hands on rope and metal and wood, and four nights ago they were inside me, careful and relentless and sure, and I want them back so badly it makes me dizzy.

The wanting hits at the same time as the guilt, tangled together, inseparable, desire knotted up with the knowledge that his fingers were slick with me while I was keeping the biggest secret of my life pressed down in my chest like a stone.

"Vanessa. Now."

I grab my rain jacket off the back of the chair.

The rain goes sideways inside of ten minutes.

It's nothing like the gentle stuff that rolled through my first week. This comes in sheets, hard enough to sting bare skin, the harbor churning gray-green and angry. The boats at the guest dock are already pitching, fenders squealing between hulls and pilings, and two of the mooring lines on the outer slip look like they're thinking about giving up.

"Vanessa, grab the spring line on the port side of that Grady-White and put a cleat hitch on it. You know what a cleat hitch is?"

"I've watched Tommy do it about six hundred times."

"Then do it like Tommy and not like a YouTube tutorial."

I do it like Tommy. It holds. I'm pathetically proud of myself for about three seconds before the wind rips my hood back and dumps a gallon of rain directly into my face.

Marcus is down at the far end tying off the sailboat that belongs to the man who always wants his depth reader looked at. Tommy's dragging extra fenders from the storage shed, running them down the dock in armfuls like he's delivering sandbags in a flood. Aiden's everywhere. Making sure none of the dry-stored boats have settled crooked. Retying lines the wind's worked loose. Hauling a dinghy up the ramp one-handed while rain streams off his jaw.

He hasn't spoken to me beyond orders, and I haven't expected him to. But working next to him in this is different from sharing an office in silence. Out here the silence has a job. We're passing each other on the dock, our hands finding the same rope, his arm reaching over mine to grab a fender that's slipped, and every time we're close the air between us does something that has nothing to do with the barometric pressure.

"Two more on the west dock," Marcus yells over the wind. He's pointing at Tommy, then at himself. "We got those. You two good here?"

"Go. And head home as soon as that’s taken care of. Before you get stuck here." Aiden doesn't look at me when he says it. Marcus jogs off with Tommy in tow, and then it's just us and the rain and whatever's left to tie down.

A gust catches me mid-step and I stumble sideways, grabbing a piling. My rain jacket is useless. I'm soaked through underneath it, my shirt plastered to my skin, water running down the back of my neck and into my bra. Uncomfortable doesn't begin to cover it.

He's worse off. He didn't bother with a rain jacket at all, just walked out in his T-shirt like the weather is beneath his notice, and now it's vacuum-sealed to his chest and shoulders, dark with rain, showing everything. Every time he braces against a line I can see his stomach tense through the wet cotton. Every abdominal outlined perfectly. Muscles rippling.

I should not be noticing this. There's a storm happening.

I notice it anyway. My body has apparently decided that life-threatening weather is a perfectly reasonable time to remember what his hands feel like, and there isn't a thing I can do about it except keep tying knots and hoping the rain hides whatever my face is doing.

"That's the last one," he yells. "Get inside."

I follow him up the ramp to the workshop. He shoves the big sliding door open and we duck in together. He pulls it shut behind us and the noise suddenly drops by half. Rain hammering the roof, the wind finding gaps in the siding and whistling through, but after the open dock it feels almost quiet.

I'm standing in the middle of the workshop floor dripping onto the concrete. He's by the door, pushing wet hair off his forehead with both hands, breathing hard.

Neither of us moves.

He's three feet away from me. Soaking wet, wide chest heaving, arms streaked with rain and dock grime. The workshop is dim, just the overhead fluorescents buzzing, casting everything in that sepia light that makes it look like a photograph.

I should say something normal. Thank you or I'm freezing or where are the towels. Something that keeps us standing on our respective sides of this concrete floor like two reasonable adults who work together and didn't do what we did on that dock.

What I actually do is peel off my useless rain jacket and drop it on the floor. My shirt underneath is see-through. I know what he's looking at because I can feel the heat of his gaze on my skin. The same way I could sense his eyes on me through the bar mirror a week ago.