Forbidden Game: Seducing the Bride at the Altar novel · Chapter 13 of 32

Chapter 13: Owing Nothing

The big one stood up so fast his chair went over.

"I'll go find him," he said. "Tonight. I know where he drinks."

"Sit down," Jasper said.

"He sank your boat and called you a drunk on TV."

"Sit down."

The big one looked at Ida.

Ida looked at the television.

He picked up his chair and sat.

The man on the screen was still talking.

"We all saw it coming," he said again, because they ran it twice.

Jasper reached up and turned the set off with the broken knob between his fingers.

Then he got up and went outside.

Nobody followed him.

The guitar didn't start again.

The neighbors found their coolers and their hoses and said good night to Ida one by one.

The bait shop woman squeezed my arm on her way out.

"That man's never been drunk on this creek," she said. "Not since I've known him."

When the kitchen was empty I took two plates of crab and went down the dock.

He was on the Patience, sitting against the wet deckhouse with a bottle of beer in his hand.

The cap was still on.

I sat down next to him and set his plate on his knee.

"You always hold one," I said. "You never open it."

He turned the bottle so the label faced away.

"He wasn't lying about all of it."

I waited.

"The year after the funeral, I drank. Every night. Ida found me in the creek one morning, face down in the pluff mud at low tide."

"Jasper."

"She sat on the dock in the rain until I woke up. Then she poured every bottle in the yard into the creek and made me watch."

He set the beer down between his boots.

"Four years. I hold one so I remember what it weighs."

I looked at the bottle.

Then I picked it up and threw it as far as I could out into Shem Creek.

It went end over end in the dark and landed with a plop.

He stared at the water.

"That was a perfectly good prop," he said.

"Get a new one. That one had his voice on it."

He laughed, low and surprised, and put his head back against the deckhouse.

I ate a crab claw.

He ate three.

The moon came up over the marsh, a little lopsided, a little less than it had been.

I'd been counting.

Twenty-two nights left on the vow.

"Last night," I said, "I told you I owed you."

He didn't look at me.

"You don't."

"I know. That's what I came to say."

I put my plate down on the deck.

"I've been owing somebody since I was twenty-one. I owed Corbett for the house and the shoes and the name. I owed my sister for my legs. I said thank you every morning for five years."

"Thalia."

"Let me finish. I'm terrible at lying, so this is going to be true."

He turned his head.

"I don't owe you anything," I said. "You married me in a chapel to make Corbett furious. You married me in a courthouse so a judge couldn't lock me up."

"You learned my hands in a night because you couldn't stand waiting for the pen. That's your business. You chose it."

He was very still.

"So now I'm choosing. Not because of the vow. Not because of the moon. I want you. I wanted you in your shower with the water going sideways."

"That was a terrible shower."

"It was a wonderful shower."

He breathed out through his nose.

"If you're wrong about this," he said, "you're going to wake up next to a salvage diver with no money and a sunk barge."

"She floats now."

"Barely."

"So do you."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he lifted his hand, made a fist against his chest, and opened it toward me.

He didn't make it look like "dive."

I didn't answer with my hands.

I stood up, took his hand and pulled.

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