He Rejected Me Out Loud and Kept Other Women, So I Never Answered novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Net Loft

Her first nights in the loft over the fish house, Ambrose's promise of a new woman every week, and the oilskin on the hook in Doran's truck; on Monday she takes her first week's wage to the Gaff.

The net loft over the fish house smelled of tar and old rope, and it had one window and no stove.

I carried my seabag up the stairs after the last run and stood in the middle of the floor while my breath showed in the dark.

Somebody had left a cot against the wall.

Somebody had also left a lamp on it, already lit.

I looked at the lamp for a long time and decided it was my mother's.

At nine she came up the stairs with a pillow under her arm and her church cardigan buttoned wrong.

"Your father's lying down," Odessa Etheridge said. "He's had a day."

"I'm sure he has."

"Rhiannon." She set the pillow on the cot and smoothed it twice with her palm. "He thought the Alpha would be glad of you."

"Mama, he said it out loud in front of everybody."

"I know," she said.

"You were standing right there."

She nodded at the pillow.

"The cot's the only thing we had that wasn't wet," she said.

She went down the stairs without looking back.

I took my boots off and lay on the cot in the dress, because I did not have the strength to take it off.

At ten I heard a truck on the harbor road, and I went to the window.

It was Doran's truck, a dull gray Ford with a plow rack, and it slowed at the end of the fish-house lane.

The woman in the green coat sat in the passenger seat with her head thrown back, laughing at something.

On the hook behind the driver's seat hung a sea-blackened oilskin coat.

It looked just like the one he had worn to the Settling, only older and stiffer.

The truck went on toward his house at the top of the road.

I stood at the glass until my feet went numb on the boards.

On Sunday morning the harbor was gray and bright, and I scrubbed the ferry deck before the first run.

Ambrose Gaskill was waiting at the foot of the loft stairs when I came back for my gloves.

He was thirty-three, lean and sandy-haired, with a neat beard and a pleasant voice.

He had been at Doran's shoulder since they were boys.

"Rhiannon," he said warmly, as if we were old friends. "Sleep all right?"

"Fine."

"Good. I wanted to say, for what it's worth, nobody thinks less of you."

A man hauling a crab pot across the lane slowed down to listen.

Ambrose raised his voice a little.

"The Alpha's going to bring a different woman home every week this winter," he said. "Until the island learns what an Etheridge's worth. Better you hear it from me."

I looked at him, and he smiled.

The pleasantness was for the man with the crab pot.

"I'll tell my feet," I said, and went up the stairs.

Across the lane an old woman stood on the church porch with a book under her arm.

Hester Ballance was holding the tide-book, the one the pack's whole law is written in, and she was not reading it.

She was only standing there, looking down the lane at the net loft.

Nobody had opened the oldest pages of that book in sixty years.

Everybody knew it, and nobody on the island seemed to mind.

I went to work.

Between runs that afternoon I heard two deckhands talking behind the cars.

"Green coat was the first one," one of them said. "Gone by morning."

"They're all gone by morning," the other one said. "None of them lasts a week. He sleeps on the fuel dock, you know, in the truck."

"Why?" the first one asked.

"Nobody knows. Ambrose says the Alpha's not himself."

The first man spat over the rail.

"I'd not be myself either, with Ambrose at my back."

The other one hushed him, and they saw me and went quiet.

On Monday night I stood at the loft window again.

At midnight the front door of the Alpha's house opened, and a woman I did not know came out alone with her shoes in her hand.

She was not laughing.

She walked quickly down the harbor road with her face turned away from the loft.

A minute later the gray truck backed out of the drive and went the other way, toward the fuel dock, with its lights off.

I stood there with my arms crossed over my ribs.

I had told myself I did not care what he did.

What I felt at that window was not caring.

It was a hot, low, shameful ache that had no business being there.

I took my first week's wage out of my sea boot, eighty-six dollars folded in a rubber band.

It was the first money in my life I had ever kept for myself.

I put on my good jacket and pinned up my braid.

The Gaff stayed open until two on a Tuesday, and it was only a few minutes past midnight.

I had never once walked in alone.

← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend