Locked Out of Gran's Secret Room, I Wore What Was Inside novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Ice Door

In the dark at low water Octavia and Tiago pry at the rusted iron door in the cliff until a swell drives them onto a ledge, where he warms her hands and she breaks the kiss with a joke about her tab.

He didn't say a word until the lights of Windward were behind the point.

Then he handed me an oilskin jacket that smelled of diesel and cold coffee.

"Put that on, Miss Tillinghast. Silk doesn't keep anyone warm."

I put it on over my engagement dress.

The velvet pouch was still tucked in my bodice, where I had slid it before dinner.

I could feel the key against my ribs, and the small brass thing beside it.

"Fifty dollars for the run," Tiago said, and kept his eyes on the water.

"Put it on my tab," I said.

"You have a tab?"

"I have one now."

His mouth moved, though he didn't smile.

The Lucia was a forty-foot launch with a narrow wheelhouse and a deck worn pale by other people's shoes.

He took her along the foot of the cliff with the throttle low.

We passed so close to the rocks that I could have touched the weed.

I knew how close it was, because I had taught eight-year-olds to sail off this shore.

"Slow," I said. "Another thirty feet. There's a cleft behind the white rock."

He eased the throttle back.

"You know this coast."

"I grew up on it. There's an iron ring bolted into the left wall."

He found it with the spotlight, a red crust of rust around an iron ring.

Without a word he put the bow into the gap.

He stepped out onto the ledge with a bow line and made it fast.

He was good at it.

Neither of us said so.

The door was ten feet from the ring.

It stood in the back of the cleft, set into the cliff itself.

It was a slab of black iron, furred green with sea and years.

I had seen it all my life from the water.

Gran had called it the ice door, and I had never thought to ask what it was for.

I put my palm flat against it.

It was cold and wet.

A thread of air came through the seam at the bottom, and it smelled of nothing at all.

"What's behind it?" Tiago asked.

"A room," I said.

"Is it yours?"

"It was left to me."

He nodded, took a long iron bar from under the stern thwart, and weighed it in his hand.

"What do you want me to do?"

I looked at the hinges, at the lines of rust, at the swollen seam.

"Left hinge," I said. "The lock's old but it isn't the problem. The hinge has seized."

"Left hinge."

"Get the bar into the gap above the pin. Lean on it. Don't jerk it."

He set the bar and put his shoulder into it.

The iron groaned.

A flake of rust the size of my palm dropped off and splashed in the pool at our feet.

"Again," I said.

He leaned again.

His shirt was soaked through at the shoulder, and I watched the muscle in his back work under it.

I did not look away.

I didn't try to.

"Higher," I said. "Right there. Hold it."

"Yes, ma'am," he said.

"Don't call me ma'am."

"Yes, Captain."

I looked up.

His face was in shadow, but I heard the grin.

The door moved.

It moved the width of a finger, with a shriek that went through my teeth.

A breath of cold stale air came out of the dark and touched my face.

"There," I said, and my voice cracked on it. "There. It's moving."

The sea moved too.

I felt it before I saw it, a heave in the water at my ankles that was higher than the one before.

"Captain," Tiago said, and for once he wasn't joking. "That's the swell. We have to go."

"One more."

"Now."

The next wave broke over the ledge and filled my shoes.

He dropped the bar, caught me around the waist, and hauled me up the side of the cleft.

There was a shelf of rock above the waterline, barely wider than a bench.

The Lucia banged against her bow line below us.

Another wave came in and slapped the iron door shut with a boom I felt in the stone.

We sat there with the sea coming up the cleft and the whole boat riding on one line.

I was soaked to the hair.

My teeth were chattering so hard I couldn't make words.

"Give me your hands," Tiago said.

I gave them.

He took both of them between his palms and rubbed, hard and without hurry.

His hands were rough and very hot.

My fingers hurt as the blood came back, and I made a sound.

"Good," he said. "That's good. Hurt means it's working."

He took my wrists next and pushed his thumbs into the soft inside of them.

Then he bent his head and put his mouth against the side of my throat, over my pulse.

I stopped breathing.

"Just warming you," he said against my skin.

"Is that what it is."

"That's what I'll say if you tell me to stop."

I turned my head.

He was very close.

Salt water dripped from his hair and ran down his jaw.

"I'm not going to tell you to stop," I said.

I kissed him.

It was cold for a moment, and then it wasn't.

He kissed me back slowly and thoroughly, with a hand spread on my back under the oilskin.

I got both fists in his wet shirt and pulled.

He made a low sound in his chest.

His other hand slid up my bare thigh, under the soaked silk, and stopped at the top of my stocking.

I felt every finger.

I wanted that hand to go on.

I wanted it so badly that I heard myself think, clearly, in my grandmother's voice.

I had walked out of my own engagement dinner an hour ago.

I pulled back.

He let me.

His eyes were dark and unhurried, and his breath came fast.

"Fifty dollars for the run," I said.

He stared at me.

"Put the rest on my tab, Captain."

A laugh broke out of him, rough and surprised.

"The tab's open," he said. "I'll keep a very careful count."

Out beyond the point, a white beam came sweeping across the black water.

It was a launch with a spotlight, running slowly along the rocks, looking for something.

The light slid over the white rock.

Tiago put his arm across me and pressed me flat against the stone.

"Don't move," he said.

I didn't move.

I lay there with my cheek on his wet shirt and the sea pounding, and watched the light come toward us.

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