Chapter 6: The Boathouse

I lasted until one in the morning.

I sat on the shop floor in my father's cardigan with the phone face down beside me.

I read the comments anyway.

Eleven thousand strangers had decided I was unstable.

A woman in Cranston wrote that she'd known something was off with me from the veil.

At one o'clock I stood up, put on my coat, and walked out into the cold.

The black pickup was parked under the streetlight.

Bram sat behind the wheel with his coat over his chest and his boots up on the dash, not asleep.

I rapped on the window.

He rolled it down.

"Take me home," I said.

"Etta." His voice was thick. "You're upset. You said not tonight."

"I said not on top of the wreck."

"It's the same night."

"I'm sober," I said. "I'm furious, and I'm awake, and I've had thirteen hours to think about what I want."

"I'm not doing this because of Preston. I'm doing it because I decided."

He looked at me for a long second.

"Get in," he said.

The boathouse stood on the water at Fox Point, a long barn of grey shingle with a wall of windows facing the harbor.

He had gutted it to the beams.

Inside there was one huge room with a kitchen at one end.

A staircase of raw oak climbed to a bed on a platform under the roof.

The lights of the bridge lay broken across the black water.

I walked in, and he locked the door behind me.

I turned around.

"Say it," he said, from the dark by the door. "Out loud. I want to hear it."

"I want you."

"How."

"Any way you'll give it to me."

My voice cracked, and I let it.

"I want your mouth and your hands and your cock, Bram."

"I want you to fuck me until I can't think about any of them."

He crossed the room.

His hand closed in my hair, not hard, and tipped my face up.

"Then you'll get it," he said against my mouth. "All of it."

The kiss was nothing like the one in the shop.

That had been a spark.

This was the fire, and he fed it, slow and deep, with his tongue sliding against mine and his beard burning my chin.

He took the coat off my shoulders and let it drop.

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