I Discharged Two Shrimper Brothers, Then Took Them Both Home novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Rhett's POV

Rhett's POV

I told Boone I was going down to check the lines on the boat.

It was the first lie I had told my brother since we were boys.

I parked two streets over so he wouldn't hear the truck.

Doc's back porch faced a strip of marsh grass, and the whole ceiling was painted a pale, washed blue.

She had told me why on Saturday.

Her grandmother painted it that color to keep the haints out, because a ghost reads blue as water and won't cross.

I didn't believe in haints, but I looked up at it anyway.

She was sitting on the porch swing in a long white shirt with her feet tucked under her.

Her legs were bare.

"You came," she said.

"You told me yes."

"I did."

I stood on the top step with my hat in my hands and my knee aching a little from the walk.

Every part of me had been waiting since Tuesday.

Seeing her up close, small and brown and calm, I felt every one of my thirty-six years.

"Come here, Rhett."

I crossed the boards.

The swing was a wide wooden bench on chains, and it rocked when she stood up on it.

Standing on the seat she was nearly as tall as my chest.

She put her hands on my shoulders and looked into my face.

"What's wrong?" she said.

"Nothing."

"Don't lie to me. You did it with your whole jaw."

I laughed, and it came out wrong.

"I'm big, Doc."

"I noticed," she said.

"I'm afraid I'll break you."

Her mouth twitched, and then she did not smile at all.

"I'm a physical therapist," she said. "I know exactly how much I can take. I also know how much you can't."

She leaned in and kissed me, once, slow, and my hands went to her waist.

My fingers nearly met around her.

I had held a hundred-pound trawl door in those hands, and she felt more fragile than that and also stronger.

"Take your shirt off," she said.

I pulled it over my head.

She looked at me in the light from the kitchen window.

I knew what she saw.

A chest gone thick and gray at the edges, and the long pink scar down my right thigh where they had gone in twice.

"Sit," she said.

I sat in the middle of the swing, and it dipped under me.

She knelt on the boards at my feet, and her small hands went to my belt.

"What are you doing?"

"Looking."

She opened my jeans and drew them down, and I lifted my hips to help.

Then she put her mouth on the scar.

It started at my hip and ran down the outside of my leg to the knee.

She kissed it from the top, slowly, with her lips warm and her breath on my skin.

I had never let anyone touch it but a surgeon and her.

"Doc," I said.

"Hush."

She kissed the knee, the dent where the screw went in, and the soft place behind it.

Something in my chest tore loose.

I covered my eyes with my forearm.

"That's the one that hurt?" she said, very low.

"All of it hurt."

"I know. I watched you do twelve weeks."

She stood and straddled my lap, facing me.

Her shirt was all she wore, and it rode up over her hips.

I put my hands on her thighs, and they were warm and smooth.

"Octavia," I said.

I had not meant to say it.

She went still for a moment, and then she smiled.

"That's the first time anybody but Gran has said it right," she said.

I kissed her.

She tasted of sweet tea and mint.

I kissed her until she moaned into my mouth and ground against me, and my cock, hard and straining under her, jumped.

I pulled the long white shirt up over her head.

She wore nothing under it.

Her breasts were full and heavy and dark in the half light, and my hands were too big and too rough for them.

She took my wrists and pressed my palms over her anyway.

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