Page 60 of Love Bound

"Oh, we’ve met," says Finn, grinning.

"Ay, we 'ave," Billy says in his best pirate voice.

Finn stands so close to me I swear I can feel heat radiating from his torso.

Be bold, be bold.

I slip an arm around his waist and hang on to the back of his coat.

"We met, 'cause this boy hauled Nellie in and helped me lash her tight last week," Billy adds.

He's no boy, I want to say.

"You're just rescuing ships right and left?" I smile.

When Billy ducks down to grab a rope that's knotted, Finn kisses me, swiftly, his mouth hot and warm on my lips. Then it's over. I cover my lips with a hand. They burn.

Sally comes out and waves to Billy and, scowling, he climbs out of the boat. I reach to steady him, but Finn stops me with a slight shake of the head. When Billy disappears inside, Finn turns to walk back down the pier, but I put a hand on his chest to stop him. He looks into my eyes, really looks, and at once, I’m lost. Averting my gaze to the oversized yacht, I start to say something about apples and oranges, but he wraps his arms around me and holds me close.

"Don't say a word," he says, and my mouth opens slightly. He leans in and punctuates his words with his mouth on mine, breathing the message while kissing me, like some form of CPR. "Don't . . . say . . . a word."

My legs go weak. They feel heavy and he must feel me sag slightly. He sort of holds me with one arm, while tenderly stroking my face with the other, then slips his hand behind my neck. His tongue is so gentle, so sweet, and he kisses me. Then, as quickly as he started, he stops, tears his face from mine, and pulls me in close.

Billy is loping down the pier again with his peculiar gait and the wood shakes a bit with his weight. He's holding a brown, square cardboard box that would fit a medium pizza. "That yacht out there wants a cherry pie," he says, mumbling as he goes by, and handing me the box so he can untie the dinghy. "All high and mighty," is another phrase I catch as he snatches the box out of my hands again and jumps in the boat.

Chloe and Devon used to do the same thing when they were kids—deliver lunches, dinners, groceries to the large boats anchored in the bay. I laugh and look up into Finn's face as I lean over to give the little dinghy a push.

But he's not smiling. Instead, his face looks worried.

The little apartment set back on the hill is the upstairs of a wood art gallery run by a guy who flies in from California every May and leaves early September. The downstairs of the adapted Cape is a studio/gallery and the upstairs, accessible only from the outside, is a three-bedroom apartment. Devon was supposed to crash here until she got her own place, but she's been slow to move on finding a job since she arrived back from Montana in September. Well, to be truthful, she's been slow to saying "yes" to the job at the fire station. She still hasn't committed.

My sisters can be a handful at times. It’s why I never wanted to have kids right away. I had the very dubious privilege of being a parent of teenagers when I had just arrived at twenty.

And Devon, she could push buttons like nobody else. When Mom and Dad were killed, she decided the chances of her dying as well were so stratospheric she could do anything. She used to say she had a license to kill (wait for it) herself, and would then do the most outrageous things. She couldn't hang glide out at the Notch. No, she base jumped before it was really a thing, with a parachute given to her by some rich twenty-something guy after she batted her eyes at him. She was fifteen.

She drove her car too fast and rolled it twice. She'd string up a tightrope across the quarry and walk on it for money in the summer. Well, until the owners put a chain-link fence around the place. She went dirt bike racing and dressed like a boy so she could compete. And she won. I was always on edge, always waiting for the call from the hospital or the morgue. Finally, the last straw was the night she graduated from high school.

It was dusk. We'd all just come home to The Inn and she was still in her cap and gown. Well, she held the cap in her hand. The gown was bright blue and could be spotted, even from as far away as the train trellis that linked the other side of the island with Route Ten. I was calling Travis, trying to get him to eat something before I took them all out to the movies. And then I spied this spot of blue on the bridge. It was so clearly her, but her back was to me. Then she tossed the cap and it flickered in the low evening light like an iridescent butterfly on its way down.

Suddenly, my heart throbbed in the back of my throat, and I saw her climb up on the trellis, on one of the girders, and as I stepped forward—the blood leaving my head and turning my legs to lead—she jumped.

I sank to the floor of the porch, head down, hands gripping the railing, and then I hauled myself up and got ready to run to her or to the phone inside. To anywhere, and that's when I saw something else.

Devon, like a bright blue button, bouncing at the end of a bungee cord.

The fight that ensued proved historic.

I couldn't handle it. It was the last straw. My twenty-year-old back was broken. Parents dead, the older sister—who should have been here to take care of it all—MIA, Laurel sleeping around and smoking weed, and little Travis growing up in a mess that used to be a functional family. And somehow, I had to keep it, and them, and me all together.

When I had come running down the road, screaming at Devon, she was already out of the water, dripping wet, euphoric that her calculations worked which made her even more pissed at me when I launched myself down the hill like a madwoman.

She pointed out that she’d used a harness around her torso, not a leg harness, and that proved she was being safe.

I pointed out that our bathroom scale—which she used to weigh herself for her precious calculations—was often off by five pounds because Laurel messed with the settings.

She fumed and trudged up the hill on the road, her back stiff and angry, her straight black hair in long ropes.

I screamed that I was sick of having to watch her, worry about her, and stop her from taking risks.