Page 5 of These Summer Storms

“Good.”

A few minutes passed. Her driver, Benny, would arrive in seventeen minutes in a gray Honda. Which meant she’d be at the wharf in twenty-five minutes. On the island in an hour.

If she was lucky, everyone would be asleep. It would be almost two in the morning. Everyone should be asleep.

Please let them all be asleep.

A rumble sounded in the distance, far away and almost unnoticeable, the heavy promise of a nearby storm, the kind that came on summer nights by the water, streaks of lightning and roaring thunder and rain that soaked you through the moment it started, before it blew past, leaving clear skies and bright stars in its wake.

Dad loved a summer storm.

The thought whispered through her, and she sucked in a breath atthe sting of it—an ordinary thought that had no place in her extraordinary relationship (such as it was) with her father. Eager for distraction, Alice checked on her unlikely companion, still staring at his phone.

He was in gray slacks, which was weird. Normal people didn’t wear business attire in South County in the middle of the night. Especially in the first week of September, seventy-five degrees and full of the humidity that came with being five minutes from the ocean.

Nevertheless, gray slacks and a white button-down it was, the only nod to the time or season or location the way he’d rolled up his sleeves to reveal forearms Alice noticed—as a student of the artistic form, not for any other reason.

One of those arms boasted a spill of black ink that she couldn’t identify at a distance. She wondered if the people he dressed for knew about that tattoo. Hiding pieces of yourself was something Alice recognized.

Her gaze tracked up to his face, along the sharp line of his jaw, unyielding.Distracting.

She called across the wide expanse separating them. “You were a Boy Scout?”

He looked over immediately, as though he’d been waiting for her to speak. He didn’t miss the reference to his words on the train. With a dip of his head, something a lesser observer might call chagrin, he replied, “I wasn’t.”

“Impersonating a uniformed officer is a pretty serious infraction, you know.”

He put a hand to his chest. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not mad, just disappointed.”

White teeth flashed and he looked away, down the quiet one-way street, as though willing a car to come around the corner and stop him from making a bad decision. When it didn’t come, he said, “What if I told you I’m good at building fires anyway?”

“An arsonist, then.”

“Nah.” He shook his head. “I’m even better at putting them out.”

Considering Alice was about to walk into fire, it was the exact right thing to say. “In that case, you can wait over here with me…if you’d like.”

On a different day, at a different time, she never would have made the offer. Twelve years riding the New York City subway gave a girl a very real sense of self-preservation around even the handsomest of men. And if the subway hadn’t, up until two months ago, the existence of the handsome man she’d been intending to marry would have made her tread very carefully around this one.

But there was something reckless about that moment, in the dark, in the dead of night, in that place somehow uncomfortably close to her real life and wildly far from it, with a man who might have been the last person she met for a while who didn’t know exactly who she was, exactly why she was there.

What was the harm?

The invitation hung between them in air heavy with salt water and the coming storm. Long Legs stayed perfectly still, time stretching until Alice thought he was going to decline, and she would have no choice but to walk directly into the sea from embarrassment.

“Are you going to set a fire?”

I already did.“You never know.”

When he moved, it was all at once, with no hesitation. Nothing but a long stride claiming the space between them with even, steady grace, and then he lowered himself to the bench next to her with a level of control that few people had so late at night.

Like a train. Like she was a scheduled stop.

She smiled and he looked at her, curious. “Is that for me?”

Another day, another time.