Page 20 of Ebbing Tides (The Lighthouse Duology #2)

I kept the questions I wanted to ask now at bay and instead asked the one I'd rehearsed on the ride over. “Why did you leave last night?”

She huffed a humorless laugh, her arms tightening still. “I was never going to stay . I have to wake up early in the morning. I have kids , Max. I—”

“I understand that, but you rushed out of there like you couldn't stand the thought of being near me,” I said, not intending to sound like I was trying to argue with her, but there it was. Hot, fiery. Hurt … because, dammit, I had been. I was .

Her lips hung open as she shook her head. “I don't understand what you think is going to happen here. I feel like …” She swallowed and shrugged, holding her shoulders close to her ears. “I feel like you are hoping for something that is just never going to happen.”

“Have I given you that impression?” I couldn't help but smile disbelievingly, my chuckle bitter and hurt. “Melanie, I haven't expected anything from this. Not at all. Should I remind you that you were the one who showed up at my office? I could've let things go, I could've—”

“You couldn't let this go though,” she fired back, thrusting her hand in the direction of Charlie's cottage door. “You couldn't let last night go. You … you just showed up here and—”

“I was making sure you were okay!” I shouted, shaking my head.

Then I turned away from her, squeezing the back of my neck as I muttered, “Jesus Christ,” before facing her again.

“You did a complete one-eighty last night and ran out of there like I had done something to hurt you.

And I was worried that I had. That's why I'm here.

I just wanted to make sure you're okay. That's all.”

There she went, diverting her eyes again and biting her lip to keep it from wriggling. “Oh,” she whispered, her voice choked by another onslaught of emotion.

My arms hung limply at my sides as my jaw shifted, and I stared as she shriveled away once again. “I gotta say,” I began, my chest heaving with every breath, “from the looks of it, you don't seem very okay at all.”

Her face crumpled as she shook her head. “I'm not okay.”

The floodgates opened, and she clapped a hand over her mouth to catch the sob that erupted from her lips.

She had held me back multiple times. Kept me at arm’s length, stopped me from going to her, from comforting her.

But now, a little voice in my head told me that what she needed was for someone to read between those lines, to push through the walls she kept building higher and higher around her heart.

To do the one thing every fiber of my being wanted to do and hold her.

So, I took the remaining steps separating us, closing the distance between her and me, and wrapped her body in my arms, cupping the back of her head with my palm and holding her to my chest as she cried.

She didn't move a single muscle, didn’t wrap her arms around me, but she also didn't pull away, and that felt like a good enough reason to hold on.

She cried and cried against my body, and the harder she cried, the more I wanted to cry with her. For what reason, I wasn't sure, other than knowing that the broken pieces of me were dying to glue themselves to the broken pieces of her, and maybe, together, we could somehow make something whole.

Moments went by before she muttered something unintelligible against my chest, her voice muffled by my coat.

“What was that?” I asked, my chin moving against the top of her head and my hand continuing to stroke her hair.

She unburied her face from my coat, burrowing her cheek against my chest. “I said,” she said, her voice so quiet and strained by tears, “I had never been with anyone else before.”

My stomach dropped the moment she made the insinuation, and still, I said, “So, your husband was—”

“The only man I had slept with,” she clarified, then quietly added, “Until you.”

Shame crashed against me like a tidal wave in the middle of a hurricane, and I lifted a hand to cover my eyes and rub against my temples.

Melanie groaned and pulled from my arms, stepping away to wipe her palms against her face before sitting on one side of the knee-high stone wall surrounding the perimeter of the yard. I took a hint and sat across from her, glancing at my truck to find that Lido wasn't eagerly awaiting my arrival.

I supposed I'd guessed correctly when I said he was taking a nap.

“Why didn't you say something?” I asked, looking back at her. “You know you could've told me.”

“That would've ruined the moment,” she said.

I tipped my head, hating that she might've caused herself discomfort and pain to spare a moment of lust … or whatever it had been. “Melanie, do you honestly think that's the kind of man I am? Do you think I'm the kind of man who'd get mad at you for being honest with me?”

She took a second to bite her lip, then quickly shook her head. “No. But do you not see, that's part of the problem?”

I leaned forward, pressing my elbows to my knees, and raised my eyes to look into hers. An invitation to continue. Because I did see a problem with what was happening between us. A glaring one. But I wanted to be sure we both felt the same thing before that problem was addressed … if it was at all.

“You want me to lay it out for you?” she guessed, and I gestured toward her, as if to say, Go on .

She pressed her lips together, devastation and determination warring within her eyes, and she nodded.

“Okay. I like you, Max. There. I said it, like I'm sixteen fucking years old . I like you .” She spit the words out as if they were vile, poisonous.

As if liking me was the worst thing to happen to her … and hell, maybe it was.

She sobbed and rolled her eyes toward the sky.

“I liked you so much twenty years ago— so much.

But I thought it didn't mean anything. It was a moment in time that felt like seconds in comparison to …

to the rest of my life. But I liked you, and I never stopped wondering about you, but I could live with that.

It was okay . That was all it was supposed to be.

Luke wasn't supposed to die, I wasn't supposed to be a widow, I wasn't supposed to ever see you again and have a chance to do something about this.”

“Death doesn't give a fuck about our plans,” was all I could say, my voice rough and fractured.

She sniffled and nodded. “I know. And I know you know that, too, and, God, I hate it all. I wasn't supposed to be doing this,” she said again, wiping the tears from her sodden cheeks.

I glanced toward the house, wondering what Charlie and his wife could hear.

What Melanie's kids could hear. If they were watching this scene unfold and what they were thinking of it.

But the curtains were closed without a sign of life behind them.

They were respecting our privacy—at least for the time being—and I appreciated that.

“But here we are,” she said, laying her hands against her knees once again. “And, God, I like you, and I wish I felt bad about it, but I don't. I just don't know what to do about it.”

I cocked my head. “What do you mean?”

“Because this time,” she said, “I'm the one passing through.”

“Ah.”

“I'm going home on Sunday.”

I nodded. “Charlie told me.”

“My kids have school.”

“I'm sure they do.”

“And I have to work,” she continued, her chest heaving with a sigh that brought my own bones to ache. “I have my parents to worry about and a house to take care of.”

“We have our own lives,” I agreed, every word piercing my heart.

“So, what are we supposed to do then?”

She was looking to me for answers, and although I might not have the right one, if there was such a thing, I did have the conclusion I'd come to with Sid's help this morning as I watched the sunrise through my father’s kitchen window.

Wishing I were watching my lighthouse blinking its reassurance on a blue-streaked backdrop instead.

I sucked in a deep breath. Then, with every ounce of bravery I'd needed to embark on every tour of duty I served, I reached across the space dividing us and took one of her hands between both of mine.

“Let me ask you a question.”

She nodded, her hand limp but still within mine. “Okay.”

“What do you think the chances are that you and I would come together under strange, serendipitous circumstances not once, but twice?”

She blew out a trepidatious breath and shook her head. “I-I don't know.”

“Well, if you asked me that same question, I'd say the chances were very unlikely. Slim to none. Yet here we are.”

She swallowed and slowly licked her lips, her eyes on my hands covering hers. “Here we are.”

I watched as my thumb ran gently over the smooth ridges of her knuckles. “And I say we forget the fact that you're leaving and enjoy the next few days as if you aren't.”

Shocked, she lifted her eyes to stare into mine. “But why would you want to do that? Would you have married your wife, knowing that she would die long before you?”

“In a heartbeat,” I replied honestly, my hands never slipping from hers.

She huffed a laugh, barren of all humor, then turned to stare off beyond me once again. “Yeah,” she whispered. “Me too.”

“We all die in the end,” I told her, stroking her knuckles with my thumb. “That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t find some light to hold on to before it inevitably happens.”

Lines formed between her eyebrows as she delved deep in thought. I took the moment to turn back toward the house, looking for any sign of being watched and finding none. That struck me as questionable now, and I couldn't help but wonder if Charlie really did know something he wasn't letting on.

“Okay.”

I turned abruptly back to Melanie, my heart pounding. “What?”

She filled her lungs with the cold winter air, then nodded. “I said okay. Until Sunday, let's pretend I'm not leaving.”

With that one sentence, my soul lifted as a devastatingly false sense of hope filled the cracks in my fractured heart.

“Okay,” I replied as a grin tugged at the corners of my mouth.

Then Melanie stood and grasped my hand for the first time, tugging me to my feet. I tipped my head in question, and she nudged her head toward the door.

“Well, since we are now officially, temporarily dating, I am cordially inviting you to the dinner I was in the middle of making when you showed up, unannounced,” she said with a teasing smile, her eyes now trained on my truck.

“I would also like to invite your dog. He's been looking very lonely, and it's breaking my heart.”