The Wrong Kind of Right

chapter 3

The boatyard smelled like sawdust and gasoline, and somehow, by nine a.m., I already had a splinter and a new appreciation for how much Ethan Cole did not explain things before expecting you to do them.

"You could've told me the crate was going to be that heavy," I said, flexing my hand.

"You could've asked." He didn't even look up from the clipboard he was scowling at.

"I didn't know I needed to ask if furniture-sized boxes were furniture-heavy."

That got the ghost of a smirk out of him — quick, gone before I could be sure I hadn't imagined it. I was starting to catalog these moments without meaning to. The almost-smiles. The way he'd correct my sloppy knot-tying by physically adjusting my hands instead of just telling me, then immediately step back like he'd touched something hot.

We worked mostly in silence after that, which should have been awkward and somehow wasn't. There was a rhythm to it — hand him this, stack that there, watch him restack it the correct way two minutes later without a word. By noon my shoulders ached and I'd learned three things about Ethan Cole I hadn't known before: he hummed off-key when he thought no one was listening, he took his coffee black out of what I suspected was stubbornness rather than preference, and he had a scar above his left eyebrow he clearly didn't want asked about, because when I opened my mouth to ask, he changed the subject before I got the first word out.

"You're better at this than I expected," he said, out of nowhere, during a water break.

"Wow. High praise."

"I mean it."

I looked at him — really looked — and there was something disarming about Ethan without the sarcasm up front, just stating a fact like it cost him something to say it.

"Thanks," I said, and meant it.

He nodded once, like the conversation was closed, and went back to work. But I caught him glancing over at me twice more before the day ended, and both times he looked away a half-second too fast to be casual.

I didn't say anything. Neither did he.

But walking back to the house that evening, sunburnt and sore and strangely lighter than I'd felt in weeks, I thought: maybe this summer wouldn't be the disaster I'd braced for.

I had no idea yet how much that thought would come back to haunt me.