Salt and Sea Glass

Chapter 2: Storm Warning

The storm didn't build so much as arrive. One second Jessica was three blocks into town with a canvas grocery bag cutting red lines into her palm, and the next the sky just opened, like it had been waiting for the exact moment she was farthest from cover.

She swore, hunched her shoulders, and ran for the nearest door with a handle that gave.

She half-fell through it, soaked, groceries sliding, and skidded to a stop on old wood floors that smelled like developer chemicals and cedar. It took her a solid three seconds to notice the walls were covered floor to ceiling in photographs black and white mostly, storm-lit water, a gull suspended mid-flight against a sky the color of a bruise, some of them big enough to swallow a whole section of wall, others small and private, clustered like a diary nobody was supposed to see.

"You're bleeding on my floor."

She spun. A man stood behind a long worktable near the back, camera in one hand, rag in the other, wiping saltwater off a lens with more patience than most people gave anything. He didn't look alarmed. Didn't look especially interested either, which made her look at him twice.

The guy from the beach. She knew it instantly, the way you recognize a stranger after only ever seeing their silhouette.

"I'm not bleeding," she said. "It's rain."

"Your hand." He nodded at her palm, where the plastic bag handle had cut a thin line into her skin. "That's blood."

She looked down. He was right. Of course he was right. She set the groceries on the floor..milk, coffee, a lemon that immediately rolled halfway across the room and pressed her thumb to the cut like that might make the whole situation disappear.

"Sorry. Your door was open."

"It's a studio. Not Fort Knox." He set the camera down with a gentleness that did something small and unwelcome to her chest. "Towel's in the back. Unless you'd rather drip on the Wentworth print go for it, honestly, I never liked how that one came out."

She didn't move right away. Partly because she hadn't caught her breath, partly because she was staring at the photographs and couldn't quite stop.

"You took all of these?"

"Don't sound so surprised."

"I'm not surprised. I'm.." She searched for the word. "Impressed. Better?"

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile more like he'd considered one and decided against it.

"Marginally."

He disappeared through a curtain and came back with a towel, worn soft from washing, holding it out at arm's length like he wasn't sure the gesture would be welcome. She took it carefully.

"Thank you." She pressed it to her hair, aware now of exactly how she looked soaked, mascara probably halfway down her face, hauling groceries like a woman who'd never once planned for weather in her life. "Jessica."

"Finn." He said it like a fact, not an opener, and went back to the camera, checking something on the lens housing that clearly didn't need checking.

Outside, the storm hit full stride, rain slamming sideways against the tall front windows, thunder close enough to rattle the glass in its frame. Jessica watched it from the doorway, towel forgotten in her hands, and felt something loosen the way it had on the drive in like the weather was doing some of her feeling for her so she didn't have to.

"You always leave the door unlocked during a monsoon?"

"It's not a monsoon. It's August." He didn't look up. "And I like it unlocked. People wander in sometimes." A beat. "Not usually holding groceries, but."

"Take the win when you can get it."

That almost-smile again, quicker this time, gone before she could be sure she'd seen it. He crossed to the window and stood there arms folded, watching the rain like it was a conversation he was having with the sky, and Jessica found herself watching him watch it.

He was younger than she'd guessed from the beach. Early thirties, maybe, dark hair pushed back like he'd run a wet hand through it and given up on the rest. There was a stillness to him that made the whole room feel quieter just from him being in it. She recognized it, distantly, as the exact opposite of everything she used to be always half a second ahead of herself, performing a version of her life for an audience that turned out to be watching for all the wrong reasons.

"You're new," Finn said, not turning around. "Marlow Cove doesn't get strangers in August. Everyone who's coming already came."

"Borrowing my aunt's cottage. Down past the point."

"Cee's place." He said it like that explained something. "Good light down there in the mornings. I've shot it a few times, it can be very beautiful you know." He turned towards like he was expecting a confirmation.

She could only give him a nod and a faint smile

The rain kept coming, and neither of them moved to end it ,her still dripping in his doorway with a bleeding thumb and a rescued lemon, him watching the storm the way he'd watched the sunset the night before. She didn't know how long they stood like that. It felt, oddly, like two strangers agreeing without saying so that they didn't mind sharing a room for a while.

"You can go when it lets up," he said eventually. "Or keep dripping. Your call."

"Generous."

"I try."

She almost smiled, the real kind, the kind that hadn't cost her any effort in longer than she could remember and caught herself halfway through it, alarmed at how easy it had been. She looked back out at the rain instead and reminded herself, firmly, that she had not driven four hundred miles to feel anything at all.

The storm, unhelpfully, showed no signs of quitting.