Page 47 of Fire Island
Of course it is. She’s far too pretty, young, and smart to end up stuck on an island with a grump of a lighthouse keeper.
God, I feel like an idiot.
Iaman idiot.
Best I keep my distance. As soon as the three-month checkup rolls around, she can go home and I can go back to my life of solitude. Just the way I like it.
Deciding to distract myself with my chores, I check over the weather station and report the daily update to the watchhouse on the radio. Next, I head for the locked-up shed. I’ve been meaning to ask Em to help me clear this old crap out for months. Twisting the combination, I tug the lock open and slide the chain from the handles.
The old weathered doors swing open of their own accord, like they’ve been waiting, holding their breath, and only now has it been released. Dust and piles of old things that used to hold meaning greet me. Boxes of books, old records, random items I haven’t used in the house for years take up far too much space. But I’m only focused on one thing in the back.
I pad to the bulky shape covered by a sheet. The material has yellowed and started to rip in places. I tug it off in one fell swoop, and dust explodes around me. I cough, waving it away. It finally settles, and my beloved Indian Chief motorcycle stands stoic, right where I left her just shy of twenty years ago.
Even covered in filth, she tugs on my heart strings.
I walk around her, taking in the damage that years of sitting hidden away have done as memories of speed and wind in my hair flood in. Ava holding my waist, giggling before she buries her face in my neck as we roar along the highway. Going nowhere in particular, just happy to be together.
Happiness is a man and his motorbike, the girl he loves wrapped around him.
My last breath chokes out . . .
Fishing hut. Bunk . . .
My arms wrapped around a soft body flickers and fades.
That one was definitely a missing memory. Or the film negative of one. The inverse, static, and untouchable facade of someone, sometime in the last three years.
In the fishing hut.
Who would I take there? To my sacred place that not even Em goes to? She must have been?—
I shove my hands into my hair and sit on the bike. The old leather creaks and splits with my weight.
“Dammit,” I say on a groan.
A knock rattles the hanging door of the shed. I look up to find Eve, her hands sunk into her back pockets as she looks around the dim interior of the shed, her eyes finally landing on me. “There you are.”
Her gaze drops to the bike I’m sitting on. A soft smile blooms before she clears her throat. “Did you want some lunch? I made sandwiches.”
I rise from the bike and brush the dust out of my hair, then from my clothes. “Sure.”
I walk from the shed and close the doors. I don’t bother with the lock. Who would want anything in that old shed, anyway?
“An Indian, hey?” Eve says, glancing up at me.
“Yeah, years ago. Know much about bikes?”
“Not really, this guy I once knew had one.” She shifts her focus toward the house, and we walk in silence. I hang back a little as she reaches the door to the house. The sway of her hips has me mesmerized, the way she sweeps a hand over her hair and pulls it around her shoulders, letting it drape over her chest as she turns back. “Hope you like chicken on rye. It’s all we have left.”
Blood harrying through my veins, I swallow past the rock in my damn throat and simply nod.
She steps inside, and I force my feet to move forward.
“Ain’t happening, McCreary,” I mutter before crossing the threshold, etching that particular hard line in my mind.
Shutting the effect she has on me down.
Thirteen
