Page 46 of Kissing the Beach Town Fire Chief
A door bangs somewhere down the hall. We step apart, breathless and grinning like teenagers who got away with something.
“Back to it,” he says, and the moment’s already settling somewhere warm inside my chest.
Afternoon slides into early evening like someone’s dimming a light. The lines are slow. People hover in the entryway, talking in clusters and checking their phones. The air has that odd combination of celebration and dread, like the minute before the roller coaster drops.
Aunt Maggie arrives around five. I see her first in the reflection of the lobby’s glass doors: jacket buttoned to her throat, hair neat, mouth set in that line I know too well. She looks over the room like she’s measuring it. When our eyes meet, she doesn’t look away. She crosses to me through the crowd and takes my hand without a word.
The last time she held my hand I was twelve and afraid of a thunderstorm. I stand very still.
“Long day,” she says quietly.
I swallow. “It’s almost over.”
“Mm.” She squeezes once, a little pulse of contact, then releases me. “Let’s get to the hall.”
The announcement is set for seven in the same gym where people voted all day. By six forty-five the bleachers are packed,and the floor is crowded with people standing around the perimeter. The American flag at the back wall hangs straighter than usual. Along a side wall, someone laid out trays of cookies and a punch bowl that looks like it belongs at a church basement social. It shouldn’t fit the gravity of the night, but somehow it does.
Ethan and I take our places near the front with the other candidates. Aunt Maggie drifts to the left but then circles back, claiming my other side like gravity I don’t fight. When the mayor asks us to step forward to offer brief remarks, Ethan looks at me first. There’s a question there:Are you okay?I nod. He exhales like that was the last piece he needed.
He speaks without notes. He thanks the poll workers, the volunteers, and the others who stayed from dawn to dusk. He talks about potholes and stray cats and big plans and small kindnesses. He says Seabrook is not an idea—it’s the people in this room, and the ones who couldn’t make it here tonight, and the kids who will read about this day in a history book we haven’t written yet. He says no matter what the outcome, he’s in. He’s staying. He’s working.
I don’t know how to breathe and listen at the same time, so I do a terrible job of both.
Then the mayor turns to Aunt Maggie. She steps up to the mic with the poise of someone who’s been doing this longer than most of us have been voting. Her voice carries, steady and sure, and for a few sentences I brace for what I expect she may say.
Instead, she builds a bridge.
“I care,” she says, “about what we were. I also care about what we could be. I’ve watched Ethan move through this town for months now, and he has convinced people not by shouting, but by listening. Preserving our past does not mean refusing our future.” She pauses just long enough to let people catch up to thewords. “Tonight, in the spirit of what’s best for Seabrook—not for me, not for my pride—I am endorsing Ethan.”
The sound that lifts in the gym is not a cheer so much as a wave. It surges and crashes and leaves behind silence in its wake. I’m crying before I register that I am. Aunt Maggie doesn’t look at me. She looks at Ethan. They nod, formal as a treaty. Then she reaches for my hand again and takes it, firm and impossible to misread.
“Don’t let it go to your head,” she murmurs, so quietly I might be inventing it.
“Oh, never,” I whisper back, and want to laugh at how utterly unconvincing that sounds.
The mayor clears his throat and brings us back to earth. “Thank you,” he says, and his voice is a shade rougher than usual. “We’ll begin the tally now. Please be patient.”
Please be patient. Right. Sure.
The next twenty minutes stretch like an hour and snap like a second. It’s ridiculous how time behaves when it knows you’re watching. People wander to the cookie table and back with half-eaten sugar stars. The foam-finger kid reappears and pokes his little sister in the arm until she yells, and then their father confiscates the offending foam and wears it sheepishly. A teenage volunteer tries to balance five empty paper cups on the rim of the trash can, fails, and does a mortified bow when people clap for the performance. Laughter flickers here and there, bright and nervous.
Ethan works the room in that gentle way of his, shaking hands, listening, thanking, listening again. When he reaches me, the crowd thins for a beat, like the tide letting us stand on a sandbar.
“You okay?” he asks.
“No,” I say truthfully, because my heart has learned a new percussion and my palms are an ecosystem. “But I’m with you.”
He tucks a lock of hair behind my ear. The light is terrible; he is beautiful anyway. “I am wildly in love with you,” he says, as if we’re discussing the weather.
I stare at him. It’s ridiculous and exactly right. I laugh one startled sound that breaks into something close to a sob. “You can’t just say that in a gym.”
“Apparently I can,” he says, crooked grin flickering. “I can also say it outside, on the boardwalk, or in the produce aisle if you prefer.”
“Don’t you dare make it the produce aisle.”
“Okay.” He sobers, the grin tugged into something softer. “Okay,” he repeats, and lets the words be a promise instead of a plan.
Before I can answer, the mayor returns with a small stack of papers and an envelope. The room stills the way a forest stills when the wind pauses. I feel Aunt Maggie’s hand reappear. Ethan’s arm brushes mine and stays there, a quiet touch. I realize we are standing exactly as we were earlier in the day: me between them, held on both sides. I don’t know what this means in the long term. I know what it means right now. It means I am not alone in a room that is about to decide too much.
