Page 25 of Nights at Seaside
His father nodded, his expression remaining stoic, and Sawyer felt sadness seeping in. As he’d done so many times before, he forced himself to bury it away, below the worry about whether he’d win the fight or lose his father’s chance for home health care, beneath the worry about the toll it would take on his mother either way and beneath his own wretched devastation over losing his father. He fisted his hands, flexed the muscles in his legs, and readied himself for a fight to the death, if need be.
“I just wanted you to know I’m training hard, Dad.” He forced a smile, and his father slowly shifted his eyes away at the same time as he reached for his son’s hand.
Usually Sawyer spent time reading to his father, but today he didn’t have it in him to think straight. They sat like that for a long time, and sometime later—an hour, maybe longer—his father said, “You’re not going to tell me.”
“Tell you what, Dad?”
“What you came for.”
He heard his mother’s car door shut out front, and as he mulled over his answer, holding his father’s deadpan gaze, his mother came through the living room door and joined them on the deck.
“How are my two favorite men?” She kissed his father’s cheek and touched the top of Sawyer’s head, as she’d done when he was a boy. Her eyes moved between them.
“Everything okay?”
“Of course.” Sawyer rose to his feet, feeling like a kid caught in a lie, and pulled out his wallet. “I wrote this for you last week.”
His mother read the song he’d written and, as she always did, she clutched it to her chest and then pulled him into a warm hug. “Honey, you are every bit as poetic as your father. I know you love boxing, but you should seriously consider putting your songs together and publishing them.”
“Thanks, Mom, but you’re my mom. You’d love anything I wrote.”
“Maybe so, but your father refuses to give me any more poems. We both know his brain still works fine, and I can certainly write them down for him. But I’ve begged him, and still he refuses me.” She squeezed his father’s shoulder in a loving fashion. “I miss that, and maybe if you wrote with publication in mind, the competitive side of your father would come out and I’d get a few more lovely lines.”
His father covered her hand with his and patted it.
Sawyer hugged her again. “I’m going to head out.” He bent down to hug his father.
“You can leave”—his father’s slow, determined voice sent shivers down his spine—“but whatever it is you came to say will still be there when you get home.”
AFTER POPPING IN to talk to Lizzie about her date with Sawyer, Sky went to her apartment above the shop to check in with Blue on the renovations. But her mind wasn’t on the pipes that needed fixing or the walls that needed painting. She was thinking about the text from Sawyer and the text she’d sent to him in response. What was it about him that had her offering herself up like she was? Maybe they’d wake up together the next morning. She hadn’t spent the night with a guy in years, and yet, no matter how many times she tried to convince herself to feel regret over having sent the provocative text, she couldn’t.
Blue scowled up at her from where he was crouched by a hole in the wall that hadn’t been there last night.
“What happened?” she asked, assessing the hole.
“I dropped my hammer,” he growled.
She cocked a brow. “In the wall?”
He rose to his feet and ran his eyes down her sundress. “Don’t worry. I’m taking care of it. You look pretty.”
Pretty? Blue never told her she looked pretty.Hotorcute, yes, butpretty? Never. “Thank you.”
“How was your date? I came by your place around eleven, but you weren’t back yet.”
“You did? Oh, well, we got back late. We went to Brewster, then went dancing. We had a nice time.”
Blue stepped in closer, encroaching on her personal space, which she usually didn’t even notice, but this morning he was giving off a weird vibe, and she took a step back.
“What’s up with you?”
“I don’t know,” he said with a bite of frustration. “You seemedintoSawyer yesterday.”
“Yeah, he’s a nice guy.”
“I saw something more than that in the way you looked at him.” Blue’s eyes narrowed. “Was I misreading the heat between you two?”
She walked toward the kitchen to grab a glass of water. “Heat? I don’t know.” She didn’t know what to make of the way he was acting, so she tried to change the subject. “What did you end up doing last night?”
