Lighthouse Key

Joshua woke up at six-something with a stiff neck and a woman's cold foot pressed against his calf. It took him a full thirty seconds to remember where he was. The lodge. The retreat. Cassandra.

Cassandra, who was asleep on her stomach next to him with her hair everywhere and one arm hanging off the mattress like she'd given up on it sometime around two in the morning.

He lay there and did the math on his life. He was twenty-five years old, a cop with the county sheriff's office, and last night he had crossed a line he'd spent a year telling himself was permanent. A good line. The kind of line a guy draws and then spends the rest of his life glad somebody made him cross it.

She was twenty-four and worked for the Coastal Heritage Trust, auditing old properties and giving tours at the lighthouse on weekends. He'd known her three years. Met her at Ana's party back when she was twenty-one and arguing with somebody about oyster farming. He'd liked her inside of ten minutes and said nothing about it for a solid twelve months, because that was how he handled things. Quietly. From a distance. Like a guy casing a bank he never planned to rob.

And then last night happened, and now her cold foot was on his leg and he had no idea what you were supposed to do in the morning.

He slid out of bed without waking her, found his boxers somewhere near the door, and went downstairs in the dark.

The lodge kitchen was all knotty pine and cast iron, the kind of room that had been a hunting lodge mess hall fifty years ago and never really changed. The great room next door had the stone fireplace and the antler chandeliers. In here it was a big commercial stove, a coffee maker from the nineties, and a window facing east over the water.

He got the coffee going and leaned against the counter with a mug, watching the sky go from gray to pink over the harbor. Nobody else was up yet. The retreat had a dozen guests and they all seemed to be the type who slept until seven-thirty and then did yoga about it.

He was maybe halfway through the mug when he heard her on the stairs.

She came in barefoot, wearing his flannel shirt and, as far as he could tell, nothing else, her hair a disaster, her face still pillow-creased. She stopped in the doorway when she saw him. He stopped breathing when he saw her. Then they both started talking at the same time.

"Morning, I was just, uh," he said.

"I didn't think anybody'd be up, sorry, I can," she said.

They stopped. They looked at each other. She pointed at the coffee maker and he nodded too many times and poured her a cup.

"Thanks." She took it with both hands and blew on it. "Sunrise is something, huh."

"Yeah. Comes up different out here. Slower."

"Everything's slower out here. That's kind of the point of the place."

He nodded again. He was going to have to stop nodding. "How'd you sleep."

The question hung there like a dead bird. She looked at him over the rim of the mug and he watched her decide something. "Fine," she said. "Eventually."

"Same. I mean, eventually. Not, like, immediately after."

"No. Not immediately after!"

He got the bagels out of the bread box and split them and put them in the toaster oven, because his hands needed a job. She hopped up to sit on the counter next to the sink, which put her at the exact height where the flannel shirt stopped being a shirt and started being a suggestion, and he made himself look at the toaster oven like it held state secrets.

"Knotty pine," she said, rapping a knuckle on the wall behind her. "You ever notice how every old lodge in Maine has the same walls? Like there was one guy in nineteen-forty selling it wholesale."

"Probably was. One guy. Named like Alden or something."

"Alden Knotty Pine." She grinned and he laughed for real, and something in his chest unclenched a little. That defined her. Even now, even this morning, she could still make him laugh like nothing had changed. Except everything had changed, and they were both circling it like a couple of planes low on fuel.

The bagels popped. He buttered them and handed her one and they ate standing up, facing each other, three feet apart, which was somehow worse than sitting.

"So," she said.

"So."

"This doesn't have to be a whole thing."

"I know."

"Like, we're adults. We're grown people."

"I know. I keep telling myself that."

She took a bite of bagel and chewed it slow, watching him. "Okay, but do you actually know, or are you just saying it?"

He set his mug down on the counter. That was the moment, right there, and he could feel it coming and did nothing to stop it. "I've had a crush on you for over a year," he said. "Maybe longer. I never said anything because I figured if I did and it went bad, I'd lose the friendship, and the friendship was, I don't know, the thing I didn't want to gamble."

She was quiet for a second. Outside, a gull screamed at another gull about something.

"A year," she said.

"Little over."

"You went to Ana's Fourth of July thing last year and spent the whole afternoon helping her husband flip burgers."

"I remember."

"You were two feet from the cooler the entire day."

"Burgers need flipping."

"Joshua." She said his name soft, and it did something to him that no amount of professional composure was going to undo. "Why didn't you say something?"

"Because I'm an idiot, mostly. And because you were always dating somebody, or almost dating somebody, or just done dating somebody, and the timing never sat right. And I figured a guy in uniform hitting on his friend was a bad look."

"You're not in uniform right now!"

"No. I'm in my boxers, apparently, and you're wearing my shirt."

She looked down at herself and pulled the collar up like she was only now noticing. "It was the closest thing to the door this morning. I wasn't being weird about it."

"You can be weird about it if you want. It looks better on you anyway. It looks better on anybody. It's a bad shirt."

"It's a fine shirt."

"It's plaid in three directions."

She laughed and it turned into something else halfway through, that shaky kind of laugh a person does when there's a bigger feeling trying to get out. She set her bagel down on the counter. He watched her hands. Her fingers were fidgeting with the hem of the shirt, twisting it.

"Okay, real talk for a second," she said. "I don't want last night to be a one-time weird lodge thing that we never talk about and then avoid each other at parties for the next decade. That's my nightmare scenario. I'd rather it be awkward now than weird forever."

"Same. That's genuinely the same nightmare I have. Except mine has more cops in it for some reason."

"You would have more cops in yours."

She slid off the counter, and he thought for a second she was going to walk over to him, and his whole body braced for it like a fire door. But she went to her coat instead, the one hanging on the peg by the door, and dug around in the pocket. When she turned back she was holding something small and old and brass.

"What's that."

"Lighthouse key." She turned it over in her palm. It was long, about four inches, with a fussy old-fashioned bow on top like something off a pirate movie. "The Trust gave me keys when I started docenting. There's a whole ring of them, but this one opens the tower door. I'm giving a tour tonight, a members' thing, six-thirty. But after it's done, the place is empty. And I have to lock up anyway."

He caught where she was going before she finished the sentence, and his heart started doing work it hadn't been hired for. "You're asking me to come with you."

"I'm asking if you want to come with me. After dinner. After the tour's done and everyone's gone. Just us." She held the key up between two fingers so it caught the morning light. "It's a hundred and sixty-eight steps to the top and the view is the best on the whole coast, and I've seen it about four hundred times and I never get tired of it. And I thought, maybe, we could figure out what this is. Up there. Where it's quiet."

"Like a date."

"Like a date. With a lighthouse. And one hundred and sixty-eight stairs, so wear real shoes."

"Kind of a weird second date. First date. Whatever we're counting."

"Everything about us is weird. Last night was weird. This morning is weird. You in this kitchen making bagels is weird. I'm leaning into it."

He picked his mug back up because his hands wanted something to do again and it was either that or cross the kitchen, and the kitchen was small and she had a bagel half-eaten and he had a whole thing happening in his chest he needed a minute on. "Yeah," he said. "I'll come. Tonight."

"Good." She smiled, and it was the smile from Ana's party three years ago, the one that had started all this trouble, except now he didn't have to pretend he hadn't noticed it. "I'll knock on your door at eight."

"I'll be the guy answering the door."

* * *

By seven-thirty the kitchen started filling up. Ana came down first with her hair in a towel and made a beeline for the coffee, then Destiny and the two guys from the birding group, and the room went from private to public in about four minutes flat.

Cassandra had gone upstairs at some point to change, and came back down in her own clothes, his flannel shirt folded over her arm. She set it on the end of the counter next to him without a word and raised her eyebrows, and he took it, and neither of them said anything about it, and it was somehow the most understood conversation of the whole morning.

Ana, however, was not going to let anything slide.

"You two look rested," she said, stirring her coffee with a look on her face that could only be described as prosecutorial.

"Great breakfast spread," Joshua said.

"You went to bed early."

"Big day of hiking."

"Uh-huh." Ana looked at Cassandra. Cassandra looked at her bagel. Ana's smile got wider and more terrible. "Well. I'm sure the hike was strenuous."

"Ana," Cassandra said.

"I'm just saying, the retreat brochure promised transformational experiences."

Joshua took his coffee and his folded shirt and escaped to the porch, and stood there looking at the water, and about a minute later she came out and stood next to him, shoulder to shoulder, looking at the same water.

"Your friend is a menace," he said.

"She's always been like that. She knew within a month of meeting you that you had a thing for me."

"She what?"

"Apparently I talk about you. Or I used to. She's been keeping receipts for three years."

He thought about that. All those parties, all those group hangs, all that careful nothing. Both of them orbiting. Both of them saying nothing. "We could've had a three-year head start," he said.

"We could've." She bumped his shoulder with hers, a small friendly thing that still landed like a heavyweight shot. "But then last night would've been a different last