Captain's Orders

The jib was talking to me in the dark, a hard slap every time the bow came up, and Ines had the tiller and the look of someone who had already decided the race.

“Ease.”

I eased. The sheet ran through my gloves and the sail filled quiet. She didn’t look at me. She was watching the other boat’s stern light off to port, a white dot that kept trying to climb the wave and failing.

“Now.”

I sheeted in until the telltales went still. Spray came over the rail and hit my neck cold. I stayed on the weather side where she’d put me at the start and didn’t think about the rest of it. The sloop took the next one on the shoulder and kept going. Somewhere behind us a horn went, thin, and then another. Ines grinned at the water.

“Trim.”

Two words. The leech was fluttering at the top, a finger’s width of bad air, and I had the winch handle in before I knew I’d reached for it. Two clicks. The flutter died. She nodded once, which on her was almost a speech, and put the bow down a hair toward the mark.

We crossed second. Not first. Close enough that the committee boat’s light caught her face when she looked up at the sail and then at me, wet and steady, and said, “Adequate.”

I laughed. It came out louder than I meant. My hands were shaking on the sheet and I didn’t care. Six months of Wednesday nights, and that was the first time the boat and I had agreed on anything for a whole leg. It was the most fun I’d had in years. I didn’t say that. She would have made me coil something for it.

We dropped the sails in the lee of the point and motored. The engine was a low complaint under the floor. The bay opened in front of us, black water, one light on a dock a long way off, and nothing else. September had taken the other boats home. Ines stood at the wheel in her foul-weather coat, hood down, hair stuck to her forehead, and pointed at a stretch of nothing I couldn’t tell from the rest.

“There. Thirty feet, mud. You’ll like the holding.”

“I don’t know what I like yet.”

“You’ll learn.”

I went forward with the anchor when she cut the engine. The chain ran out clean. She backed down on it, the way she always did, and I felt the hook take through the sole of my boot. She killed the engine. The quiet came in all at once. Water on the hull. A loon somewhere I couldn’t place. My stomach, which had been negotiating with me since the second mark, finally sat down.

She handed me a mug from the companionway. Cocoa, hot enough to matter. We sat in the cockpit with our boots off the cushions and our shoulders not quite touching. The riding light threw a small circle on the coachroof and left the rest of us in the dark.

“You were married,” she said. Not a question. She’d heard me on the phone at the marina in May, once, and never mentioned it.

“Was. Papers in March. She kept the house. I kept the numbers, which is funny if you do what I do.”

“Not that funny.”

“No.” I drank. The cocoa was too sweet and exactly right. “She said I lived like I was waiting for a variance to clear. She wasn’t wrong. I just didn’t know what to do with the part of the week that wasn’t a spreadsheet.”

Ines looked at the anchor light’s reflection, a thin line on the water. “I almost sold her after the divorce. Ten years ago. A man in Milwaukee wanted her for a cottage boat. Cash. I had the listing half written.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I’d have had to explain the boat to him, and I didn’t want to.” She turned the mug in her hands. “Also the odds were bad. Most people who sell the boat after a marriage ends buy another one inside two years and hate it. I ran the numbers on myself. I’m not proud of that.”

“I’m an actuary. I’m proud of you for running the numbers.”

She made a sound that might have been a laugh. “So. Probability we do this again. Overnight, end of season, just the two of us. You first.”

I thought about it the way I think about anything that can be ruined by rounding. “Low, if you count the calendar. One race left, and we just sailed it. Higher if you count the fact that I answered a notice in April and haven’t missed a Wednesday. Call it one in three that I’m back in the spring whether you post another notice or not.”

“Optimistic.”

“I’m not, usually.”

She was quiet long enough that I heard the bilge pump click off. “You spend half the season green. I’ve watched you swallow it and keep trimming. So why do you keep coming back?”

The true answer was sitting in my mouth and wouldn’t come out clean. I tried anyway. “The boat’s good. You’re good at this. I like having somewhere to be on Wednesdays.”

“That’s three answers. None of them is the one.”

“I know.”

She set her mug in the holder. The cockpit was small enough that when she turned toward me our knees almost met. Her face was lined at the eyes from twenty years of looking into weather, and she wasn’t performing any of that for me. She just looked.

“You like it when I tell you where to stand,” she said. “I’ve been watching since June. It isn’t the sailing. You’d sheet in if I told you to in a parking lot. I don’t mind. I’m telling you so you stop pretending I haven’t seen it.”

My ears went hot. I stared at the coil of jib sheet by the winch, neat the way she’d taught me in April, clockwise, working end on top.

“Re-coil that,” she said. “The other way.”

It was a ridiculous order. The line was fine. I got up anyway, because my body had already decided, and I undid the coil and laid it down counterclockwise, wrong and tidy, and set the tail where she could reach it. My ears burned the whole time. When I sat back down she gave a short laugh.

“All right,” she said. “Do you want me to stop?”

“No.”

I crossed the cockpit. Two steps. She didn’t move away. She took my chin in her hand and held me there and looked at me, long enough that I felt the look more than the hold. Her thumb was cold from the mug. I put my hand on her wrist and didn’t pull. She kissed me.

It was not careful. Her mouth was warm and she tasted like cocoa, and I kissed her back with my other hand in her hair, salt and wind still in it, holding on because if I didn’t I was going to do something stupid with the rest of the sentence I hadn’t said. She slid her free hand over mine where it gripped her wrist, and for a second we were just that: her hand on my face, my hand in her hair, her fingers over my knuckles. Then she let go of my chin and sat back an inch. Not far. Far enough to talk.

“Check the anchor,” she said. “Then come below. That’s an order.”

I went forward in the dark faster than I had ever moved on that boat. The chain was tight and true, the hook still where she’d said it would be, and the cabin light was already on behind me when I turned around.