The Dark Kitchen

Eloise calls on Thursday with the kind of news that would have made you scream a month ago.

"Charleston County is running an open competition for a new main library," she says. "Waterfront site on the Cooper, old shipyard parcel. Public, ambitious, exactly your kind of building. I want Ames & Partners in it, and I want your name on it, and you happen to be standing in Charleston. Go look at the site. Fall in love with it. Send me sketches."

You hang up and stand in your father's kitchen with your hand over your mouth.

"Good news?" Hayes asks from the doorway.

"I need to go look at a shipyard."

He picks up his keys. "Then let's go look at a shipyard."

The site is twelve acres of cracked concrete and rusted rail on the river, a skeleton of an old crane against a white-hot sky, and it's beautiful. You walk it for two hours in the heat with a sketchbook, and Hayes walks it with you, a few steps behind, quiet. You keep forgetting he's there and then remembering, all at once, in your whole body.

You stand where the old dry dock opens to the river and see it: a reading room hung out over the water, glass and timber, the light coming off the river all day. You sketch so fast your pencil tears the paper.

"What do you see?" he asks.

You didn't hear him come up beside you. You hold up the sketchbook. "A room where a kid could sit and read and look up and see ships."

He looks at the drawing for a long time. Then at the river. Then at you.

"Yeah," he says quietly. "I see it."

"Hey! Are you with Ames?"

A man is picking his way toward you across the concrete. Tall, sandy-haired, in a sweat-darkened linen shirt, carrying a laser measure. Handsome in a golden-retriever way: open face, dimples, the kind of man your mother would describe as "nice" and mean it as the highest compliment.

"Jensen Lowry," he says, holding out a hand. "Coastline Studio. We're entering too. I recognized you from the Dorchester library write-up. That building is unreal."

"Thank you." You shake his hand. "Ava Delacorte."

"I know." He grins. "I read the article twice. That cantilever over the courtyard? I've had it as my laptop wallpaper for a year." He glances at Hayes, who has not moved, and something in his grin falters. "Is this your—"

"Security," Hayes says.

"Ah." Jensen looks back at you, relieved, and his grin comes back brighter. "Well, if you ever want a local to show you the good parts of the site, or to argue about load paths over a drink, I'm around. Seriously." He presses a card into your hand. "Good luck. I mean it. Not too much luck."

He walks off. You turn the card over.

Hayes is staring at the river as if it insulted his mother.

"He was nice," you say.

"He was." Flat.

"You're doing the fence post thing."

His head turns. "Darius talks too much."

The sky starts to go green on the way home.

Summer storms in the Lowcountry don't arrive so much as ambush: one minute the sun is blinding, the next there's a wall of slate-colored cloud over the Cooper and the wind is turning the leaves of the live oaks silver-side up. By the time you cross the bridge, rain is hitting the truck's windshield in sheets.

"Can I ask you something?" you say.

"You keep asking that like I've ever said no."

"Are you ever scared?"

He drives for a while. The wipers go back and forth.

"Every day of my life," he says. "Fear's not the problem. Fear is information. It tells you where to look. The problem is when it's the only voice in the room." He glances at you. "You've been scared since January."

"Since March, really. January I was just angry." You look out at the rain. "In March I came home and he'd been in my apartment. On my bed. And I stood in the doorway and I thought, I designed this place. I chose every light fixture. And it's not mine anymore. It'll never be mine again."

"It will be."

"You don't know that."

"I do." He says it with such quiet certainty that you turn to look at him. His hands are steady on the wheel. "I've watched a lot of people get their lives taken from them, Ava. You're not one of them. You'll get it back. I'll make sure of it."

You don't trust your voice. So you don't say anything at all.

The power goes out at eight.

You're in the kitchen making pasta, because you refuse to let a stalker and a thunderstorm stop you from eating dinner like a person, and he's leaning against the counter with a beer he hasn't touched, and there's a crack of lightning so close the windows shudder. Then everything goes black.

The fridge stops humming. The AC dies with a sigh. Rain roars on the roof.

"Generator should kick in," Hayes says in the dark. "Ten seconds."

You stand still. You can hear him breathing. You can feel exactly where he is, the way you can feel the heat off a stove without touching it.

Ten seconds pass. Twenty.

"Okay," he says, "it's not kicking in," and there's a beam of light, his phone, and he sets it face up on the counter so it throws a white glow onto the ceiling. "Stay here. I'll check the panel."

"I'm not afraid of the dark, Hayes."

"I know you're not." He doesn't move. "I'm going to check the panel."

He still doesn't move.

The light from the phone is soft and strange, making everything look underwater. His face is half shadow. His eyes are on yours. The kitchen is getting warm already without the AC, and there's a fine sheen on your collarbones, and you watch his gaze drop there and come back up, slowly, like it's being dragged.

You don't decide to step closer. You just do.

So does he.

There's a foot between you. Then less. Your back finds the edge of the counter. His hand comes up, slowly enough that you could turn away, and brushes a strand of damp hair off your cheek, and his thumb stays there, just at your jaw. It's the lightest touch in the world. Every nerve in your body goes to that one spot.

"Hayes," you whisper.

His eyes close.

He's so close you can feel his breath. The storm is roaring. Your hands are on his chest; you don't know when you put them there. His heart is slamming under your palm, as fast as yours. You tip your face up. His head bends. A half inch. Less.

And he stops.

He opens his eyes, and the look in them almost takes your knees out: hunger and grief and something like apology, all at once. Then he takes a step back. And another. Your hands fall away from his chest.

"Your father," Hayes says, very low, "is my oldest friend."

"I know who my father is."

"Then you know why I can't."

On the counter between you, his phone starts to buzz. The screen lights up the whole dark kitchen, bright and white and merciless.

WARREN.