Work Text:
There was a man sitting in Stede’s seat.
Stede tried not to be put out by this. It wasn’t rational, he knew that; it wasn’t his seat, really. It was just the seat Stede had sat in every morning since he’d moved to the island.
Five days a week.
For the last three years.
And now someone else—someone Stede had never even seen on the ferry before—was sitting in it.
Stede sat in the seat behind his usual spot and scowled at the back of the interloper’s head. One arm of his leather jacket was missing. It looked very cool in a way Stede himself had never once been able to achieve.
It was fine, he told himself. He was fine. He had a seat.
It just wasn’t as good as his seat.
*
The man was there on Tuesday, too. Still in leather. Sitting in Stede’s same seat.
Fear rose in Stede like bile. What if he meant to take the ferry every day from now on? And what if he meant to claim Stede’s seat forever? Stede had put a lot of work into selecting the perfect seat, and everyone else knew it was his. All the regulars, anyway.
What if he was going to be a new regular?
He didn’t look like the sort of person who went into the city everyday. Most island residents didn’t; that was why they’d elected to live on the islands to begin with. To get away from all that, the bloodthirsty competition and the breakneck speed and the go, go, go, go of sales pitches and contract negotiations and petty corporate dramas.
This guy wore leather and long hair and an impressive, slightly curly beard. He looked like he was into breakneck speeds of a different sort.
Stede went because he didn’t really have a choice. Bonnet Industries would tolerate a lot from its miserable son, but not absence.
This time he sat in front of Curlybeard so he didn’t have to look at him. The hum of the engines underneath was good from this spot, but not quite perfect.
*
Wednesday. Stede shouldn’t have been surprised.
He tried to think of a reasonable-sounding way to say, hello there, ah, yes, it’s just, that’s my seat you’re in? I know there aren’t assigned seats on this ferry but it’s still mine, but everything just made him sound bananas. No, he needed a different tact. A plan. A clever little plan to ruin this man’s fondness for this seat, or else to find a new fondness for some other seat.
“You all right, mate?” Curlybeard said, looking up directly at Stede.
Oh, fuck, he’d been staring.
“Erm.” Stede said the first thing that popped into his mind. “Is this seat taken?”
The man looked at him. He looked around at the rest of the seating area, which was only maybe a quarter full this early in the morning. The seat in front of him was open, in fact. And the seat behind. A plethora of seats, an abundance of seats, a treasure chest of open bloody seats. The ferry was practically overflowing with seats.
Curlybeard raised an eyebrow back at Stede, but he said, “Sure,” and scooted over a tiny bit so Stede could sit next to him on the bench.
There was nothing else for it. Stede sat.
It wasn’t quite his seat. His seat was the window. Snugged up against the side of the boat, looking down at the water. But it was close. So close.
“Ed,” Curlybeard said.
“Mm?”
“Ed. My name’s Ed. And you are?”
“Oh! Stede. Stede Bonnet.”
“I’ve seen you around, Stede Bonnet.”
Ed was looking at him. He had a warm, intent gaze, which was very lovely. Stede couldn’t imagine why Ed would be looking at him when outside was right there, but it was nice to experience, at least.
“I take the ferry every morning. Office is downtown.” He patted his satchel to make the point.
“And I’m new to the morning commute,” Ed said. “Makes sense.”
Stede wondered if he should keep talking. In just a few minutes they were going to turn his favourite bend in the waterway, get a view of his favourite stretch of coastline, and he didn’t want to miss it. He tried to concentrate, but he could feel Ed’s eyes on him, studying. A bit unnerving, but understandable, he supposed.
It made him feel hot under his collar, to be looked at like this.
He’d have to say something. It was only polite, after intruding on this gentleman’s space. He settled on: “Commuting to what, if I may ask?”
Ed hummed and finally looked away, back out the window. Stede’s third favourite dock was passing in the distance, but Ed didn’t even seem to see it.
“The library,” he said.
“The library?”
“The library. Isn’t one on the island, is there?”
Stede had nearly forgotten that his library wasn’t actually a public library; he did loan quite a few books to various whoevers that stopped by. Maybe Ed would like to stop by sometime. “Researching something, then?”
Ed nodded. He studied the water, the passing coasts. As intense as his gaze had been when it had been fixed on Stede, he seemed very far away now. Stede’s favourite coast passed, curving and curling its way through the water—he resisted the urge to point out the boulders that looked like a Great Dane.
“You ever feel like you’re just treading water?” Ed asked, suddenly. “Waiting to drown?”
Only every day of his life. Every day at Bonnet Industries, trying to follow in his father’s shoes, ill-fitting as they were. Trying not to let the weight of them drag him down.
“Yes,” Stede breathed, before he could think better of it.
It was a strangely fragile confession to make, a strange bit of vulnerability to offer up like the segment of an orange. He felt a little brittle in its wake, but Ed only nodded again. Pressed his shoulder back into Stede’s, just briefly, as though to steady him. His shoulder was bare against Stede’s suit, and then it was gone again.
“I dunno,” Ed said, coming back to himself. “Suppose I’m just looking for the next lifeline. Something to hang onto for a bit."
Stede pressed his shoulder back. An acknowledgement, of sorts. “Sounds nice. Maybe I’ll find one someday too.”
“We’ll be just a couple of guys, then, getting towed in by the life preservers.”
“You never know. Maybe it only looks like a life preserver, but it’s really the first step toward wakeboarding.”
Ed laughed. He had a nice laugh. Like cashmere, Stede thought, like a candle in the dark.
They were quiet the rest of the ride. It was—nice, actually. It was nice.
*
On Thursday, Ed was there again. Still in the Stede’s seat. He waved, and held up a pair of pastry bags at Stede’s approach.
“Noticed you usually had coffee with you, but no breakfast,” he said, as Stede slid into the seat next to him. “Cinnamon scone or pain au chocolat?”
Stede felt himself wiggle in surprised delight. He blushed, stilled himself. “Which one’s your favourite?”
“Mm. I like everything, but the pain au chocolat’s really good.”
“I’ll have the scone then. Thank you, Ed, I didn’t think to—”
“Ah ah ah. Don’t even think it, I didn’t expect you to. I was just popping by the bakery to—” He tripped over the next word, lost it in a cough. “To grab a bite, and I didn’t want to eat alone.”
Stede took the offered pasty bag. The scone inside was beautiful, practically sparkling with cinnamon sugar in the morning light. The bit of parchment paper it came wrapped in was stamped with the bakery’s logo: the many arms of the Kraken, waving threateningly behind a ship.
“Oh!” Stede couldn’t help his little exclamation of recognition. “Blackbeard’s!”
Next to him, Ed stiffened, pausing with his pain au chocolat already halfway to his mouth. “You know it?”
“Only by reputation,” Stede said mournfully. “It’s clear on the other side of the island from me—well, you know that, of course.” Ed nodded. “I probably could make it on the weekends, but I like a bit of a lie in and every time I’ve made it over there on a Saturday, they’ve always been sold out.”
Ed seemed very focused on his pain au chocolat. “Owner’d probably save you some. If you wanted. I mean, if you asked.”
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly. They need to sell their wares, and the early bird gets the worm and so on. Maybe I’ll see if they do a catering request.”
“They do,” Ed said quickly, “yeah, they would do, you could order like, a delivered breakfast, or something. They’d do that. For you. Probably.”
He took a massive bite of his pain au chocolat. Flakes of pastry dusted down into his beard.
Stede left him to it and took a bite of his scone, and oh, it was gorgeous. He couldn’t stop his hand from flying to his mouth, like he could press the flavour further in; he also couldn’t stop the sound that rose up out of his throat, which had tried to come out appreciatively and instead landed somewhere closer to obscene.
“God,” Stede hurried to say, hoping Ed hadn’t noticed. “Well, you can see where Blackbeard got his reputation from. Best bakery on the east coast, they say. Probably the best bakery on any coast.”
Ed snorted. “Nah. There’s this little bakery right on the water in Dubrovnik that’s amazing—all this fiddly thin dough, it’s amazing stuff. And in Columbia—churros, right on the fucking beach. Pandan waffles in Vietnam.” He made a face at his pastry, like it was somehow offending him. “That stuff, all those street vendors, mom and pops, it’s just people doing what they do, you know? Living their lives, having a treat just because. None of this pretentious stuff, the competitions and the awards and—”
Ed cut himself off. Took a deep breath. Stede concentrated on his scone to give him a moment of privacy.
“Sorry,” he finally said. “Sorry, I guess I just—I miss being out there in the world. Experiencing it, yeah? Back when things were still exciting.”
Stede’s world felt very small, all of a sudden. He’d travelled, sure, but he’d seen it all from pristine all-inclusives and boardrooms. His life had never been exciting.
“What’s stopping you from going back out there?” he asked, instead of begging Ed to take him with him.
Ed shrugged. “Dunno. Things pile up. Got responsibilities now, managing this and that. Sign these papers, present at this event. Contractual obligations. It’s not even fun anymore, I don’t even need to show up anymore, people just see the logo and think, oh, yeah, this is tops.”
He sighed, popped the last bite of pain au chocolat into his mouth. Rested his head on the window. Stede knew from experience that the glass would be cold, comforting.
He usually wiped it down before he put his own head on it, but he didn’t think now was really the time to bring it up.
“What about retirement?”
“Pfft. Retirement. Retirement would mean having to have someone I trusted enough to hand everything over to, and right now all I’ve got is Izzy.”
“And we don’t trust Izzy,” Stede concluded.
“Really good at crunching numbers,” Ed conceded, “drawing up contracts, managing events. Fucking terrible in the kitchen. Left to Izzy we’d have half our stock in cronuts every fucking day.”
And—oh, ah, of course. Stede looked down at the cinnamon scone in his hand. He was a bit late picking that one up, wasn’t he? He looked over to Ed, took in the leather again, the tattoos, the long beard. Slotted everything he’d ever heard on the Food Network or read in Bon Appetit into the correct places. “You’re Blackbeard.”
Ed nodded, not lifting his head from the glass.
“Suppose the beard should’ve been a bit of a giveaway, but in my head I’d called you Curlybeard.”
“Probably a bit more accurate than Blackbeard these days. My beard hasn’t been black since I was practically still a kid. It’s all just—” he waved a hand carelessly. “Branding.”
The ferry shuddered beneath them; Stede startled. He’d forgotten completely that they were on it, and now they were already at the docks.
“Christ,” Ed muttered, brushing down his beard for the last of the pastry bits. “Sorry, here you are, on your way to work, and I’m just dumping everything into your lap like a hot tea—”
“Nonsense,” Stede said primly. “You needed an ear and I have two. Look at me.” Ed looked. Stede mimed the spot where the last flake of pastry had gotten lodged. “No, over a little bit—down a little bit—oh, so close, you’re just missing it—”
“Just get it,” Ed said, and he leaned in, chin forward.
He was close. Very close. His eyes were dark and intense and his bottom lip was pink in the mass of his beard and he looked like he was carrying the weight of the world on his brow, and Stede wanted not only to pluck the bit of pastry out but to take Ed’s face in both his hands and press their foreheads together and just say, I hear you, I understand you. Me too.
Instead he just reached up and very carefully picked the pastry out, flicked it away.
“For what it’s worth, Ed,” Stede said, getting up and arranging his satchel on his shoulder, “I think you could do anything you wanted to.”
*
On Friday, Ed brought two donuts from a place called Marge’s. “Simple stuff,” he said, handing Stede one frosted in chocolate and sprinkles. “Just people doing what they do.”
It was good. It was really good, actually.
“Go on then,” Ed said, when he’d finished it. “I did my little overshare. Your turn, I reckon, Stede Bonnet.”
He said Bonnet like he knew. Of course he knew. There wasn’t anyone doing business in the city that didn’t know: Bonnet Industries owned half the real estate, half of every sports team, and—off the record, of course—most of the banks.
Stede fought the urge to apologise. Then he fought the urge to deny that there was anything really to share at all.
Then he looked down and saw Ed’s knee there, next to his. He’d put on a navy suit this morning. Tan oxfords, matching belt. White shirt, starched like a uniform. His tie was a navy-striped navy. He looked like he could be off to announce his run for president.
Stede hated it, and he said so, decisively: “I hate this suit.”
Ed nodded in his periphery. Stede kept going.
“I hate wearing navy. I wore school uniforms as a child and now I wear an office uniform and it’s all about just dissolving your sense of self—that’s been my whole life, just trying to be—trying to fit into this idea of what they all wanted. Sometimes I feel like a droid that’s gained consciousness and everyone around me’s just trying to reset my programming.”
Somewhere, in a cosy little blue office downtown, Stede’s therapist was giving a standing ovation. It was probably the most he’d ever managed to say about his own feelings in his entire life.
Ed didn’t respond. Instead he put his hand on Stede’s knee, right there on that navy suit. His skin was a lovely brown, inked with tattoos, fingers studded with rings. He was warm. Stede could feel that he was warm.
He felt real.
“I got divorced, three years ago,” Stede went on. “And she said, you know, come on, you know we never really loved each other, and I said, didn’t we? And I realised that I wasn’t even upset. I didn’t love her. I didn’t really feel anything at all. I think I forgot how.”
He gave Ed a wan smile that Ed didn’t return. Ed just looked at him and waited. Left room for Stede to keep opening himself up. Laying himself bare.
“I moved to the island to get some space. Some quiet. See if I could find a bit of freedom, and I thought I had, but here I still am. Wearing navy, commuting into the city on the 7:25. Same thing I’d have done if I’d stayed in the damned condo, only with a ferry instead of a car.”
He tipped his head back and sighed. “What a joke.”
Ed’s hand tightened briefly on his knee. “I don’t think you’re a joke,” he rumbled quietly.
“I only asked to sit next to you because you’re sitting in my seat,” Stede confessed.
There was a pause. The engine of the ferry thrumming beneath them was deafeningly loud. Every second felt like the bay had iced over, like Stede had just smashed into something delicate and left destruction in his wake. Ed had spilled his heart out to him, had fed him and listened to him and all Stede had wanted was his seat, and he didn’t know how he could deserve the rest of everything he’d gotten and—
“All right,” Ed said. “Get up.”
“I’m sorry, Ed, I’m—”
“Stede. Stand up.”
Stede stood. It had been a long time since the movement of the ferry under him had made him feel unbalanced, but he felt it now. He grabbed his satchel and made for the back of the boat, out of Ed’s line of sight.
“Woah, no, right here, come on.”
Ed grabbed his elbow. Tugged and pulled and jostled and eventually got Stede turned around, pushed him gently back onto the bench. Into his seat. Into his seat.
Everything was suddenly at an equilibrium again—he knew this seat, he knew the scuffs and the screws and the angle of the window and the feeling of the engine. For a moment, everything felt like this whole week had never happened.
Then Stede opened his eyes, and Ed was there.
He’d slid into the seat in front of Stede and turned in it, looking over the back to watch Stede. “Better?”
Stede could have cried. “It’s stupid, I’m so sorry—”
“Shut up,” Ed said, though he said it fondly. “It’s okay to need something, eh? I’m not fussed about what seat I sit in. I want you to be comfortable.”
Had anyone ever said that to Stede before? I want you to be comfortable. It wasn’t exactly the whole world on a platter, it wasn’t happy or successful or powerful, but Stede had feigned a lot of that to the whole world, it seemed like. Comfortable, though.
Stede was so rarely—so, so rarely—comfortable.
“Thank you,” he said quietly.
Ed reached over the back of his bench, left his hand hanging until Stede took it. He squeezed. It felt good. Nice. His hands were broad, and callused, and strong, and holding it felt safe.
Like a lifeline.
“Turns out we’re both in a bit of the same boat, huh,” Ed said. “Stuck in our lives. Wondering what it’d be like to break free. Escape from all this.”
Stede looked up at him. His dark eyes were shining in the morning sun, turned almost amber, somehow translucent. His beard was quirked up on one side—a smile. His thumb ran over the side of Stede’s, back and forth, soothing.
“I don’t know that there is an escape,” Stede sighed.
The smile under the beard grew. “There’s always an escape.”
“You really believe that?”
“You said it yourself, mate. I can do anything.” His eyes were fast on Stede’s. “I think you could too.”
If Stede could do anything, he thought, he knew what he wanted to do most. He wanted to slide forward in his seat. He wanted to tug Ed’s hand to bring Ed closer. He wanted to close his eyes and lean in and—
Ed met him halfway.
He was warm, he was so warm. His mouth was warm and his hand that caught Stede’s jaw was warm and he kissed Stede like he meant it, like he wanted it. He kissed Stede gently and the beard was a strange, otherworldly sensation against his mouth and his chin, and when Ed pulled away, just slightly, Stede followed, kissed him again, felt him inhale, felt him open, felt him make a noise in the back of his throat that made Stede want to climb inside and know him from somewhere closer.
Felt him smile.
Stede smiled back.
*
Stede didn’t take the ferry on Saturdays.
He usually spent these days puttering around his cottage, trimming back the garden, organising his books. He’d usually log into his emails a few times, just to make sure nothing urgent had cropped up, and then he’d spend a few hours sorting through whatever inevitably had. He’d do the shop, he’d pick up the dry cleaning. He’d get a manicure. Maybe take a bubble bath.
He didn’t do any of those things this weekend.
Instead he made some phone calls. Made some reservations, wired some money. Looked up a gardening service. Cleaned out his fridge. Drafted an email to his father. Dug his suitcase out of the closet in the guest room.
After dinner, he called Mary. They talked for ages, longer than he thought they ever had when they were still married. Eventually she handed the phone to Alma, and then to Louis, and Stede made some apologies and some promises. They sounded happy, and when Mary came back on the line again, she sounded happy too. It settled something in him, to hear them that way. A teetering rock of uncertainty he hadn’t known he’d been harbouring, suddenly finding its place.
“I am,” Mary said, a little note of surprise working its way into her voice when he told her so. “I’m really happy. I think the kids are too. They miss you, but yeah, I think—I think they’re happy.” She paused. “I hope you find that too, Stede.”
He looked at the suitcase laid out on his bed. He thought of the note written on the back of his donut napkin—a time and a place. Another phone number. A future, scrawled down in ink.
“I think I’m going to be,” he told her, and he wasn’t surprised at all to find that he meant it.
*
Sunday dawned beautifully over the horizon. Stede was already awake to see it.
“You’re sure?” he asked again, one more time.
Ed squeezed his hand. Wrapped an arm around his shoulders, shifting the blankets with him so he and Stede were cocooned together in a single duvet. He pressed a kiss to Stede’s temple. “I’m sure.”
“We can always come back if you change your mind.”
“Are you changing your mind?”
Stede looked at him. He was gilded with the light of the dawn, pink and peach and gold, and the lines of his face—bare now, set free in the bathroom barely an hour ago with Stede’s steady hand and a razor against his skin, Stede had kept hold of him after as he’d inspected his own face in the mirror like he was meeting a stranger, and then he’d turned to Stede and kissed him, kissed him softly and gently and then harder and then desperately, achingly, wonderingly—were open. Easy.
He looked back at Stede like he wanted Stede to be with him.
Easy.
“No,” Stede said. “No, I’m sure.”
Ed pressed another kiss to Stede’s temple. Stood, and then climbed up from where they were curled together at the bow so he could be seen down the line of the sailboat. Forty-six feet of anywhere they wanted to go, anywhere they wanted to be, and it had cost Stede the last two nights’ sleep in arranging everything from the hire to the crew to the kitchen stock, but it was worth it. It was beautiful.
Five days ago he’d have said it was impossible—things simply don’t happen that fast.
But five days ago, Ed had seemed impossible too, and there he was. Winding whipping his hair, hand still tangled in Stede’s, laughing at the reach. The scent of Stede still on his skin, if Stede got close enough. He’d been close enough that morning.
“All right, lads,” Ed called. “Take us away, yeah?”
The anchor lifted.
*
On Monday morning, the 7:25 from Ocracoke Island left right on schedule.
There was no one sitting in Stede’s seat at all.
*