Work Text:
*
Kathleen shifts her weight on her heels, her A-line navy-blue skirt swinging faintly in the harbor’s breeze.
“So.”
Standing a few feet in from of her, arms outstretched, Joe grins. It’s a boyish grin that she has grown to think less annoying and more attractive over the course of their acquaintance. Now that he’s her – boyfriend? Partner? Man? The nomenclature for relationships past the age of thirty is exhausting – her whatever, she thinks it’s quite cute. It lights up his eyes and crinkles his mouth and she gets a low shiver in her belly. It’s a mischievous grin.
“This is the boat?” she asks.
Perched at her feet, Brinkley shivers and leans against her legs. He’s a warm and happy dog. She never thought of herself as a dog person, but Brinkley she likes quite a lot.
Joe fixes a stare on his dog. “Traitor.”
Kathleen smiles and strokes her hand through the dog’s fur from head to back, leaning down. “Joe – “
“Don’t – don’t pass judgement. Not yet,” he interjects.
“I do not pass judgement!” she exclaims.
He rolls his eyes. “Kathleen – “
“I don’t! I make informed decisions,” she says, straightening back up.
He crosses his arms over his chest. “When have you ever been on a boat?”
She blinks. “It’s just – it’s the thing about boat people.”
“The thing?” he asks archly.
“The aura. The mystique. I don’t have a boat person personality.”
“Kathleen, just come onto the boat,” he says in exasperation.
She tips her head back to look at the grey-blue spring sky thoughtfully. Then, she sighs.
“Fine,” she says, and walks towards him. Brinkley follows at her heels.
When Joe takes her hand she can’t help but smile and rub her thumb over the back of his hand. It’s nice to have the freedom to touch him like this, to experience a Joe Fox in a relationship as opposed to as an enemy or a casual acquaintance. She didn’t quite know what to make of his subterfuge at first, but she thinks she understands it. It isn’t in her best interest – theirs overall – to dwell on their acrimonious beginning. She learned more about herself in the past nine months than she had in years with Frank, and she thinks Joe has learned some things too.
She hopes so, at least. This already feels more permanent than any other relationship she’s been in, and it’s only been two months.
Inside the boat, she squints. The wood paneling, the bar – “It’s exactly what I pictured.”
“Oh yeah?” Joe asks, settling on one of the built-in sofas. Brinkley jumps up next to him with a huff.
She tugs on the hem of her blue-floral cardigan, standing in the middle of the room. Through the windows she can see the harbor, other boats bobbing in the water. “Dark. Boozy. Woodsy. Menfolk-y.”
“Wow. That’s quite the list,” he says with a small grin. “Come sit.”
“Isn’t this the part of the movie where Jaws jumps through the window and bites off our legs?” she asks.
“Is that where this boat thing comes from? Jaws?” he asks, laughing.
“I saw it at an impressionable age!”
Joe ends his laughter with a sigh and reaches out a hand to her. “Kathleen.”
“You are very bossy,” she says, edging towards him.
“I only have to be this commanding with you. I can’t imagine why,” he says dryly.
She settles on the sofa next to him, tucking her legs under her skirt, and he drapes his arm around her shoulders. Her cheek presses to his shoulder and she sighs. He relaxes under her, as she rests a hand on his thigh. Joe moves a mile a minute, always thinking ahead; it’s a pace she’s growing accustomed to, though she thinks he might like taking it easy with her.
“I’m not asking you to live on the boat, you know,” he says after a few moments of peaceful stillness, just the whuffs of Brinkley’s breathing to fill the comfortable space.
“I know,” she says, smoothing her fingers over the worn denim of his jeans.
“You might like being out on the water.”
“Maybe.”
He groans. She can almost see his eyes rolling, without looking at his face. “Kathleen – “
She tips her head up and kisses her name from his mouth. “I just don’t understand how you can sleep on this thing.”
He blinks, his mouth twitching into something of a smirk. “Well. Haven’t been sleeping here very often of late, have I.”
Blushing slightly, she pops up and kisses him again. The arm around her shoulders slides against the couch cushion as it anchors around her waist and pulls her flush to his chest. The kisses are deep and long and echo low in her belly, a thrumming want she remembers from reckless college hookups and the early days of her twenties. She’s older and wiser and in her thirties now, but she can still have this. It’s refreshing to have the physical desires and the intellectual stimulation all in the same attractive package.
Brinkley shuffles off the couch and settles himself down at the closed door, his snout resting on his crossed front paws. She smiles slightly as Joe pulls her closer on to his lap. The hand not around her waist plays with the hem of her skirt.
“I’m not having sex with you on a boat, Joe,” she says between kisses, her fingers finding purchase in his thick dark hair.
He groans again, this time a low wanting sound. “Kath – “
She bites her bottom lip and leans away, tilting her head. “You got me on the boat. That will have to satisfy you.”
“I’m insatiable when it comes to you,” he says, fixing his gaze on her.
“Don’t try your lines with me,” she laughs.
His hands settle on the rise of her hips and he shuts his eyes with a sigh, stroking his thumbs along her curves. “You know what I think about sometimes? You in that princess storytime hat.”
“Joe, you’re ridiculous,” she says.
“Funny way to say I’m the best,” he murmurs.
She leans over and kisses him softly. “Tell you what – the next time Matt and Annabelle are around, I’ll bring out the hat.”
He smiles into her kiss. “That’s a place to begin negotiations, sure.”
They do not have sex on the boat. That afternoon, at least.
*
Kathleen remembers the dinner party in which she discovered who Joe really was so clearly.
Sometimes it wakes her in the night. She might be alone, and thinking of Joe. He might be sleeping next to her in her wide cloud of a bed, soft breaths and dark hair.
I’m in the book business, he had said, so easy and cool.
I’m in the book business, she had replied, twisting the dagger out of her back.
There is of course the coffee shop and the closing of her store and weeping in the children’s section of Fox Books – all of these are hard moments in their past. But she thinks of the dinner party because she remembers the email from that same evening, the email from NY152 – when he asked her if she ever felt as if became the worst version of herself. Thinking about it months later, she knows he regrets how he spoke to her, because the best version of himself told her so through a remote internet pathway.
Joe is prickly and sometimes too hard, but he always knows how to come back to his best true self.
*
“This place is just windows and books,” Joe says as he hands Kathleen a glass of chilled pinot grigio.
She looks away from her street-facing window, through the gauzy curtains, where she has been watching the heat rise off of the pavement, and smiles. “I thought you liked my place.”
“I do. It’s just – I can’t get over it. Windows and books,” he murmurs, resting a hand on the small of her back. She feels the heat of his body through the soft cotton of her dress. It’s still bright and hot at six in the evening, July in New York City. They wait for friends to arrive, a small little dinner party; Christina and George and Kevin and whatever dates they may bring. Brinkley lays stretched along the wood floor between her bedroom and her makeshift office, breathing easy and deep.
“It’s an apartment for one person,” she says off-handedly after another moment of silence, after a fortifying swallow of wine. He knows his wine.
Joe is quite still next to her. She remembers all those months ago, talking about The Godfather and mattresses, when he told her over that chat that he knows she has problems being brave. She wants to be brave now.
She turns and looks at him, smiling slightly. “And I’m not living on the boat.”
He blinks, smiling slightly. “Kathleen Kelly, you are full of surprises.”
Her apartment buzzer sounds just then, breaking the moment. Joe goes to let their friends in and she inhales. The press of his palm against the small of her back lingers.
Later, with the buzz of wine and friends humming in her veins, she finds herself chatting with Kevin in the kitchen. Joe is off in the living room patiently listening to George talk about Eric Carle, and Brinkley collects attention from Christina and Birdie near the street-facing window.
“You know what Joe told me once?” Kevin says after a swallow of beer.
She blinks, watching him.
“That you were the most charming person he’d ever interacted with. And he’d be a fool not to move heaven and earth to marry you on the spot,” he finishes.
Her heart thumps rapidly in her chest, her cheeks flushing. “Oh.”
“So, you know. He’s working on it,” Kevin says with a grin.
“Working on it?” she squeaks out.
“Yeah, well. There’s still some moving to do,” he says, shrugging.
*
A night in September, when she has a draft of her first children’s book due in a week and the leaves are beginning to shift and turn, she is alone in the apartment. It is three in the morning and she can’t sleep without the weight of Joe next to her. She plays Joni Mitchell and opens the windows wide, listening to the city at night. It’s soft echoes of sirens and dogs barking and the wind in the trees outside her windows.
Kathleen sits at her computer and opens the word processing document, thinking fondly for a brief moment on Frank and his loud typewriters. She tucks a leg under her as she sits in her chair, the soft brush of her striped pajamas lovely against her skin. The screen glows in the darkness of her apartment. She doesn’t log into her email because why should she?
Except, an hour into editing and sipping at a cool mug of tea, she does. Because it’s habit, and because sometimes on nights they’re apart, Joe will send her little notes, or reminders. It’s a cute tradition, a reminder of how they know each other on every level.
And yes, there is an email, from NY152. He asks to meet for breakfast at the diner three blocks away from her apartment, and she smiles. She won’t reply now, because he will frown and get those lines in his brow when he sees the timestamp. But she will go, and she will be brave, and ask him about apartments. They are in this together, despite everything.
*
The diner is full of daisies. There is a ring hidden inside of a copy of Pride and Prejudice at their table. All of their friends and family appear at the windows once she sits down across from Joe. When Joe slides down to one knee, the sun catches on the simple sapphire and pearl in their silver setting.
She smiles through her happy tears, and brings him from his knees to kiss him an answer.
She loves New York in the fall.
*