We did, in fact, make it to a bed—if you counted the narrow, thin mattress he’d installed in one of the berths down below as a bed. It was hot down there, despite Boone’s battery-operated fan. Or maybe it was just hot any time I was near this man.

“Told you it wasn’t so nice,” he said sheepishly. There was a tiny light on over the sink in the corner, bathing the whole cabin in chiaroscuro shadows. “Now you know why I sometimes sleep in the truck.”

I trailed my hand over the wooden paneling above my head. This part was either undamaged or had already been restored, as it was glossy and golden. “But it’s so beautiful. I’m jealous of whoever will get to sail this thing once you’re done with it.”

His breath seemed to catch beside me. “It’s mine.”

My hand froze on the woodwork. “What?”

I propped myself up on my elbows and turned to him. He sat up at the other end of the mattress.

“Well, I’m going to sell it. But for now, it’s mine.”

“You own a yacht?” I shook my head in disbelief.

“I own a barely watertight piece of driftwood, yes.” He shook his head. “It’s stupid, right? I thought I could get more money for it if I fixed it up before I sold it, but some of the bigger repairs are beyond my skills, and every time I pay an expert to look into it, I feel like that’s cutting into any profit I could reasonably make.”

I looked around the boat, at the carved wooden paneling and the elegant lines. Yeah, real stupid. Boone was a man of mystery, indeed. “I don’t know. Properly restored, she’d be really gorgeous. I think you might make a lot off of her.”

“Yeah.” But he didn’t sound convinced.

“What’s her name?”

He rolled his eyes. “Sunrise Suzie.”

I laughed.

“I know. I’m going to change it.”

“I think that’s hard to do,” I said. “Don’t you have to sail across the equator backwards during a full moon or something?”

He furrowed his brow. “Who told you that?”

People at the yacht club my whole life. “I don’t know. It’s a rule.”

“I assure you, all I have to do to give her a new name is paint over the old one.”

“Well, yeah,” I replied, mocking, “but then you’ll incur the wrath of the sea gods.”

He smiled and crawled on top of me. “True. There’s a horror movie in that, I’m sure.”

I trailed my fingers up his biceps. “Oh, definitely.”

And then we stopped all pretense of conversation for quite a while. But we still talked—boy did we ever. I don’t know what it was about sex with Boone, but every time he touched me, it was like I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I would have been embarrassed by it, but he talked through the whole thing too, and every wild, sexy thing he said only spurred me on.

Afterward we fell into a sated, sweaty sleep, our slick bodies wrapped around each other as the cabin cooled in the night. And when I woke, sometime later, still hot, I didn’t want to move. It had been years since I slept on a boat, rocked to sleep by its soft swaying. It had been nearly nine months since I’d slept in the arms of a man, too. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it. I couldn’t believe I was here.

With Boone.

He was supposed to be my one-night stand. My bit of rough. But this was three dates, now—or whatever you wanted to call those first two. And here we were spending the night together, and sharing secrets, and he took me to horror movies and got me a new salad because he remembered about the nuts…

This wasn’t the plan. Not that I was any good at making plans.

I snuggled farther into his arms and he stirred, tightening his hold on me. “Hannah,” he whispered into my hair. “What are we doing?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, leaving soft kisses on his jaw. At least I wasn’t alone in thinking we were nuts. “Something stupid, probably.”

“Probably.” He ran his hands down the length of my body. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. I should stay away from you. Why can’t I stay away?”

“Because I’m crazy hot?”

“Yeah,” he said softly. “That’s definitely the reason.” He shifted a little, propping his head up on his hand so he could look down at me. “Listen, I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. You still don’t know me very well. Before this boat, I was living in my truck. It wasn’t pleasant.”

I nodded soberly. “I figured as much.”

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes. A lot.”

“Me, too.”

“Not these kinds.” His pale eyes held entire seas of sadness. I would have kissed it away, but somehow I knew that Boone didn’t need distractions right now. He needed to tell me the truth. “I’ve lived on my own since I was fifteen. I fucked up a lot. I’ve lived beneath bridges, I’ve lied, I’ve stolen things. I’ve been with people I shouldn’t have and sold things I really shouldn’t have—”

“You sold drugs?” I asked, wide-eyed. I had been seriously sheltered.

“Yeah. Four years ago.”

“Did you do drugs?”

“I…have done some drugs,” he admitted. “But not much. I saw the way it messes you up. And I stopped selling, too. I got scared. I thought I was such a badass, you know, to leave home, but I realized how close I was to falling off a cliff.”

“What did you do?”

“I started working construction. You know those guys that hang out outside construction sites? A lot of times they don’t get picked up, and they are hanging out all day. And when I was one of them, I’d ask them to show me stuff. Once I turned eighteen, and I knew they couldn’t put me in the system or send me home, I got a GED and went to a technical school. The GED was easy. My real high school had been great, before I dropped out. And I took some classes in carpentry and contracting and stuff.”

“So things are better,” I said, as if convincing both of us.

He shook his head and looked at me, incredulous. “Sure. Better. Hannah, you don’t know me.”

“I’m getting to know you,” I insisted. “That’s why you’re telling me all this, right?”

“Or maybe I’m just waiting to see how long it will take before you get scared off.” His shoulders raised in a shrug. “That would be the easiest route.”

“I’m not going to get scared off.” I set my jaw. If I was planning on getting scared, the time to do it would have been before I let Boone take me out into the middle of nowhere, multiple times.

“Really?” He raised his eyebrows. “You’re not scared off by the drug dealing, the drug use, the living under bridges, the thievery—”

“You said it was over.” I gave a firm nod. “That’s what matters.”

“You aren’t thinking to yourself, ‘gee, I should have asked if he’d been tested for sexually transmitted diseases before I had sex with him three times’?”

Okay, he had a point there. A little late to be making it, though. “Do you have any diseases?”

“No, but you should have asked.”

“You should have told me if you had,” I shot back.

“And what if I didn’t?”

What was the point of this little exercise? “Well, that’s why we use condoms. Boone, I trust you.”

“Don’t trust me,” he growled. “Why would you do that?”

“Good question,” I replied mockingly. “Probably because I’m insanely naive and sheltered and privileged. Is that what you want me to say?”

He scowled.

“What’s going on, Boone? Are you trying to scare me off?” Or was he just scared, too?

“I’m trying to be realistic. Because…whatever this is, it’s…” He sighed and looked away. “It’s fast.”

“Realistic?” I echoed. I’d done realistic. That guy dumped me for my sister. “If I’d wanted realistic, I wouldn’t have fucked you in the back of your truck.”

He turned to me. “And now you know enough of the truth to understand that person’s not the real me, either.”

It hadn’t been me, either. Until I did it. Until we both did. Then it had been amazing.

“Look at you, Hannah. You’re like a princess in a castle. That is not my life and I don’t want it to be. So then what are we doing?”

“If I’m a princess, then you’re a pirate on a ship,” I replied coyly. “And don’t tell me what I should and should not be doing with you. They only live who dare, right?”

He groaned and fell back on the mattress, covering his face with his arm.

“By the way,” I said at last, for lack of anything else, “it’s not a poem. It’s Voltaire.”

“What?” Boone asked, his voice muffled by his arm.

“Your tattoo.” I ran my finger along the writing. “It’s not poetry. It’s a quote from Voltaire. He was a French philo—”

“I know who Voltaire is,” he drawled, sitting up. “But it’s a poem.”

“No,” I said. “I looked it up—”

“Be not thou as these,” Boone intoned, “whose mind is to the passing hour confined; Let no ignoble fetters bind thy soul, as free as wind.”

I stared at him in shock.

“Stand upright, speak thy thoughts,” he went on. “Declare the truth thou hast, that all may share. Be bold, proclaim it everywhere: They only live who dare. It’s a fucking poem, Hannah.”

And then, without another word, he crawled out of the berth and started pulling his clothes back on. I sat there, so stunned that I didn’t even speak until he was halfway up the ladder to the deck.

“Wait!” I grabbed my pants and shirt. “Boone!” I threw my clothes on as quickly as I could and followed him above. He’d already untangled the lines from the pier and was starting the engine. Rosy light spread over the horizon, turning the sky and water a silvery blue. Morning had come, and with it, reality.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“What, that the guy you’re slumming around with knows a poem?”

“No! I…I should have realized you wouldn’t have tattooed something on you if you didn’t know where it was from.” I understood that about him now. Boone was too careful, too caring, about everything he did.

“What did you do, Google it?” he said, his voice stony.

“Yes.” I hung my head. I felt so stupid. I was such a snobby bitch.

“Well, now we know why the internet is never to be trusted, don’t we?” He turned the boat and headed back toward the yacht club docks.

I swallowed, and tried again. “It’s a beautiful poem. Who did write it?”

“Lewis Morris.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know him. Then again, I hadn’t actually read Voltaire, either. I was in college, and I wasn’t nearly so interested in poetry as the GED-educated bit of rough I’d been sleeping with.

“It’s called ‘Courage!’” Boone continued. “And I put it on my body to remind me of the reasons I left home. To remind me that I wanted to be better than my parents. That I would never let their lives corrupt me. Shit.” He looked away, over the water. “I should never have brought you here. We shouldn’t be doing this.”

Tentatively, I moved across the deck to sit down beside him. “Why?”

“This boat, you…this is a mistake. It’s a slippery slope.”

“What do you mean?”

“The boat was my grandfather’s,” he said, looking down into his callused hands. “My mother’s father. He died last year and left it to me in his will.”

“Oh. I’m sorry…”

“Don’t be. He’d been wasting away in a nursing home for years.” He shook his head. “Anyway, my mom tracked me down to give me my inheritance.”

“That’s…nice.”

“It’s an excuse,” he said coldly. “I hadn’t spoken to my mother in six years.”

That sentence seemed impossible to me, even though Dad and I were barely speaking these days. Six years? I tried to imagine what it took for Boone’s mother to go looking for her son after everything that happened. It couldn’t have been merely because she wanted the boat off her hands. She must have cared a lot. “Is she still with your father?”

“No. She’s got a new husband now. She swears he’s a really, really nice guy,” Boone sneered. “Of course, that’s what she swore about my father, too, so who knows?”

I reached out and stroked Boone’s arm. His muscles were tense, holding an entire childhood of anger. Or maybe he was still just angry at me.

“The boat is mine, but she pays for the slip,” he said. “And if I could have had it any other way, I wouldn’t even accept that much. Money comes with strings.”

My heart broke for both of them, mother and son. “Do you see her much?”

Boone laughed mirthlessly. “You have no idea. She wants things to go back to the way they were. Dad’s gone and he was the problem, right? And I can’t seem to explain to her that it wasn’t just him. It was her, it was the whole system. I don’t want any part of it, Hannah.”

I squeezed his hand. “Okay.”

“No. Not okay,” he said. “Don’t you get it? What you said the other night about the curtain between your real lives and the show you put on? That’s what my life was like, too. And my mom had pretended so long it was like she believed the lie. No one else knew what was backstage, and she liked it that way. And when—” He stopped for a second. “When I told people, she just danced harder, and no one believed me.”

I ached so hard for that boy—that scared fifteen-year-old boy that Boone had been, whose own mother had chosen her lies over him. But I was a psych major once, and I’d read articles about the kinds of self-deceptions an abused woman could get very good at believing. Boone’s mother was a victim, too.

“It’s like she thinks she can just buy me back with this wreck of a boat. Even though it’s not even hers.”

I said nothing, just sat and listened.

“And now you’re here, and when we were just fooling around, it was fine, but we can’t keep this up, or I’m going to get dragged into it all over again.”

“No you won’t,” I said. When we were just fooling around, he’d said. Did that mean Boone also thought we’d gone further than that tonight? “I don’t care about your family. Mine aren’t exactly saints, either.”

“That’s not what I mean.” He looked pained. “Believe me, it’s been a long time since I let myself want anything as much as I want you.”

“Boone,” I whispered.

His expression closed up tight again and he looked at me, jaw set. “But this is a mistake. We should never have taken it this far. I don’t think— I can’t be with you and live the life I want.”

His words fell like lead around my heart. “Why not?”

Boone closed his eyes and said nothing for a long moment, just sat there and breathed. “Because you’re Hannah Swift.”

I recoiled as if he’d slapped me. “I told you. That’s not what I want. That’s not who I am.”

“It is who you are. Look at you. Designer jeans, trust fund apartment, fancy college. Don’t kid yourself. You can screw the handyman if you want, but you know it’s just a game.”

There was no point in denying it any longer. No matter how good it felt to play, no matter that we dressed up for dates and talked about our feelings in the middle of the night, it was stupid to pretend. My friends told me so, and Boone clearly knew it, too.

Something horrible and hot worked its way from my belly to my throat, choking off every argument, every response, every thought but this:

“Take me back,” I said flatly. “I want to go home.”

“Yeah,” he replied, his voice cold. “I thought you might.”