A week or so later, Mari was quiet as she and Jay bobbed on the water right before sunrise, watching the dark swells roll in from the ocean. The sun was an electric red where it kissed the horizon. It was a clear, cloudless morning, so the sky was a deceptive, tame pink surrounding the sun.

“Your mom hugs just like you do,” Mari finally spoke right as Jay was about to ask her if everything was alright.

It was just about the last thing he’d expected to come out of Mari’s mouth but it made him smile, big. “Is that right?”

“Yeah.”

“What do we hug like?”

Mari side eyed him for a second, swirling her feet through the frigid water. Even with her inch-thick wetsuit on, she wasn’t gonna last much longer out here on the January ocean. “Too tight, all heart, nothing polite about it.”

Jay threw his head back and laughed, hard, utterly delighted with the description. “Yeah, I’ve been told that we don’t have the lightest touch in the Brady family. Marcus and Eli used to complain when we’d wrestle as kids. Say I was way too rough. I never quite got it though. I was just doing what felt right.”

Mari didn’t answer, she just smiled lightly and looked back toward the beach.

Jay continued on. “She’s always been like that too, my mom. Kinda rough. She used to damn near take the hair out of my scalp when she’d dry my hair as a kid.”

Mari smiled bigger but it fell away in thoughtfulness. She turned toward Jay, her eyes piercing his. “Your mom still keeps your dad’s last name?”

A complicated expression crossed Jay’s face. “Nah. Neither do I. Brady is her maiden name. And it was always my middle name. But when I was eighteen we’d both really come to terms with the fact that one, he was never coming back and two, if he did, we’d never be a family in that way again. I told her I was gonna file paperwork to turn my middle name into my last name. She did the same thing. We changed it back together.”

He paused, glanced at her, saw that she wasn’t going to ask. Which is exactly what made him willing to tell her. “It was Sayers. My last name for the first eighteen years of my life. Jay Brady Sayers.”             

Mari shrugged. “It’s a good name. Jay Brady is a hell of a lot better though.” She looked back at the beach and missed the way that he looked at her. In a way, he was relieved she hadn’t seen it, because he was sure his feelings were written all over him. And he was sure that they were definitely the kind of feelings she’d categorize as “a problem.”

“So no middle name, then?” she asked.

“Uh,” Jay scraped at the back of his neck. Either he was blushing or the sunrise was even pinker than she’d thought it was. “Actually, yeah. I, uh, picked a new middle name.”

Mari raised her eyebrows. Sensing that it was more embarrassing than it was sensitive, she leaned across the water between them and nudged him in the ribs. “Tell.”

He pursed his lips. “It’s Bird.”

Mari cocked her head to one side. “You took Eli’s last name as your middle name?”

Jay frowned and shook his head, paused. “No. Well, I mean yes. But it’s, uh, because of Ryan more than anything.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah, I asked him if I could do that and he cried,” Jay smiled at the memory. “He wrapped me up in his arms and just cried.”

“So he really is like your dad then?”

“Yeah,” Jay nodded sincerely, scrubbing a hand over the little bit of his face that was exposed by the wetsuit. “Even when my dad was still at home, Ryan was the one I would go to when I was hurt or confused or even just wanted somebody to mess around with. And then my dad left the same year that Eli’s mom died. And even then, even days, weeks after his wife died, Ryan still had so much,” Jay pounded a hand over his chest, at a loss for the right word, “so much that, still left over for me. For Eli and Marcus too, obviously. But I just remember realizing being in pain didn’t mean you had to stop loving the people around you.”

Mari felt something constrict in her chest. He was doing it again, damn it. He was doing this again to her and she didn’t know how to stop it. Half of her wanted to catch the next wave and just get the hell away from this man. But the other half of her wouldn’t have left the water even if there was a tsunami coming.

“And that’s not how my dad was, is, whatever.” Jay’s brow furrowed. “I see now that he was a really messed up guy. He’d had a hard life, for sure. But he let it affect his everyday interactions with his wife and son. He never showed love or tenderness. It was always just anger with him. And then he left and Eli’s mom died and I just sat back and waited for the same thing to happen to Ryan. I waited for him to get angry and bitter and withholding. With me and with all of us. But days went by and then weeks and months and years and he was sad, so inarguably sad. But he was still hugging the hell out of me, waking up early to surf with me so I wouldn’t be alone, going to Eli and Marcus’s football games, helping my mom mow the yard and fix the pilot light and…”

Jay broke off, the golf ball in his throat cutting him off for a second. He could feel Mari’s gaze on the side of his face and it was more intense than the sun rising behind him.

“You’re like that,” she spoke the words quietly. “You’re just like that.”

He turned and looked at her, but she was framed by the sun behind her and he couldn’t see more than a red halo around her silhouette. “Like Ryan?”

She cleared her throat and he could barely hear the sound over the shifting ocean around them. “Maybe, or maybe it’s just all you. But I remember thinking that during the hurricane. That no matter how scared or upset you were, you were never callous or angry. You were always so tender. So sweet to me. Even when your leg was damn near torn in two and you were bleeding out right before my eyes. You were more worried about me. You were still…” Her lips trembled and neither of them missed the way she stumbled over the next words. “Loving me.”

She didn’t let the words hang there. She couldn’t let the words hang there. The longer they did, the truer they become. Mari knew that it would have felt like a lie not to say them. That her only choice had been to tell the truth. But it was a particular truth that suddenly made her life a hell of a lot harder.

She’d brought love into it. Finally recognized out loud to him that it had been love on that island with them. And that made things different between Mari and Jay. And that made things different between Mari and Linc.

“I’m cold,” she said as she turned to him. Barely a second had passed since she’d last spoken.

“Alright,” he replied easily, although his heart was beating a mile a minute beneath his wetsuit.

***

It was three days later and Jay hadn’t heard from Mari since the morning they’d surfed together. He frowned down at the mountain of paperwork waiting for him on his desk. Metaphorical paperwork, of course; his company was extremely green.

He knew she was currently somewhere in the same building as he was. He knew that she knew it too. And he also knew, somehow, that he couldn’t be the one to reach out first this time. Mari had said the L-word in relationship to the island. She’d drawn a line in the sand at the same second she’d crossed it. And as much as it thrilled Jay that she had, he knew that this was her issue to come to terms with. And he had to admit that coming to terms with it was a hell of a lot more complicated for her than it was for him.

“Oh!” Rita, the head of HR, squeaked somewhere behind Jay and he couldn’t help but roll his eyes. She was typically stoic, reserved, just a touch sandpapery. But there was one person in this world who reduced her to a blushing high schooler.

Jay swung around in his desk chair, faced the front door of his office. “Marcus,” he said, raising an eyebrow. He hadn’t been expecting his friend to come see him at work today.

“Hey man,” Marcus said, tossing one devilish smile toward Rita before he crossed the office.

Jay instantly saw that there was something off about it though. He rose. “What’s up?”

“You got time for a lunch break?”

Jay’s heart plummeted at the tone in Marcus’s voice. Something had happened. “Of course. Rita, I’m gonna take off. If I’m gonna be longer than my hour, I’ll log it in as personal time when I get to work tomorrow.”

“Oh!” Rita said again, blushing and patting her hair. “No, ah, no need for that, Jay. You never take time off, go ahead and take all the time you need.”

“Thanks, Rita.” He resisted the need to roll his eyes. Even in their small, ten-person organization, she was notorious for being an absolute troll when it came to company time. You took too many bathroom breaks in a day and Rita was practically waiting outside the bathroom, eyeing her watch and logging your wasted minutes into the computer.

“Yeah,” Marcus echoed Jay. “Thanks, Rita.”

“Oh, you, why, of course, you’re welcome,” Rita half giggled half whispered as the two men made their way out of the office, Jay grabbing his coat from the hook at the door.

“Man,” Marcus said they strode out into the parking lot. “That Rita sure is a boost to the old ego.”

“A boost to your ego, maybe.”

“She’s not like that with you?”

Jay laughed. “Hell no. I tried the whole, cut-me-some-slack-get-a-load-of-my-smile-and-baby-blues thing when I first started working there and she cut me down like I was wheat in a field. Never tried that shit again.”

“Hmmm,” Marcus cocked his head to one side and pointed at his brown eyes and black hair, his naturally tanned skin. “Maybe she likes ‘em tall, dark and handsome, not Malibu Ken.”

“Fuck you,” Jay griped affectionately. Ever since he was a kid, Marcus and Eli had been able to get a rise out of him by calling him a Ken doll.

With the ease of long habit, Jay unlocked his bike from where it was lashed to a stop sign and hooked it in to the bike rack on the back of Marcus’s truck. Marcus’s biodiesel truck. It had been a three-year long battle, but Jay had refused to ride in the behemoth until Marcus had folded and had it converted to a greener vehicle. He still cursed Jay every time he had to pass up a regular gas station in search of a biodiesel fueling station.

They slammed into the truck and the noise of the late January wind was immediately blocked out. In the strange, vacuuming silence, Jay instantly knew that his suspicions were right, something was really wrong with Marcus.

“My house,” Jay said, just wanting to get somewhere quiet and private so he could figure out what the hell was making his friend’s shoulders tense up to his ears.             

Marcus drove there without another word and they pulled into Jay’s driveway not five minutes later. Jay flipped some lights on in his modest, single-story bungalow.

Marcus followed behind and flopped down on the lumpy couch that he’d flopped down on a hundred times before. He was as comfortable in Jay’s house as he was in his own. More comfortable in Jay’s house, in fact. Marcus never let his demons come out and play when he was at Jay’s or Eli’s. Not the way he did in his own place.

Jay’s house was very Jay. A little bit clean, a little bit cluttered, and welcoming as hell. Everything about it was just plain nice.

Hold it together, man. Marcus screamed the words at himself in his own head as Jay disappeared into the kitchen and came back moments later with some vegan leftover mush thing that Marcus knew looked like hell but would taste pretty good.

Jay also had two beers clenched in the crook of his arm and Marcus’s eyes widened in surprise.

“You left them here a few weeks ago,” Jay, the extremely occasional drinker, said. “It seems like this might be a beer with lunch kind of day.”

Marcus sighed. As much as he was trying to keep it together, his old friend had seen right through him. Knowing Jay, he’d seen through Marcus the second that he’d stepped into the office.

“Well, no need to dip our toes into the water,” Marcus said and reached up for one of the beers. He cracked the top, took a humongous swig of the beer and leaned forward on his elbows. “I had to kill someone yesterday.”

Jay felt all the blood crystalize somewhere around his feet. He’d been really worried it was something like that.

Marcus was an FBI agent. An active field agent. Jay knew this. He’d come to terms with the regular violence his best friend would have to suffer. But this kind of thing never got easier to hear. And from the lined, devastated look on Marcus’s face, it didn’t look like it got easier to do either.

“Jesus,” Jay muttered before he sat immediately kitty corner to Marcus on the old armchair he kept there. Jay tossed the food on the table in front of them and didn’t hesitate to lay one hand on the back of Marcus’s bowed head. Just like he used to when they were kids. “I’m so, so sorry, man.”

They were quiet, just like that, for a long time. Jay hated that they’d been through this before. That at this point, he knew exactly what his friend needed in moments like this. He hated Marcus’s job.

When Marcus looked up, his eyes weren’t dry. Jay counted himself among the lucky few who ever got to see Marcus emote like this. He was typically so rough, so hard edged.

“I can’t tell you much about it, classified.”

Jay cleared his throat. “A man?”

“Yeah,” Marcus nodded his head. “A really bad man. An absolute asshole. He was cancer, dude. Bad for the world. And I killed him. It was him or me.”

Jay took an unsteady swig of his beer. God, that was hard to hear. Jay wasn’t altogether thrilled with the part of him that was so relieved that Marcus had another life on his conscience. But he was. It meant that Marcus was sitting here with him today instead of… what? In a hospital? In a morgue?

“Don’t imagine that makes this part much easier,” Jay said.

Marcus scoffed. “The killing part? No. Doesn’t matter much to your soul who the person is that you kill. It still tears you in two.”

Jay eyed his friend. He’d never heard him admit anything like that before. “Are you off duty for a while?”

“Yeah,” Marcus said gruffly. “Like I said, I can’t talk about it much. But yeah. I’m on leave for a while. I’ve got dates with a psychologist. I’ll have to pass some tests to get back in the field. I’m looking at a pretty boring couple of months. To be honest.”

“Boring is good,” Jay insisted.

Marcus looked up at him like that was the dumbest thing that Jay could have said. “Come on, man. You know bored is a fate worse than death for me.”

“Well,” Jay leaned back in his chair and scraped at his stubble. “Are you allowed to leave the state for a while? Take a vacation?”

Marcus nodded.

“Alright, well, we’ll go somewhere then. Somewhere with pretty girls and some nice, easy waves that even you can surf.”

Marcus flipped him off, but there was a faint smile on his face. Eli, Marcus and Jay had all learned to surf around the same time, when they were eight years old. But Jay was the one who’d really taken to it. Eli and Marcus weren’t embarrassing out there, but they had nothing compared to Jay.

“Sounds perfect,” Marcus said, taking another swig of beer. “Somewhere warm and tropical. Eli will need a vacation after the Superbowl, too. That’s why I didn’t ask him to be here too.” Marcus picked at the label of his beer. “He’s got the Superbowl this weekend. The team’s shipping out tonight. I just didn’t want to get in his head.”

“Makes sense.” Jay nodded. “Want me to tell him after the big game?”

“Nah. I’ll tell him. No matter how emotional he gets. He’s worse at this shit than you are.”

“Excuse me?” Jay raised an eyebrow and reached for the leftovers on the table. “I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

“You two are always crying over something,” Marcus said as he leaned back against the couch for a second and closed his eyes. “You know, writing love poems for your girls, choosing paint colors, crying for your friend Marcus’s dirty, dead soul.”

Jay frowned, both at the insults and at Marcus’s description of himself.

“I don’t cry over your soul, dude. And I don’t write fucking poetry.” Jay paused. “But I would, if I thought it would get me anywhere.”

Marcus rolled his head to one side and eyed Jay. “Still no luck with Mari?”

“I don’t know, man. She’s confused. I’m confused. I’m gonna have to tell her how I feel pretty soon. Or else I’m just gonna be straight up lying to her. And I’m not gonna do that.”

“What if telling her how you feel drives her away? I thought you were playing the long game?”

“Long game is for people who can hide their feelings.” Jay passed food over to Marcus who took it and sniffed skeptically. “I’m not one of those people. She probably already knows how I feel.”

“You do kinda have hearts in your eyes when you look at her.”

Jay scoffed. “Great. That’s just great.”

“When are you seeing her next?”

“No plans.”

“You didn’t invite her to the Superbowl?” Marcus looked at Jay like he was an absolute idiot.

“Uh, no. That’s not exactly her thing.”

Marcus raised an eyebrow. “Luxury box seats from the star quarterback at the Superbowl is everybody’s thing. Even eco hippies like you two. Trust me. You should definitely invite her.”
“I don’t know.” Jay scraped a hand over his blonde hair. “I told myself I’d chill out for a little bit. Ball in her court, you know?”

“Dude, her court has another man in it.”

“Yeah.” Jay frowned.

“I know I told you to play the long game, but since you’re deciding not to, come on, you gotta jump. There is no middle game.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s sleeping with someone else. Making plans with someone else. Snuggled up to someone else.” Marcus paused, he knew his words were scraping Jay raw but he also saw he was making his point. “You’re right that the long game is for someone who can keep a lid on his feelings. But seeing as you can’t, all you’re doing is sitting back while the love of your life gets sucked on by some douchebag.”

Jay tossed his uneaten food on the coffee table. He was suddenly sick to his stomach. Marcus was right. He was totally right. It was either time to stuff his feelings inside and wait for Mari to make up her mind, which was nearly impossible. Or it was time to tell her exactly how he felt. Which was scary as hell.             

All he knew was that he couldn’t wait around anymore. He’d been waiting to see if the way he felt about her had changed in the years since the island. But he knew now, in just the few short weeks she’d been back in his life, that nothing had changed. She was it for him. Her good face, her tough little attitude, her wiry muscles. The way she pushed, hard, against fear. Pushed herself to be more, brave, better. Her honesty. Her heart.

Yeah. Marcus was right. Now that he’d admitted this to himself, there was no way he could keep it inside. Not if it meant that she kept going home to that guy.

“Alright,” Jay said, nodding slowly to himself, realizing that he was deciding things right now. Big things.

He glanced over at Marcus who was raising an eyebrow. “Alright?”

“Yeah. I’m gonna invite her to the Superbowl. And then I’ll tell her.”

Marcus blinked at him. “Well, that was the fastest I’ve ever convinced you to do something in the history of ever.”

“Yeah,” Jay agreed. “I think it was the visual of the douche sucking that did it.”
Marcus grinned for a second but it was laced with grief and guilt. Jay knew that the FBI had counseling programs for things like this. Shit, Marcus himself had been through them before. Twice before. But he also knew that there were some things that only your friends could help you with. And Jay knew just what to do.

“Finish eating.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Jay said, shoveling some food down. “Your pretty ass face apparently got me the afternoon off, and we’re going surfing.”

***

Marcus had to admit. Surfing had helped. It always did. He had nowhere near the natural skill or the experience that Jay had, but still, the ocean calmed him. Hanging out with his friend calmed him.

Marcus drove them back from the beach. They were exhausted, starving, and that strange mixture of hot and cold that always happened after winter surfing.

“Wanna grab dinner?” he asked Jay.

Jay looked up in surprise at his friend. Marcus was a notorious lone wolf and it wasn’t usual for them to have more than one meal in a row together. That typically exceeded his limit. But right before he’d asked, he’d glanced at the clock, saw it was 6:12, and realized that exactly 24 hours ago, he’d shot a man dead.

Marcus felt dread and regret settle even further into his stomach. He didn’t want to go home yet. Back to his dumb, bare apartment. He didn’t want to face his cold, empty bed. He didn’t want silence or music or mindless television.

What he really wanted was a woman. He wanted warmth and softness and pleasure. He wanted somebody who smelled good and tasted better. He wanted to lose himself for a few hours, fall asleep and wake up to do it again. That was the only way he’d gotten through the last two times he’d killed someone in the line of duty.

And goddamn him and his dumb-ass celibacy bullshit. He’d brought this on at the exact wrong time in his life.

He took a deep breath. He knew that a woman would only solve his problems for the night. And she’d inevitably create problems down the line for him.

Marcus knew he wasn’t a bad person. He was smart, funny, often kind, a good friend. He was competent and good at his job. But he also knew he wasn’t cut out for a relationship. He wasn’t cut out to be a husband. And because of that he’d hurt too many women. He wasn’t a player, like Eli had been before he met Tia.

But he’d tried his hand at all sorts of arrangements with women before he’d realized that he was just plain bad at it. Women wanted one thing. And he could pretend to give it for a certain length of time before his own desires, his real desires, reared their ugly heads and he became too much for that woman to handle.

Marcus knew, from conversations with his best friends, that he had an unusual sexual appetite. That the things he craved, needed, from a woman were much more intense than the average man. He needed control, submission, things that were too… hard for pretty much every woman he’d ever been with. So, in order not to push his partners too far, he always pulled up short of what he wanted. And there was only so far you could travel down a road with someone who couldn’t handle who you really were.

Marcus had pledged himself to celibacy almost a year ago now. He’d stopped trying to pick up women. Hell, he’d stopped trying to even meet women. He’d focused on his career and he’d focused on his friends. And now his career was hitting a major pause button.

He’d been working on this case for years. Literal years. He’d been up in Baltimore, about to pin down and arrest a drug lord and known sex trafficker. Someone he’d been hunting for years. And because of some hotshot newbie agent jumping the literal gun, shots had been fired, the man Marcus had been hunting for years had pointed a gat in between Marcus’s eyes, and Marcus had taken him out.

Clean and cold. He’d wasted him.

Years of investigating, waiting, planning, hunting, creative thinking, and more waiting. And instead of seeing him behind bars like he’d fantasized for years, the man was getting cold in a morgue, and his soul rested heavy on Marcus’s shoulders.

The irony of all ironies. Marcus had wanted this shit to be over so that he could stop thinking about this scumbag. And now he knew he would think about him until the day he died. Until the day he died and hopefully didn’t go to hell.

Marcus sighed hard. He didn’t believe in that shit. But he’d grown up Greek Orthodox and his mother certainly did. Marcus wondered idly if God made exceptions for people who murdered in the line of duty.

“Did you hear me?” Jay asked and had Marcus blinking.

“Sorry, man, what?” He realized that Jay must have been talking and he hadn’t even listened.

“I said that yeah, I wanna get dinner. But let’s pick up and eat it at my house so we can watch a movie or something. I’m tired as hell and I’ve got work in the morning.”

“Alright.” Marcus swallowed past the pit in his stomach. Past the burning need to drop Jay off and go find a bar where he could make eyes at some pretty little distraction.

“And afterwards you can crash on my couch.” Jay’s tone was final, firm in the way his mother was often firm. Sweet, but there was no arguing with it.

Marcus attempted to argue it anyways. Call it force of habit. “Nah, man, that’s alright. I’ll be okay to go home.”

“Nah, man,” Jay leaned across the cab of the truck and slapped his friend heartily on the back. “That’s okay. You’ll just crash at my place.”

Marcus rolled his eyes, a small smile on his face. Well, he’d tried.

***

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Marcus asked Jay the next morning as the two of them ate oatmeal and slugged back coffee before Jay left for work.

Jay frowned viciously at his phone.

He slid it across the table toward Marcus who promptly burst out laughing the second he saw the text strand that Jay was texting on.

Hey, any chance you wanna go to the Superbowl? Marcus and I are driving up on Sunday. We’ve got luxury box seats from Eli.

Not my thing.

Box seats are everybody’s thing, trust me.

Who is the halftime show?

Beyonce.

Well, I like her. So I guess I’ll come.

Great!

Can Linc come?

“Damn,” Marcus said, chuckling and sliding the phone back toward Jay. “First she busted your balls over some free Superbowl tickets and then she invites her man? Woman’s got brass.”

“I mean,” Jay stared down at the phone again, a deeply creased frown lining his face, “what the hell am I supposed to say to this?”

“Wait,” Marcus stopped laughing. “You’re considering saying yes?”

“How can I say no? She straight up asked.”

“Jay,” Marcus pinched his eyebrows together. “Under no circumstances is that walking pocket protector who happens to be screwing your woman coming with us to watch Eli in the Superbowl. Alright? Let me make this real easy for you.”

He lunged up and snatched the phone out of Jay’s hand. He typed out two letters. N and O. And handed the phone back to his friend. “Send it.”

Jay sighed, erased the message and typed in Y-E-S. Just the way Mari felt those weeks ago, Jay had the strange sensation that he was saying yes to a hell of a lot more than he wanted to. But he sent the text. Knowing he had no way out of it.

“You said yes,” Marcus frowned.

“I can’t pretend he doesn’t exist, Marcus. He exists. And whatever. Fuck it. So do I. She’s the one who has to decide. Not me.”