Chapter 3: Salt
By the time you've found your shirt, he's gone out the back of the shed, through the loose board by the rope locker that you didn't know about and he clearly did. You catch one glimpse of him through the gap, barefoot on the rocks, moving fast and low the way he must have learned in an arena a lifetime ago. Then the headland takes him and there's only you and the sailcloth and the paper twist with one sugar cube left in it.
You go out the front door.
The woman with the polished voice turns, lowering a clipboard. She has silver-dusted eyelids and the kind of practiced warmth people in the capital still wear like jewelry. The man behind the camera swings the lens toward you before she can stop him.
"Oh," she says brightly. "Good morning! We're with the national broadcast, the Victors' anniversary special. We were told Mr. Odair..."
"This is a working shed," you say. "On a working beach. My nets are in there. You're standing on my tide line."
"We have permits from..."
"I don't care who you have permits from. The district council doesn't own the sea." You walk straight at the camera until the lens is a hand's width from your face and the operator, who is very young and very nervous, takes a step back. "If you want to film District 4, film the fleet coming in. Film the market. Film the cannery we rebuilt with our own hands. You'll find plenty of Victors there. We were all in the war."
The woman looks at you for a long moment. Then she looks past you, at the open shed door, the rumpled sailcloth, the shirt that isn't yours lying on it. You watch her understand.
"I see," she says, in a different tone.
"No," you say, "you don't," and close the door behind you.
Annie finds you at the bottom of the road up to the Victors' Village. You've never actually spoken to her. Everyone knows who she is, the Victor who won by not drowning, the woman who married Finnick Odair in the middle of a war with half of District 13 crying at the wedding. She's barefoot, like him, with a cardigan pulled around her and sea-glass on a cord at her throat, and she looks at you with green eyes that seem to be listening to something behind your head.
"He's in the bath," she says.
"I'm sorry?"
"When it gets bad, he gets in the bath and pulls the curtains. He's done it since the hospital. I used to sit on the floor outside and talk about fish." She tilts her head. "I think you'd be better at it than me. I don't know very much about fish."
"How did you know..."
"The cameras came to my house first. I told them he'd moved to District 7." She smiles, a little vaguely, and touches your arm. "He laughed last week. At breakfast. He came to tell me something you'd said about his bowline and he laughed so hard he spilled his coffee. I hadn't heard him laugh like that since before." She lets go. "The back door doesn't lock. Go on."
His house is enormous and empty. The kitchen has a table for twelve and one chair pulled out from it. The hallways are white and long and echo when you walk. There's a window seat at the top of the stairs piled with lengths of cord in every color, some knotted, some loose, hundreds of them, like he's been sitting there for four years tying the same nervous prayer over and over.
The bathroom door is half open. You knock on the frame anyway.
"Annie," he says, from behind a drawn curtain. "I'm alright."
"It's not Annie."
Silence. Water moves.
"I'm sitting on the floor," you tell him, and do, with your back against the tub, so the curtain is right there at your shoulder and you can't see him and he can't see you. "Annie says I'm supposed to talk about fish. So. The mackerel are running early this year. The old men at the market think it's because the Capitol stopped dumping into the bay, and the young ones think it's because the old men stopped overfishing, and they're both right, and I sold forty kilos yesterday at a price that'd make my brother cry."
A long breath behind the curtain. Then: "Forty?"
"Forty-two."
"Skipper," he says, rough, "I'm sorry. I left you there. With them."
"I handled them."
"I know you did. I heard." There's a sound that might be a laugh. "You told them the district council doesn't own the sea. That woman is going to have nightmares." The water sloshes. "That's not the point. They'll put it on the broadcast anyway. They'll find a still of you coming out of the shed. They'll make you the Victor's secret fisherwoman, and some woman in the capital will dye her hair the color of yours, and every time you walk through the market people will look at you the way they look at me. I did that to you. I wanted one thing that was mine and I made it into a story."
You sit there on the cold tiles for a while. Then you reach up and pull the curtain back.
He's sitting in the bath with his knees drawn up and his arms around them, water to his waist, hair dark and dripping. He looks up at you with red-rimmed eyes and doesn't hide.
"Let them look," you say.
He stares at you.
"Let them," you say again. "I've been looked at. I punched a Peacekeeper in the fish market when I was a lot younger and stupider than now, and they made me stand in the square for a day with a sign around my neck. My brother got shot on our own jetty during the uprising, and the whole harbor watched me hold him. I'm not scared of people looking. I was scared of wanting you." Your voice cracks; you let it. "Because I thought, if I want him, I'm just like them. I'm just another person who wants something from Finnick Odair."
"You're not," he says, fierce. "You're not, you've never..."
"I know that now. Last night I figured it out." You lean your arms on the rim of the tub, close enough to touch him, and don't. "Wanting you isn't the problem. It was never the problem. It's about who gets to decide. So I'm deciding. I want you. I want you on my boat and in my bed and at the market where everybody can see. I don't care what they put on the broadcast. They can say whatever they like. I'll be the one who knows what it was."
He reaches out, slowly, dripping, and puts his wet hand on your face.
"I love you," Finnick says. His voice is barely there. "I don't know when. Probably the day you told me to get off your nets. I've said that to people before when it wasn't true, and I've said it to Annie when it was a different kind of true, and I need you to know this is the first time I've said it and meant this. Just this."
You turn your face into his palm and kiss it.
"Can I come in?" you ask.
The smile that breaks across his face is the most honest thing you've ever seen.
"Yes."
The bath is big enough for two, because of course it is. Everything in this house was built for show. But the water is warm and he pulls you back against his chest, and you lie there together with his arms around your waist and his chin on your shoulder, and for a long time that's all, his breathing slowly evening out against your ear.
Then he says, very quietly, "Ask me something else."
You turn in his arms. He's watching you with dark eyes, his lips parted, and you can feel him stirring against your hip under the water.
"Take me to bed," you say. "Open the curtains. I want to see you in the daylight. All of you. And I want you to let me."
He swallows. For a second you think it's too much. Then he nods, once, decisive, and stands up out of the water and holds out his hand.
His bedroom faces the sea. He pulls the curtains back himself, standing naked in front of the glass with the whole bright morning pouring over him, and turns to face you. You let yourself look the way you haven't let yourself for four years. The long legs, the narrow hips, the hard flat stomach and the scars climbing it like coral, the water still beading on his chest. He's hard, flushed, and his hands are flexing at his sides like he wants something to hold.
"You're beautiful," you say.
"I've been told." His mouth twists.
"Not by me." You cross the room and put your hands on his chest. "Not like this."
His breath leaves him all at once.
You walk him back to the bed and lay him down in the sunlight and take your time. You kiss him from his mouth to his throat to the hollow of his collarbone, slow and open-mouthed, tasting salt and soap. You kiss the scars. You kiss down his stomach while he grips the sheets and says your name, then says it again with a "please" behind it, and when you take him into your mouth he cries out and then covers his face with his arm.
"No," you say, pulling off, and he looks down at you, dazed. "Let me see you."
He drops his arm. He keeps his eyes on you while you suck him slowly, your hand wrapped around the base, and it's the most intimate thing you've ever done, holding his gaze while he comes undone in the open light, his chest heaving, his fingers sliding into your hair without pushing, just holding. He doesn't perform. He's not quiet and he's not graceful. He swears and gasps and laughs once, cracked and astonished, and when he gets close he taps your shoulder and gasps, "Wait, wait. I want you. I want to be inside you, can I?"
"Yes," you say, and climb up his body.
This time he rolls you under him, and asks with his eyes, and you nod, and he pushes into you slowly with his forehead pressed to yours. You both groan. He holds still, shaking, until you wrap your legs around his waist and pull him deeper. Then he moves, long, deep strokes, the sun on his back and his eyes never leaving your face. He finds the angle that makes you clutch at him and stays there, steady as the tide, his hand sliding down between you to rub you in time with his hips.
"Tell me," he breathes, "tell me what you want."
"This. Harder. Don't stop."
He gives you harder. He gives you everything, until you're arching up off the sheets with the pleasure building in your belly like a wave, until you break around him with his name in your mouth. He fucks you through it, then buries his face in your neck and follows you with a low, shuddering moan, holding you so tightly you can feel his heart.
Later, much later, you're lying across his chest with the sheet half off and the sun high when the radio set in the corner crackles. It's an old military one; he says he never got around to returning it. A man's voice comes through, plummy and genial and familiar from the war broadcasts.
"Finnick, dear fellow, it's Plutarch. I gather my team had a little run-in with the locals this morning. A fisherwoman, they tell me. Formidable. Look, the anniversary special. Just a short interview. You on the water. You'd be wonderful. Think about it and call me back?"
The radio goes quiet.
You look at Finnick. Finnick looks at the ceiling. Then he reaches over to the bedside table, picks up the radio handset, and presses the button.
"Only on the Petrel," he says. "Only if my skipper's at the wheel. And only if she says yes." He lets go of the button and looks at you, and holds out his other hand, palm up. There's the last sugar cube on it, the one from the shed. He must have carried it all the way here.
"Want a sugar cube?" he says. "It's not the only thing I'm offering."
You take it. You take his hand with it.
"Yes," you say. "To all of it."