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“You need company,” Mr. Heavensbee says. “I can’t in good conscience send you out there alone.”
“I don’t,” Finnick says firmly. He’s had enough company to last a lifetime.
“People go mad out there, all by themselves. If nothing else, the work is too grueling. You’ll need someone to trade shifts with at times.”
“Then get another worker and send us both,” Finnick says.
He wants this job. He needs this job. He needs to be alone, and he needs to be far away, and all he wants is for it to be him and the sky and the sea and for nobody to be able to find him. Nobody at all.
“Don’t you have a sweetheart?” Mr. Heavensbee says, exasperated. “Good looking boy like you, clearly a hard worker. There must be someone.”
Finnick hesitates.
“Just ask her to come with you,” Mr. Heavensbee says. He pushes his chair back and claps Finnick on the shoulder. “If she’ll go with you, I’ll give you the job.”
Finnick heads straight for the beach. He can already see her, picking her way along the shore. She’s got her skirt folded up in her hands, and he’s sure there’s a thousand shells and stones and pieces of sea glass weighing it down. When he catches up to her, she looks over and scoffs.
“I thought we had a deal,” she says.
“I have a new deal for you.”
“No,” she says.
“It’s our chance,” he says. “I can get us both out of here.”
She stops in her tracks. “There’s no us,” she says. “You know that. I can take care of myself.”
“I know,” he says, immediately backpedaling. “And I’m not saying – there doesn’t have to be an us, ever. But I talked to Mr. Heavensbee, and he’ll give me the job, as long as someone goes with me.”
“So he can hire someone else,” she says, unimpressed. “It’s got nothing to do with me.”
“He’ll give it to me if I have a wife,” Finnick says, and she turns to stare at him.
“So go ask one of the girls that’s always falling all over you,” she says.
“I don’t want a wife.”
She raises an eyebrow.
“What I really want is this job,” Finnick says, and he doesn’t know why he tells her these things. He doesn’t know why he tells her anything. She always tells him to leave her alone, but she doesn’t leave. She’ll let him talk to her, just so long as he doesn’t stop her on her path along the beach, picking up things, or staring into the tide pools, looking at the creatures there. She’ll listen impatiently, but she won’t leave, for as long as he wants to talk.
“That’s all I want,” he says. “If you come with me, I’ll leave you alone. You can do whatever you want. I’ll give you half the money, there’s a place for us to stay. You can spend all day on the beach. You can make as much jewelry as you want, when I have to come back to town I’ll sell it for you.”
Her eyes narrow. “I can sell it myself,” she says.
“Or you can sell it yourself.”
She’s still unimpressed.
“It’s your chance,” he says. “You can…”
He trails off. Her sleeve’s ridden up, and he can see the patterned bruising along her forearm. She sees where he’s looking and makes a huff of frustration, shakes her sleeve back down.
“I thought you said he wasn’t going to do that anymore,” Finnick says softly.
“Got dinner on the table late,” she says impatiently. “What else is in it for me?”
Finnick doesn’t have anything else to offer her. It’s a lonely life, being a lighthouse keeper. All he wants is to be left alone. He thinks she wants that, too.
“I’ll never touch you,” he says. “I’ll take care of the house. All I need is for you to be there. We don’t have to talk, we don’t even have to see each other. I’ll stay out of your way.”
She makes a sound of assent.
“And any time you want to leave,” he says, “you can go.”
Her gaze brightens.
“Fine,” she says.
“Really?”
“Hurry up,” she says, and starts walking again. “You’re the one that’s going to tell my father. He might not knock me down for it if you’re there.”
Finnick winces.
“I’m Anastasia,” she says. “If you’re so determined to marry me, you should probably know my name.”
Finnick already knows her name. Everyone knows her name. Everyone knows who Anastasia Cresta is, and everyone knows she’s mad. That all she does is spend her days on the beach, that sometimes, the entire street can hear her screaming, and rumor is, if things don’t go her way, she won’t hesitate with one of the long knives she has, always hanging at her hip. Everyone’s going to think Finnick’s just as mad as she is, marrying her and running off to sea with her.
He doesn’t care.
Her father tries to knock her down, even with him there. Finnick steps in between them.
“I’ll grab my things,” Anastasia says, and something about her voice is different. It’s still got the hard edge Finnick knows so well, but there’s something almost like fear there.
She packs a bag, half filled with rocks and shells and sea glass. They go straight to the church, grab two strangers they pass on the street for witnesses, and an hour later, they’re married.
“I’ll stay with you,” Anastasia says. Her lip curls. She clearly hates the idea, and Finnick doesn’t blame her. He’s not thrilled about it, either. His apartment is…
“I’ll sleep on the floor,” he says. Anastasia scoffs.
“Not a chance,” she says.
He goes to tell Mr. Heavensbee the next day. Anastasia comes with him. They’re both packed, and Mr. Heavensbee takes a long look at the two of them before he sighs.
Maybe Mr. Heavensbee didn’t want Finnick to take someone that’s already mad out to a remote rock with him. He doesn’t care.
“This is my wife, Anastasia,” Finnick says.
“I know who she is,” Mr. Heavensbee says tiredly.
“We’re packed,” Anastasia says impatiently. “Are you going to give him the job or not?”
“Yes,” Mr. Heavensbee says. “We’ll go now.”
The first few months are easy. The weather’s good. Finnick rarely sees Anastasia. She’s got a strict routine. She’ll clean in the mornings, but she refuses to cook. Finnick doesn’t mind, he’s always liked cooking. She’ll spend the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon outside, picking through the tidepools, following the shoreline on the island, and at night, she lights a candle and works on her jewelry. It’s delicate, intricate. It takes her hours to make a single piece, and Finnick knows she’s selling it for far less than it’s worth. He knows she’d been selling it for years, trying to pocket enough money to leave, and he knows she’ll do that now, too.
She doesn’t trust him. He doesn’t blame her. But her long knives, always at her hip, never make an appearance, and he never hears her scream.
Finnick gives her half his wages when Mr. Heavensbee comes to the island to see how the lighthouse is operating and give him the first envelope, and her eyes narrow.
“I don’t take charity,” she says.
“You’re the reason I got this job,” Finnick says, “and you’re the reason that this house isn’t a disaster. It’s not charity.”
Anastasia huffs but takes the money from him.
She’s the one who takes the boat in to get supplies and sell her jewelry. It doesn’t make sense to take two trips, and Finnick knows she’d never trust him to sell the jewelry. It suits him fine. He doesn’t want to go back for as long as he lives, and he thinks if she keeps going instead, he’ll be able to pull that off.
Anastasia doesn’t come back that night.
Finnick sits at the table and stares at the wood. He thinks about waiting up for her, but it’s long since dark, and he’d told her that she could leave whenever she wanted, anyway. She doesn’t have to come back. He tries to ignore the sinking feeling that the thought gives him.
She’s back the next day and passes him a handful of coins as soon as she walks in the front door. Finnick almost knocks over his chair in his eagerness to stand up, and he almost runs to her.
“What’s this?” he asks.
“Half my earnings,” she says, and Finnick bites his cheek to keep in the smile.
The seasons change, and it gets cooler. It starts to rain. It doesn’t stop Anastasia from going outside. Finnick doesn’t think anything could stop her from going outside, but he’s worried she won’t be warm enough.
He starts making her a sweater. His grandmother taught him to knit and his sisters always teased him about it, but Finnick doesn’t care. He knows Anastasia would never spend her money on something like that. She’d only brought two sets of clothes with her.
He hides the sweater from her. He doesn’t know why. She claims the kitchen table at night to work on her jewelry, and he retreats to the bedroom, because she’d insisted on him taking it and her sleeping on the couch, and he works on her sweater behind closed doors. But soon he finishes it and he needs more yarn, because he needs to make them both heavier ones for the winter, and so he has to ask her to get some.
“What’d you do with your other yarn?” Anastasia asks. Her tone has lost its harshness over the months they’ve lived at the lighthouse. The tension he’d always seen in her body back when they lived in town has started to ebb away. She’s still sharp, still likely to poke at him more often than not, but it’s not the ironclad defenses she’d had up before.
“Did you drop it in the sea?” Anastasia asks, and he realizes that she’s joking.
“No,” he says, and leans over to dig the sweater out of the basket next to the chair. He passes it to her. “I made you this instead.”
Anastasia stares at him. She’s rubbing the sweater between her hands, back and forth. He’d felted the wool after the sweater had dried, to make it as soft as he could. She likes soft things.
“Why?” she finally asks.
“I was worried about you.”
“You don’t have to worry about me,” she says. “I can take care of myself.”
“I know you can.”
She nods once, a short, sharp thing.
“If you don’t like it you can sell it,” Finnick says.
She could get a lot of money for it. He hadn’t needed to make it as nice as he did. But the yarn had been taking up space, and he never would’ve used the colors on himself.
“I’ll keep it,” she says softly. “Thank you.”
“I’m making a couple others for winter. That one won’t be warm enough.”
“Okay.”
“Anastasia, you’re shaking.”
“Annie.”
“What?”
“You can call me Annie,” she says.
With the fall comes the storms. The sea isn’t as calm as it is during the summer, and the wind howls. The rain is torrential, and it’s all Finnick can do to keep the light from going out. He stays up one night, lights the wick over and over, and it gets blown out over and over again, because one of the windows is broken and there’s a draft he’ll never beat.
The storm finally dies down at around five in the morning, and once the light stays lit for half an hour, Finnick considers it good enough and stumbles back to the house. It’s still raining, and he’s soaked through over the course of the short walk back. He wants to collapse into bed and sleep for a week, but the best he’ll get is a couple hours. He flings the door open and winces at the wave of heat that crashes into him.
The fire’s still going.
Usually the fire burns out in the night. Once Annie’s asleep, she’s out. She doesn’t wake up even in the chill, and she never lights the fire at night, but this morning, the fire’s going. He looks over to see Annie leaning against the counter, wearing the sweater he made her and an enormous pair of pants she’d lied and told the shopkeeper were for him, that he ended up taking in for her, because another thing that Annie doesn’t do is sew, with a mug of coffee between her hands.
“There’s one for you,” she says. “If you want.”
Finnick wants. He suddenly wants, so badly.
He wonders what she’d think. What she’d do.
“I’ll drink it if you don’t,” Annie says impatiently, but he can see the smile playing at the corner of her lips, and he knows. She doesn’t get impatient with him anymore, not really.
Finnick grabs the mug off the counter. “Can you wake me up by ten?” he asks.
“No.”
“What -”
“No,” Annie says. “Sleep as long as you want. I’ll keep it lit.”
Finnick thinks maybe he should argue it, but he’s so tired he doesn’t want to and his clothes are still dripping water on the floor, and it’s really not that hard to keep it lit, not when it’s not storming.
“At least wake me up if the weather gets bad again,” he says, and Annie nods.
He shows her everything the next day. He explains it all to her and she watches him closely, and then says, “We could take it in shifts.”
Finnick doesn’t really understand why she’s offering, because it’s his job and he’s managed to do it so far, and he tells her that.
Annie looks down. “I’m not contributing much,” she says. “Now that I can’t go to town.” The sea’s too rough, the small boat they have is too dangerous to take, so one of the larger ones from town comes out with supplies every couple months.
If Finnick tells her she doesn’t have to contribute anything, he knows she’ll shut down. With the weather the way it is, Annie’s already fraying around the edges. She doesn’t like storms. It hadn’t been as bad the night before, so he’d gone back to the house for a couple hours, and Annie had been up late, pacing the length of the living room, tugging at the ends of her hair. The careful routine she keeps has fallen apart, she’s got a growing stack of jewelry and no money to show for her efforts, and she won’t stop pacing. She hasn’t stopped moving in days, and he wonders if that’s why she’s always out on the beach, always moving, because the energy is always there. He wonders what else he’s missed about her.
“Could you check it in the mornings after storms?” he asks. “That way I can sleep.”
Annie nods.
It’s never really that cold in the winters, but the house is drafty, and being on such a small island means there’s no escaping the water and the constant damp chill in the air. Finnick asks for more yarn, even thicker, the next time the ship brings them supplies, but he knows he won’t get it for a couple months, and he resigns himself to being cold until then.
The storms get worse, and they’re so frequent that he stops sleeping at night, sleeps a couple hours in the morning and a couple in the evening instead. He always gets back to the house exhausted and soaked through, and the fire’s always going, and Annie’s always awake. She doesn’t say anything, just jerks her head towards the already made coffee, and then goes out into the early morning air, back to the lighthouse.
She doesn’t say much, and she never has, but they’ve never spent so much time together. They’re almost trapped in the house, because even Annie gets tired of being outside in the steady drizzle, and Finnick runs out of things to do because he still doesn’t have any yarn, and when he’s not at work, he thinks he might go mad, staring at those dingy four walls.
He understands a little more, now, about why Mr. Heavensbee had been so adamant that someone had to come with him.
“Are you any good at poker?” he asks Annie one day.
She raises an eyebrow. “What do you think?”
She is good at poker. They bet with matches, and she’s got three boxes’ worth by the end. That keeps them occupied for a few days, but then Finnick runs out of matches, and Annie’s restlessly drumming her fingers on the table, her attention clearly waning.
“I think we’ll just have to talk to each other,” Finnick says.
“Oh no,” Annie says, deadpan. “I wouldn’t want you to think I enjoy your company.”
Finnick laughs, startled, and Annie looks at him and starts laughing, too, and maybe they are both going mad, because once they start laughing, they can’t stop, and every time they look at each other, they’re set off again.
They pass an afternoon like that.
The rain finally relents that night and Annie immediately disappears onto the beach for hours. Finnick checks the light, and when he’s satisfied, he goes back to the house, waits up for her until he can barely keep his eyes open, and then goes to bed, or tries to. As soon as the clouds rolled out, the cold rolled in, and he can’t stop shivering. He gives up and goes to sleep on the couch, in front of the woodstove, and has almost dropped off to sleep when the front door bangs back open.
Annie’s staring at him. Her expression darkens when she sees him half asleep on the couch, and Finnick realizes what he’s done. How much he’s pushed, how he’s so firmly in her space.
“It’s cold in here,” Annie says finally.
Finnick nods. “I’m so sorry,” he says, his voice rough with sleep. “I can -”
A muscle in Annie’s jaw ticks. “Grab the blankets,” she says.
“What?”
“We’re sharing,” she says. “Splitting the blankets is just going to make us both cold. I’m assuming you’re able to keep to your half of a bed.”
Finnick nods. He stumbles back into the bedroom and climbs back into bed, and the last thing he feels before he falls asleep is the weight of Annie settling the blankets she uses on top of his, smoothing them down.
He snaps awake in the middle of the night. He knows the fire’s gone out, he can practically see his breath in the air of the room, and he goes to restart it, but by the time he’s back in bed, he’s shivering so violently that it wakes Annie up.
“Fire went out?” she whispers.
“Yeah.”
“I’ll never get back to sleep with you shivering like that,” she says, and Finnick opens his mouth to snap something back, because it’s three in the morning and he’s freezing and she doesn’t get up to make the fire in the middle of the night, anyway, but before he can say anything, Annie shifts over on the bed and presses herself up against his side.
Finnick’s frozen.
“Better?” Annie asks, once he’s shivering a little less violently.
Finnick still can’t move. He hasn’t had anyone touch him in what feels like an eternity and it burns, and he still doesn’t want her to move away.
“Finnick?” she asks, and there’s concern bleeding into her tone. “Are you -”
“Fine,” he says. “It’s better.”
Annie carefully moves back to her side of the bed.
Finnick thinks that’ll be it. That it’ll happen one night, they’ll never talk about it again, but the nights where he’s not in the lighthouse, Annie always appears in the bedroom, and they never say anything about it. He stops tensing up when she curls into his side. She stops moving away from him once they’re no longer shivering. He wraps his arm around her one night and she sighs and buries her face in his shoulder, and Finnick’s breath catches in his chest.
He finally gets his thicker yarn. He uses it on another sweater for Annie.
“It wouldn’t have been enough for me,” he says when she opens her mouth in protest. “They didn’t send enough.”
With her new sweater, Annie’s finally warm enough to fully go back to her routine, spending hours and hours outside, and Finnick almost…
He misses her.
She stops working on her jewelry as much at night, though. She doesn’t need to get more ready to sell, she’s already got a full bag of it, waiting for spring. Instead they sit and they talk, because he doesn’t see her during the day, and he tells her increasingly ridiculous stories, trying to get her to laugh, and she tells him more facts than he could ever remember about all the sea creatures she finds on the shore.
“Finnick,” she says one night while they’re on the couch. The firelight is playing on her face, her hair spilling down around her shoulders, and she’s tucked her feet up under his legs.
“Hmm?”
“Why’d you take this job?”
“I wanted a change,” he says.
“No. What are you running from?”
Finnick stares at his knees.
“Most people don’t ask a stranger to marry them so they can live on a remote island,” Annie says.
“Most people don’t say yes.”
“You know what I was running from,” Annie says. “What about you?”
Finnick can feel it. If he doesn’t tell her now, he knows she’ll never ask again, and he doesn’t think he’ll ever tell her if she doesn’t ask.
“I used to turn tricks,” he says finally. “I was one of Snow’s boys. And I wanted out.”
“Oh,” Annie says softly.
Finnick bites his tongue, hard.
“I didn’t know Snow let his boys go,” Annie says.
“He doesn’t.”
There’s a long silence. Finnick waits for her to pull back away from him, to walk out, to say something, anything, but the silence stretches on, and on, and on.
“You know,” Annie says, “I think I need to order more of that silk thread for the bracelets. I’m almost out of the blue. Will you remind me to fill out one of the purchase forms tomorrow?”
Finnick almost cries.
It’s deep in the middle of winter when Finnick thinks that she might actually like him. They’ve tolerated each other. Annie had agreed to come with him and she’s put up with his company, only now she smiles when she sees him walk in the door, and she pushes a shell across the table to him one night. “It’s too fragile for jewelry,” she says. “If I bore a hole it’ll splinter. You can have it.”
Finnick turns it over in his hands. It doesn’t seem too fragile, but he doesn’t know much about shells or jewelry, not like Annie does.
She gives him a piece of sea glass a week later. It’s a deep, shining blue, the same color as the sea below the cliffs on the far side of the island. “It doesn’t match,” she says. “I won’t be able to do anything with it.”
Finnick starts to make a pile of the things she gives him, the rejects, she calls them, on his nightstand, but he keeps that sea glass in his pocket.
They’ll talk. Annie will tell him things about her life with almost heartbreaking simplicity, about the way she struggled in school, about the time her father broke her arm, about the necklace she made for the mayor’s daughter to wear to her wedding. Finnick keeps telling her stories. He never talks about what happened. She doesn’t seem to care.
She likes to be close to him. She’ll tuck her toes up under his legs when they’re on the couch, and leans in close to his side if they’re walking along the beach together. She carefully reaches across the table one night and catches his hand in hers as they’re talking, strokes her thumb over the back of it, and Finnick trails off in the middle of his sentence.
“Okay?” she asks, and he nods.
At night, she immediately curls into him, and he doesn’t move away, just pulls her closer, every time. They stay up later and later, now that the sea is rough but the storms have calmed, and they get in bed and they whisper to each other, and one night, that’s when Annie whispers that she’d like to kiss him.
“Would you like that?” she asks, and Finnick thinks about it, and then he nods.
She shifts back up the bed a little bit, so their foreheads are touching, and carefully reaches up, tracing along the line of his temple, his cheekbone, down to his jaw. Her nails are long enough that the rasp of them against his skin makes him shiver, and he can almost feel her smile before she leans in and gently presses her lips to his.
At night, they kiss. They kiss, and it’s so sweet, and Annie never kisses him during the day. Only at night, when it’s so dark in the bedroom that he can barely see her outlined by the faint glow from the fire in the living room, and when they’re pressed so close together that there’s nothing in between them at all, not even air.
He kisses her. He kisses her, and it always starts to deepen, and she eventually always pulls away with a ragged gasp and settles.
Finnick doesn’t want her to pull away. He wants to make her feel good, to feel better than she ever has in her life. He’s her husband. He’s her husband, and they’re alone on an island in the dead of winter, and he wants her.
Then one night, she doesn’t pull away. She shifts closer to him and her hands tighten in his hair, enough that he sighs against her lips. She hums back and rolls onto her back, and he follows her. He’ll always follow her.
He doesn’t get on top of her. He wants to, but she’s back to kissing him so delicately, and he wants this to be about her.
Finnick starts to trail his hand up and down her side, down over the ridge of her hip, back up along the side of her ribcage. He grazes the side of her breast as he moves back up to stroke his fingers along where her neck meets her shoulder, and suddenly she’s moving, tearing her sweater and shirt off over her head. She starts tugging at the hem of his shirt, and together they get it off and he tosses it onto the floor to join hers.
Annie presses back into him and the slide of her skin against his, the warmth, the softness, is so good that Finnick loses focus for a minute. Annie wraps a hand around the back of his neck and pulls him back in to kiss her again. She’s shifting almost restlessly against him, Finnick knows she won’t say it but she wants more, and the next time he trails his hand back up her side, he traces over the side of her breast even slower, with more intention.
Annie exhales, a sharp thing, the air punched out of her, and Finnick drags his fingertips up and over the top of her breast, feels her nipple start to harden under his fingertips. She’s panting against his lips, he’s moved up and carefully tracing patterns on her collarbone, and when she tenses, enough that he knows she’s losing patience, he slides his hand back down and brushes over her nipple again. Her fingernails dig into the back of his neck as he starts to roll it between his fingers, pinches and tugs, trying to figure out what she likes, what makes her shift on the bed, what makes her start making cut off sounds in the back of her throat.
Finnick can feel her hips rocking down. He doesn’t think she knows she’s doing it, and he wants to shift, get a leg between hers so she has something to grind against, but before he can, she takes his hand and moves it so he’s cupping her breast. It’s so soft under his fingertips, it fits so perfectly in his hand that it’s like she was made for him, and he immediately squashes the thought. He finds the pressure that makes her sigh and relax into him, and he kneads her breast until she starts shifting against him again. Their legs are tangled together, she can’t close them and get the friction she wants.
Finnick carefully trails his hand back down her side, ignoring the slight sound of protest she makes, strokes back over her hip, down, down into the crease where her hip meets her leg, and before he can overthink it, he slides his hand over and traces a circle over her clit.
Annie arches up into it and the sound she makes, a half choked off thing that sounds almost like his name, sends heat coursing through him. Finnick shifts, rolling closer to her, more onto his side so he can get a better angle, have more space to move. He’s kissing her and now it’s her that can’t focus, and he’s still drawing slow circles that drag against her clit. She presses her forehead into his shoulder and then she moves, kicking the rest of her clothes off and down the bed.
Finnick tugs her chin back up so he can kiss her again, and Annie tangles their legs together, pulling him closer. She grabs his hand and drags it back between her legs, down until he’s stroking over her cunt, and she’s so hot and so wet and so swollen that he can’t hold back a groan. He’s barely touched her, barely done anything at all, and still, she wants him so badly. He feels her smile against his lips.
Finnick slicks up his fingers and drags them back up, up through wet heat. He presses hard, starts rubbing slow circles over her clit again. He doesn’t think it’ll be enough, all he wants is to tease her a bit, make her impatient, but she starts to tremble in his arms, and he knows not to stop. She’s still kissing him but her breath has started to hitch, and then it turns to whines. Her hips are rocking down against his hand and she’s pulling him closer to her, he can barely see her in the glow from the woodstove in the other room, but she’s flushed and shaking and so radiant in his arms.
He wants to tell her she’s beautiful, ask if she likes it, but he’s afraid if he says anything, he’ll startle her away. They haven’t spoken once since this started and she’s so close, he can feel her tensing against him. He doesn’t want to ruin this for her. He speeds up the motion of his hand a little bit and she moans, sounding so shocked.
When he kisses her again, her nails dig in hard to his shoulders as she gasps against his lips and comes. She whines her way through it and he doesn’t stop touching her until she drags his hand down further, presses it to her cunt so she has something to rock down against through the aftershocks.
They’re both breathing heavily. Annie twists in his arms and starts to trail a hand down his chest, and he immediately moves back from her.
“No,” he says.
“Okay,” she whispers, and tentatively leans back in to kiss him.
Once it starts, it doesn’t stop. It’s so cold out and it gets dark early, and before, when they’d stayed up later and later on the couch talking, now they go to bed earlier and earlier, and spend what feels like hours tangled up in each other. They never say anything, those times. They never talk about it. She doesn’t kiss him during the day, and sometimes he can see it on her face, that she’s thinking about it, but he doesn’t…
She’s his wife. He doesn’t want to ruin what they have.
Winter feels like it lasts forever. Annie spends her hours on the beach and Finnick always has dinner on the table when she gets back. She works in the lighthouse in the mornings, even on days where there’s no storms the night before, and Finnick sleeps in. They talk. They talk about everything, they talk for hours, and Finnick doesn’t know when it happens, or how, or really even why , but suddenly he loves her, and he knows she loves him too.
But they don’t say it.
The sea finally calms. It starts to warm up, and once the weather’s held for a week, Annie takes the boat back to town. She’s got a bag full of jewelry to sell and a three page list of the supplies they need, and the weather’s been good but the boat seems smaller than the last time Finnick looked at it.
“You’re hovering,” Annie says gently. He’s walked her to the cove to see her off. “I can take care of myself.” She picks up his hand and presses a kiss to his knuckles.
“I know you can.”
“I’ll be gone for longer.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Finnick says, instead of doing something as embarrassing as giving into the tears he can feel prickling at the backs of his eyes. At least Annie’s eyes are shining with tears, too.
He takes a step back from her, and then another step, and then turns and walks away. He climbs to the top of the lighthouse and watches the boat disappear down the coast, until it’s a speck, until she gets around the bend and he can’t see her anymore.
Annie didn’t say she’d come back. They both know better than to make promises like that, especially when they’re at the mercy of the sea.
She said she’d be gone for longer, and Finnick only starts to worry after it’s been five days. She doesn’t really have friends in town that she could visit. She could be waiting for some of the supplies, but they should all be in season, easy for her to get. And he doesn’t have any way to get to town, any way to check on her and know where she is, if she’s all right. The most he can hope for is eventually Mr. Heavensbee will come to see what’s going on if his wages haven’t been picked up.
Annie comes back on the seventh day. He hears the door to the lighthouse creak open, and he runs down the stairs and nearly collides with her as she’s on her way up. She grabs him by the shoulders to steady him, and she’s smiling, the brilliant, big smile that he’s started to see more and more.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.”
They stand on the stairs smiling at each other for what feels like an eternity. She doesn’t let go of his shoulders.
“Come on,” she says eventually. “I need help unloading the boat.”
She’s brought back everything they needed, all the food, all the provisions. A box of jewelry supplies for her and an entire crate of yarn for him. She rolls her sleeves up as they start putting everything away, and that’s when he sees them.
He catches her hand. “Annie.”
“Hmm?”
“What’re those?”
“What?”
“On your arm.”
She doesn’t move. He pushes her sleeve up further.
Her arm is mottled with bruises.
Annie pulls her hand free. Her expression is shuttered. “Saw my father,” she says. “He still doesn’t like you.”
“I’ll go to town,” he says immediately. “I’ll talk to him.”
“No.”
“I don’t mind.”
“No,” she snaps. She turns on her heel and marches out of the kitchen, and he hears the bedroom door close behind her.
Finnick finishes putting away the rest of their things.
Annie doesn’t talk to him for days. She stays out of the house, and it’s like it was when they first came to the lighthouse, and Finnick doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know how to make it up to her, but before he can apologize or really do anything, one night she curls into his side again, and he knows he’s forgiven.
The storms return with a vengeance in the spring. Finnick doesn’t sleep, and he’s forgotten how much he hates those long, lonely nights. Annie never looks well rested when he comes back in the morning. She doesn’t like them, either.
Finnick doesn’t know why he does it. He comes back one morning, and Annie’s leaning against the counter, half asleep. She passes him a mug, and he bends down and kisses her in thanks.
She exhales, surprised, against his lips. The early morning sun is streaming through the kitchen window, lighting up the living room in gold, and it’s the first time he’s kissed her in the daylight. It’s the first time they’ve done anything to acknowledge what they are outside of the bedroom.
When he pulls away, she’s flushed, and she looks more flustered than he’s ever seen her. He’s sure he’s no better off.
“Thank you,” he says. “I love you.”
Annie breaks into the most brilliant smile he’s seen from her yet, and he can’t help but smile back.
“You’re welcome,” she says. “I love you too.”