The Roommate's Bargain

The cash register is a lie. It is gleaming brass and ornate scrollwork, a bell that still dings when you pull the lever, worth maybe eight hundred dollars to a collector and polished every Sunday like a holy relic. A woman at the bank has just told Cal Hunter, with genuine sympathy in her voice, that the extension request has been denied. Ninety days, and the property goes to auction. The family inn has been operating since 1947. This week it took three bookings. He goes down to the beach to think, and there is a man sitting on his driftwood log with a sketchbook balanced on one knee. Black hair shot through with silver, ink curling up from both wrists, eyes the colour of the sea before a storm, and a scar through the left eyebrow that almost mirrors Cal's own. He knows the public access law better than Cal does, and admits he gets pedantic when he's nervous. Cal's mother spots him from the kitchen window, decides he has kind eyes, and points out that they have empty rooms. So the stranger takes the attic room with its slanted ceilings and faded rose wallpaper. Eighty a night. He pays three hundred, for the trouble and for not calling the police, and gives a first name only. Dorian. The leather bag he leaves behind the front desk supplies the rest. There is cash in bands, twenties and fifties. There is a contract with a non-disclosure clause in bold, headed Croft Management, signed in ink still faintly smudged by Dorian Voss — the musician who won two Grammys last year and then disappeared. The agreement holds him to one designated property for six months, and prices any deviation from it at five hundred thousand dollars in liquidated damages. So the guest in the attic is running, and Cal has just helped him hide, using money he needed too badly to give back. What comes for them after that is an ex-manager with a New York business card, a developer who has already done her digging, a shoreline law somebody wants repealed, a forged petition, and a lighthouse where one of them finally reads a poem out loud. A closed-door small-town romance between two men, about an inn on a ninety-day clock, a contract with a leash on it, and the point at which protecting someone by leaving stops being protection.