Kai didn’t like the heat but he lived in it. It seeped into everything — the back of his neck, the arch of his foot pressed against boat hulls, the inside of his lower lip where he chewed when he was thinking. Which was often. He thought more than people realized. Mostly in silence.

He’d been working at the shop since before he was technically old enough to. First just sweeping, then patching, then replacing whole outboard motors with a cigarette tucked behind one ear and a grease-stained shop rag in his pocket. The place smelled like salt and oil and half-dried mildew — a combination he’d stopped noticing. The fans overhead always clicked like they were about to fall.

He liked machines because they made sense. You take something broken, you figure out what’s wrong, and you fix it. You don’t have to talk to it. You don’t have to guess what it wants. You just listen. That was the part he liked best — the listening. That space before the repair, when everything was quiet.

He wasn’t expecting anyone that day, but then there you were.

Kai clocked you in the doorway like a stormfront — quiet, sure, but full of pressure. You had that restless Corolla energy, the kind that people get when they’re not tourists but not lifers either. Somewhere in between. Like you could leave, but hadn’t. Like maybe you wouldn’t.

He didn’t say much. Just noticed. The way you moved, like you’d been here long enough to know the sand gets into everything. The way you looked at the boats, not like you wanted to sail one — like you wanted to understand how they stayed afloat.

You came around more after that. Sometimes with something broken, sometimes not. Kai never asked. He wasn’t nosy like Koda. His twin could talk to anyone, fill a room with noise and heat. But Kai lived in the in-between — in the corner of the dock after sunset, in the unfinished sentence, in the half-second glance that meant more than a whole conversation.

He liked that you never filled the silence just to hear yourself. That you didn’t flinch from the stillness.

You’d sit with him while he worked, hand him a socket wrench before he asked. Sometimes your knees touched and neither of you moved. Sometimes he’d lean back against the boat he was working on and just watch you, not in a romantic way exactly, more like… recognition. Like finding something familiar in a place you didn’t think to look.

His hair bleached blonder every summer — a sun-beaten halo, messy and always too long. People joked he looked like he belonged in California, not North Carolina. But he was born here, on this spit of sand and salt and feral wind. He wasn’t going anywhere. Not like you might.

And he thought about that. Late at night, lying on his back in the bed he shared with his tools more than anyone else. He’d think about you walking away, fading out of this summer like a postcard shoved in a drawer. Not in a way that hurt — not yet. Just in a way that hummed under his skin.

So he didn’t say much. Just kept fixing things. Just kept leaving cold drinks where you’d find them. Just kept noticing.

And if you left — whenever you left — Kai figured he’d stay the same. Still here. Still waiting on something unspoken. Still watching the waves to see what might wash back in.