Jacques did not come from money.
That was the part most people got wrong.
Standing at the helm of Always Wet, linen shirt open at the collar, gold catching at his wrist when the light hit just right, he looked like a man who had always belonged to excess. As though yachts and champagne and women with sharp tongues had simply found him one day and decided to stay.
But Jacques had learned wealth the way sailors learned storms — by surviving them.
He’d grown up coastal and rough-edged, the son of a man who disappeared for weeks at sea and came back with nothing but salt in his hair and debts in his pockets. Jacques learned early how to read men the way others read charts. Who wanted to be admired. Who wanted to be seen. Who wanted to forget themselves for a night.
By his twenties, he was running charters no one advertised — private nights, quiet routes, boats that didn’t ask questions. He ferried secrets. He kept them. He let people ruin themselves safely, then charged them for the privilege.
By the time he bought his first yacht outright, he already owned people in ways that never showed on paper.
Always Wet wasn’t indulgence.
It was proof.
Aiofé knew this.
She always had.
She stood at the bar now, sunglasses pushed into her hair, prosecco untouched in her hand, watching Jacques move through the deck like he owned not just the yacht, but the air around it. The way people leaned toward him. The way conversations softened when he entered them.
“Still playing king of the floating fuck palace, I see,” she said when he finally approached.
He smiled lazily. “Still pretending you don’t love it.”
“I love the boat,” she corrected coolly. “You’re just… unfortunate ballast.”
He leaned in close enough that only she could hear him. “You came anyway.”
She snorted. “Curiosity. And boredom. And because my husband thinks yachts are vulgar.”
“Ah.” His eyes flicked down her body, slow, unapologetic. “Then this is practically charity.”
“Careful,” she said lightly. “You know what happens when you mouth off.”
“Yes,” he replied. “You fuck me.”
The history between them was not romantic.
It was chemical.
They never pretended it was anything else.
By late afternoon, the yacht had settled into that particular kind of indulgent haze — sun-warmed skin, half-drunk conversations, laughter that carried just a little too far over the water.
Aiofé found Jacques below deck.
She didn’t knock.
“Still hiding your good liquor like a coward?” she said, already opening a cabinet.
“You always did like my secrets,” he replied from behind her.
She turned slowly, deliberately. One hand slid beneath her skirt, her thong gliding down her legs to the floor as if it were nothing more than an inconvenience. She didn’t look at him while she did it. She didn’t have to.
Then she lifted her eyes.
Smiled like a knife.
“Only the ones that fuck me back.”
The air between them went tight, electric.
“You’re married,” he said mildly, as if discussing the weather.
She stepped closer, close enough that he could feel her heat. “You’re intolerable,” she said. A beat. “And French.”
“And yet.”
“And yet,” she echoed, grabbing his shirt and dragging him into her.
Their kiss was not tender. It never had been.
It was teeth and memory and the particular violence of wanting someone you had already decided you would never have. Jacques backed her against the wall, one hand braced beside her head, the other already learning the familiar shape of her hip like it had never forgotten.
“You still smell like you’re going to ruin my life” he murmured.
“You still fuck like you’re angry about it,” she shot back.
“Only with you.”
“Good.”
They did not undress carefully.
They did not speak kindly. They did not fuck gently.
It was years of restraint snapping all at once — whispered insults, breathless laughter, the kind of sex that wasn’t about love, respect or escape, but ownership without consequence.
She rode him like a challenge. He fucked her like a dare.
After, she dressed first.
Always did.
“You’ll ruin someone one day,” she said, smoothing her dress, lipstick reapplied with surgical precision. Nose powdered.
He smiled up at her from the bed. “I already have.”
She paused at the door. Didn’t look back.
“Don’t get sentimental,” she said. “It’s unbecoming, frenchie.”
When she returned to the deck, the sun was lowering, the light turning gold and dangerous. Heidi caught a glimpse of Jacques moments later — calm, immaculate, unreadable.
She didn’t know what Aiofé knew.
But the ocean did.
And Jacques, watching the horizon with a glass in his hand, felt the familiar prickle at the back of his neck — the sense that tonight was not about pleasure at all.
