She managed to pull her eyes up from his magnificent chest and to his eyes but found no relief there. They sparkled and danced, catching all the light of the stars overhead and throwing them back at her dazzling her. So she listened to his words and lowered her eyes, but they landed instead on his mouth. That was no better, that mouth with its impossibly white teeth, with its maddening smiles was no safer than his eyes or his chest. She knew the briefest taste of that mouth and it unsettled her how much she wanted another. Not fair, he was not fair to come to her with no shirt on asking her for anything. 

She solved the problem by looking up to the rigging this absurd contest was taking place in, measuring distance with eyes used to measuring things, to putting numbers and names to things so that she could categorize and contain them. Jax had a name, one he’d insisted she used and it did nothing to contain him, not even in her mind. Three letters, one syllabus, one vowel, two consonants. It was not enough to contain someone such as he. Each time she used the name, aloud or in her head she felt like she had less of a grasp in the mercurial man than before. As if each use revealed a facet she hadn’t know. And this multifaceted man wanted so much from her, more than he asked as his last question to her said with weight, not words. 

“Yes… No.” He asked too much, but she would help him. She stepped out of her cabin a little more, to look up at the rigging and then back at him, closer now, surly that had been an accident on her part. She risked meeting his dangerous eyes with her own, which were far too open for her to have done such a thing. But it was done and she was undone. 

“Oui, I will help you. I will hold your rope.” She said, honey on the breeze, loud enough for all to hear. “But I will not hold your boots.” 

A bit of humor, honeycomb in the honey, slipping past her lips without intending. There was laughter from the crew, less at the humor which was small and unpracticed but at the source. They had not heard their dour first mate ever crack a joke, even a small one. 

Her eyes were still on his, she could not look away. “I must get dressed.” She said in a whisper to him, a bit of hair, tugged free by the ocean breeze as she’d spoken to him danced across her face and seemed to reach out to him, lightly caressing his skin as if in proxy.

“I must put my hair up, be decent.” But she didn’t move, she just stood there and watched as that lock of hair danced across his bare skin.