Page 21 of Aim for Love

He smiles again, tucking his chin like he’s abashed. “Very disciplined.”

He helps me maneuver so I’m behind him, shifting knee-over-knee until I’m on the back of the board. He gives me the same spiel he’d given me the other day, all of it familiar but already nearly forgotten when I try to repeat it. “You want to be slightly behind the middle of the board, and when you stand up, you want to spread your feet so you have a good center of gravity. Don’t lock your knees. And give yourself some time to adjust because the blood is going to rush to your head after kneeling.”

He’s absolutely right. When I stand up, I almost sit back down again immediately, because I get dizzy. Hunter holds me around the waist from his kneeling position and grounds me.

“Holy shit, I feel high,” I say, once I open my eyes again. There’s nothing but water around us, the shore far away. Will I ever get used to this? Hunter won’t always be there to save me from falling, or reassure me I won’t. Right now, I genuinely don’t know what I’d do without him.

“Look at me,” Hunter says, and I do. His eyes are steady. “One paddle at a time is how we get to where we’re going.”

“OK.” I take a deep breath and hold the paddle the way he showed me before we left the dock, trying to push-pull with my two hands as I tow it toward me in the water. After a few strokes, we start to move. We’re turning, but we’re moving! I decide turning toward shore was my goal and go with it, skimming us across the water. I’m not as fast as Hunter, my strokes not half as powerful. I’m still doing it. The board is moving under my own power. And I’m standing! Unlike the other day, I’m doing this the way the name implies I should.

“Don’t get too close to shore on this side,” Hunter says quietly. He’s facing forward now, and I’ve been partially bracing my—bent!—knees against his back. “There are those overhanging trees. It’s not that big of a deal on this lake, but on a river you could get caught in a strainer.”

I stop paddling. We keep drifting toward shore, though. “I don’t know what that means, but it sounds bad.”

“It’s undergrowth that we could get trapped in. If we get pulled under, it’s hard to get out of underwater roots and we could drown.”

Immediately, I start paddling on the other side, veering away from the shore again. I amnotgoing to drown today.

“My feet are starting to hurt,” I say after we’re safely back into the middle of the lake. “Is that normal?”

“They’re not used to balancing on the board. Very normal. Do you want to sit down again?”

We perform the same maneuver again, carefully trying to switch places without touching the water. Well, I’m trying not to touch the water. Hunter splashes me with the smallest handful before he slides to the side and pauses, face-to-face with me again.

“I’m afraid to close my eyes,” I confess. “Are we going to fall off of this thing?”

“Well, one way to solve this problem would be to lower your center of gravity,” Hunter says. It takes me a moment to follow his logic, because he says it in his “coach” voice, the one he uses to keep me from panicking.

“You mean lay down?”

He shrugs, tucking his chin again. “If you want to.”

“It sounds hard. I’ll do it.” After all, hard gets rewarded around here.

Slowly, I manage to get my legs out from under me. I try to lay down but the lifejacket gets in the way, so I take it offand tuck it under one of the bungee cords wrapped around the paddleboard. Then I lay prone on the board on my back. Hunter stands to get out of my way, straddling me from above. He grins down at me. “Not so hard, was it?”

I pause a moment before I answer, working up the courage. “Well, not yet,” I say, and raise my sunglasses for a moment to wink at him. Then I put them back on, because my eyes start watering from the sun.

He laughs. “I wouldn’t depend on that,” he says, and his voice sounds a little strained. I wonder how I look, laying beneath him like this, my big boobs filling out this bikini top nicely. I’m often self-conscious of my curvy body, but out here in front of no one except Hunter, I’m not worried.

Hunter lowers himself onto his knees, still straddling me, then down onto his hands. He attaches the paddle to the board with the velcro straps and takes off his lifejacket, too.

Then he pauses and looks at me. “You look nervous. Is thistoohard?”

“I don’t know, is it?” I grin. I can’t stop teasing him. He takes it so well and it’s fun. “I’m nervous about the board, not you.”

“It won’t flip, I promise. This board really can’t do that.” He hovers over me, and his thighs must be rock-solid because he barely moves and neither does the board.

Using the fingers of the hand not holding onto the side of the board with white knuckles, I gesture for him to get closer. He’s heavy on top of me, and the board does rock a little when he lies down. There’s zero room for us to lay side-by-side, so he holds himself up on his elbows over me. He can’t hide a thing from me now, with his crotch next to mine. I laugh a little to cover my shiver at the position.

“What?”

“This is not what I expected from your one-on-one lessons. I like it!” I add quickly, because he moves to get off me.

“I’ve never done anything quite like this,” he admits. “It’s…not very professional.”

“You don’t usually train the tourists this way?”

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