Page 23 of Aim for Love

Hunter rolls his eyes. “I guess we better paddle in,” he tells me. “You first,” he adds to me, and I take a deep breath and use my arms for leverage to lift myself back aboard. I lean to the other side of the board when he does the same.

“Bet you learned a lot from today’s lesson, huh?” Scott asks me, using his paddle to turn his board back toward shore. “Pop quiz later! Be ready!”

“Paddle us back in,” Hunter says, pulling the paddle out of the velcro straps on the side of the board and offering it to me.

“Me?” I squeak. “Don’t we need to hurry?” The windisstarting to pick up and I’m afraid to stand.

Kneeling in front of me, holding out the paddle, Hunter smiles easily. “We have plenty of time. You’ve got this. It’ll warm you up. You can kneel while you paddle if it makes you more comfortable.”

He read my mind.I take the paddle. “OK, I’ll give it a shot.”

Leaning in, he says softly, “Want your reward now or later, when we have more privacy?”

I’m pleased to hear our deal still stands later. I bite my lip. “Later,” I say.

“Later,” he agrees, like it’s a promise. And with Hunter, I believe it is.

nine

HUNTER

Once the sun goes down,the guys who rent rooms in Tom’s house tend to gather in the living room. Scott is playing Madden with Tyler, who doesn’t live here but works for Tom part-time and is the acknowledged expert at Madden—given he used to play professional football. Tom is doing a crossword puzzle in the local newspaper. I’m reading my book, the latest from Ta-Nehisi Coates.

“Did you hear Hunter has a girlfriend?” Scott nudges Tyler, as they sit side-by-side with their controllers.

Tom looks up.

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” I protest. I get stuck after that, because I don’t know what Mollie is and insisting it’s “just a summer fling” would be disingenuous. Plus, no one would believe me. “You’re one to talk!” I fire back instead.

Tyler smirks and nudges Scott back. “He’s got you there. Who’s your flavor of the season?”

“Hey, I’ve never been caught making out in the middle of the lake.”

“‘Never been caught’ are the operative words there,” Tom grumbles. As a boss and landlord, Tom is pretty compartmentalized. He watches closely on matters of safety and lets us live our lives otherwise—which clearly includes Scott’s frequent dips into the pool of paying customers.

Tyler snorts. “What, on one of those tiny boards?” A huge man, most of our “gizmos” are toys to Tyler. He helps out sometimes when we get a large axe-throwing party and can handle a whitewater raft better than anyone, but he refuses to get on a horse, a paddleboard, or a bicycle for fear he’d “snap it like a twig.”

“He fell in,” Scott teases.

“That wasyourfault!” I protest. “And she fell in, too.”

“Hey, don’t go making out on a paddleboard if you can't handle getting wet.” He twists his lips a little over the words “getting wet,” and Tyler and Tom both smirk.

I kick Scott in the back—only a tap, yet enough to let him know I don’t like this. He shouldn’t talk about Mollie that way.

Scott drops his controller and turns around. “You’re the one getting in too deep, man.”

“I’m fine,” I say, putting a bookmark in my book and getting ready to stand.

“Nah, you’re too serious for this,” Scott insists. He looks to Tyler and Tom for support. “Make sure you have the conversation.”

“What conversation?” I shouldn’t ask. But I do.

Scott groans, rolling his entire head back. “‘What conversation’, he says. Poor sweet summer child. The conversation about what this is and when it ends!”

“I don’t know,” Tyler says, as he crushes Scott on Madden while his back is turned. “Sometimes you don’t know what it is and you get to explore it together.” Tyler’s been in an on-and-off-again relationship with the same woman for as long as we’veknown him. That’s different. She’s a local. They’re also great together and everyone knows it, so we’re all waiting for them to catch up.

“That’s different,” Scott says. “Mollie’s not a local. She’s going to leave at the end of the week. Then what, they’re going to explore long-distance?”

---