Page 41 of The Ripple Effect

When I look up, he’s watching my face, an odd look in his darkened eyes. “You have good hands,” he says. “Strong. They’re very… kind.”

I cringe at the bright, hot discomfort of his praise. I don’t deserve to be called “kind” by Lyle McHugh.

“Good, because they’re not very pretty.” Prominent knuckles, short bare nails. Doctor hands.

“There’s a difference between pretty and beautiful,” he says softly, and I don’t know why I almost feel like crying.

He runs the pad of one thumb over the purple marks dotting my nail beds. We both have them—there are a million chances a day to catch a finger between a boat and a paddle, a boat and the trailer, a boat and pretty much whatever. “These bruises never seem to hurt you.”

I make a dismissive sound, not sure what else to do when he’s laying whispering touches across the part of my body withthe highest concentration of nerve endings, with a few exceptions. Lips. Tongue. And then there’s… I take my hands back and shove them in my pockets, dismayed at how fast my imagination went everywhere it shouldn’t have.

“They hurt. But you learn not to sayoopsorouchwhen something surprising happens. It freaks out the patients.”

He gives me an incredulous look. “You know it’s not normal to pretend you don’t feel pain.”

“It is what it is. And we’re getting off topic. Sloane knows,” I say in a low voice.

“Sloane knows…” He glances around nervously. “Sheknows? You told her?”

“No, I didn’ttellher,” I snap. “I don’t tell anybody anything—you know that. She guessed. And she thinks others may suspect.” They might, too. At lunchtime, Lori nudged me and suggested Lyle’s lap would be softer than the log I was sitting on, then died laughing when I looked at his shorts, then quickly down at the log, and said I didn’t think so. “You don’tthinkso, huh,” she teased, winking. “Do youknowso?”

Ironically, I know plenty about Lyle’s lap—it’s his love I can’t answer questions about. I remember only too well it was me who suggested this charade, me who talked him into it. The fake engagement could save the business, if it holds. But it could hurt him, too. It could hurt us both.

Also, it feels uncomfortably like a con. Isn’t this what Dad did, creating an illusion to throw over people’s eyes while he rifled through their wallets? Isn’t this what the old boys’ club at the hospital did, gaslighting me to serve themselves?

This is different, I promise myself. This is a PR response to a criticism so flimsy that I can’t believe we ever had to answer for it. We’re not stealing people’s life savings. We’re not faking our qualifications or tricking people into buying a defectiveproduct. Lyle’s relationship status will mean nothing once this company’s found its legs.

Even if Sloane was right and no deception lasts forever, the plans for our breakup can wait. Right now, we need to plan for our romance.

“Does anyone else know?” Lyle asks, face pinched with worry.

“Well, we can’t exactly take a poll. But we could do a better job selling our engagement. We could, um. Kiss.”

Sloane gave me a two-minute primer in the truck: Start slow. Keep the contact light; deeper moves can look awkward. Focus on posture and facial expression instead of overselling what’s happening with your mouth. Pick a time and place that suggests youweren’ttrying to get seen.

I try to remember when I’ve seen her kiss Dereck, and can’t. But those two have nothing to prove, I guess.

Lyle frowns. “You said you didn’t want to kiss.”

“Yousaid you didn’t want to know me at all,” I shoot back. “Of course I didn’t want you to kiss me.”

“I didn’t…” He grips a rung of the trailer until his knuckles shine white in the green-tinted daylight under the forest canopy. When he speaks again, his voice is as soft as his fist is tight. “I didn’t mean it that way. You wouldn’t even stand in the same room as me, Stellar. At Liz’s improv showcase, you did a heck of an impression of somebody who wanted me to go away forever. When I said the thing about us not wanting to know each other, I was saying it first. So you wouldn’t have to.”

Trust Lyle to try to give me everything, even a way out of a difficult conversation.

“You don’t have to say uncomfortable things on my behalf. There’s enough awkwardness between us that we can share the pain.”

I do like his smile when it’s subtle, with a slight press of hisfull lips, a little crinkle around the eyes, and a lift of his crooked brow that looks like a laugh instead of an exasperated question.

“So,” I say, already regretting having volunteered to say uncomfortable things. “We should, um, plan to kiss a few times. In front of people. Well, not infrontof people, but where they might see us accidentally on purpose.”

He nods at a blue-and-white baseball cap on one of the logs surrounding the parking lot. “Willow will be missing her hat any minute now.”

“You want to do itnow?” I thought we would work the problem a little before plunging in. Everything feels suddenly too large: the truck, the trailer, the sway of wind-tossed branches overhead, Lyle.

Lyle.

I swear his warmth radiates across the careful twelve inches between us. Suddenly I smell not the lemons and sugar I could be eating, but the earth underneath our feet, his damp, clean hair, and what’s left of his sunscreen after the water has had its way.

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