Chapter Nineteen Lucky
Chapter Nineteen
Lucky
I settled on pivoting around and pressing forward without answering him. He seemed to correctly sense that he might have pushed me a bit too far out of my comfort zone and didn’t ask me anything further about my catastrophizing everything.
I was considering what he’d said, recognizing the truth in it. I’d always thought envisioning the worst possible outcome was the smart thing to do so that I would be prepared. Being caught off-guard by a doomsday event was awful.
Something I knew all too well.
It occurred to me that I was always holding my breath, waiting for terrible things to happen, because they always had.
The stress that constant fear caused—the pressure that I put myself under—it wasn’t good.
Hunter started whistling “Luck Be a Lady,” one of the songs from Guys and Dolls , as we continued down the path and it felt pointed.
Like he was making a pun with the song. Only I didn’t catch the meaning.
Maybe he just liked the song and liked to whistle.
It didn’t feel that way, though.
He abruptly stopped and then said, “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”
What, he didn’t want to keep making wild but accurate guesses? “You don’t know most things about me.”
“That’s not true. I know lots of stuff. I know you sometimes have panic attacks, that you’ve lost a lot of your family, that you’re a hard worker charged with keeping the yacht clean even though you’re a messy person. You’re extremely loyal, protective, and you always follow the rules. You’re smart and funny and probably too generous with your time. Your anxiety is difficult to deal with but you do it anyway. You’re kind and thoughtful, especially with the guests. You have excellent taste in movies. I make you laugh even though you want to pretend that I don’t. And you have freakily good balance—you can carry several plates on your arms up and down narrow sets of stairs on a swaying ship.”
There was another moment, just like I’d had earlier, where it felt like he was laying my soul bare and correctly calling out everything he saw.
I didn’t want to dwell on that, this feeling of being so seen. Because that was another thing that hadn’t happened in a really long time. “I love to bake.”
“You do? That works out well for me because I love to eat.”
I’d seen him eat and that was a hundred percent true. I still got a little hot and bothered when I thought about how he devoured his food, the hunger, the focus.
Wanting to redirect myself, I announced, “I want to open a bakery.”
The confessions just kept rolling on. I had never said that out loud before, not even to my sisters. It felt like such a foolish and impossible dream, like something that couldn’t ever happen.
“That’s why I’m yachting,” I added on. “My nonna used to have an Italian bakery. She and my nonno immigrated to America from Naples and that’s where I spent all my time with her. My dream is to reopen it and carry on her legacy.”
“What happened to her bakery?”
The path had narrowed and I had to push some tall grass out of the way to continue on. “It got foreclosed on and everything inside was sold off. She had battled cancer for a few years and was really deeply in debt because she took out all these loans to pay her bills. She never told us.”
“I’m sorry. That sucks.” He must have been able to hear the pain in my voice.
Was it weird that his empathy was one of the most attractive things about him?
“What about you? What’s your dream job?” I realized that most of the time we’d spent together, it had been him asking me questions.
In part because I was afraid to get to know him better. I suspected that if I did, I would like him even more.
What I already knew, that he was funny, kind, compassionate, goofy, quick-witted, comforting, and implausibly handsome, was bad enough.
He didn’t answer for a bit and I wondered if it made him uncomfortable to talk about himself. That definitely would have set him apart from every other man I’d ever met. “I told you about my sister Harper passing. What I didn’t tell you was that she died from an overdose. She had struggled with depression and anxiety for most of her life and dealt with suicidal ideation. My parents think she took her own life but I think it was an accident.”
That stopped me in my tracks and I turned toward him. “Hunter.” Without thinking I walked over to him and wrapped my arms around his waist. I realized after the fact that I probably should have asked him first, but he returned the hug, holding me close.
“I’m sorry,” I said. My inclination was to rub his back the way he’d rubbed mine when I told him about my family, but I knew that nothing good would come from that. “Are you okay?”
“I am. Like I said, I had a lot of professional help after the fact. I mean, once I stopped acting out.”
Let go of him, my brain was chanting, registering how embarrassing this was. My arms were reluctant to move but I finally managed it. I took a step back so that I’d stop crowding the poor man. “Acting out?”
He turned his gaze toward the ocean, visible from our vantage point. “I blamed myself after Harper was gone. I thought that I should have reached out more, checked in with her. Maybe I would have figured out she was using again and could have done something. But I was busy with life and school and I’ll always regret that I didn’t. And my way of coping was to get blackout drunk as often as I could and drop out of law school.”
I heard his voice break, saw him swallow a couple of times, watched the way his jaw set.
“Law school?” I asked, wanting to change the subject, as it seemed like talking about that time in his life was hard for him. “Isn’t the law like, all memorization?”
“That and arguing.”
He had that last one down, at least. “You have a hard time remembering names.”
“Case law is different.”
“How?”
“It just is,” he said with a shrug. “That’s how my brain works. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“That’s how I feel most of the time. I know I’m being irrational and I know the things I worry about aren’t going to come true but it’s just what my mind does.”
He nodded, his gaze still on the horizon. “But to answer your question, my dream is to open a residential treatment center to help people like Harper.”
That seemed pretty spot-on for him. And it had the effect of further weakening my poorly constructed defenses. “Did you go back to law school?”
“No.” There was something heavy there, something he left unsaid.
“Well,” I said brightly, “you’ve come to the right place. To earn money and to maybe find potential investors for your residential treatment center. We’re dealing with the wealthiest people in the world and you might be able to make some connections. I know a lot of yachties who have gone on to some great jobs or started their own businesses because of the friendships they made with the owners or the guests. Or you could take the path one of my former chief stews did.”
Hunter raised his eyebrows as a question.
“She married the owner of the boat. He is forty years older than her, and she’s very happily spending as much of his money as quickly as she can.”
“Is that your plan? To find a rich guy to marry?”
The question felt completely insulting. “I’d rather french-kiss an electric eel than end up with somebody rich. Rich people took my nonna’s bakery.” Which was a whole other story I didn’t want to get into—how furious I felt at the bank executives who foreclosed on her bakery without even giving me the chance to make things right.
A strange expression crossed his face. “But you spend your days serving the rich.”
“The irony is not lost on me. And I do worry sometimes that it makes me a bit of a hypocrite. But a prospective date telling me he has money would send me screaming in the opposite direction. Rich people are the literal worst, and I know that even more now because of my job. I’m going to save up everything I need and then I’ll reopen her bakery.”
Another pause. “So you’re not looking for an investor, but why don’t you take out loans?”
“I’m never going into debt,” I said firmly. “I saw what it did to my nonna and my mom and I’m not going to put myself in a position where a bank can take everything I’ve worked so hard for.”
“Given how you feel, you really did pick the worst possible job to go into.”
“Like I said, I recognize that. But the money we can earn here is ridiculous, and I’d be a fool to miss out on that. I’m hoping to earn fifty thousand dollars in tips by the end of this season. And I try not to think about the ‘rich’ part with our guests and focus on what works for me. I like taking care of people. I think it’s why I like baking so much. It’s a way to take care of someone with sugar and chocolate.”
We were close to the beach that was the turning point for our walking tour. I started down the path again and he was close behind me.
“I can’t believe you were almost a lawyer,” I said.
“Not quite. There were a lot more steps before that point.”
“It explains why you’re constantly contradicting me.”
“I don’t do that.”
I glanced over my shoulder and saw him grinning. We broke through the grass line and it emptied onto a quiet beach. There were only a handful of people there. The sand was white but littered with gray rocks.
I went over to the shore and stared out at the sea, at that color that exactly matched Hunter’s eyes.
“It’s funny,” I said. “I’m constantly surrounded by the ocean but I never, ever get tired of it.”
He came over next to me, his arms folded across his chest. “I know what you mean.”
We stood there for a long time, quietly watching as the tiny waves lapped onto the shore. The sun continued its ascent in the sky and the edges of the waves sparkled like diamonds in the bright light. The air smelled of brine and sea salt and suntan lotion.
It was a perfect moment.
Hunter looked like he was deep in thought.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“I was thinking that I’m really glad I’m here. Thank you for sharing this with me.”
My breath caught at his words. I had intended for this to be a group activity that we would all enjoy but I discovered that I was so, so grateful that he and I were here alone.