19. Hands on the Wheel #2
Sighing, he pulls the sunglasses from his face and perches them carefully on my nose.
All while steering one-handed with an ease and confidence that makes me envious.
His fingertips brush my cheek, and though it’s heating up out here, a shiver moves through me.
He curls his hand around my waist, tugging me in front of him, facing the wheel.
I expect him to step back and bark orders the way he usually does. Instead, he returns his other hand to the wheel so I’m now trapped in front of him.
I guess...I don’t mind all that much.
“Hands on the wheel, Rookie,” he orders.
I place my hands on the curve of metal, and he slides his hands closer until they’re bracketing mine.
I expect some kind of sailing lesson to follow or maybe more rebuke telling me to snap out of it. And honestly, he’d be right to do so. I’m violently overreacting.
It’s just...I want to do well. I tackled sailing knowledge like I did all of my academic classes— hard . But also excitedly. I’ve babbled on to Wyatt about things I’ve learned, asked him questions, given myself mental gold stars for my efforts.
I’ve got this , I thought.
But I don’t got this. Not any of it.
Having my confidence shaken so early in the trip over something so simple as channel markers has rocked me. My insides feel wobbly. My self-doubt is raging, and I’m trying really hard not to cry.
Which only makes me angry at myself for being an overly sensitive baby about this. I don’t like to think of myself as a delicate flower, but here I am. Delicate. Flowery.
Wyatt says nothing. He simply shelters me against the firmness of his body, his thumbs brushing over my pinkies as we cut through the open water of the Chesapeake Bay.
Slowly, the tightness in my chest loosens and the threat of impending tears dissipates like the morning fog.
“Thank you,” I whisper, not sure if Wyatt can even hear me over the wind and the water.
But he leans forward, cheek brushing mine as he says, “Don’t let it happen again.”
I laugh because it’s so very Wyatt. “I can’t promise I won’t steer us off course again.”
“No—I meant don’t doubt yourself again.”
I can’t promise that either. But his support makes me feel infinitely better.
The rest of the day passes without incident, and by the time we reach our stop for the night, I’ve fully recovered from my bout of almost paralyzing self-doubt.
I have not, however, recovered from the feeling of Wyatt’s strong and steady presence, the warmth of his muscular chest against my back, the occasional puff of breath against my neck.
People talk about sea legs, how you have to get used to the water and the rock of the boat. I had zero problem finding my sea legs.
Instead, I’m struggling to find my Wyatt legs. I am completely shaken by him.
Even after he backs the boat expertly into the spot the harbormaster gave us over the radio and I hop off the boat, I feel an unsteadiness that’s bone deep. Maybe soul deep.
“Come on, Jibby,” I say, grateful for the tiny dog who somehow is my only ally, my noncomplicated companion. As long as she’s here, I have some kind of protection against the man who is slowly and far too quickly dismantling all of me. A canine chaperone or buffer.
But I can’t help wondering: Is Wyatt trying to dismantle things? Is he intentionally trying to push past my defenses?
Does he have the same tug of attraction, or am I projecting my own growing feelings?
That I can’t answer. And I’m not sure I want to know. How terrible would it be if we had a conversation about feelings and learned that our feelings are not the same?
I try to imagine being on the tiny deck with Wyatt after he’s said that he just doesn’t see me that way or, like an echo from the past, Not your sister.
That was years ago, I tell myself. After all, I’d said I would never be into him, and look where we are now.
In any case, my head is a mess over Wyatt.
Aside from that, I feel really great about our first day sailing. Despite my carelessness, we didn’t run aground. We didn’t hit anything. We followed sailing protocol when we passed other boats, and I got to chat with a few of them on the VHF radio, which made me feel very official.
A small pod of dolphins—or porpoises? I don’t know the difference—swam alongside our boat for almost an hour.
I honestly thought Jib might go overboard to join them. She barked at them for a solid five minutes, running from one side of the boat to the other until she finally fell into an exhausted nap.
I kept watch as the sleek gray heads appeared and then dipped below the surface. A good omen for sailing.
I swear one of them made eye contact with me and we had kind of a moment.
“How many of those did you pack?”
Wyatt is suddenly beside me in the grassy area just outside the marina where Jib has been peeing for probably two minutes straight. She did not learn to use Wyatt’s fake grass patch after all.
I glance at the navy-and-white-striped sailor’s costume I put her in after the morning fog left.
“Let’s just say...she has more clothes than I do.”
Wyatt watches her for a long moment, his expression unreadable. She’s still peeing. Honestly, for a small dog, I don’t know how her bladder holds so much.
“Why, though?” he asks finally.
“You said she was ugly. Then I had her shaved and you said she looked like a rat. It’s enough to give a girl a complex.”
“I did not give our dog a complex.”
Our. The word slams into me, and I think it hits him at the same moment because he goes stiff beside me.
Our dog.
Several thoughts compete for dominance in my brain. There’s the super hopeful, suddenly romantic part of me that wants to read into this as Wyatt’s way of declaring his feelings.
I mean, you don’t have a joint dog with a friend, right? That’s totally a couple thing.
But a more logical, tragic part of my brain, the part that sometimes rises up to do battle with my optimism, reminds me that at the end of this trip, I’ll be going back to Fredericksburg and my normal life.
And Wyatt? He’ll go back to Boston where he’ll lace up a pair of skates and then resume whatever normal life looks like for a hockey star.
There is no our with Jib. What’s next will be a custody battle.
Or not, actually. I can’t see Wyatt fighting me for her. Not when his job involves so much travel.
Still. He said our —that one little word holds way too much possibility.
Jib finishes peeing—finally—and I make the conscious choice to shake off all the giddiness brought on by a single syllable. I can’t go catching feelings for Wyatt.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s walk Jibby before we head inside.”
Quietly, Wyatt falls into step beside me.
Tonight we’re staying at a yacht club that has reciprocity with Wyatt’s yacht club. Reciprocity with a yacht club is a statement that feels silly and pretentious at the same time.
But I won’t complain about the fact that there is a locker room with nice showers, or so Wyatt told me, and a great restaurant.
We have lots of provisions on the boat, but there will be no fancy meals in the limited kitchen.
I anticipate a lot of sandwiches and soups direct from a can.
I’m excited for the hot shower and also a few minutes’ break from Wyatt to reset my brain.
I expect him to ignore the weirdness of our the same as I’m trying to do, but he doesn’t. After a few minutes of walking in silence other than to say hello to strangers who stop to admire Jib’s outfit, he turns to me.
“At the end of this—”
“Nope,” I interrupt, waving the hand not holding Jib’s leash as panic shoots through me. “We’re not doing this.”
“You don’t know what I was going to say.”
“You’re right. But it’s day one of the trip. I am in no way prepared to think about the end of it.”
“I just think it would be good to have a conversation about expectations,” he says.
Somehow, the way he words this and his tone of voice make it sound like he thinks I have expectations—and they’re not realistic. Or not the same as his. Like he needs to make sure I understand there will not be an our , a we , or an us at the end of the trip.
“You know what this feels like?” I say. “You’re trying to force me to read the last chapter of a book I just started so I can be prepared for how it will end. I don’t read that way, mister.”
He drags a hand through his hair, clearly agitated, leaving the dark blond strands a mess. “That’s not what I’m doing.”
Maybe not. But that’s how it feels. And I’m not sure how I’ll make it through the next few weeks if I know every day is taking me closer to certain doom.
Do I really think something could work between Wyatt and me?
No.
Or—I don’t know. It’s highly unlikely.
Even if I am picking up on signals and there is a real spark here, at the end of the day, Wyatt lives in Boston and has a totally abnormal job.
One where the hours and the travel and the intensity make a normal life hard, and where the perks include women waiting in hotels and sliding into DMs. Though I don’t think Wyatt even uses social media.
Jacob has told me that he hires people to run accounts for his clients who don’t want to do it, and I’d place bets Wyatt is one of them.
I also know from Jacob that most of his clients don’t do normal.
They don’t date elementary school nurses; they date models and actresses and heiresses.
Leggy and booby and on a first-name basis with their eyelash-extension people.
Women who are willing and eager to put up with all the downsides of the lifestyle.
When it comes to Wyatt, I may have been able to move past my long-held hang-up with athletes, but that doesn’t mean I’m eager to be a WAG, the term I learned from Jacob to refer to athletes’ wives and girlfriends.
Speaking of Jacob, how would he feel about me and Wyatt?
Any way I try to think about this, about us, about the future, I can’t see one ending with us together.
But this—here and now with Wyatt? This, I can see. This feels good—like something real and right.
I’m not ready to look past the present moment, afraid it will pop like a bubble with no warning. There one minute, translucent and delicate and perfect, hanging in the air, and gone the next, like it had never existed at all.
Wyatt is still staring at me, his jaw working like he’s trying to come up with the right answer, the arrangement of words that will convince me to have this discussion. And honestly, he just might. I feel my resolve cracking the longer I look at his gray eyes.
Jib provides the perfect distraction by choosing that moment and a flower bed to finish doing her business.
“Can you hold her leash so I can get a poop bag?” I ask Wyatt, handing him the leash.
Because I can think of no better mood killer, no better way to slam and lock the door on an emotional conversation, than talking about poop bags.