8. Hudson
Hudson
Here's what I do with a morning I'm looking forward to. I wake up before the alarm and lie there being smug about it for a while.
I do exactly that today at five-fifteen, staring at the ceiling, grinning like an idiot. Because in four hours I get to put Josie Porter in a kayak. She thinks she's going to hate it. She's wrong, and I get a whole morning to prove it.
When I told her last night I was putting her in a kayak, she said, and I quote, “No, and I'd like to keep it that way.” Which is the most Josie sentence ever constructed. A full no, a stated preference, and total certainty she'd be terrible at it.
What she doesn't know, because nobody's ever given her a reason to, is that she's not bad at the water. She's just never had anybody put her on it right. Flat and easy, a quiet morning, the kind where the whole lake feels like it's yours.
That part I can do in my sleep. That part I'm good at.
I get to the launch early. Drag the tandem down to the water, the long red one, the stable one. I'm not actually trying to drown her. I just want a morning where she's stuck in arm's reach for an hour with nowhere to be.
I lay out the paddles. I check the straps on her life vest twice. I tell myself this is professional diligence and not nerves, and I almost believe it.
The cooler I do not examine too closely. I'm a grab-a-gas-station-sandwich man by long tradition, and yet I was up before six packing one. Cold drinks, the good cheese, the bread from Sutter's.
Because she came into the shop a while back to grab something for the preschoolers and stood at my counter swearing Sutter's sourdough had ruined her for all other bread, and I apparently kept that. Held onto it without deciding to.
I told myself it's just good sense to feed people. I told myself a number of things this morning, out in the dark, buying fancy bread for a woman who thinks this is a practice drill.
Wes is opening the shop. I texted him at six and he texted back a single thumbs up and then, because Wes has known me eleven years, a second text that just said have fun on your date. I did not dignify it. I am, however, wearing the good shirt, which I also did not dignify when I put it on.
She comes down the path at nine on the dot in shorts and a tank top, my gray hoodie tied around her waist. Apparently Phase One means hauling my clothes to the lake even when it's going to hit the high eighties by noon.
The sight of her in my stuff, even knotted around her hips, does something to me that I decide is just the plan working, and leave right there.
“You brought it,” I say.
“Phase One.” She stops at the edge of the dock and looks at the kayak like it personally owes her money. “This is smaller than I pictured. And tippier. It looks tippy.”
“It's the most stable boat I own. You could stand up in it.” You cannot stand up in it. “Get in. I'll hold it.”
It takes us six minutes to get her seated, and four of those are her negotiating.
“Where do my legs go.”
“In the boat.”
“Both of them?”
“That's the dream, yeah.”
She lowers herself in like the kayak's made of something that bites, gripping both sides, and I steady the stern and climb in behind her, and the second I'm settled she goes rigid as a fence post because the boat does what boats do, which is move a little.
“It moved.”
“Boats do that.”
“I don't like it. I'd like it to stop.”
“Paddle,” I tell her. “Movement feels worse when you're fighting it. You want to go with the water, not argue with it.”
“I argue with everything, Hudson, this is going to be a real adjustment.”
But she digs in, and we go, and for the first few strokes it's a disaster. She paddles like she's beating something off the side of the boat. We spin a slow half-circle. She blames me. I deserve none of it.
Then I talk her through it, left, right, easy, let the boat do the work. Somewhere in there it clicks, and we straighten out, and we're moving.
“Oh,” she says. Quieter. “Oh, that's, okay, that's not the worst.”
“High praise.”
“Don't get used to it.” But I can hear the grin in it, and we slide out past the reeds into open water, the lake flat and bright and the morning still cool off the surface, and she settles into the rhythm of it, and for a while neither of us says anything because we don't have to.
It's good. It's just good. Her two feet in front of me, the loose hair at the back of her neck, the small efficient way she's started moving the paddle now that she's stopped fighting it.
The shoreline slides by. The Hendersons' dock, the old boathouse, a heron standing in the shallows pretending to be a lawn ornament. She names the heron Gerald. She narrates Gerald's inner life for a solid minute. I laugh so hard the boat wobbles and she shrieks at me to respect Gerald's home.
This is it. This is the whole thing I wanted and didn't have a word for. I don't let myself finish the thought, because the thought has a cliff at the end of it, and I'm trying to enjoy the water first.
Then a fish jumps.
A small one, ten feet off our left, the kind of splash you'd miss if you blinked. Josie does not miss it. She makes a sound and torques around in her seat to look, which in a kayak is the one thing you absolutely cannot do.
“Don't you dare,” I say.
She does.
The boat goes over with the lazy inevitability of a thing that was always going to. The lake comes up green and cold and sudden, and then I'm under, and then I'm up.
I'm laughing before I've even cleared the water out of my eyes, because the first thing I see is Josie surfacing two feet away, hair plastered to her face, mouth open in pure betrayal. Very much standing. Because we're in four feet of water and she has just discovered this.
“It's.” She looks down. Looks at me. The fury arrives. “It's shallow? We TIPPED in the SHALLOW part?”
“I told you you could stand up.”
“You said that as a JOKE.”
“I never joke about water safety.” I'm wheezing. I can't help it. She is so mad and so wet and there's a piece of lake weed in her hair and she has never once in her life looked better, and that thought doesn't have a cliff at the end of it, it just has open air, and I'm already over the edge.
She splashes me. Full arm, both hands, a wall of lake to the face. It's so undignified and so completely her that I splash her back.
For a minute we are two grown adults having a water fight in a swimming-depth lake while the fish responsible for all this watches from a safe distance, unrepentant. And I haven't laughed like this, from the bottom of something, in longer than I can account for.
We haul the boat up onto a little spit of grass under the cottonwoods and flop down to dry off. She's shivering almost at once, soaked through in the shade, and she plucks at the wet hoodie still knotted around her hips and grimaces. “Well. Phase One drowned.”
“Give it here.” I take it off her, heavy and dripping, and spread it over a low branch to dry, and then I reach into the cooler bag and pull out the flannel I threw in this morning for no reason I was willing to name at the time, and hold it out. “Dry. Warmer. Take it.”
She looks at the flannel. Looks at me. Takes it, and pulls it on, and wraps it around herself, and pushes the sleeves up, and she has no idea, none, what it does to a alpha to watch a omega disappear into his shirt by the side of a lake. I look very hard at the lake.
“Okay,” she says, smaller, hugging the flannel closed. “That's, thank you. That's better.”
Then I go back for the cooler, because we are not doing the real talk on empty stomachs, and because I want to see her face when she opens it.
“You packed a picnic,” she says, like I've confessed to something.
“I threw some stuff in a cooler, relax.” I drop down beside her on the grass. “Can't have my first mate keeling over on the paddle back.”
She opens it. Takes in the cheese, the bread, the cold drinks sweating in the ice, and lights up.
“Oh my, Sutter's?” She's already tearing into the loaf. “This is the best bread in three counties. I'm obsessed with this bread. I would marry this bread. Do you just keep Sutter's sourdough in a cooler at all times? Is that a you thing?”
“Big bread guy,” I say. “Famously.”
“I had no idea.” She's chewing, blissful, completely unaware that she's the one who told me about this exact bread, months ago, across my counter, while buying life jackets for four-year-olds and not really looking at me, and that I drove out to Sutter's at seven this morning before they'd flipped the sign to open.
“Okay, this is the best cooler I've ever been handed. I take back everything I said about the plan.”
“I still smell like a pond, though.”
“You smell like an adventure.”
“I smell like a pond, Hudson.”
“Adventure-adjacent.” I lean back on my hands. The sun's climbing now, warm on the wet, and the lake's gone back to glass like nothing happened, like it didn't just dump us both out for the crime of one nervous omega and one show-off fish. “For the record, you did great.”
“I capsized.”
“You didn't panic, though. Most people half-tip and flail and make it worse. You just went all the way in.” I tip my head at her. “I respect that. Takes one to know one.”
She laughs, but it goes quiet at the end, and she pulls her knees up and wraps her arms around them and looks out at the water, and something in her face changes, the joke draining out of it, and I watch it go and feel the morning tip into a different gear.
“Can I ask you something,” she says.
“You can ask me anything. I'm an open book. A beautiful, mysterious enigma of a man.”
“Why'd you really say yes?”
And there's the real question, under the easy one.
I could deflect. I'm extremely good at deflecting; it's most of my personality, a fast mouth and a slow heart and a system for keeping the first one between people and the second one. I open my mouth to do the thing where I make it funny.