25
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, I was tucked onto the passenger seat of the camp waterskiing boat, dressed only in Mack’s giant Pine Lake sweatshirt and a pair of worn, flannel boxers that had clearly been retired from everyday use.
Sam had responded to my latest check-in text with: Back, going to bed, I love you. I sent off a row of hearts, and then Going out on the boat with Mack.
The engine came alive with a quiet purr, and I tucked my phone away in the small side compartment next to me and watched as Mack steered the boat, maneuvering us out onto the lake with the kind of confident ease of someone who did this daily, without thinking about it.
“Anything specific you’ve always wanted to do on a nighttime boat ride?” he asked. “Besides the obvious, I mean.”
He wiggled his brows at me, and I giggled, still giddy and euphoric from the feeling of his body against mine. Sam was truly going to lose her mind when I told her this latest tidbit of news.
“Will you shut up,” I said, turning back and smacking a dangling sweatshirt sleeve at him as he chuckled. “I’m trying to enjoy this. I’ve never gotten to go out on the lake at night before, and I probably won’t again.”
“Well, then, I have to show you the sights,” he said matter-of-factly, and I waited for some crack to follow. But Mack just turned back toward the water in front of us as the boat puttered along. Finally, after what felt like an endless stretch of quiet, I couldn’t take it anymore.
“So, what, you’re not going to make some joke about skinny-dipping, or the sights actually being your butt, or something like that?” I asked.
“See, I was trying to keep things above the level, Millen,” he said, giving me a disappointed look. “But then you and your dirty mind have to go and get fired up again.”
“I think you bring it out of me,” I said. It was meant as a joke but landed more like a confession, the unbridled truth about how I felt around him. The last year of my life I’d felt like a broken burner on a gas stove, the pilot light lit but still unable to click on. And then Mack had shown up with the flame, and now I was turned to high heat, all the time.
“I can think of no greater compliment,” he said as he steered us left, heading toward the north edge of the lake. This time the quiet that settled in between us was easy, matching the stillness of the lake.
I reached my hand over the edge of the boat and grazed the water, enjoying the thrill of it passing through my fingertips like silk. In the distance, a loon howled just as Mack cut the motor, and we floated toward the edge of the rocky, overgrown shore that jutted out at an angle.
“There,” Mack said, pointing to two giant slabs of granite wedged under a canopy of looming pine trees along the shore.
“What exactly am I looking at?” I asked. He was shirtless and dressed only in a pair of jeans, and I stood up and moved next to him, just so that I could feel him against me. He kept one hand on the steering wheel and wrapped the other one around my waist.
“Those two trees mark the spot where the original Pine Lake Camp was built, just behind there,” he said, his voice low. “Almost a hundred years ago. It’s all overgrown now, but you can still find some original foundations back there. And poison ivy.”
“How the hell do you know that?” I whispered. He pulled me down to sit on his lap, tucking his chin on my shoulder.
“When it gets quiet in the winter, I like to go to the library and research the history of this area. Last year I got very into reading about old eighteenth-century farmsteads because I wanted to try to rebuild the art barn porch on my own, using the same structural systems these farmers did a couple of hundred years ago, so I needed to do some research,” he explained, wiggling his brows. “Sexy, I know.”
I slid my hands over his, lacing our fingers together in my lap. “Honestly, it is kind of sexy.”
“One day, I came across the sale documents for Pine Lake, and photos of the original buildings. The camp’s only had four owners,” he continued, our eyes still locked on those two trees. “Rutherford Gordon bought the land from a farmer in 1918 and built the first cabins himself; then the Finkelstein family bought it from him and opened Pine Lake. Then the Rogerses, who had it for decades, and then on to Steve and Marla. All this land has sat unused for years. I spent last winter imagining what could go up here.”
“I’m sure your first idea was a glamping resort,” I said sarcastically.
“Oh, obviously,” Mack said, playing along. His laugh sent a tickle across my neck. “With a row of tennis courts, right there.”
He pointed to a spot along the shore, pristine and untouched. “Then maybe a coffee station? Free lattes.”
“Totally,” I agreed. “Right next to the yoga studio and infrared sauna.”
“Honestly, it doesn’t sound bad,” he said as he turned us away from the ghosts of Pine Lake Camp past, and toward the center of the lake. “I bet we’d love glamping.”
We. We.
That small word set off a universe of longing inside of me. But it was pointless to even say this out loud. We were here together for a few more days, living out a fantasy. Soon we’d be separated by thousands of miles.
I stuffed the feeling away.
“You know you’re basically proving my point that you should try to buy Pine Lake, right?” I said, admiring the way his hair danced on the wind.
But he didn’t respond, and I didn’t push it.
Eventually, he stalled the engine, the boat practically still on the water.
“Here,” he said, nudging me to stand and then sliding by me to sit on the floor of the boat, his body settling easily against the cushioned bench at the back. “This is the best spot.”
I sat down next to him, shoulder to shoulder, knees bent, heads together, our faces tilted upward. He was right; from here, the sky was endless, as if all that was left in the universe were the two of us and a sprinkling of stars.
Mack looped his arm across my lap, tugging me in toward him.
“My boss thinks I’m failing at my job,” I blurted out, the words scorching me with humiliation that warmed the back of my neck.
“Millen,” he said, giving my thigh a squeeze. “You’ve been at that job forever, haven’t you? Aren’t you, like, president of the company by now?”
“According to my boss, Amaya, I have burnout,” I said with a defeated sigh. “The pitch I’m supposed to be leading next week is a grade-A shitshow right now. I actually think I’ve come up with a pretty brilliant fix for it, but still. She basically forced me to take this week off.”
Mack nodded. “And what do you think?”
I paused, contemplating his question while he traced circles on my skin with his thumb in a soothing, steady rhythm.
“I think that I’ve worked so hard because I thought it was the right thing to do. That it would make me happy.”
I’d considered these feelings in bits and pieces before, but never quite strung them together like this until now. There was something freeing about finally figuring out a truth like this, but it was equally terrifying. Because if my job wasn’t the right thing for me to do, then what was? Trying to answer that felt vast and unknown like the sky spread out before us.
I nuzzled closer into the crook of his arm, his bare skin warm and comforting at this moment, when everything else felt completely up in the air.
“It feels kind of scary,” I added, “to even think that I might need a break. Or want one.”
“Sometimes the things we want to do are the most terrifying, you know?” he said. “That’s never totally made sense to me. But I get it.”
I turned to find him looking at me, eyes searching. We were doing it again, talking about one thing while also talking about something else too.
I didn’t know what we were to each other, exactly, but we were something. It was dawning on me that we always had been, in our own strange way. We’d never just been friends, and I’d been an idiot to even suggest it. Not that I knew a better word. I just knew that we weren’t nothing. Not even close. But I had no idea how to even ask about his feelings for me, much less share my own.
“What’s terrifying to me right now is not knowing how to get my work mojo back,” I said, a half-truth but the only one I knew how to speak to right now. “How do you stop being tired and pissed off? It seems impossible.”
“I think the answer is change,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why Marla and Steve are selling, you know? It’s not that they don’t love it here. It’s just that they’re done. It’s time for them to move on. But I don’t think I’ll ever be done with this place.”
“I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around some stranger buying it,” I murmured, my chest now heavy with the grief that came with the passing of time. It was a sadness I’d felt more of recently, this odd, stabbing sorrow that popped up when I remembered that life truly was beyond my control, no matter how much I wished it wasn’t. “You just seem like the obvious person to take over.”
Mack was silent next to me, but I could feel the rise and fall of his chest, the kind of exhale that comes with defeat.
“Don’t you think?” I pushed. “I mean, it just seems like that would have been your plan.”
“My plan.” His voice was flat, and it landed hard, a rock thrown in the water.
“Yeah, I mean, you didn’t ever think about what you’d do after this?” I scooted a little bit closer to him. “Or did you just assume you’d be the waterfront director forever?”
“See, that’s the difference between us, Millen,” he said. “Planning out my life down to the minute doesn’t make me happy. Working with the kids here made me happy. And I was good at it, without having any sort of plan whatsoever.”
“I don’t plan my life down to the minute,” I protested, my fingers jabbing out air quotes as I mimicked him. “I just feel better when I know what’s coming next.”
“You mean like checking your work calendar while you’re on vacation?” he asked.
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean.” The words burned in my chest like a giant paper cut. “There’s nothing wrong with being prepared, or knowing what your next step is.”
“I’m just trying to understand how you went from telling me you’re currently in the shitter at work to somehow instructing me on what to do with my own life?”
His eyes were now slivers of dark green and white, like trees against the clouds, and I could feel the conversation shifting gears, turning on its head, though I wasn’t quite sure why.
“I’m not instructing you to do anything,” I huffed back at him. “It was just a suggestion.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t need your suggestions, Millen,” he said, his voice clipped and sharp. “Focus on your own life; I can figure out my shit, thank you.”
This conversation had unraveled into a tangled mess at my feet, and I had no idea what piece to pull to begin to right it.
“Are you calling me a mess?” I said, voice rising. Everything he said was now hitting like an insult, whether he intended it that way or not.
“No.” He raised his hands, frustrated. “But you did just use the word ‘failing’ to describe yourself.”
“So you’re saying I’m bad at life.” I could feel the reactive side of me going full force, seething, tapping into an angry, familiar hurt that had lingered since I was a teen.
“Didn’t you suggest the same thing about me the other day?” he asked. “What was it you said, that all I do is float around on the lake all day?”
“Mack. I said I was sorry for that asinine comment,” I said, my voice loud enough to echo off the water.
I felt my throat clench, my voice cracking over the last few words. I wasn’t even sure how we got into this conversation, but it felt like riding a bike for the first time with no helmet. Exciting for a moment, but now I was panicking and desperate to pump the brakes.
“Just forget it,” I said before he could reply. “And you know what? I am focused on my own life. I came up with an amazing idea for my big pitch next week. Wrote it up last night.”
“Oh yeah?” he said, somewhere between aloof and mocking.
“Yup. I honestly can’t wait to get back home so I can work on it. It’s, like, the burnout disappeared the second this thing popped into my brain.”
I snapped my fingers, to really prove how easy it had been to fix all my issues overnight. This entire argument felt immature, ridiculous even. Like something from twenty years ago. A race to see who could push the others’ buttons harder, and then grin and bear it when they did it back.
“Problem solved, then, huh?” he said, pushing himself back up to sit on the bench.
“Yeah,” I said. “Crisis averted. Everything’ll be great and back to normal next week. All according to plan.”
“Good.” He moved back up to sit in front of the steering wheel. “And I’ll follow my own plan. Maybe I’ll even send you a postcard from LA.”
He raised his eyebrows at me, an invitation to challenge him on this, to bicker more, push back harder.
Instead, I stayed on the bottom of the boat and twisted my gaze away from his, shutting down the conversation with a literal cold shoulder. He was moving across the country. I had a life in Boston. Whatever romantic feelings for Mack that I’d let blossom in my heart and grow as fast as ivy were just weeds, covering up what I was truly supposed to be focusing on. What actually mattered.
“I gotta get back to Sunrise. I need some sleep,” I announced. Mack replied by switching on the engine with a swift yank, and it sputtered to life with an angry grunt. This time there was nothing peaceful about the quiet between us; it was tight and tense, a decades-old, frayed rubber band just waiting to snap.