Chapter 11
Amelia
Hudson was quiet the entire drive to the marina.
Maybe I shouldn’t have pushed my way into this trip, but I needed to get to the bottom of why he was acting weird, and Bret and Gage had handed it to me on a silver platter. Even if the long silence was starting to make me feel itchy.
“Your sailboat is getting repairs?” I asked, even though I already knew it was getting repairs. That’s why we’d gone to his parents’ house to grab the keys to their dinghy.
“Just normal maintenance,” he replied.
“How has traveling this last year been?”
“Good. I’ve met a lot of interesting people.”
He parked his car, and I think we both breathed a sigh of relief when we exited.
Things had never been awkward between us like this, and I was more determined than ever to make him talk to me.
Maybe he resented me for relying on him so much after Shiloh died.
He’d given up a really great job to do so and had worked a terrible shift at a run-down hospital in order to live close to me and Quinn.
Maybe he’d been in a relationship, and it hadn’t survived the distance.
I’d been so in my head, I never even thought to ask him about the life he’d left behind to come and help me.
But he’d told me he wanted to be there, and I believed him.
I still did. It had to be something else.
He was studiously avoiding looking at me, which was making me feel more and more dejected. A blue jay flitted to land on the ropes beside me, and my heart stilled. I reached out to grab Hudson’s arm, and he paused and looked back.
“It’s a blue jay,” I whispered.
Blue was always Shiloh’s favorite color, and after he died, Hudson and I remarked on how often we noticed the birds around the house. It always felt like it was a reminder that Shiloh was still close and loved us.
We stood together quietly until it flitted away, and the air seemed more relaxed between us as we continued walking down the floating marina.
Until Hudson paused in front of a red metal floating boat-adjacent thing.
Scratched and dented, it was definitely older than me and appeared to be listing concerningly to one side.
“This?” Say, no. Say, it’s the big, beautiful yacht behind this one, silly. And then we could both laugh at how I thought this rickety thing was going to take us to Dylan’s island.
“Yep,” he said instead. “I’ll help you step in.”
He held out his hand to me, but I hesitated as I watched the tiny boat bob with the motion of the water.
Maybe this was a bad idea. I wasn’t a huge fan of the ocean, with all its mysterious creatures lying in wait to make you feel like you were in a horror movie.
Truly, I wasn’t a huge fan of any body of water larger than a bathtub.
Maybe I could corner Hudson tonight, instead, after I got Quinn to sleep and force him to tell me what was going on.
His brows furrowed when I didn’t move. “Amelia, if you’d rather not come—”
The hope in his voice made me steel my spine. No. He was not going to get rid of me that easily. “I’m coming.”
I slid my hand into his and stepped into the boat as gingerly as I could.
This would be much easier in pants or shorts, rather than this long dress.
I gripped Hudson’s hand so tightly, my fingers hurt.
He remained steady, staying right next to me, until I was settled onto the seat.
I let out a huge, shaky breath and laughed nervously. “Did I break your hand?”
His concerned gaze made my stomach flip. “Amelia, are you sur—”
“Yes. Let’s go.” I patted the wooden bench across from me.
He finished untying the dinghy and got in carefully, like he was making sure not to shake the boat too much.
He retrieved life vests from under the seats for us to both put on and then sat in front of me.
My knees pressed into his back. We both shifted and tried to get comfortable in such a small space, but it was going to be impossible.
I finally grabbed him by the shoulders and had him lean back into the small gap between my knees.
He went still as I pressed my knees to his sides, and then he turned on the dinghy and eased slowly away from the dock.
I let him concentrate as he maneuvered around other, larger boats coming and going, and tried to be chill about being surrounded by water. Most people loved this. Found it super peaceful.
And going slow like this wasn’t bad at all. Hudson waved to a few people as he got farther out, approaching a white line of buoys.
“Hudson,” I began. He cocked his head to the side to indicate he was listening. “Did I do someth—” The engine turned on with a roar, and Hudson peeled into the open ocean.
Okay. I hadn’t considered that it would be too loud to talk over the engine.
I gripped the back of his life vest in my fist as we flew over the water. Mist sprayed out to the sides of us. Logically, I knew we couldn’t be going that fast, but my heart thought we were going at least a hundred miles an hour. Probably more.
I rested my head on Hudson’s back and saw a small pool of water at our feet. Were we leaking? No. Hudson wouldn’t take me on a boat that was falling apart.
I closed my eyes and felt his steady breathing against my forehead.
I tried to match mine to his, slow and calm.
I breathed him in, his muscular, sandalwood scent.
Let it fill my lungs. I didn’t know Hudson smelled so good.
I knew he didn’t smell bad. But I’d never really focused on breathing him in like this and really letting him overflow my senses.
It was pleasant, in the kind of way that made me want to wrap my arms around his chest and bury my nose in his back.
“Doing good back there?” he shouted over his shoulder. I felt the rumble of his words more than I heard them.
“Yes,” I said, realizing it was true. Of course it was okay.
I had Hudson close, and I trusted him fully and completely.
I couldn’t imagine my life without Hudson.
Without him, I never would have met Shiloh.
Wouldn’t have Quinn. Hudson was the reason I had been able to pick up the pieces of my life again after I went through the worst thing that could ever happen to me.
If I were on a rickety boat in the middle of the ocean, or facing down a moose, or just trying to undo a horrible knot, Hudson never let me down.
Had I let him down, though? Who helped him through his grief when Shiloh died? Who did he call when he was facing down his metaphorical moose? Had I allowed our friendship to become too one-sided, where I took, and he gave? Who could blame him for putting up a wall between us, then?
I finally gave into the urge to wrap my arms around his chest and give him a tight hug. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled into his back. I’d say it again when we got to shore and he could hear me, but it felt like the words would burst out of me right in that moment if I didn’t say them.
In my mind, Hudson’s presence had always been a given.
The iambic pentameter in a Shakespeare sonnet.
The layered meaning in a seemingly simple Emily Dickinson poem.
A marriage at the end of an Austen novel.
The steady, predictable beat my life marched alongside since freshman year of college. One I would be completely lost without.
More than lost. Devastated.
But what was I to him? I didn’t know, but I was determined to find out.