Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Twenty minutes later, Brinton cautiously shifted her feet on the dock and peered across the lake.
It looked like darkened glass that threatened to crack beneath her.
The dock stretched thirty feet from Crawford Lake’s shore.
On each side, two dozen pillars lit the way, casting an amber glow reminiscent of candlelight.
It would have been romantic if not for the lake’s heady aroma. It was faintly sulfuric, reminding her of trash day in the city. The thick, ninety-percent humidity coated her lungs.
Already in the water, Jamie gazed up at her expectantly from a ten-foot row boat tied to the dock.
“Is that thing going to hold us? It looks like a death trap,” she said, leaning over the dock’s edge.
He chuckled, playfully rolling his eyes. Despite the darkness, they still sparkled.
How’d he do that?
“It’s not a death trap,” he said plainly. “It’s a dinghy.”
She crossed her arms. Clearly, he was fucking with her.
“What did you call me?”
Now, he was full-out laughing. “A dinghy—it’s a type of boat.”
She bit back a smile, but dragged her thumbnail against the edge of her pointer finger until she felt the centering sting of broken skin.
Lakes were murky and slimy. Then there were brain-eating amoebas and a menagerie of dead bodies lurking at the bottom.
Brinton didn’t want to admit her fear. Namely because she was afraid of everything. Once Jamie knew that, why would he take her seriously?
“I live in New York City. I don’t get out on boats much,” she said instead.
His laughter softened, and he nodded to the long paddles affixed to the boat’s sides. “This one has oars, so it’ll be a nice, easy ride. We’ll be back at the dock before you know it.”
He unwound the thick knot securing the boat to the dock. “Can you swim?”
She nodded. Swimming used to be a beloved hobby.
She’d even led her team to a state championship in high school, but it had been over a year since she set foot near a pool.
As her panic disorder matured, Brinton realized almost everything she once enjoyed could potentially kill her. Including boats, lakes, and swimming.
This was where Jamie wanted to talk. Her choice was made. Brinton wrung her slick palms together, which, unfortunately, he zeroed in on.
His smile faltered. “I’m not gonna let anything happen to you. I’ll help you in, paddle us out a bit, and we’ll come back. Okay?”
When he looked at her so earnestly, the screeching doubt in her mind dampened. She liked that as much as she scrutinized what it meant.
“Okay,” she answered.
Steadying herself, Brinton braced one hand on a metal ladder leading into the boat’s inner shell. The other gripped Jamie’s hand. His palm melted into hers, transferring an essential dose of assurance as she maneuvered.
Soon, they faced each other, knees touching. She tried to keep her breath steady and relax her death grip on the boat’s low railings.
“Comfortable?” he asked, as if he knew the answer.
“Yep. This is great,” she said, voice jumping an octave. Her breaths audibly zipped from her nostrils.
On the plus side, being out there—far from city lights, traffic, and interminable to-dos—was a nice change. Brinton surveyed the cloudless sky and appreciated the softly twinkling tapestry. She would have never experienced these stars back home.
Jamie slowly paddled them away from the dock. A wake of ripples trailed behind as the boat sliced through the lake’s placid surface.
Brinton traced their path. She needed the distraction from his shoulders, chest, and forearms. Planes of lean muscle lazily, teasingly stretched and swelled beneath his white T-shirt with each rotation. How might they tense and release during more vigorous cardiovascular activity?
Brinton bit her lip, cataloguing his soft intake of breath and smooth exhalation.
In and out. Over and over again.
Close enough to feel Jamie’s body heat, she’d realized how lonely she’d been. Adding further insult, he smelled so damn good. Sweet and smokey, like when they first met.
“You’re good at this,” Brinton said, snapping back into focus.
Surely, he was good at many things.
He smirked. “My dad taught me when I was a kid. Said a man should know how to steer his own boat.”
“How’s that working out for you?”
Jamie dragged his eyes to the night sky. “Some days there’s a hole in the hull—that’s the bottom of a boat, by the way—but I do all right.” He sounded skeptical, like he didn’t believe the words himself.
“How do you patch a hole in the hull?”
He laughed dryly. “I’ll let you know when I figure it out. How’s your boat?”
She ran a hand along the cool metal edge. If he had a hole in his boat, hers was the Titanic. She didn’t have hobbies outside reading and music, which were inextricably tied to work, and the manuscript she had started and stopped writing dozens of times since graduating from undergrad.
Aside from her sister, she had no real friends, but not out of lack of desire. It was more that when the judgmental voice in her head told her that she was too awkward, too needy for anyone to want to be her friend, she believed it.
When she was dating Eli, there was a brief period when Brinton thought things were changing. She’d gotten to know Callie, the girlfriend of one of Eli’s co-workers. Callie worked in fashion PR but was a true music aficionado, which Brinton appreciated.
While Brinton politely declined Callie’s invites to various Instagrammable parties and late-night speakeasies that’d seemed too overwhelming at the time, it was comforting to feel like, maybe, one day, they’d go together. That, perhaps, they had found some easy kinship.
When Eli dumped Brinton, however, Callie ghosted her as if she had an expiration date. Brinton knew it wasn’t personal, just the friendship politics. But it still hurt.
“I guess I’m built for dry land,” she said, suddenly too aware of herself frowning over everything she couldn’t change, so she forced her lips into a watery smile.
There was the weekend book club she ran for Gael, her twelve-year-old neighbor, and other kids on her block.
Children, she found, were far more accommodating of her particular brand of uptight.
But a reading circle with preteens probably sounded pitiful to someone with millions of Instagram followers.
He nodded but didn’t push her to explain. She appreciated it. Pulling her recorder from her skirt pocket, she placed it in her lap. “So, you wanted to tell me something?”
Jamie stopped rowing. They were about thirty feet out from the dock. He watched his ring flip around his pinky for a moment.
“Yeah, I guess I did.” Then, he smiled. Not a real one, but the one she remembered at the Grammys.
“Please don’t do that,” she said faintly.
He laughed humorlessly. “Can’t a man smile?”
“Not like that. That’s your on-camera smile. When you’re performing.”
“Ah, been studying me?”
She chucked up her shoulder. “It’s my job. And if this interview is going to work, I need you to be real with me. That’s the man I came here to interview.”
He laughed weakly, nodded to her voice recorder. “Sorry, it’s a bad habit. I wanna be real, I wanna tell you something that’s gonna change everything for me. But I need to work up to it, if that’s cool?”
“That’s fine.”
For now.
“Thank you. So…you had something to ask me too?”
She clicked the record button. “Your father has had quite the Midas touch on your career. But I’d love to know more about your mother, how she’s influenced your music. Like, have you ever written a song about her?”
Jamie clasped his hands tightly in his lap. “You sure got an interesting definition of going slow.”
Brinton shrugged, then shifted her recorder to her knees so the audio was sharp. The recorder was reinforced with duct tape after many years of neglect, but she couldn’t risk a blip. Not when she was this close to her goal.
“There’s so little out there about her, so I thought…”
Her voice sank into the black expanse surrounding them.
“That it’d make for a good story?” he asked, eyes narrowed. The energy shifted to something undeniably tenuous. Tense. For the first time, Brinton couldn’t tell what Jamie was thinking when she looked at his face. It worried her.
“I assumed she was important to you. I saw her picture at the guest house, and I felt like it was a good way to paint who you are. Beyond being a celebrity, or a Grammy winner, or heartthrob—”
He leaned back, but his posture was slightly less defensive. A smile—a real one—crept across his lips. Then, his teeth grazed his bottom lip, torturously slow.
“You think I’m a heartthrob?” he asked.
She rolled back her shoulders, suddenly tighter with each second his mouth worked over soft flesh. “Some people think you’re a heartthrob. And stop flirting with me. I know the whole lip-biting thing too.”
He chuckled to himself. “All right, that’s fair.
There’s a lot people don’t know about me…
” He looked like he wanted to say more, but instead, his knee bumped hers.
She twitched violently enough that her recorder slid dangerously close to the boat’s low wall, only a few inches up from the waterline.
Brinton’s eyes rounded. An inhuman squeak spiraled from her diaphragm as Jamie snatched the recorder mid-tumble.
Her chest swelled with adrenaline as she tried to speak. “Shit—I can’t even…thank you.”
He nodded, then handed it back. “I appreciate you asking about my mother, wanting to do right by me in that way. But that’s not something I want out there publicly.”
Brinton’s heart sank, but she understood. And yet, she mourned the loss of her most viable story angle. It would have set her article apart from anything else published about him. It would have all but guaranteed a cover story.
She felt for Jamie’s immense loss. She truly did. She couldn’t imagine surviving her own growing pains without her chronically supportive mother.
However, Brinton simply couldn’t afford to go home empty-handed.
“Then you have to give me something else,” she said.