Chapter 12
BOOKER
“So you’ve got two hooks on the line?” Miles asked, holding up the hooks in question. “And this is… four-pound line? Because trout have really good eyesight and they’d see it if you used anything thicker?”
“Wow,” I watched him fingering the line intently, focused like this was the most important thing he’d ever done. “You did do your research.”
The tiny smile I got in response made this whole trip feel worth it. Even if Miles was standing by the edge of a river bank in the least outdoor shoes I’d ever seen. Including Seth’s patent leather heels.
It was a beautiful day out, crisp air and clear skies. The leaves were turning, the river was rippling, everything smelled fresh and open and wild. I loved weather like this. The change of seasons always felt full of possibilities.
“Research librarian.” Miles shrugged, drawing my attention back to him. “Show me how to cast this?” he asked, shaking the baited rod I’d handed him at me.
I moved to stand behind him, stomach flipping over as he leaned back toward me. It wasn’t as though he couldn’t trust me. I liked to think of myself as a trustworthy person. But it was nice that he did, that he always had.
He was nice. He fit against me like he’d been carved out of the same block of wood. His body was warm and since he had ultimately asked to shower before we left, he smelled of my soap, and…
I was way too old for this.
“You wanna pull your arm back like so,” I said, guiding him through the motion, my fingers brushing the soft skin on the back of his hand. “And then you’re gonna sweep forward. Kind of like pitching a curveball.”
“No idea how to do that,” Miles said.
I chuckled. I should’ve guessed he wouldn’t. Miles was many things, but he was exactly as athletic as he was outdoorsy, which was to say there were fish in the river with better chances of playing in the World Series.
“You’ll be fine. Just… like you’re throwing it. It matters less than people would lead you to believe. Just don’t do it over your head, that’s a good way to get a hook stuck in your ear.”
Miles winced. “If I get a hook stuck anywhere in me you’ll have to hold my hand all the way to medical attention.”
“I promise that, in the unlikely event of hook-related injury, I will hold your hand,” I said solemnly. “You ready?”
“As I’ll ever be,” Miles said. I guided him by the elbow, guiding his arm back cast his line into the river.
“Now throw it.”
He did as I told him and I watched the line sail over the water and then sink like an expert had done it with barely a splash. I grinned, barely stopping myself from bursting into triumphant laughter and scaring every fish in a hundred-yard radius away.
“You sure you haven’t done this before?” I asked.
Miles shook his head, glancing back at me. “Was that okay?”
“Perfect,” I said. “You’re a natural.”
He lit up at that, like no one had ever told him he was good at anything before.
And if I thought about it, I wondered if anyone ever had.
I patted him on the shoulder for good measure then forced myself to step away.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Wait for a tug on the line,” I said. “You’ll know it when you feel it.”
Miles laughed nervously. “I know trout are meant to be jumpy,” he said. “Which makes two of us.”
“They’re also aggressive predators,” I told him. “But we’re a little big for them.”
“You might be,” Miles said. “I’m probably bite-sized.”
I laughed. “They’re not tuna. You can take ‘em home from eight inches up.”
Miles snorted, the tension in his shoulders draining away. “That’s what Joel used to say,” he said.
“Joel?” I asked.
Not jealous. I wasn’t jealous over Miles mentioning the name of a man I hadn’t met.
Get a grip, Book.
“Evie’s best friend,” Miles said. “Mine, too, in a lot of ways. But he was never… mine, exactly. Sometimes I wished he was. He’s so sweet and he makes a fantastic human pillow for movie nights.”
I wondered if Miles was entirely sure Joel hadn’t wanted to be his. Or rather, I wondered if he realized at all that this Joel guy had definitely wanted that.
I was starting to think flirting just went right over Miles’s head.
Which led to a whole range of other paths of thought that I shouldn’t have been going down about someone who was trusting me to be their friend.
“And he’s a size queen?” I asked, remembering what Miles had actually said.
“You know, I’m not sure. I think he just liked saying things like that.
He’s got the ideal boyfriend for him now, though.
Nearly old enough to be his dad,” Miles said.
“But he’s a good man. He’ll take care of Joel.
He moved to Malibu to live with him. You should see the house. It’s got two different pools.”
“So you’re in the market for a cougar heiress who can keep you in style on a beach somewhere?” I teased.
Miles wrinkled his perfect nose. “Definitely not in Malibu, anyway. And… I dunno. I’ve never really… can I tell you something weird and personal?”
“We’re fishing buddies now,” I said, heart in my throat at the thought of hearing something weird and personal from him. “You can tell me anything. Sacred fishing buddy code.”
“That sounds made up,” Miles said.
“Look it up when we get back,” I suggested, hoping he wouldn’t since it was, in fact, completely made up. “But tell me. I’ll never tell another soul.”
Miles sighed. “Okay so. Joel used to hook up with someone new every week and if anything, Evie has him outpaced. I’m really glad that seems to make them happy, but I don’t get it.”
“Not a fan of hookups?” I asked, halfway sensing where this was going.
I’d known Miles was one of us from the moment I laid eyes on him. It’d just taken me until now to figure out how.
“I don’t understand what they get out of sex with strangers, I guess,” Miles said.
“I’ve never felt like I could ask without it sounding judgmental.
And it’s not! They’re not hurting anyone, they’re clearly having fun and I love them and I want them to be happy.
I just feel like I’m missing something obvious and...
I dunno. Thought maybe you could shed some light on it. You seem like you know things.”
I took a deep breath, but tried not to make it sound like that as I breathed out carefully. The last thing Miles needed right now was for me to sound like I was annoyed with him. Because I wasn’t, not even a little bit.
I was honored that he felt this safe with me.
“Feel free to push me into the river if this is too personal,” I began cautiously, “but, uh. Do you like sex at all?”
Miles’s brows knitted. He fiddled with something on the rod that he probably shouldn’t have been fiddling with, but this was more important than fishing.
“Maybe?” he said after a silence of a few heartbeats.
“I don’t… umm, know. Exactly. I… with Robin, I never really…
we only had sex a handful of times and it felt…
awkward and like a lot of effort and not particularly satisfying.
I always felt like I was letting her down.
But then uh. I guess I was, by not being Evie, so… ”
Reading between the lines, I was starting to get the picture here.
I felt ill-equipped for this situation and like the worst possible person to be handling it. For a wild second I wished Joel had handled it—but then I didn’t know him. Maybe he would’ve screwed it up anyway. Maybe he had screwed it up.
Either way, Miles must have been thirty or so and it turned out he had a lot of unanswered questions about himself that he maybe hadn’t even asked yet.
“You want water?” I asked, heading for the cooler I’d packed while he’d been showering earlier. “I also have fancy rose lemonade.”
“Is there something wrong with me?” Miles blurted out. When I looked up at him again, he had those piercing blue eyes turned on me and a look in them that made me want to wrap him in a blanket again.
“No,” I said without hesitation. “No, there’s nothing… wrong with you.”
Miles bit his lip.
“There’s not,” I said, gentler this time, grabbing a bottle of water for him. “And you’re not alone, either. You’re not the only person who feels like you do. And even if you were, it wouldn’t be hurting anyone and therefore it’s not wrong, right?”
“The voice of reason,” Miles smiled wryly, accepting the water, then frowning and handing it back. “Can you open that for me? I don’t have enough hands.”
I laughed and cracked it open for him, tucking the cap into the pocket of his actual tweed blazer.
Standing like this, he looked like a man out of time.
Like I’d accidentally stepped back to the eighteen hundreds or something.
He had those classical, vintage good looks, too, and with the sunlight hitting like it was right now…
No. Nope. He was relying on me to be a friend. Especially right now.
“Thank you,” Miles said softly, fingers brushing against mine as he accepted the water again.
“I wasn’t stepping away because there’s anything wrong with you,” I said, standing closer than I otherwise might have so he’d know I meant it.
“I’m just trying to figure out how to give you the answers you’re looking for.
Again, full permission to push me into the river, but have you ever…
I dunno, looked at any stranger and thought maybe you wanted… ”
There’d been a time in my life when I was good at talking frankly about sex and sexuality, I was sure. As recently as a couple of weeks ago, even. Something about Miles just tied my tongue into knots.
Miles was quiet for so long that I thought maybe he was actually thinking about pushing me into the river, but then after what felt like a decade he took a breath to speak.
“Not a stranger,” he said slowly, as though he was weighing each word in his mouth. “But—holy shit.”
“What?” I asked, suddenly on full alert.
“The—” Miles gestured at the fishing rod. I watched the end bend as something tugged on it. “Book, what do I do?”
I’d never seen a person so panicked by the thought of catching a fish, but I couldn’t stop myself from grinning at him. “You’ve got one!”
“But what do I do?” Miles asked, the last word jerked out of him as the fish gave another strong tug on the line, hard enough to make him slip a little way down the bank in his absolutely, one-hundred-percent indoor shoes. “I thought you said they were small?”
I took a breath to tell him they were small, it was just fighting him, all he had to do was fight it back. Unfortunately, I never got to say any of that.
The splash of Miles falling into the river stopped me.