5. Chapter Five
Chapter Five
Forrest
I've fished this tournament every year since I was fourteen. Won it six times. It's the one day a year the whole lake belongs to the people who actually love it, before the summer tourists have left for the season and the locals have winterized their boats.
And this year, I can barely think about it, because Aileen is standing at the registration tent with a clipboard, signing anglers in and quietly logging every fish that comes to the weigh-in as survey data, and every time she pushes her cap back and laughs at something Dani says, I lose the thread of my own life.
"You're staring," Ace says, appearing at my elbow with the smugness of a man who spent all of last summer doing exactly this.
"I'm allowed."
"Oh, buddy." He claps me on the shoulder. "You're gone. You're so gone. It's beautiful. I'm gonna cry."
"You bet on this, didn't you."
"I’m already out of the running," he says, wounded. "I bet you’d have locked this thing down by the end of June, but you’ve been dragging your feet. Cost me forty bucks.”
I roll my eyes. “Serves you right.”
Ignoring me, he says, “But I'm happy for you, so it's fine."
“You know we’re not a couple, right?” I point out. “We haven’t so much as kissed.” But I’m hoping to change that tonight…
“Yet,” he says with a wink. “I have faith in you, buddy.”
The horn blows and the boats scatter, and for six hours I do the thing I've done my whole life.
Read the water. Find the fish. Keep the best five alive in the aerated well and cull the smaller ones as the morning goes on.
Every fish will go back after the scales, but for now I have a limit that would win most years.
One corner of my mind stays at that tent anyway, and when I run in for the weigh-in, the first face I look for is hers.
She's already looking at me.
"Second place," she says when I dock. "The great Forrest, dethroned."
"Kid beat me fair." I nod at the sixteen-year-old whooping beside the winner's table. "Tommy Brandt. His dad taught me to tie a Palomar knot when I was his age. Best stringer I've seen all summer."
Aileen studies me. "You don't look heartbroken."
"I've won six times. He earned this one."
"That is annoyingly decent of you."
"Don't tell Ace. I have a reputation."
I climb onto the dock beside her, close enough that she has to tilt her head back to hold my eyes. Her smile stays, but I see the caution behind it. Every time this starts to feel real, some part of her looks for the nearest exit.
I do not ask her to explain it in the middle of the festival. I do not tell her what I want from her or how long I have wanted it.
I just hold out my hand.
She looks at it. The noise of the whole town rises up around us—the winner's table, the grills, the kids, the music, Rayna calling my name from the pizza window, all of Mercury Ridge loud and bright and alive on the best day of the summer.
Aileen puts her hand in mine.
Her palm is warm and a little rough from three weeks of nets and rope, and when her fingers curl around mine she doesn't let go too fast. She doesn't let go at all.
"Fireworks," she says. "Your boat. You promised."
"I remember."
"Okay." She takes a breath. "Then don't let me overthink it between now and dark."
I bring her hand up and press my mouth to her knuckles, slow, the way I've wanted to for three weeks, and I feel the shiver go through her.
"Wouldn't dream of it, Doc," I say.