Chapter Eleven
It’s impossible to steal a private moment with Lyle during the day. Every single guest wants to eat with him and paddle next to him and ask him a million questions. Especially Brent, who made a point of casually inquiring about our engagement in every conversation.
My chance finally comes during afternoon snack.
By the time we paddled back to our beach, every couple but Mitch and Lori was somewhere on the spectrum between putting on a brave face and openly speculating about pushing each other’s beds out onto the highway.
Now they’re drowning the day’s sorrows in Jasvinder’s lemon-ginger scones with vegan clotted cream and cranberry-cognac jam.
I corner Lyle in the parking lot, checking over my shoulder before whispering, “I’ve been waiting all day to get you alone.”
Lyle fumbles the canoe he’s racking, dropping the deck plate on his fingers.
“Shhhhhh—” he hisses, and for a second I think I’m finally about to hear him swear.
“—ooooooot.” He sticks one finger in his mouth, face creased in agony.
I throw my load of paddles into the trailer with a clatter and dart over, tugging at his elbow. “Spit that out!”
“A little dirt is good for you,” he mumbles, shoulders hunched with pain. “Natural.”
“You already eat enough dirt. And the human mouth is a hotbed of microbes.”
He draws in a sharp breath as I take his hand and palpate the finger as gently as I can. “Sore here?” I look up at his pinched expression. Fingers hurt more than anything, except maybe the heart.
“A little.” His voice is strained.
“How about here?” Eyes closed, he shakes his head. “Good. Skin’s not broken. No dislocation. No displaced fracture.” I flip his hand over, pleased.
When I look up, he’s watching my face, an odd look in his darkened eyes. “You have good hands,” he says. “Strong. They’re very… kind.”
I cringe at the bright, hot discomfort of his praise. I don’t deserve to be called “kind” by Lyle McHugh.
“Good, because they’re not very pretty.” Prominent knuckles, short bare nails. Doctor hands.
“There’s a difference between pretty and beautiful,” he says softly, and I don’t know why I almost feel like crying.
He runs the pad of one thumb over the purple marks dotting my nail beds. We both have them—there are a million chances a day to catch a finger between a boat and a paddle, a boat and the trailer, a boat and pretty much whatever. “These bruises never seem to hurt you.”
I make a dismissive sound, not sure what else to do when he’s laying whispering touches across the part of my body with the highest concentration of nerve endings, with a few exceptions.
Lips. Tongue. And then there’s… I take my hands back and shove them in my pockets, dismayed at how fast my imagination went everywhere it shouldn’t have.
“They hurt. But you learn not to say oops or ouch when something surprising happens. It freaks out the patients.”
He gives me an incredulous look. “You know it’s not normal to pretend you don’t feel pain.”
“It is what it is. And we’re getting off topic. Sloane knows,” I say in a low voice.
“Sloane knows…” He glances around nervously. “She knows ? You told her?”
“No, I didn’t tell her,” I snap. “I don’t tell anybody anything—you know that.
She guessed. And she thinks others may suspect.
” They might, too. At lunchtime, Lori nudged me and suggested Lyle’s lap would be softer than the log I was sitting on, then died laughing when I looked at his shorts, then quickly down at the log, and said I didn’t think so.
“You don’t think so, huh,” she teased, winking. “Do you know so?”
Ironically, I know plenty about Lyle’s lap—it’s his love I can’t answer questions about. I remember only too well it was me who suggested this charade, me who talked him into it. The fake engagement could save the business, if it holds. But it could hurt him, too. It could hurt us both.
Also, it feels uncomfortably like a con. Isn’t this what Dad did, creating an illusion to throw over people’s eyes while he rifled through their wallets? Isn’t this what the old boys’ club at the hospital did, gaslighting me to serve themselves?
This is different , I promise myself. This is a PR response to a criticism so flimsy that I can’t believe we ever had to answer for it.
We’re not stealing people’s life savings.
We’re not faking our qualifications or tricking people into buying a defective product.
Lyle’s relationship status will mean nothing once this company’s found its legs.
Even if Sloane was right and no deception lasts forever, the plans for our breakup can wait. Right now, we need to plan for our romance.
“Does anyone else know?” Lyle asks, face pinched with worry.
“Well, we can’t exactly take a poll. But we could do a better job selling our engagement. We could, um. Kiss.”
Sloane gave me a two-minute primer in the truck: Start slow. Keep the contact light; deeper moves can look awkward. Focus on posture and facial expression instead of overselling what’s happening with your mouth. Pick a time and place that suggests you weren’t trying to get seen.
I try to remember when I’ve seen her kiss Dereck, and can’t. But those two have nothing to prove, I guess.
Lyle frowns. “You said you didn’t want to kiss.”
“ You said you didn’t want to know me at all,” I shoot back. “Of course I didn’t want you to kiss me.”
“I didn’t…” He grips a rung of the trailer until his knuckles shine white in the green-tinted daylight under the forest canopy.
When he speaks again, his voice is as soft as his fist is tight.
“I didn’t mean it that way. You wouldn’t even stand in the same room as me, Stellar.
At Liz’s improv showcase, you did a heck of an impression of somebody who wanted me to go away forever.
When I said the thing about us not wanting to know each other, I was saying it first. So you wouldn’t have to. ”
Trust Lyle to try to give me everything, even a way out of a difficult conversation.
“You don’t have to say uncomfortable things on my behalf. There’s enough awkwardness between us that we can share the pain.”
I do like his smile when it’s subtle, with a slight press of his full lips, a little crinkle around the eyes, and a lift of his crooked brow that looks like a laugh instead of an exasperated question.
“So,” I say, already regretting having volunteered to say uncomfortable things. “We should, um, plan to kiss a few times. In front of people. Well, not in front of people, but where they might see us accidentally on purpose.”
He nods at a blue-and-white baseball cap on one of the logs surrounding the parking lot. “Willow will be missing her hat any minute now.”
“You want to do it now ?” I thought we would work the problem a little before plunging in. Everything feels suddenly too large: the truck, the trailer, the sway of wind-tossed branches overhead, Lyle.
Lyle.
I swear his warmth radiates across the careful twelve inches between us. Suddenly I smell not the lemons and sugar I could be eating, but the earth underneath our feet, his damp, clean hair, and what’s left of his sunscreen after the water has had its way.
We stand there, the sounds of wind and river and a rise of laughter from the clearing coming and going.
He looks down, and I look up, and something hovers shimmering between us.
He’s still got a hand wrapped around the square metal rail of the trailer.
With one quick move, he could bracket me in.
The idea puts a shiver between my shoulder blades.
“Do you…” I clear my throat. “I thought you wanted to kiss me now?”
“I’m not kissing you, Stellar,” he says, voice rough. “We’ve done that before, and you sneaked out of my house without waking me up or leaving a note. You didn’t answer any of my texts. I was worried I hurt you. Or scared you.”
I let myself scoff a little. “You couldn’t hurt me, Lyle. And I don’t scare easily.”
Am I sure, though? Didn’t I imagine him giving everything away, unable to hold on to anything, not even me? When I imagined him letting me go, was I so scared I decided to let him go, instead?
It was nice having a safe little fantasy that he had feelings for me, and never having to find out whether he’d keep me in real life. It was nice thinking I had something, without ever having to risk anything for it.
His breath comes out in a rush. “And how was I supposed to know that? People get nervous around me; it happens. Or maybe you didn’t want to tell me I wasn’t gentle enough when…”
I want to run my thumbs over his cheeks where they’re stained crimson.
No—I want to fit my cheeks to his and feel the heat of whatever he didn’t say.
But unless he bends down, I can’t physically do that, so I touch one hand to his chest, right where my cheek would land if I stepped forward and leaned in.
His black T-shirt is soft under my hand.
It’s faded at the neck and sleeves where his life jacket doesn’t block the sun; there’s a fingernail-sized raised circle at his neck where his peace sign must lie.
Under a decal of green cedars framing a night sky, my fingertips find the good hardness of his chest, the shift of cotton against his skin, the subtle change in tension as my hand lands, and stays.
“I wasn’t hurt.” Not in my body, anyway. “But if you don’t want to do this, we won’t. We’ll figure out something else.”
“I didn’t say I don’t want to.” His voice drops to a deeper hush, vibrating against my fingertips.
Vocal fremitus, it’s called—the vibrations you feel through someone’s chest. I was taught to diagnose what’s underneath: liquid, solid, air?
He is in every way solid, if these vibrations mean anything.
I can’t imagine someone steadier than him.