Perhaps not the highest quality admirers.
But it was fine. I’d had a rough six weeks.
I’d take any encouragement I could get.
FYI: You can’t just walk onto a cruise ship like you’re checking into a hotel. There’s a whole process. You have to wait in a long, snakingcheck-in line on the dock and get all your papers examined before they’ll let you anywhere near the gangway.
So that’s what I did that morning. I stood in line next to my family, trying to look pretty with my fancy hair, wearing a pair of shorts disguised as a miniskirt and the most painful heels known to man. Not to mention: a snug T-shirt of Ashley’s with one of those gravity-defying padded bras underneath.
I didn’t need padding, for the record, and the bra felt a little cartoonish, but the whole getup was Ashley’s strong recommendation for the best first impression on Finn, and the stakes were too high to argue.
She was a scientist, after all.
Mostly, I just tried to stand like a pinup girl while I craned around, hoping for a glimpse of my destiny.
But my destiny turned out to be hard to spot.
Not everybody on the ship would be part of our wedding party, of course. Of the 1,600 passengers, fewer than a hundred of them were here for Ashley’s wedding—and it would’ve been even fewer if my childhood neighborhood hadn’t decided to make it into a block party reunion.
As the check-in line inched forward, I kept thinking that finding Finn shouldn’t be so hard. I’d memorized his photo already. I knew what he looked like these days. But I had a confounding variable: the dominant image of Finn in my head was Finnas a teenager. Tall, tanned, and blessed with the metabolism of a jackrabbit. I knewthatversion of him very well. Too well. I’d carried it in my memory all these years like a photograph.
If I was twenty-six now, that made Finn—a senior when I was a freshman—twenty-nine. Which also made him, of all things, almostthirty. Which seemed so wrong. It was like he should have been suspended in time in the golden hues of his high school reign as class president, quiz bowl champion, and varsity captain of everything.
Could Finn be almost thirty? Would that even work?
As I stood awkwardly in line next to my secretly separated parents, trying to keep my shoulders back and wondering if I should’ve gonewith a maxi skirt instead of a mini… I kept scanning the crowd for a version of Finn in a suit with aGQhaircut, trying to pattern-match.
And then a head-turningly cool guy decided to make a hell of an appearance on the dock.
A cool guy—in a vest.
A vest over an oxford button-down with the sleeves rolled back. Also: Ray-Bans, and perfectly faded Levi’s 501s, with a short-on-the-sides-but-long-on-the-top haircut. I took it all in, along with his vintage canvas-and-leather duffel bag, like he’d just stepped out of the pages of some aspirational lifestyle magazine.
Was he Finn?
He was far away—but maybe.
I should mention thatmen in vestswas my weakness. It was just a thing with me—for as long as I could remember. Any kind of man in any kind of vest: Sweater, suit, puffer. Scottish tartan. Tuxedo. Even a fishing vest might do in a pinch.
Is a vest appropriate cruise wear?
Hell no.
But did this guy somehow make all the dudes in flip-flops and sweatpants look like total amateurs?
You bet your life jacket he did.
Guessing from the crowd’s reaction, I wasn’t the only vest person in line to board.
Everybody stared as this guy strode past us like he was on a catwalk.
Whoever he was, he was somebody. Did he own the ship or something? Was he an actor I wasn’t recognizing? Or the son of some nautical billionaire?
Or possibly all of the above?
This guy wasn’t just cutting the line. He was walking right past it like it was irrelevant. He was focused on something else entirely—something up at the front—and it took a few minutes of gaping at him before I realized that the something he was focused on was… me.
He was walking right toward me.
