“Big bread guy,” I say. “Famously.”
“I had no idea.” She's chewing, blissful, completely unaware that she's the one who told me about this exact bread, months ago, across my counter, while buying life jackets for four-year-olds and not really looking at me, and that I drove out to Sutter's at seven this morning before they'd flipped the sign to open. “Okay, this is the best cooler I've ever been handed. I take back everything I said about the plan.”
“I still smell like a pond, though.”
“You smell like an adventure.”
“I smell like apond, Hudson.”
“Adventure-adjacent.” I lean back on my hands. The sun's climbing now, warm on the wet, and the lake's gone back to glass like nothing happened, like it didn't just dump us both out for the crime of one nervous omega and one show-off fish. “For the record, you did great.”
“I capsized.”
“You didn't panic, though. Most people half-tip and flail and make it worse. You just went all the way in.” I tip my head at her. “I respect that. Takes one to know one.”
She laughs, but it goes quiet at the end, and she pulls her knees up and wraps her arms around them and looks out at the water, and something in her face changes, the joke draining out of it, and I watch it go and feel the morning tip into a different gear.
“Can I ask you something,” she says.
“You can ask me anything. I'm an open book. A beautiful, mysterious enigma of a man.”
“Why'd you really say yes?”
And there's the real question, under the easy one.
I could deflect. I'm extremely good at deflecting; it's most of my personality, a fast mouth and a slow heart and a system for keeping the first one between people and the second one. I open my mouth to do the thing where I make it funny.
“Because you looked like you were braced to be told no,” I hear myself say instead. “Like you'd practiced it on the walk over. And I didn't want to be one more person who said it.” I'm looking at the water, not at her, because that's already more than I meant to say. “That's all. Don't make it a thing.”
The quiet that comes after has a little weight to it.
“Hudson.”
“Nope.” I reach for the rope back to solid ground. “We're not doing a moment. Eat your fancy bread.”
“Hudson.”
I look at her.
It's a mistake, looking at her. She's soaked and freckled and furious-soft, lake water on her lashes, a piece of weed still stuck above her ear that I want to reach over and deal with, and not stop there.
And she's looking at me like she's trying to read the back of a page she can already half see through, and the want comes up in me so fast and so total that the whole running commentary in my head just, stops.
I want to put my mouth on the weed-stuck spot above her ear and work down. I want to know what sound she makes. I want, with an immediacy that has nothing professional in it at all, to find out how soft the inside of her wrist is, and whether she'd shiver if I got my teeth near it.
You said surprise me, she'd told the room. Do what sells it. I trust you.
Nobody's watching. That's what gets me. There's no aunt, no porch, no mother, no town, no one on this entire shoreline to sell a single thing to. But we're supposed to be practicing anyway, aren't we. That's the whole arrangement. A man could kiss her right now and call it practice and nobody, not one soul, could say he was out of line.
I can call it practice. I can absolutely call it practice.
I cup her face in one hand. Lake-cold skin, warming under my palm.
“Tell me no,” I say, and I mean it, the rule is the rule, hers is the only call that counts. “Right now. And I'll make a joke and we'll never bring it up again.”
She doesn't tell me no.
“Practice,” I say, mostly to myself.
