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“They’re young and dumb,” I said, which probably wasn’t fair, but I also had zero interest in sharing this sacred slice of Jillian time that landed in front of me. I stopped at the water’s edge. “All right, here’s the boat.”
Jillian gaped in horror at the canoe in front of us. “Are you joking? This thing is ancient. It has a hole in the side!”
“Gotcha.” I nodded toward the dock farther down the beach where our speedboat was anchored.
She returned an even steelier look my way. “Too soon for jokes, Hoffstetter.”
A welcome thrill ran through me. It’d been years since I’d heard her call me by my last name. Wow, did it feel familiar in the best way.
I readied the boat and signaled for her to climb in.
“I miss having friends with boats,” she mused. “Not that we’re—I mean, I told Vincent I was staying with a friend. It was the shortest way to get him off my back. You and I, we’re something…else.”
I turned the ignition and slowly coasted away from the dock. “Noted.”
She hadn’t driven home. She hadn’t holed up in her room. She was here, with me, so I still had a shot to make things right. If Jillian left here no longer hating me, I’d take it as a win. Then I could finally move on. For real.
So yeah, maybe this was as much for me as it was for her. Maybe more for me. But seeing her again, those feelings I’d put off dealing with for so long flooded back. I doubted I could cast them off again, all boxed up and squared away to deal with another day. Another day was here, whether I liked it or not.
I glanced to Jillian, her dark blond hair floating behind her. I liked dealing with it pretty well, actually.
Jillian could have sat at the back of the boat, but she’d chosen instead to sit at the passenger seat beside me. She trailed her hand off the side and wiggled her fingers against the wind. My mind flashed to ten years ago, seeing her do exactly this thing when we’d been out on this very lake. Jillian loved cruising the lake. Maybe even more than I did.
“So when did your family buy this second house?” she asked. “And why are they selling it? Your parents don’t want to retire up here?”
“They’d been watching the property a few years. The house needed work and the owners were aging didn’t have the ability or the money to do a proper rehab. When my parents offered to buy, my folks decided to do a full time rental of their place and stay in the second house while they fixed it up. But they got overwhelmed by the repairs and sort of lost interest.”
“Ah, the complexities of multiple home ownership.”
Her tone came off as teasing, but with a prickly undercurrent. “I know, I know. Boohoo, the woes of people who own three different houses.”
“Your family was always generous with what they had. Mine never could have afforded to rent a place up here. We could vacation here because your family let us stay with you. Your parents could have been making money off us, or renting to other families.”
When we were kids, our parents loved the idea of multi-family vacations given they had kids the same age. Our brothers, Gabe and Josh, were a year apart. Jillian and I had been in the same grade but at different schools across town. The Levesques spent a couple weekends here and there with us at the lake house, which morphed into a full week or even two at a time in later years. Then, when Jillian and I became more than friends, she’d come up north without her family. As my girlfriend.
And here she was again, trusting me to tour her around the lake like we used to do. Everything about us being here together had the outline of old times, but we were different now. We were no longer teenagers. We’d experienced life. Jillian had earned a freaking doctorate.
I picked up a little speed and angled farther from the shore. Remembering she’d asked about the house and my family, I returned to that. A safer topic. “My parents booked a tour to the Grand Canyon last year and loved it. They wondered why they hadn’t traveled more places instead of coming up here every summer. So now they’re into booking travel tours and not so into owning two lake houses.”
“How did you end up here fixing it?”
“Funny you should ask. It’s what I do.”
“Fix up your parents’ cast-off summer homes?”
“I’d flick water at you but I don’t want to get my hand wet.” She must not have heard through the parental grapevine what I was up to these days. Or maybe she was being polite. “I work on houses. For a living.”
“Oh, well that makes sense then. Your parents would obviously jump on free work. They don’t even have to pay you.” She clapped a hand over her mouth. “That sounded ruder than I intended. I only meant it’s a good deal for them.”
“We worked out a deal, yeah.”
“I have to admit, I never got into those home reno shows. My friend Haley was obsessed with them when we all lived together.”
“Is she one of the friends who planned to be here this weekend?”
She shrugged. “Yeah, but it’s no big deal. We’ve all kind of gone our separate ways like people tend to do. I thought I had a genius idea to get us back together like the old days. So much for that.”
“It’s a great idea. I’m sorry again about the problem with the reservation.”
