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He blanches. “I’m so sorry about that. And I’m doing the paddling.”
This is too easy. “No paddling me, either.”
The poor man is now the same shade of red that my lobster was at dinner last night.
“Kidding!”
He groans.
“Stop worrying about all that. You have a good grip,” I say with a smirk.
Brooks’s expression moves from flustered to hungry before he catches himself. The change happens around his eyes, like someone in a vampire movie. It’s just a dim flash of need like he forgot all about his embarrassment at my teasing and wants to eat me. And then the look disappears like he’s working hard to get control of his emotions.
He starts the motor once again, and we’re off.
My phone rings, startling me out of getting lost in Brooks’s eyes. The name that appears on the screen: “Damian.” My knee-jerk reaction is to silence it, drop it in my pocket, and fidget with my hands.
“I don’t mind if you need to take a call. You don’t need to feel like this is a date.”
“It’s not?”
“Ah, well, I mean. Do you want it to be a date?”
“What do you want this to be, Brooks?”
He’s quiet until we arrive at a remote dock on the island’s south end, tucked away in a cove surrounded by dense trees. Here, he helps me into a small sailboat. Thank god, the water is calm today. And, thank god, no more kayaks.
He doesn’t answer my question until he’s rowed us well offshore.
“No one has ever asked me what I want. I don’t particularly enjoy dating. It’s difficult. I don’t know how to flirt. What I want is to spend time with you, and that’s all I know.”
My body stills as my fingers grip the weathered wooden bench at the approach of a slight swell in the water, rocking the sailboat gently. I breathe it all in, every word he just said.
I don’t want to dump too much information on him, but the truth is, he has no idea what that means to me. My entire life has been in the presence of people who want things from me, not people who simply want to spend time with me. Sierra has always been the only exception to that. And now, there’s Brooks.
“Lunch” turns out to be an impromptu al fresco picnic on a tiny, untouched beach on the opposite side of the smallest island in The Pearl Crescent. Sitting here on a piece of driftwood while Brooks expertly chops open a coconut in the groove of a palm tree, while looking out onto the open sea, away from the view of the other islands on the horizon, feels like we’re stranded together on a deserted island.
“You’re the person I would take with me,” I say.
He splits open the coconut and offers me a drink after showing me how to drink it straight out of the fruit.
“What person?” Brooks asks.
I take a drink, and though coconut water has never been my favorite, this is so much better than I thought it would be. “The person I’d take if I were allowed to choose five things to take to a desert island to survive. You’d be the one to find food and build a raft.”
He shrugs and begins wandering into the trees again. I get the feeling we’re not headed to a restaurant for lunch, but we’re going to live off the land instead for the next hour, or two, or three. All of that sounds perfect to me. “Eh, most people could find it in themselves to find food and shelter, even build a raft.”
Snorting, I respond that I would be the one to capsize the raft and ruin everyone’s rescue.
He laughs. “Then I guess we’d be stuck here together for the rest of our lives. I can think of worse punishments.”
God, he’s so corny. So corny, I would not think twice about sitting on his face to keep him quiet.
“What else would you bring to your desert island?”
I need more information. “How many items do I get?”
Brooks has been climbing trees, cutting down fruit. Now, he’s retrieved a stash of fishing poles and has me standing in the water because I suppose we’re going to catch our lunch now.
