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Chapter 8
Josh
A “date” she called it. I heard it, loud and clear. I’ll have to make sure she meant what I heard her say.
I’m so flustered when I’m packing my cooler and fishing gear into the boat that I can’t seem to get the motor started. Which is weird. I just did this yesterday.
I pull the rope a second, third, fourth time, my frustration growing.
“You’re flooding it, you’re going to have to wait a minute.”
I turn around and see her, Penny, standing there in a rainbow two-piece swimsuit, her hair tied up.
“I what?”
“Flooded the engine. Might as well chill out and swim with me while you wait.”
Stupidly, because I can’t take my eyes off all of her exposed, tanned skin, I reply, “I don’t have a swimsuit.”
She spreads out a beach towel and plops down on the end of the dock, raising a hand to block out the glaring sun. “You go on vacation to the lake without a swimsuit?”
I hop off the pontoon boat and make my way closer to her, using my height to block out the sun.
“Thank you,” she says, lowering her hand.
“And you book a vacation at a fishing resort without planning to fish?”
She smiles. “Well, I booked it for the nostalgia.”
I laugh. “This place is old as shit.”
She pats the spot on the wooden dock next to her, where she’s slowly swinging her legs in the water. “Sure is. Same old boat dock, same everything. In fact, right on this spot, one of my most vivid childhood memories took place.”
Curious, I sit down next to her.
“Really?”
Penny nods and says, staring down into the water. “This is where I had my first kiss.”
I’m having trouble identifying the feeling I’m experiencing at this news. Is it jealousy? Envy? Anger? Not exactly.
Confused, I blurt out, “With who?” And then I hear it. The jealousy. Okay, yes, I’m jealous over who might have kissed her.
Penny looks me dead in the face, as sober as can be. “You, Josh. It was you.”
Any sane man would play along as if he remembered. I could save us both embarrassment by simply saying I was too shy to bring it up. But no. My mouth runs away from me again. “I’m sorry. I’m finding myself to be insanely jealous of my younger self because I don’t remember that at all. Also, why would adult me be jealous of the younger me kissing a child? That’s messed up. I’m sorry. I’m just speaking gibberish now. I should go check on the motor.”
Penny’s hand presses my thigh. I didn’t think I could get any hotter out in this blinding morning sun, but here we are. My body is on fire at her touch. “Relax, Josh. It’s okay if you don’t remember. I think you were just trying to make me feel better about the end of vacation.”
“I was?”
Penny launches into a highly detailed story that has my head spinning. She remembers everything leading up to the kiss, her sadness about going back to school. She remembers me giving her a scrap of paper with my address on it. She wrote me a long letter on quality paper and signed her name meticulously; I wrote her back something quick and scrawled on notebook paper. The recollections are coming back to me in drips and drabs. I did have a pen pal for a time, I recall. Only one. My brief chicken scratch missives were not worthy of her heartfelt messages, written like something from another era, even for a ten-year-old.
“I’m sorry I didn’t remember the kiss. And I’m sorry I stopped writing to you. I got busy, and also I was a dumb teenager.”
She smiles indulgently, squeezing my leg once before letting go. I wish she would leave it there, even though I’m starting to sweat like a wild boar. “I know that now. At the time, I was pretty crushed that you didn’t refer to the kiss ever again in any of our letters. And then you stopped writing by Thanksgiving.”
