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Jenna gripped my arm. “Give me all the tips, please.”
I laughed and shook my head. “I haven’t done this since I was an undergrad, but I do remember the basics. Try to maintain your balance while you stand up. Keep your core tight and your knees springy. Don’t throw your arms around too much.”
“I will never be able to do this.” She made a face, then brightened. “But it’s supposed to be fun, right?”
I recalled the conversation with Nicole earlier. “Just like the snorkeling you don’t really want to do tomorrow? I told you, you don’t have to go.”
“Yeah...” Jenna laughed nervously. “I have a hard time letting people down. And who knows? It could be better than I expect.”
“Why don’t you sit with Grandma on the shore?” Weirdly enough it didn’t feel the slightest bit weird to refer to my grandmother like she belonged to Jenna, too.
“Nah, it seems important to Nicole, and I hate to cause her any more stress than she’s already had on this trip. Besides, what are fish going to do to me?”
I shrugged. “Anisakid nematodes are no joke.”
Jenna nodded rapidly. “You’re telling me. My first year as a nurse, I had a severe food poisoning patient who kept escalating and went into severe abdominal pain. By the time it was identified as Anisakiasis, he needed surgery.”
“I read a paper on the rise of anisakidosis in Spain,” I began, before remembering with a start that this wasn’t a topic most women wanted to discuss. “Well, anyway, you won’t have to worry about it, as long as you don’t take a bite out of the fish while we’re snorkeling.”
“I’ll try to restrain myself, but no promises.” She grinned at me. “What was the paper about?”
I blinked in surprise, realizing that Jenna wasn’t recoiling from the topic like most of the other people I’d tried to share my knowledge with.
But before we could discuss the rise in popularity of consuming raw fish, it was our turn to surf.
The boards were shorter than the longboards I was used to, but as I crouched in the water, years of practice came back to me, and I managed to stand on my own. My body seemed to remember what to do, making minute movements to keep me balanced on the board and then weaving side to side. The tame swells of the machine transported me back to a time when I hadn’t been quite as rigid, when life had held more possibility than working every day. I was twenty years old, and I expected to be happy, not just intellectually stimulated.
Why hadn’t I kept up with surfing? I had plenty of time off saved and enough money to travel to the world’s best waves. Hawaii, Mexico, Australia. And I’d be fine traveling alone. Would prefer it, honestly.
As soon as I had that thought, I remembered Jenna, just on the other side of the wave machine’s barrier. She was wobbling on her board with one of the attendants holding her hand to keep her upright.
“I’m going to let you go,” the worker shouted.
Jenna’s eyes widened with panic, and she started to tremble even more.
Without thinking I reached out and grabbed her hand, turning my board diagonal to the water flow. At first, the unexpected pull from a new source sent me shaking so much I feared I was going to wipe out. But then my body steadied itself and, by extension, her.
Jenna’s mouth was open in shock as if she couldn’t quite believe she was doing it, and then she smiled at me.
And that was the moment I realized I wasn’t in the process of becoming attached to Jenna.
I already was.
That was a complete disaster.
I released Jenna’s hand. She floundered a moment and then got her balance, but I wiped out spectacularly, rolling several times until I hit the back barrier so hard that I got the wind knocked out of me.
“Are you okay?” Jenna asked, hovering over me, a soothing hand pressed to my forehead.
“Yeah,” I croaked just as soon as I had my breath back. “I lost focus for a second there.” In a way that was far more dangerous than a wave machine spill.
“Do you want to try again, or should we go back to our rooms?”
“Think we should call it a day. Don’t want you to have to switch from vacation mode to nurse duty.” I tried to keep my tone light, but inside, a storm was brewing. I could no longer deny that my feelings for Jenna had moved past friendly.
With a tight smile, I stood to walk back to the suite.
On the third day of the cruise, I kept glancing at the clock as I dressed for the formal dinner celebrating Grandma’s birthday. After a day in the Cozumel sun, everyone had supported Grandma’s suggestion of a nap before we ate, and I’d slept a little later than I’d planned. I had to speed to get ready if I didn’t want to be late.
