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Kyle: I’m bored. The marina is a ghost town this afternoon. Show me one of your bulletin boards.
I snapped a quick selfie with the sunshine board in the background.
Kyle: Beautiful.
Me: Yeah it turned out pretty good.
Kyle: It did. But that’s not what I was referring to.
Wait, what?
Oh.
Oh. Was he referring to me? Wait. Did he really think I was beautiful?
Me: *GIF of a woman saying oh, you*
How was I, a thirty-four-year-old woman, rendered speechless by a single flirty text message? Who was I kidding? Probably because the last time someone other than my husband had flirted with me was more than a decade ago. The heat radiating up my neck and into my face was proof of that.
Chapter Five
KYLE
What the hellwas I doing? The whole way to Tina’s house, I second-guessed my asinine idea. But after spending almost the whole week texting with her, I couldn’t just back out now.
A good part of my reasoning was purely selfish. Tina’s texts had made me laugh more than once this week. Usually GIFs or crazy-ass stories of what Teddy had gotten into. The GIF that depicted kids spilling a whole bag of flour all over the living room made me chuckle and feel bad for her all at the same time. I wasn’t sure whether he’d really done that—I’d be livid about that kind of mess—but when her follow-up was laughing emojis, I figured she was kidding. It amazed me how easily shefound joy and happiness in everything. One of the things I was quickly learning about her.
But there was something else too…
I’d spent the last nine months doing nothing but recovering, and now I had a chance to do something, help someone, feel useful.
Tina had yet to question my physical,or mental, ability. My family, on the other hand, could make me feel utterly incapable at any given moment. Never purposefully, but between the possibility of PTSD and the slower than anticipated healing of my left leg, they all looked at me like I was a ticking time bomb.
If Callie hadn’t had dance camp, I probably could have started these lessons sooner instead of spending all week questioning the whole thing.
Was I overstepping? Something horrible had happened to this family, and here I was, flirting with Tina via text more than once this week. And it felt good. Really fucking good. What did that say?
Probably that you should turn your truck around, go back home, and leave her alone, asshole.
Here I was, trying to offer her something she didn’t even seem to want. But fuck, she needed it. Her kids needed it. If they were going to live here, they needed to learn to swim.
Callie knew the basics, enough to keep her afloat for a short amount of time, but my guess was that she didn’t have any actual skills.
I climbed the steps to the porch that ran along the front of the ranch-style home and knocked.
When the door swung open, Tina was smiling and waving me inside. “Hey, Kyle. Come on in.”
“Any other progress?” I asked.
“Nope. Teddy is still refusing to put his bathing suit on, and Callie is adamant that she knows how to swim and doesn’tneed you to teach her. I’m so sorry. This was probably a waste of your time.”
“There’s a possibility of rain in the next hour, so this might be a wash anyway.”
“Oh, good.”
“What?” I stuttered.
“I won’t have to water the grass if it rains.”
