My kind of perfect, p.14
My Kind of Perfect, page 14
After packing the few remaining leftovers into the cooler, we managed to get back on the bike with a bit more ease this time, and the last part of the ride was quiet as we pedaled slowly, digested our lunch, and enjoyed the scenery. When we got back to Earl and Sally’s Bike Rental, Jayden gave me the most platonic of hugs. Don’t get me wrong. It still felt great and sent a delicious ripple through me. I wanted to smoosh my body as close to his as possible and was struck by how incredibly solid he was, and how he managed to still smell so frickin’ good even after a three-hour bike ride, but there was no linger to the embrace. No extra running of his hand along my back or meaningful glance as we stepped apart from each other. Nothing that hinted of sexual tension. Not from him, at least.
“That was awesome, Lilly. Thank you so much for going with me. I had a great time,” he said.
It was nice to hear him say my name, since thus far he’d only called me Chevette, but now I kind of missed it. It was like our secret joke. But now he knew me better and knew my name, and the joke was over.
“I did, too, Jayden. That was really fun. And tell the chef I said thanks for lunch.”
“I will. When are you back on set?”
“Thursday.”
He nodded and touched his index finger against the brim of the baseball hat that had replaced the bike helmet. “Thursday. Good. I’ll see you then.” And with a smile and a wave, he was gone.
And I had exactly one hour before meeting Matt.
Chapter 15
Yakkity Yak’s Kayak Shack was located on the south shoreline just past Trillium Pointe, and somehow I managed to arrive there before Matt. I’d stopped home just long enough to grab a warmer, waterproof jacket, since it would be chilly out on the lake today, and to brush my teeth. And my hair. And to check my mascara and put on some lip gloss . . . so maybe I was looking forward to this afternoon a bit more than I cared to admit. While the morning with Jayden had created a memory I was certain to cherish for the rest of my days, it was like a Petoskey stone. Unique, beautiful to possess, full of sentimental value, but best left on a shelf to be dusted off once in a while and otherwise forgotten.
As I approached the water’s edge, Zach of Yakkity Yak’s Kayak Shack ambled out from the tiny red hut that served as his business center. He wore a denim jacket that had once been autographed by Bruce Springsteen, but the signature had long since faded. He also wore a dingy green baseball hat turned backward, and since he’d pretty much worn a baseball hat turned backward every single day of his forty-nine-year life, his cheeks and nose were leathery-old-pirate bronze, while his forehead remained Irish baby-bottom pale, except for one little tan spot right in the center where the adjustable brim and hat left an opening. This was only obvious at Mass on Sunday mornings, when Zach was sans chapeau and that tan spot looked like the most unfortunate birthmark ever but was, in reality, completely self-inflicted.
“Hiya, Lilly. Glad to see you back home,” Zach said.
“Thanks, Zach. It’s nice to be back.” I looked around but saw no sign of my companion. “Have you seen Matt Eastman around?”
“Nope. Not since sunrise yoga yesterday.”
That was not the answer I was expecting. At least not the part about the yoga, since Zach was more of a daily twelve-ounce curls by way of a Budweiser beer can kind of guy.
“You go to sunrise yoga?”
He straightened the frayed lapels of his jacket with obvious pride. “Every Wednesday and Saturday. And Sharon and I do the Tuesday-evening couples’ class whenever she’s not working.”
More information I had not expected, since the only Sharon on the island was Sharon Bostwick, who was not at all, shall we say, Zach’s type. Or rather, Zach was not Sharon’s type. He wasn’t too fussy about his female companionship and would pretty much accept any woman who’d have him, while Sharon, well, she liked men who read literature, dressed nicely, and could do their multiplication tables all the way through the twelves.
“You and Sharon? Are you two . . . together?”
He blushed enough that I could see it underneath the copper hue of his cheeks. “It’s new, but yes, and I have Matt to thank for it. He’s the one who encouraged us both to try the class, and once you’ve seen someone do the happy baby, well, it moves the relationship forward pretty quickly.”
My unbidden laughter came out as an amused snort, but Zach was smiling right along with me.
“Right?” he said, as if to agree with all that need not be said, and giving me another thing to consider while considering those private lessons with Matt. I wasn’t ready to happy baby for anyone yet . . . but doing the happy baby could lead to . . . well, maybe to my own happy baby, in a roundabout sort of way. If I was playing the long game. The very, very long game.
“But sunrise yoga is still my favorite,” Zach said. “It starts the day off on the right foot, no pun intended. It gets your blood pumping, clears your brain. It’s turning me into a whole new man. You should try it.” He fluffed his lapels again, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he still looked exactly like the same old Zach, right down to the brown target on his forehead. Or that, in spite of his enthusiastic endorsement, sunrise and I had an agreement. I would avoid it, and it would let me sleep. Because if I really wanted a baby, staying in bed was the way to do it.
“Hi there,” Matt said from behind me, and I spun around and felt my own cheeks flush with embarrassment, as if he knew what I was thinking. He couldn’t, of course, but my blood vessels didn’t understand that.
“Hi,” I all but squeaked. “You startled me.”
“Sorry. I didn’t want to interrupt Zach’s sales pitch for my sunrise class. Did he convince you yet?”
“You’re as pushy as Father O’Reilly,” I said, laughing nervously for no apparent reason. It was just Matt. No reason to be nervous.
“Same good intentions,” Matt said. “Different kind of church. So, you ready to hit the water?”
“It’s choppy out past Potter’s Pointe,” Zach said. “Not the best day. I’d recommend staying on this side of the island.” Telling us it was not the best day was also not the best business strategy, but I appreciated his honesty. Matt’s brows lifted as he looked at me questioningly. “Still up for it? If we stay on this side, we’d have to skip Pine Island.”
I’d been looking forward to a bit of hiking on the other island, but in all honesty, this was kind of a relief. I hadn’t gotten that much sleep the night before, what with being nervous about the day and the fight with Emily keeping me tossing and turning until all hours, and my morning bike ride with Jayden, although not remotely strenuous, still seemed to have taken a lot out of me. I felt oddly fragile at the moment, and the last thing I wanted to do was get caught by a rambunctious wave and tumble into the lake. The water at this time of the year would be very un-bath-like.
The only downside of this new plan was that I’d hoped during our hike that I could oh-so-casually ask Matt about the mysterious Wendy. We could talk while kayaking, of course, but it wouldn’t be as easy, and my curiosity was pretty potent.
“Staying over here is fine,” I answered. “I’d rather not risk rolling over and getting dunked in the lake. It’s a bit cold for a swim.”
“Plus, I didn’t bring my flippers or my snorkel,” Matt answered, making me smile at the mental image.
“Sounds good. You guys want two singles or a double?” Zach asked as he grabbed keys from the shack. Across the street was a much larger shed where the kayaks were stored at night during the summer months, but since it was still early in the season and not too many adventurous tourists were around yet, most of his inventory was still locked up. Matt looked at me again, another question in his eyes.
“Singles are easier to manage, but it’s up to you,” he said.
“Singles, please,” I said to Zach. He and Matt hauled the kayaks out to the short dock, and after putting on my borrowed life jacket, I climbed in and paddled out of the way. Matt was next to me in seconds, and our Waterworld adventure had officially begun.
The sky was still bright and cloudless, but the wind had picked up, and although the water along the shoreline was smooth, the air over the lake was chilly. Much chillier than during my morning bike ride. I should have brought a hat, but on the flip side, the breeze was doing attractive things to Matt’s hair, blowing it around and tousling it just so. We made idle chitchat, discussing which direction to head and talking about our favorite spots on the island, the hidden spots that the tourists never found.
“Thanks for showing up today,” Matt said after we’d been on the water for about half an hour. “I thought I might get stood up.” He had a mild smile on his face, but he was looking straight ahead.
“Why would I stand you up? This was my idea.”
“Yeah, but I thought you might get a better offer.” This time he did glance my way, and although his expression was neutral, there was something about the look in his eyes that said he’d believed that was a real possibility.
“Why, because I went bike riding this morning?” There was no way it was a secret. He crooked a brow and paused in his paddling so that he wouldn’t pull ahead of me.
“That, and I guess I thought with how busy you’ve been, something else might come up. So, anyway, I’m glad you showed up.”
“Of course. And thank you for showing up when you did, too. I don’t think I could’ve talked to Zach about his appreciation of Sharon’s yoga poses for much longer. They seem like a very unlikely couple. You must have some powerful matchmaking skills.”
Matt’s face relaxed as his laughter floated over the water. “I didn’t have anything to do with that, other than to invite them both to the class, but maybe I should add that to my long list of non-marketable job skills. I did help teach Tiny how to square-dance so he could win Gloria’s heart last summer, but that was definitely a group effort, since I don’t actually know how to square-dance.”
The wind suddenly got a little chillier—because every Wednesday evening at Saint Bartholomew’s Church there was square dancing, and that’s where I’d met Tag for the very first time. While Tiny and Gloria were circling each other and testing the waters, Tag and I had fallen in love between the promenades and the wagon wheels, and although I was moving beyond that relationship and storing all those emotions in a locked box somewhere in my psyche, I didn’t want to think about that right now. I didn’t want to remember how that falling had felt or how it compared to what I might be experiencing now, because although I was certainly attracted to Matt, I’d felt just as many zings and pings and zoinks and quivers with Jayden this morning, and suddenly I mistrusted all the feels pulsating through my limbs. Too many conflicting, unidentifiable emotions and all of them equally risky.
“I remember,” I said. “I was there for that.” And I could see the details dawning on his face. His realization that, yes, I’d been there, and Tag had been, too. It wasn’t an ideal thing to remember, and yet . . . it prompted me to ask the question that had been lingering in my mind since last night. Now might not be the best time for that, either, but I was going to go for it anyway.
“Matt, can I ask you something?” I asked after a pause.
He took a stroke with his paddle, doing an admirable job of keeping us next to each other. “Of course.”
“Have you dated anyone since you’ve lived here?”
He moved ahead a bit. “Not really.”
“Not really? Or no? No one.”
He paused, but I could tell it wasn’t because he was trying to remember. “Nope. No one.”
“Why?”
“I guess no one has caught my attention. Until you came back home.” He turned to grin at me, but for the first time ever, he seemed insincere, and maybe a little wary. I supposed I could just blurt out Wendy’s name to see what kind of a reaction I got, but I didn’t want Emily to be caught in the middle. And I didn’t want Matt to feel obligated to share something he didn’t want to share. Still, I persisted.
“So when is the last time you had a significant relationship?”
“I didn’t realize we were out here for a fishing expedition,” he said, plunging the oar into the water. I paddled to keep up until I was beside him again.
“Sorry, but you know all about me and Tag, and I have the distinct impression that the Lifetime TV-movie version you gave me of your past left out some stuff. There must have been a significant other here or there, and now you’re being sort of mysterious. I’m starting to think a crime was involved. Is that it? Did you stuff your last girlfriend into a barrel and drop it in Lake Huron?”
The wariness faded as he chuckled. “You have a very vivid imagination, and my story is not nearly so sensational.”
“Okay, give me the boring version.”
He looked over at me, his blue eyes serious even as he smiled. “Okay, the short, boring version is that I was engaged, and my fiancée ran off with another man.”
“Ohh . . . I’m sorry. That sucks.” Though not eloquent, my response was accurate.
“It does. It did.”
We floated for a minute before he finally said, “There is actually a longer, more interesting version, but it’s more of a sit down over a few drinks kind of story. So how about I give you the director’s-cut edition when we get back, okay?”
“That’s fine, Matt. You don’t have to tell me anything, if you don’t want to.” Although, damn, now I really want to hear this story.
“No, I’m fine with it. It’s just . . . complicated.”
Given what he’d already shared about his rather colorful history, I couldn’t imagine what this next bit would involve. But he looked kind of sad, and so I said, “Complicated, huh? You do realize you’re talking to a woman who dated her sister’s fiancé’s sixty-year-old father, right? And that I’m going to have to see him very soon at their wedding? How’s that for complicated?”
“Well, when you put it that way, I guess my stuff isn’t so complicated after all.” His shoulders seemed to relax a bit. “Let’s head out to the Pointe, and then we’ll turn around and make our way back. Once we’ve landed, we can stop by the Palomino Pub for a drink or go to my place and you can see the kittens. Either way, I’d rather talk about this when we don’t have to fight the currents.”
I agreed, and we continued to head in the same direction, but the mood had dampened, and I wished I’d waited for a different opportunity to get my answers. While this morning’s bike ride had been full of laughter and smiles, my afternoon had turned decidedly somber. Matt tried to lighten the conversation with some stories about Garth and Georgie’s latest bickering match over which one of them had lost the good hammer, and a long, drawn-out anecdote about Tiny sharing his enthusiastic fascination with hearing his baby’s heartbeat, and I laughed when I was supposed to, but it felt forced.
After an hour, we turned our kayaks back in to Zach at the shack. My ears and fingers and toes were cold, the wind had picked up significantly, and although there wasn’t likely to be a big crowd at the pub late on a Sunday afternoon, I felt pretty certain that Dmitri Krushnic would be holding court with Sudsy Robertson, Monty Price, and a few of the other old guards. Matt’s place with kittens sounded far more pleasant, and so we headed there. And I was right. The cottage was definitely cozier than the pub.
“This place is so cute,” I said as I stepped over the threshold. “I thought you said it was a gardening shack.”
“It was, but I’ve done an amazing job.” He was teasing but the boast was accurate, because this little guesthouse was adorable. It was an efficiency style with wide wooden plank flooring, a big, comfy bed in one corner, and a kitchenette with cream-colored cabinets and a glass-tiled backsplash in the other. There was a tiny bathroom and a door that led out to a deck that was just big enough for four Adirondack chairs. As of yet, there was no railing on that deck because of the unforeseen kitten infestation.
“You have done an amazing job. What still needs to be done, other than the railing?”
“Some light fixtures and trim work. It’s mostly finished. Now I’m just trying to stall because I don’t want to move until I know where I’m headed next.” He walked over to the narrow, vintage-style refrigerator and pulled open the door. “I have beer, oat milk, and water. What’s your preference?”
“Are you having a beer? I thought you didn’t drink.”
“I usually stay away from the hard stuff, but honestly, it’s not an issue. Since leaving Los Angeles, I’ve learned that the partying was more a by-product of my surroundings and the crowd I hung out with. Fortunately, not an addiction. I can take it or leave it. Right now, I think I’ll have a beer.”
“In that case, I will also have a beer.”
He got one for each of us, popped the tops, and we went to sit out on the deck in the sunshine. He also brought me a soft knit throw blanket because the wind had picked up a bit. I hadn’t told him I was cold. He just guessed, because Matt had that kind of insight, so I gratefully tucked it around my legs and feet.
Through the trees, I could just barely see the lake and a bit of the road that surrounded the island, but once the leaves were out in full force, this would be a completely private oasis. Even now, it felt very secluded. We sipped our drinks in companionable silence for a few minutes until I said, “I can see why you wouldn’t be in a hurry to leave this little spot. It’s very cozy.”
“Yes, it is, and as long as the neighbors aren’t making a huge ruckus, it’s quite peaceful.”
“A ruckus? You have noisy neighbors?” I looked around to see any nearby cottages, because this place was tucked into the woods behind the Dunnigan House, and the Dunnigans were far too rich to ever do something so gauche as be noisy.
“I’m referring to the infestation,” he said.
“Oh, that’s right. When do I get to see the kittens?”
“If we sit here for a bit, they’ll probably come find us. There’s one marmalade guy who is very inquisitive, and he’s usually the first to show up. And he has a spotted sister, who shows up next. I’m trying to convince Emily to give one to Chloe for her birthday.”
