Page 51 of The Hang Up
“Should I switch sides?”
“Not unless you want to. I’ll steer from back here, but feel free to switch if your arms are tired or you want to try it out over there to see how it feels.”
Miriam drove the paddle into the water again, getting the hang of it now. “This is kinda fun,” she said, surprised to realize it was true. “It’s not as tippy as I thought it would be.”
“You’re a natural,” Jason said, and the pride in his voice made her turn to see his expression. It was equal parts happiness and pleasure and maybe…love?
No.It couldn’t be. They’d agreed that wasn’t happening. Not for either of them, absolutely not. It was lust, that’s all.
But with her gaze locked in his, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was happening here.
“Why do you guys keep looking at each other like that?” Henry asked.
Miriam blinked as the spell broke between them. “Like what?”
“You know…” Henry said, his voice five-year-old singsong. “Like you’re a dog and he’s got a bone you really want.”
Miriam felt her cheeks go crimson. She was working so hard to stifle a laugh that she had tears pooling in her eyes. Behind her, Jason was making no such effort. He was laughing so hard the canoe began to rock.
“You’re a real romantic, sport,” he said. “Now turn around and tell me where we’re going.”
* * *
“So this was fun,”Jason said as he reached up to tuck a stray curl behind Miriam’s ear.
Not like she couldn’t fix her own hair, but his need to touch her was so all-consuming that he couldn’t help himself. He let his finger graze the edge of her ear, savoring the soft warmth of her skin and the way her bare knee brushed his.
They were sitting close together in a patch of sunshine on a picnic blanket, the remains of their lunch spread out between them. On a far corner of the blanket, Henry snoozed in the shade, his little boy body curled tight like a potato bug.
“Itwasfun,” Miriam agreed, sounding surprised. “I didn’t think it would be.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“No, really.” She plucked at a blade of grass near the edge of the blanket. “I mean I grew up occasionally doing outdoorsy things with my dad, but never canoeing. And as I got older, I stopped getting to do those things with him.”
“How come?”
She shrugged and began to shred the thick blade of grass. “My folks split up when I was ten, and I spent most of my time with my mother after that.”
“I take it she wasn’t an outdoor enthusiast?”
Miriam laughed. “My mother makes me look like Davy Crocket. She always saw herself as more of a cross between Martha Stewart and one of the Real Housewives.”
“Quite a combination,” he said, catching one of her hands in his. “Does she live around here?”
“No. After the divorce, she moved back east on a quest to become a New York City socialite. I lived with her until I graduated from high school, but came back out here after college.”
“And here you stayed.” He planted a lazy kiss across her knuckles.
“Yep. I’m more of a West Coast socialite, minus the actual social scene.”
He grinned and began tracing the outline of her hand against the picnic blanket, his fingertip dipping and trailing between her digits. “So your folks were pretty opposite?”
She nodded and looked up to meet his eyes for the first time since the conversation had started. “Yes. So it’s probably no surprise that didn’t work out.”
The words hung there between them for a moment, casting a dark shadow over an otherwise perfect afternoon. Jason tried to think of the right thing to say, but he couldn’t come up with something clever.
His parents may have died young, but they’d always loved each other. Even when he was seventeen and rolling his eyes over their need to hold hands at the dinner table, he appreciated how much his mother and father cared for each other.
