Page 25 of Knot the Plan
“Okay,” I say, and my voice only wobbles a little. “Okay. That's, that's fine. That's good. We can do that.”
“We can do that,” Logan agrees, and doesn't let go until I do.
Chapter 8
Hudson
Here's what I do with a morning I'm looking forward to. I wake up before the alarm and lie there being smug about it for a while.
I do exactly that today at five-fifteen, staring at the ceiling, grinning like an idiot. Because in four hours I get to put Josie Porter in a kayak. She thinks she's going to hate it. She's wrong, and I get a whole morning to prove it.
When I told her last night I was putting her in a kayak, she said, and I quote, “No, and I'd like to keep it that way.” Which is the most Josie sentence ever constructed. A full no, a stated preference, and total certainty she'd be terrible at it.
What she doesn't know, because nobody's ever given her a reason to, is that she's not bad at the water. She's just never had anybody put her on it right. Flat and easy, a quiet morning, the kind where the whole lake feels like it's yours.
That part I can do in my sleep. That part I'm good at.
I get to the launch early. Drag the tandem down to the water, the long red one, the stable one. I'm not actually trying to drown her. I just want a morning where she's stuck in arm's reach for an hour with nowhere to be.
I lay out the paddles. I check the straps on her life vest twice. I tell myself this is professional diligence and not nerves, and I almost believe it.
The cooler I do not examine too closely. I'm a grab-a-gas-station-sandwich man by long tradition, and yet I was up before six packing one. Cold drinks, the good cheese, the bread from Sutter's.
Because she came into the shop a while back to grab something for the preschoolers and stood at my counter swearing Sutter's sourdough had ruined her for all other bread, and I apparently kept that. Held onto it without deciding to.
I told myself it's just good sense to feed people. I told myself a number of things this morning, out in the dark, buying fancy bread for a woman who thinks this is a practice drill.
Wes is opening the shop. I texted him at six and he texted back a single thumbs up and then, because Wes has known me eleven years, a second text that just saidhave fun on your date.I did not dignify it. I am, however, wearing the good shirt, which I also did not dignify when I put it on.
She comes down the path at nine on the dot in shorts and a tank top, my gray hoodie tied around her waist. Apparently Phase One means hauling my clothes to the lake even when it's going to hit the high eighties by noon.
The sight of her in my stuff, even knotted around her hips, does something to me that I decide is just the plan working, and leave right there.
“You brought it,” I say.
“Phase One.” She stops at the edge of the dock and looks at the kayak like it personally owes her money. “This is smaller than I pictured. And tippier. It looks tippy.”
“It's the most stable boat I own. You could stand up in it.” You cannot stand up in it. “Get in. I'll hold it.”
It takesus six minutes to get her seated, and four of those are her negotiating.
“Where do my legs go.”
“In the boat.”
“Both of them?”
“That's the dream, yeah.”
She lowers herself in like the kayak's made of something that bites, gripping both sides, and I steady the stern and climb in behind her, and the second I'm settled she goes rigid as a fence post because the boat does what boats do, which is move a little.
“It moved.”
“Boats do that.”
“I don't like it. I'd like it to stop.”
“Paddle,” I tell her. “Movement feels worse when you're fighting it. You want to gowiththe water, not argue with it.”
