There’s something magical about the way my head fits into the crook of Tucker’s neck. I lie there, breathe in his scent, which is a delightful mix of earth and hay and his own brand of man smell and aftershave, a touch of bug spray thrown in there, and for a minute all my worries evaporate. It’s just him and me, the lull of the water gently rocking the boat, particles of dust floating around in the warm air. I don’t know what heaven’s like, aside from the sense of brightness that Mom described for me once, but if I got to choose my heaven, this would be it.
On the lake with Tucker. I’ll take the mosquitoes and everything.
“I so needed this,” I say, which comes out almost as a yawn.
I feel him smile against my hair. “Me too. Your hair smells like wind, did you know that?”
Yep, me and Tucker, smelling each other.
I tip my head up to kiss him. It starts out as something sweet, slow and lazy as the afternoon sun, but it heats up fast. We pull apart for a second and our breath mingles, and I twist around so I am practically lying on top of him, our legs tangling. He reaches up to take my head in his hand and kisses me again, then does this half groan, half laugh that drives me crazy and drops his hand down to my hip and tugs me closer. I slide my fingers under the collar of his shirt, along the solid breadth of his chest, where I can feel the hammering of his heart. I love him, I think. In that moment I know, if I tried, I would be capable of glory.
He breaks away.
“Okay,” he gasps.
“You still think you’ll get struck by lightning if we . . . you know?” I tease, arching an eyebrow at him and pinning him with my most seductive (I think) look.
He gives me a kind of tortured, bemused smile. “When I was a kid my mom used to tell me that if I had sex before I was married, my . . . junk would turn black and fall off.” That gets a startled laugh out of me. “Seriously?”
“Yeah, and I believed her, too.”
“So you’re not going to have sex before you’re married? What if you don’t get married until you’re thirty?”
He sighs. “I don’t know. I just love you. I don’t want to mess anything up.” This doesn’t make sense to me, but I nod. “So we’ll be good.”
“Right.”
“Because you’re scared.”
“Hey!”
“Okay,” I say with a sigh. “Even though that’s not much fun.” He startles me by flipping me over, pressing me gently back into the blanket at the bottom of the boat. “You don’t think this is fun?” he challenges, and then he kisses me until my insides turn to mush and my head goes all fuzzy.
Much, much later, we actually attempt to fish. I find that I still suck at it. And I still like that I suck at it. And Tucker is still some kind of fish whisperer.
“There now,” he says softly as he carefully removes the hook from the lip of a gleaming cutthroat trout. “You be smarter next time.”
He lowers it back into the water, where it darts away in a flash of green and silver. He looks up at me and grins wickedly. “Want to make out with me now?” he asks, holding up his fish-slimed hands.
“Um, tempting, but no,” I answer quickly. “I think we better be good, don’t you think?”
“That’s really funny,” he says, then starts re-tying his fishing line, “. . . so-ho-ho-ho funny.” A cloud moves over the sun, and suddenly it’s colder. Quieter. Even the birds stop singing. A shiver passes through me.
“Want my shirt?” Tucker asks, always the gentleman.
“I’m okay. I’m working on becoming immune to cold.”
He laughs. “Good luck with that. We probably won’t get any more days like this, warm enough to fish out here.” He threads some bait onto his line and casts again. Almost immediately he has a bite. The same fish.
“You deserve to be on a dinner plate,” he tells the cutthroat, but releases him again anyway. “Go! Find your destiny. Stay away from the shiny hook-type things.” This reminds me, for some crazy reason, of my talk with the school counselor.
“So, all this work you’re doing lately—” I start.
“Don’t remind me.”
“It’s to buy a new horse?”
“And a new truck, eventually, and by new I mean used, and by used I mean probably on its last legs, since that’s all I’ll be able to swing.”
“You’re not saving for college?” I ask.
Bad question. His eyes stay focused on his fishing pole, which he quickly unties and disassembles. “Nope,” he says with forced lightness. “After I graduate, I’ll stay on the ranch. Dad hurt his knee this spring, and we can’t afford to hire more help, so I thought I’d stick around.”
“Oh,” is all I can think to say to that. “Did you have to go visit Ms. Baxter?”
“Yeah,” he says with a scoff. “She got me set up for some talks with Northern Arizona University next week. I guess I’ll probably go off to school in a year or two, because that’s what’s expected of me.”
“What would you study? In college, if you go?”
“Agriculture, probably. Maybe forestry,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck.
“Forestry?”
“To be a ranger.”
I picture him in the green ranger uniform, wearing one of those hats like Smokey the Bear.
Which is totally hot.
“Hey, it’s getting late. Ready to go in?” he asks.
“Sure.” I reel in my line and stick my pole with Tucker’s at the bottom of the boat. He starts the motor, and in a few minutes we’re gliding over the water toward the dock. Neither of us says anything, but he suddenly sighs. He slows the boat to a crawl, then stops us. We’re right in the middle of the lake, the motor idling, the sun sinking behind the mountains.
“I don’t want to leave,” he says after a minute.
I look up at him, startled. “You don’t want to leave?”
He gestures around, at the towering blue mountains behind us, the gray heron skimming the water, the glimmers of the sinking sun on the lake. “This is it for me. This is what I want.” I realize that he’s not talking about today, the lake, this moment. He’s talking about his future.
“I might go to college, but I’m going to end up back here,” he says. “I’ll live and die here.”
He looks at me like he’s daring me to challenge him. Instead I scoot across the boat to him and circle my arms around his neck. “I get it,” I whisper.