“She knew. But she didn’t know. She was working at the ice cream shop—for Trixie, actually—and we had kind of a whirlwind thing. I was in the process of buying the Desperado so I was in port a lot more than usual. We fell in love and man, I was on top of the world. New boat, new wife. I thought I had this thing called life nailed.”
He shook his head at his naive former self. In the next moment, he wondered why he was telling her about this. He didn’t open up about his marriage to very many people. Maybe it was because no one could possibly be more short-term than Lulu at this point. Telling her something was like telling it to the wind.
“Were you pretty young?” she asked.
“Twenty-four. Young enough that I made a mess of it. I was just a pedal-to-the-metal fisherman. I’d stay out longer than everyone else, go out further, take crazy risks because I wanted to make my mark. Then I’d come home and she’d be furious because she’d spent the last month alone with her vibrator.”
He caught himself up. He barely knew this woman and he was talking about vibrators?
But Lulu just ate another spoonful of ice cream and kept listening. So he kept talking.
“I tried to make up for it. I mean, I tried hard. And long.”
“And throbbing?” she said lightly.
He snorted. “Yeah. And throbbing. We both did a lot of that. But it turns out sex isn’t really enough to keep a relationship together. I should have stayed home more. Paid more attention to her. I think she needed more of a social life than she got here. She was from Florida and she missed all her friends back there.”
He felt a light touch on his knee. Great, here came the sympathy. “Tristan, to be honest, it sounds like your marriage didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.”
He jerked his head around to meet her eyes. Was she laughing at him? “Huh?”
“And it absolutely doesn’t count as a dropout. Sorry, you get no credit for that.”
Wait…did he want credit or not want credit? He’d lost the thread here. “Do I at least get credit for a good sob story?”
“No, you do not, because a sob story implies it isn’t genuine. Sorry, no sob story points either. Was it very difficult for you, the divorce? My parents went through quite a bitter breakup, though they were never married.”
“My parents have an incredibly happy marriage, so I felt like a real failure, along with the broken heart. I licked my wounds for a while. One of my deckhands caught me sobbing into the fish hold once. It freaked him out so much he went belowdecks and wrote a letter to his girlfriend proposing to her. First letter he ever wrote in his life. They’re still married.”
Her laughter was filled with so much delight that he smiled at the sound of it. “I like your laugh.”
His spontaneous declaration obviously caught her by surprise, because the laugh ended on a hiccup. “Oh. Well, I enjoy a good laugh, and I liked your story.”
“The part about me sobbing or the part about Yeet’s letter?”
“Yeet? That’s his name?” She’d paused her ice cream consumption in order to listen. A late-season black fly buzzed near her spoon, and he waved it away before it could land.
“Nickname. His real name is something Russian that I can never pronounce right.”
“So you have an international crew?”
“There’s a fair-sized Russian population here in town. Some of them fish. One of my longtime crew members is from Brazil, and another from Somalia. Hell, I’m part-Chilean so any crew of mine is going to be pretty eclectic.”
“And now you have a British stowaway.”
“That’s right. And if you don’t follow captain’s orders, it’ll be Brexit all over again. Boom. Out.”
She burst into peals of laughter. “That’s a good one. I can’t believe an Alaskan fisherman knows or cares about British politics.”
“Of course I know. But I didn’t say I cared. Y’all can do what you want. I’m just making a point about who’s in charge on my boat.”
“What if I hire you and your boat?”
He frowned down at her. “For what? You want a couple tons of salmon?”
“No.” With a light shrug, she went back to her peanut butter ice cream. “It’s just a thought.”
“Go on with it. What comes next in this thought?”
“That you could take me someplace where I could disappear for a while. Like…” She waved her hand at the magnificent mountains across the bay, their jagged peaks shining stark white against the vibrant blue of the autumn sky. “Over there.”
He stuck his spoon into the remaining lump of his ice cream and set the container on the rock next to him. “Over there. Do you know what that is, over there?”
“Mountains. Wilderness. A place where no one would find me.” She glanced at him sideways and for the first time he caught the real fear behind her lighthearted manner.
“Oh sure. Except the bears. They might find you.”
“I’ll bring bear spray. I read about it. It’s very effective.”
Good God. She wasn’t serious about this, was she? “You do know that winter’s coming, don’t you?”
“It’s only September.”
“And this is Alaska. First frost will hit any day now. Freeze-up could happen in a few weeks. First snowfall came on October fifteenth last year. You want to be in Lost Souls Wilderness for the first snow dump? Where? A tree? A tent? A hunter’s cabin? What’s the plan, exactly?”
When her eyes filled with tears, he cursed himself for being too rough on her. And then he worried he hadn’t been rough enough.
“Then there’s the old saying, ‘strange things happen around Lost Souls Wilderness.’ You know why that is? Because it’s wilderness. It’s not meant for people to be wandering around in it. Especially cruise ship tap-dancers with no survival training.”
Her eyes flared from a cheerful blue to a stormy slate.
Ah hell, he’d gone too far with that crack. But it was too late to take it back. Before he knew what was happening, she snatched up her paper dish of ice cream and dumped it over his head. The cold sticky mess dripped down his cheeks and even into one of his ears.
He probably deserved that.
“Well, hell,” he growled. “Now there’s only one thing to do.”
Her eyes widened and she shrank away from him. “Sorry, I don’t know what got into me. It was an impulse. All the stress, you know.”
He cast her a stern look as he got to his feet. “Stress is no excuse for wasting perfectly good ice cream.” He stripped off his blazer—he hated the thing, but he didn’t want to get ice cream on it—then unbuttoned his collared shirt and ripped off his t-shirt. Turning his back to her, he unfastened his trousers and stepped out of them.
When he was down to his navy blue briefs, he climbed off the rocks and jogged down the beach toward the ocean.
As a child, he’d spent hours in the ocean—in the harbor, in hidden coves across the bay, at the beach on warm days. He and Toni had both loved swimming but as he got older, he focused more on fishing while she remained a swimming-obsessed mermaid. But he still took a dip now and then. It was important to keep that connection to the ocean that gave him so much—freedom, peace, adventure, not to mention a living.