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eight

MOLLIE

I never should have let Nora and Sophie believe I was off to hook up with Hunter.

Sophie made me borrow her underwire bikini top that makes my boobs look like a cliff. “It worked for me,” she told me with a wink.

Nora painted my toenails to match the color of the bathing suit. “It’s a subconscious clue the carpet and drapes match, you know what I mean?” she joked.

Admitting the only reason I’m meeting Hunter this afternoon is to get in extra practice would have been worse. Nora and Sophie are effortlessly good at everything. They won’t understand that I need to try, and try, and try again in order to get it. They’d tease me for not wanting to spend my time under a hot instructor learning other things about my body.

And it’s not that I’m not interested in Hunter like that. This morning was a revelation. Spending time with Hunter felt like a date wrapped up in a lesson or vice versa. But I’ve felt so incompetent so far this vacation that expanding my capacity to have adventures sounds even more satisfying than sex at the moment.

When I get to the adventure center, I realize I’ll be under Hunter, after all, because he’s only got one stand-up paddleboard out and he says I can sit in the front while he paddles standing over me. “This will give you a chance to get a better feel for the board,” he says. I’ll definitely get a feel for something if I’m holding onto his legs with a death grip.

He sees from my face that I’m uncertain. “You need a distraction,” he announces. “How about…” he hesitates, like he has to work up the nerve to suggest this. “A kiss for every time you try something hard.”

“How do we define ‘hard’?” I volley back, not because I don’t want to say “yes” but because I want more kisses. Then I realize what I said.

“Hard is in the eye of the beholder,” he says. He grins back at me. “So it’s however you define it.”

“And I just have to try? Not succeed?” That’s basically what he promised me that morning, and it’s too good to be true.

“That’s right.”

“This seems like a pretty good deal for me,” I say suspiciously.

“Hmm, I’ve seen you try things over and over again. Pretty sure I’m getting the better deal.”

And so off we go on the single paddleboard, me awkwardly sitting with my legs criss-crossed in front of Hunter, who stands up with the paddle. I keep checking my crotch to make sure I’m not exposing more than I intend in my bikini bottoms. When I try to rearrange my limbs, the entire board sways. My toes get splashed with cold lake water.

“It’s OK. This board is more stable than you think,” Hunter says. He starts wiggling the board by moving his legs, tilting it back and forth between his weight, and I shriek. “See? It’s hard to tip!”

I grab his ankle and he stops. If I tilt my head back, I’m looking at his shorts. So I stare straight ahead while I answer. “It’s like we’re standing on air in the middle of a giant lake.” I’m absolutely positive that we’re going to end up in the lake at some point on this adventure. It’s a matter of when.

He laughs. “People know we’re out here. I left word at the center. If that makes you feel better.”

“The lifejacket makes me feel better,” I sigh, putting my hands on both sides of the jacket that keeps pulling up around my ears.

“See? Falling in isn’t the worst thing in the world.”

“I’d rather decide when I want to go in.” Then I grimace. I sound so whiny, even to my own ears. At least I’m not sitting in a windowless office all day. This could be fun if I let it. “OK,” I say, partly to myself. “Let me try.”

I can hear him grinning when he replies, “You got it!”

Switching places is a delicate dance. He gets down on his knees, the paddleboard swaying, and I get up on mine. I turn so I’m partly facing him. Now we’re face to face and I’m thinking about my promised reward.

He’s not grinning anymore. His face is serious, his blue eyes searching. He’s waiting on me to move.

Well, he didn’t specify what I’d be trying that was hard—and this, right now, seems to qualify. I’m staring back at a man I’d like to kiss and I’m frozen. My knees are objecting to the hard board. My hands are wet from a pool of water beneath us. Our positions feel precarious. Yet he told me I could kiss him and for some reason, I haven’t. Silly Mollie. You can do this. And I do. I lean forward and kiss Hunter.

His lips are warm compared to the water evaporating off my skin. He’s a little salty and he tastes like the sun. I pull back when he puts his hand on my arm. “I haven’t tried the thing yet.”

He smiles again, tucking his chin like he’s abashed. “Very disciplined.”

He helps me maneuver so I’m behind him, shifting knee-over-knee until I’m on the back of the board. He gives me the same spiel he’d given me the other day, all of it familiar but already nearly forgotten when I try to repeat it. “You want to be slightly behind the middle of the board, and when you stand up, you want to spread your feet so you have a good center of gravity. Don’t lock your knees. And give yourself some time to adjust because the blood is going to rush to your head after kneeling.”

He’s absolutely right. When I stand up, I almost sit back down again immediately, because I get dizzy. Hunter holds me around the waist from his kneeling position and grounds me.

“Holy shit, I feel high,” I say, once I open my eyes again. There’s nothing but water around us, the shore far away. Will I ever get used to this? Hunter won’t always be there to save me from falling, or reassure me I won’t. Right now, I genuinely don’t know what I’d do without him.

“Look at me,” Hunter says, and I do. His eyes are steady. “One paddle at a time is how we get to where we’re going.”

“OK.” I take a deep breath and hold the paddle the way he showed me before we left the dock, trying to push-pull with my two hands as I tow it toward me in the water. After a few strokes, we start to move. We’re turning, but we’re moving! I decide turning toward shore was my goal and go with it, skimming us across the water. I’m not as fast as Hunter, my strokes not half as powerful. I’m still doing it. The board is moving under my own power. And I’m standing! Unlike the other day, I’m doing this the way the name implies I should.

“Don’t get too close to shore on this side,” Hunter says quietly. He’s facing forward now, and I’ve been partially bracing my—bent!—knees against his back. “There are those overhanging trees. It’s not that big of a deal on this lake, but on a river you could get caught in a strainer.”

I stop paddling. We keep drifting toward shore, though. “I don’t know what that means, but it sounds bad.”

“It’s undergrowth that we could get trapped in. If we get pulled under, it’s hard to get out of underwater roots and we could drown.”

Immediately, I start paddling on the other side, veering away from the shore again. I am not going to drown today.

“My feet are starting to hurt,” I say after we’re safely back into the middle of the lake. “Is that normal?”

“They’re not used to balancing on the board. Very normal. Do you want to sit down again?”

We perform the same maneuver again, carefully trying to switch places without touching the water. Well, I’m trying not to touch the water. Hunter splashes me with the smallest handful before he slides to the side and pauses, face-to-face with me again.

“I’m afraid to close my eyes,” I confess. “Are we going to fall off of this thing?”

“Well, one way to solve this problem would be to lower your center of gravity,” Hunter says. It takes me a moment to follow his logic, because he says it in his “coach” voice, the one he uses to keep me from panicking.

“You mean lay down?”

He shrugs, tucking his chin again. “If you want to.”

“It sounds hard. I’ll do it.” After all, hard gets rewarded around here.

Slowly, I manage to get my legs out from under me. I try to lay down but the lifejacket gets in the way, so I take it off and tuck it under one of the bungee cords wrapped around the paddleboard. Then I lay prone on the board on my back. Hunter stands to get out of my way, straddling me from above. He grins down at me. “Not so hard, was it?”

I pause a moment before I answer, working up the courage. “Well, not yet,” I say, and raise my sunglasses for a moment to wink at him. Then I put them back on, because my eyes start watering from the sun.

He laughs. “I wouldn’t depend on that,” he says, and his voice sounds a little strained. I wonder how I look, laying beneath him like this, my big boobs filling out this bikini top nicely. I’m often self-conscious of my curvy body, but out here in front of no one except Hunter, I’m not worried.

Hunter lowers himself onto his knees, still straddling me, then down onto his hands. He attaches the paddle to the board with the velcro straps and takes off his lifejacket, too.

Then he pauses and looks at me. “You look nervous. Is this too hard?”

“I don’t know, is it?” I grin. I can’t stop teasing him. He takes it so well and it’s fun. “I’m nervous about the board, not you.”

“It won’t flip, I promise. This board really can’t do that.” He hovers over me, and his thighs must be rock-solid because he barely moves and neither does the board.

Using the fingers of the hand not holding onto the side of the board with white knuckles, I gesture for him to get closer. He’s heavy on top of me, and the board does rock a little when he lies down. There’s zero room for us to lay side-by-side, so he holds himself up on his elbows over me. He can’t hide a thing from me now, with his crotch next to mine. I laugh a little to cover my shiver at the position.

“What?”

“This is not what I expected from your one-on-one lessons. I like it!” I add quickly, because he moves to get off me.

“I’ve never done anything quite like this,” he admits. “It’s…not very professional.”

“You don’t usually train the tourists this way?”

“Never.” He looks serious when he says that.

And I like hearing it—that I’m the first tourist he’s laid on top of out here. It’s a little hard to believe. Hunter is different than Sophie and Nora think. He’s quiet and thoughtful. But he’s also got a body like Chris Hemsworth and the blue eyes of Paul Hollywood. “What about a local?”

He laughs lightly. “I have never gotten horizontal on a paddleboard with another woman, ever. This is a first.”

“Then I’m a lucky girl.” I’m babbling and he knows it. I swallow my nervousness and say, “Now what are we going to do in this position, Mr. Tour Guide?”

“Well…” He adjusts and his body skims over mine, raising goosebumps on my bare skin. Then he says in his coaching voice, “If you turn your head a little and close your eyes, that means I can kiss you.”

I angle my head to the left.

Close my eyes.

And wait, tuned into the sounds of the birds and the rippling water around us, and the places where his bare skin meets mine. He’s warm, even though he’s blocking the sun, so warm even the puddles of water beneath me are comfortable.

Then he kisses me. His lips are soft—kind, like him—and warm, gliding over my mouth gently until I open my own lips and let him in. It’s beginning to be familiar, this meeting of our skin. Yet it’s still so consuming I tune out the rocking of the board beneath us, the sound of the water rippling.

We spend several minutes or more like that, exploring each other with only the fish as witnesses. Then I start to notice something moving between my inner thighs. I startle, like a dummy, because my first thought is something has made its way onto the board with us. Then I realize it’s Hunter, growing hard against my leg.

“Oh my, I appear to have caught a big fish,” I say, and he laughs, resting his forehead against mine, because we’re good at being silly together. I’d never say that in front of my friends. Or any of my recent lovers. I can’t imagine being that comfortable with any of them, especially this soon after meeting.

“Don’t worry, it’ll go away if you ignore it,” he says. “I like doing what we’re doing.”

“Me too.”

Then the breeze sweeps between us and I shiver.

“Are you cold?” he immediately starts gathering himself to get up, getting one knee under him on my right side.

“No, I’m OK!” I insist quickly, shifting to grab him greedily back to me. The board rocks to the right when I do and I freeze, clutching him to me chest-to-chest.

“These boards really are stable, I promise,” he tells me, his breath whispering over my lips because he’s so close to me. The board rocks back to center and stops, barely moving on the water.

“I don’t know what I’m afraid of. If we fell in, we’d get right back on the board, right?” I crane my neck, not letting go of Hunter, and check to see whether we’re drifting closer to shore. We’re still in the middle of the lake.

So we make out some more, lazily, drifting along on the board in the sun. I start to relax, forgetting I’m on a board made of air in the middle of a body of water.

That’s when a whistle blasts through the air and makes Hunter leap off me, jumping to his feet. He immediately tips over, tries to balance on one foot to avoid stepping on me, and then falls in. “Fuck you, Scott!” he yells as he goes. Stupidly, I try to grab him, and slide off the board after him in slow-motion, grabbing at the sides as I go. The water is a shock, cold against my sun-heated skin.

I never quite submerge because I manage to grab the board to keep my head above water. It’s icy cold. I’m sure this water comes straight from the mountains. Scott is on a paddle board to our left, laughing his ass off and doubled over clutching his stomach. I blink at him. To go from Hunter warm and on top of me to this freezing lake is disorienting.

Hunter resurfaces and grabs onto the board, which has already regained equilibrium. He’s right, this thing really is stable. “Are you OK?” he asks me. I nod, shivering.

“You guys could’ve seen me coming for the last 20 minutes but I guess you were busy. ” Scott is remorseless.

Hunter looks over at me, and before I can stop myself, I’m brushing the wet hair out of his eyes. My hand trembles when I touch him. “I’m sorry, my friend here is an asshole,” he says. He raises his voice on the last word, looking over his shoulder at Scott, who is still grinning.

“You know, paddleboarding is normally done standing up. I thought you guys had some kind of medical emergency out here. I was worried,” Scott continues, smirking through his deadpan words. “So I came to check.”

“Sure you did,” Hunter replies.

“Plus, you’re not wearing life vests.” He clicks his tongue disapprovingly. Hunter actually looks a little abashed, despite his irritation with the other guide. I know we weren’t actually being unsafe, but Hunter is such a professional about everything that I feel bad.

“In all seriousness, did you notice the wind is coming up?” Scott points at the sky to the west. There are dark clouds moving in rapidly, I realize.

“Oh,” I say.

“I came to warn you,” Scott says. He brushes off his shoulder. “Good thing I was here, huh?”

Hunter rolls his eyes. “I guess we better paddle in,” he tells me. “You first,” he adds to me, and I take a deep breath and use my arms for leverage to lift myself back aboard. I lean to the other side of the board when he does the same.

“Bet you learned a lot from today’s lesson, huh?” Scott asks me, using his paddle to turn his board back toward shore. “Pop quiz later! Be ready!”

“Paddle us back in,” Hunter says, pulling the paddle out of the velcro straps on the side of the board and offering it to me.

“Me?” I squeak. “Don’t we need to hurry?” The wind is starting to pick up and I’m afraid to stand.

Kneeling in front of me, holding out the paddle, Hunter smiles easily. “We have plenty of time. You’ve got this. It’ll warm you up. You can kneel while you paddle if it makes you more comfortable.”

He read my mind. I take the paddle. “OK, I’ll give it a shot.”

Leaning in, he says softly, “Want your reward now or later, when we have more privacy?”

I’m pleased to hear our deal still stands later. I bite my lip. “Later,” I say.

“Later,” he agrees, like it’s a promise. And with Hunter, I believe it is.