Avery’s house is small with yellow vinyl siding in a subdivision off the county highway. It’s a haul from town; no wonder Avery showers at the store after her morning paddle, even if the water is ice-cold, instead of driving home. Garden tools and yard-waste bags are all over the place on one side of her driveway, barely leaving room for Cameron to park his camper.
She appears in the front doorway clutching a coffee mug. A pair of running shorts sits low on her hips, a flash of light- brown skin peeking out between the waistband and her tank top. Damn. Suddenly, he’s very glad she suggested they meet here for their paddleboarding date rather than down at her shop. She had claimed it was because she doesn’t like to come into work on her days off, but maybe she has something more in mind?
Squinting into the sun, she says, “You made it!”
Cameron hops down from the cab and tucks the keys in his pocket. “Did you expect otherwise?”
She grins. “To be honest, I don’t normally date younger guys. I’ve been ghosted more than once.”
“Younger guys? How old do you think I am?” “Twenty-four?”
“Try thirty.” Cameron bounds up the short set of front steps in one leap. “But I’ll forgive you. It’s hard to tell with my youthful glow and athleticism.”
Avery rolls her eyes. “Save your chest-puffing for after I get you on a paddleboard. We’ll talk about your athleticism
then.”
“I’m sure I’ll be a natural. Naturally.”
“Uh-huh.” Avery smirks. She gestures at the open door. “Come in for a bit? I need to finish getting ready.”
“Sure. But what about you?”
Avery turns to him, puzzled. “What about me?”
“How old are you?” A note of anxiety creeps into Cameron’s voice.
“Turned thirty-two last month.” She laughs at his look of relief, then bends down to pick up a lone sock from the laminate floor. “Why, how old did you think I was?”
“Oh, early twenties, obviously.”
She bats him with the sock. “Stop.”
Cameron puts on his best smile. “I mean, why not? You’re
—”
A beleaguered grunt from the other room interrupts him. Moments later, a teenage boy lopes out. He’s almost as tall as Cameron, with shaggy dark curls and the same olive complexion as Avery. Without a glance at Cameron, the boy holds up a cereal box and moans, “Mom! We’re outta Cheerios.”
Cameron’s jaw drops. A kid? A teenage kid?
A look of surprise crosses Avery’s face, then she inhales stiffly. “Cameron, this is Marco.” She turns to the teenager, who glares at Cameron the way someone looks at a fresh turd. “Honey, this is my friend Cameron.”
“Hey,” Cameron says with a nod. “Sup.” Marco juts his chin.
“Don’t mind him. He’s fifteen. And I thought he had headed out on a bike ride ten minutes ago,” Avery says, ruffling Marco’s hair, which he tolerates for a couple of seconds before ducking away from her hand. Cameron runs the numbers in his head three times to make sure he’s got it right. Seventeen. Avery had a kid when she was seventeen!
“Marco, hon, what do we do when we’re out of Cheerios?”
Marco rolls his eyes. “The list.”
“Right. We add it to the shopping list,” she says, her tone pointed. “I’m sure you’ll find something else to eat in the meantime.”
Marco mutters, “We’re out of chips, too.”
“Oh, the humanity,” Avery says dryly. “Look, I’ll try to get to the grocery store later. Cameron and I are going out on the water. Don’t trash the house while I’m gone, okay?”
“Can Kyle and Nate come over later?”
“If you promise to do something besides play video games all day. Go ride your bikes! And the lawn needs mowing.”
“Yeah, fine. I’ll mow.”
“Great. Have fun. And here.” She tosses the sock at him. “This got lost on its way to the hamper.”
These last words send a shock wave through Cameron. That’s exactly what Katie used to say to him when he’d leave his clothes on their bedroom floor.
“I SHOULD’VE TOLD you.” Avery bites her lip and stares out the passenger window of the camper. “I’m sorry.”
“No! It’s cool. Totally cool.” Cameron rests his arm on the rim of the open window. Is it cool? To his surprise . . . yeah, maybe it is. Watching Avery as a mom, for some reason, had impressed him in a way that he’d never been impressed by a girl before. He turns off the highway and down the long, winding hill toward the water. The transmission shudders at the downshift, and that damn loose belt squeals, which causes him to second-guess his insistence on driving. He had wanted to show off the camper, though. It’s looking good these days. He scrubbed the whole inside down with vinegar and lemon, and even the windows are streak-free. He even sprung for a cheap, but new, mattress.
She gives him a sidelong look. “You’re cool with me having a kid?”
“Well, I guess it means you’re easy,” he says, voice hitching on the last syllable. Did his joke cross the line? But Avery bursts out laughing and gives his shoulder a playful shove.
“You are so going in the water. I’ll dunk you myself.” “You can’t! I don’t have a swimsuit.”
This is true. All of Cameron’s board shorts are stuffed in a black garbage bag, where they went after Katie tossed them off her balcony. The garbage sack has probably been moved to Brad and Elizabeth’s basement by now.
Avery stares at him, incredulous. “Why not?” “Don’t own one at the moment.”
“We have trunks at my shop, you know.”
“Too rich for my blood. What do you think they’re paying me to hack up mackerel and mop up the guts afterward?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I would have given you a pair for free!”
“Nah, I’m done with handouts. Although that shit you gave me for my neck was amazing.”
“Fair enough.” She shakes her head, smiling. “But I hope you like being cold and wet.”
TINY WAVES LAP at the pebbled shore. How hard could this be? Nonetheless, Avery gives him the play-by-play. “So, you want to put your feet here.” She points to the middle of his board. “And hold your paddle like this,” she says, demonstrating.
Cameron nods, half listening as she goes through a million more directives.
“And the last thing,” she chirps as she launches her board gracefully over the water, “is don’t fall in!” A breeze flips up the edge of her running shorts, distracting him.
“I won’t,” he promises. He lies on his stomach, as instructed, and launches his board from the beach. But as soon as he rises to a knee, preparing to stand, he starts to topple. With a humbling splash, his foot plunges, sinking
into the rough sand six inches below. “Holy shit!” he gasps. The icy water knocks his breath away. Shockingly cold.
“Five seconds.” Avery looks over her shoulder, brow raised. “A record.”
“I was just testing the water.” “Try widening your stance.”
Somehow, Cameron gets both feet on the board. And Avery is right; wider is better. When she tells him in a pointed way that she’s taking him on her standard beginner route, he lets it slide. Puget Sound is freezing.
He follows her around a long, curved jetty. On the outermost rock, a seagull cocks its head, its glare comically angry. Studying the surly bird almost leads to another spill, but this time, he recovers. With each paddle stroke, he’s feeling steadier.
They’re halfway to the pier when Avery sets down her paddle and sits, cross-legged, on her board. Cameron’s eyes widen. Is he supposed to pull that off, too?
She giggles. “It’s not as hard as it looks. Keep your weight balanced as you lower down.” Holding his breath, Cameron follows her instructions and soon finds himself seated, bobbing on the waves.
“This is nice,” he says.
“Isn’t it?” Avery reclines, propping on her elbows. Her shirt hikes, revealing her perfect little belly button. “Sowell Bay has some of the calmest water in all of Puget Sound. Part of the reason I moved here.”
“When was that?”
“Five years ago? Yeah, that’s right. Marco was ten. We moved up from Seattle.”
“That must’ve been tough.”
“He did okay. His dad took a job in Anacortes, and Sowell Bay was halfway between.” She trails a hand through the water. “Plus, I’d always wanted to start a paddle shop, which I never would’ve been able to afford in Seattle.”
“What did you do before?”
“Some odd jobs, but when Marco was little, I was a mom, mostly. His dad is a deckhand on a fishing trawler, so his schedule is all over the place.” She stares out at the bay. “He doesn’t see Marco much in the summer. But he’s not a bad guy.”
“Aren’t exes always bad guys?” Cameron inches a leg toward his board’s edge and dips a foot into the water. It’s still cold, but the sun is so relentless out here, it almost feels good.
Avery smiles. “Actually, Josh and I are good friends. We never even dated. Just hooked up once my junior year of high school, and poof! There’s a kid binding us for life.”
“Poof! Is that what childbirth is like?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to know what childbirth is like.” Avery flips over onto her belly and props her chin on her hands. “Sorry Marco was such a jerk to you earlier. Honestly, I don’t bring guys home often, and when I have, it hasn’t always gone well . . .”
“It’s okay. He’s fifteen. He’s allowed to be Oscar the Grouch, trash can and all.”
“Trash can? His bedroom is more like an actual dumpster!
I don’t even go in there anymore.”
“Believe me, that’s wise,” Cameron says with a laugh. A speedboat buzzes by farther out on the bay, and after a few moments his board knocks gently into Avery’s, pushed together by a series of small swells. They’ve drifted almost all the way to the pier now. At the very end of the leggy wooden structure, some teens are horsing around, some of them tiptoeing along on the top edge of the slanted railing like it’s a tightrope. Avery’s eyes narrow, watching them.
“At least Marco doesn’t pull idiotic stunts like that.” She shakes her head. “It’s, like, thirty feet down, depending on the tide. And there are huge, sharp rocks under there. Old pilings. You hit the water wrong, you’re toast.”
“Yikes.” Cameron isn’t a huge fan of heights.
Avery paddles into the pier’s shadow where the water turns inky, and Cameron follows. Under here, there’s a cold, oily smell. Kelp clings to the pilings just below water’s surface reflected in cool shades of sepia.
Suddenly, Avery says, “I stopped someone from jumping once.”
“Jumping?”
“A woman. From this pier.” She pokes a barnacle-crusted piling with her paddle.
“Whoa. How?”
“I beached my board and went up to help her. Talked to her.” Avery shivers. “Talked her down.”
“I wouldn’t even know where to start, talking someone down.”
“Mostly, I just listened.” Avery shrugs. “But it was weird. I’d never seen her before. Sowell Bay is such a small town. When someone new pops up, it’s an event.”
“I’ve noticed.” Cameron can’t help but think of Tova and her gossiping knit-nutters, or whatever they’re called. And about how much Ethan loves to give him the down-low on the town’s drama when he gets home from the store. “So, what did you do once you got her down?”
“Helped her to her car. Guess I could’ve called the police, but . . .” She lets out a long breath, then plasters on a forced smile. “Anyway, why am I telling you this? My original point was, Marco would be grounded for life if I found out he was messing around up there.”
“He’s lucky to have such a good mom.”
“Yeah, well, my own mama took no shit from me. I guess it’s how I was raised.”
“I wish I’d been raised that way.” Eyes focused on the water, Cameron tells Avery about his mother leaving him at Aunt Jeanne’s house and never coming back.
“God, I’m sorry, Cameron.” She lifts her paddle and lands it on the nose of his board, then uses it to pull his closer. After they bump softly, she rests a hand on his knee.
Footsteps pound on the pier above them, echoing through the wood. One of the teens lets out a shriek, and for a second Cameron expects a testosterone-fueled body to hurl over the side toward the dark water below. But then, peals of laughter.
He shivers. “Sometimes I wonder if she’s even still alive.” His voice drops. “But then I also wonder whether that makes it worse. That she’s been out there, all these years, and never tried to be a parent again, you know?”
“Your aunt never hears from her, either?” “Nope.”
Avery runs her finger along the edge of her board, leaving a trail of little water droplets behind it. “That must have been really hard for your mother.”
“Hard for her?”
“To leave, I mean. To leave you with someone who could do better.”
Cameron snorts softly, about to retort, but he can’t quite find the words. Of course he’s heard that sort of line before, people saying that his mother ditching him with Aunt Jeanne was a blessing in disguise. An act of mercy, even. Even Aunt Jeanne herself used to say that. Those comments always seemed like grade-A bullshit, hollow platitudes meant to make him feel better. But somehow, hearing them from Avery, the words feel real and solid.
When he was younger, he used to imagine what life with his mother would have been like, but in those fantasies, the mom figure was always . . . well, a typical mom. Like some version of Elizabeth’s mom, with her aerobics videos and famous recipe for butterscotch cookies. Naturally, it hurt like hell to mourn the loss of that. But maybe Avery is right. It never could have existed.
“I went through some shit when I found out I was pregnant with Marco,” Avery goes on. “Decisions, you know. And every single person in my big obnoxious family had an
opinion on the matter. Thought I’d be ruining my life, no matter what I did.”
“People and their opinions generally suck,” Cameron says. “And for the record, you’ve done an amazing job with your life.”
“Well, yeah, I kind of have, right?” A half-modest smile flashes across her face before it turns serious again. “But back then, I was seventeen. I had no idea what I was doing. I decided to keep the pregnancy, but there were moments when I thought it might be better—for Marco, if not for me— to let someone else have him.”
“You thought about giving him up for adoption.”
“Almost went through with it.” She hugs her knees to her chest. “My family, they all kept saying it was best for everyone. And in my case, they were wrong, you know? But I understood their argument. It can be the right decision.”
Cameron sees again, in his mind, the self-assured way Avery ruffled her son’s hair. Took no shit about dirty socks on the floor. He can barely scrape up enough money to buy a crappy camper with money siphoned from his overly generous aunt, and meanwhile, Avery has raised a whole entire human being, not to mention buying a house and a paddleboard store, and doesn’t think twice about giving away a twenty-dollar jar of organic Vaseline, for free, to a schmuck like him. A sucker for injured creatures, indeed.
“My friends Elizabeth and Brad are having a baby,” he says, although he’s not sure why, because it’s kind of out of nowhere. “Best friends, I mean. We’ve all been tight for a long time.”
“That’s wonderful,” Avery says.
“It is. It’s amazing.” Cameron nods slowly. “I mean, they have no clue what they’re doing, but I guess they’ll figure it out.”
“For sure. Billions of people have figured it out.”
Cameron smiles. “You’d like them. I mean, Brad is a dork, but he’s a solid dude. And I think you and Elizabeth would
be good friends.” He runs a hand through the cold, dark water. “I wish you could meet them. I mean, someday.” He rubs the back of his neck, which is suddenly hot, flushed.
“Sure, I’d love that.” Avery rises to her knees and dips a paddle. “Let’s head back, huh? It’s chilly under here.”
An hour later, as they swing back around the tip of the jetty, that same aggrieved seagull gives them another hard glare. “Cheer up, mate,” says Cameron, chuckling to himself. Ethan is rubbing off on him.
The gull rears back, thrusts open its beak, and lets out the loudest, angriest squawk a bird has ever made.
All it takes is his one foot slipping back a couple of inches, weight shifted, and with a massive splash Cameron is in the water. Again.
Coming up with a gasp, he yells, “Holy shit, that’s still cold!”
Where did Avery go? Treading in the freezing water, he swivels his head around looking for her. He probably looks like a goddamn seal. Or a sea lion? He can’t remember which pinniped is native to the Pacific Northwest. Is the cold taking over his brain? Hypothermia?
“Need a hand?” There she is, paddling toward him on her board. She’s gasping. With laughter.
“I’ve got it,” he grumbles, attempting to hoist himself back onto his slippery board. Just as he gets a knee up, it shoots away, sending him back underwater.
When he resurfaces, Avery is letting loose a string of incomprehensible instructions. “Shift your weight, brace your knee, tighten your core, no, your other knee, that elbow, grip with that hand, no, your right hand, no, your other right hand . . .”
He manages to flop up onto the board, and is sitting there like an asshole, dripping and panting, when the seagull lifts off the jetty and glides past them.
“You feathered little jerk,” he mutters, shaking his fist.
Avery has finally recovered from her laughter. She wipes her eyes with the hem of her shirt. “So close to the shore! You almost made it.”
“Gee, thanks for believing in me.” A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “Well, since I’m already wet . . .” He dives into the bracing water and beelines for her board. Her warnings are muffled by the water as he gives the board a solid shove. She crashes into him, squealing and pushing him under, as the board pops back out few feet away.
He surfaces, grinning. “Now we’re both wet!”
“You are so dead.” Her voice is sandpaper, but her eyes are sparkling. He winds an arm around her waist and pulls her into him, her body practically weightless underwater. She wraps her legs around his hips. It’s hot as hell, even though he’s numb from the armpits down at this point.
“You didn’t pack a change of clothes,” he says, teeth chattering. “I noticed you didn’t bring a bag.” His lips are a breath away from hers.
She whispers, “Because I never fall.”
“Good thing I’ve got blankets in the back of the camper.”
Laughing, she pulls back a bit. “Cameron, if you try some line about us needing to get out of these wet clothes . . .”
He feigns offense. “Well, we do, don’t we?”
“And if you say one damn word about how you’re glad we brought your camper here, because Marco and his friends are back at my house . . .”
“Well? Aren’t you glad about that?”
“Yep.” She draws herself close again and kisses him, softly at first. Her lips are salty, shivering, but as she opens her mouth to his, the inside is warm, sweet, intoxicating. Then, with a swoosh, she jets away. As she grabs hold of her loose board, she flashes him a daring grin that almost sends him off the edge as she says, “Last one back to the shore is a rotten egg.”
