problem to be solved dispassionately.
The problem that had been niggling, and that was now making itself more overtly known in his consciousness, was that Nora made him feel things that were not mechanical.
He didn’t put his arm around her, but it was a close thing.
Nora had a problem, and that problem was that she wanted to jump Jake.
Her sister had told her, today in fact, that this wasn’t a problem. “That is one fine specimen of human male, Nor,” she’d said during a FaceTime. Nora had not brought this up; Erin had. “I mean, could you do better for a rebound fling? But you make sure it’s just a fling, because I have a bunch of house listings to send you.”
Nora had declared her Moonflower Bay time-out a “no boys” zone, but she hadn’t actually thought through what that meant. Certainly it meant no boyfriends. And no dating, because dating was how a person ended up with a boyfriend. Just like she was keeping her house mostly empty, she didn’t want to clutter up her life or her brain with other people’s junk. She didn’t want to have to please anyone but herself—and she was still figuring out what that meant.
One thing she hadn’t really taken into account as she’d thought through the life reset was the concept of casual sex. Mostly because she hadn’t really had much of it in her life. She was more of a serial monogamist.
She was pretty sure she wanted a husband and kids someday, so at some point she was going to have to get back on the horse. Just not yet.
But…did she have to take a breather from sex itself?
When her sister and some of her hospital friends had suggested she go out on the prowl and have some revenge sex, she’d laughed. The idea had actively repulsed her.
But then there was Jake. Sneaking up on her. Strong, steady, gruff, kind, gorgeous Jake who also did not want a relationship.
The thing about Jake, though, was that in addition to all that, he was damaged. He was hurt, perhaps irreparably, by all that had happened to him. That wasn’t a recipe for a clean rebound fling. And, perhaps more to the point, he was her friend. He had never given her any indication that he thought of her as more than that.
So yeah, if there was going to be any no-strings-attached-ing, it wasn’t going to be with Jake.
Which was too bad, because she really, really wanted to jump him.
So all she could do was lean against him—in a totally platonic way—and sigh.
But that wasn’t nothing. And this cove felt like a perfect little secret the universe had deigned to reveal to her. She was sitting in maybe the prettiest place she’d ever seen, watching the October sun paint pink stripes across the sky, while her friend—a good, true man—cooked her fish he’d caught himself. She sighed again, but tried to make it a more contented one.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. I was just thinking that this is exactly what I imagined as a best-case scenario when I decided to come to Moonflower Bay.”
“Yeah?”
“I mean, not this exactly, but I had this idea of getting out of my own head, right? I had this romantic notion of standing next to a Great Lake—living next to a Great Lake—being a curative, somehow. Like, it would be beautiful but also…I don’t know, powerful. Capable of scouring me clean.” She lifted her head from his shoulder and shook it. “Listen to me, all hippie-dippy. I sound like Wynd.”
“No. I know what you mean. The lake can be pretty, like it is right now, but you should see it in a storm. It’s raw, merciless power then. You look at it for long enough, in enough different moods, and you do sort of start to think of it as a force. As something with the power to change you.”
“To heal you, you think?”
“No. Not that. It’s a sort of temporary comfort because it’s so indifferent. Whatever happens, the lake goes on.”
“Even when people don’t.”
“Even when people don’t,” he echoed.
She stood and walked to the edge of the deck, picking up her wine along the way. “So you used to fish commercially?”
“Yeah, my dad and his dad before him fished this lake. I grew up on my dad’s boat, and he formally cut me in when I graduated high school. I told you Kerrie went back to work when Jude was three months old?”
She nodded. She had wondered about that. Canada offered a