by Zoe York
“If you go out on the lake again tomorrow, you’ll be a pro in no time,” Frank said as they returned their gear to the staff.
You. Not them, just her. The need for cover was gone, and it was a good reminder that Frank was there to lean on—and she’d offered to be there for him to do the same—but he didn’t really want to spend all his time with her.
He was miserable here, and just counting down the days until the wedding.
Speaking of which, that was where she should put her attention today. “I need to go find Heather,” she said brightly. “She’s officiating Tegan and Wyatt’s wedding ceremony and I’d like to go over those details. Thanks for the company on the kayaks, and all the tips.”
She skedaddled out of there before he could reply.
Frank was pretty sure he spent more time watching Grace hustle away from him than was natural. And yet he very much liked watching her, so he didn’t question it too much. There wasn’t anything else to do around here, anyway.
That was why he’d sought her out for breakfast. And kayaking.
And if he were being honest with himself, he’d look for her at lunch, too.
Which…he might want to question that. The more he thought about it, her reactions to him today had been hesitant and careful. He’d practically had to drag her to breakfast and then kayaking. And at the first opportunity, she’d dodged away as fast as she could.
He was getting rusty at reading people. Or maybe he’d never been that good at it, and it hadn’t mattered before.
He took a deep breath and headed to the main lodge. Maybe instead of leaning heavily on Grace for company, he could get some advice on a good, long hike to take. One that might clear his head and give his body some good, clean work to do.
At the activity board, he found hiking maps, and a bright sticker on the front advertised that the kitchen could prepare lunches to take along on the walk. He checked in at the main desk about that.
“Yep, we can do a brown-bag lunch, no problem. They’re ready at eleven, you can come back then and pick yours up then. And in the future, you can put in an early morning pick-up request as well.”
He knocked on the wood counter. That sounded like a great idea. “Can I do that for tomorrow?”
“Sure thing. For one person?”
He flicked a quick glance at the menu example on the pamphlet. It didn’t sound like enough calories for him to do a full-day hike. He assumed most campers weren’t him, though. “Can you make it two orders?”
“Of course.”
He gave the man a grateful smile. “Thanks. I’ll be back in a bit.”
So, he had an hour to kill. He headed back to the activity board. Tennis lessons popped out at him, and he thought of Grace. Had she wanted to take lessons?
Bianca had played tennis four times a week her whole adult life. He’d enjoyed it when he’d had time. Maybe—
No.
He jerked his attention elsewhere on the board. Anything else but tennis.
Except everywhere he looked now, he saw his wife. Cooking classes in the kitchen, swimming races.
Even the Arts & Crafts lesson going on right now—friendship bracelets—reminded him of the embroidery thread Bia had bought for a Navy wives project. He’d thrown out the remnants just last month when he’d finally worked up the courage to clear out her craft room.
“It’s so hard for the spouses, Frank. You’ll never understand. Not really. I know it’s hard for you when you go, but you have a purpose. And it’s not really like you have a choice. I know what it’s like to sit at home and feel…empty. Alone. Scared.”
The thing was, he did understand. Now. Now that it was too late, he knew exactly what his wife had tried to explain all those years ago. He’d been a young commander, full of drive and eager to lead his first overseas command in Afghanistan. It had been the early days of their engagement there. Ugly, chaotic, dangerous.
Back home, his wife had held a lot of scared hands.
He’d brought back all those men. Every single one of them returned alive, which was a miracle. Not every tour of duty was that lucky. Not every commander was able to protect his men, and those that couldn’t weren’t any less skilled at leadership than he was.
And his wife’s doctors couldn’t save her.
Grief welled up inside him and he blindly turned in the direction of the Arts & Crafts building. His legs churned as he stalked away from that pain. Not today, grief. Fuck off.
He was going to make a friendship bracelet or three and think about his wife’s accomplishments. Her leadership, her athleticism, her friendship. To him, to other military spouses, to everyone she ever met.
She’d be best friends with Grace right now. They’d be taking tennis lessons from Nate together while Frank did a hike on his own. Even if Grace didn’t want to, Bianca would have talked her into it, finding the angle that would please her new friend.
When he got to the class, he yanked the door open.
The space was empty. It was a big room, lit by tall windows on both sides. Tons of sunlight streaming in, and zero people anywhere to be seen, although the back of the room was dark. Maybe it was in another part of the building.
His heart pounded in his chest and his palms slicked with sweat. He swallowed around a lump in his throat.
Damn it, he’d really wanted to make a friendship bracelet. Or three.
“Hello?” A female voice, thick and husky called out from the shadows at the back of the room.
He lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the overly bright windows. As his gaze adjusted to the light, he realized a woman was walking toward him. Tall, stacked, brunette.
Bianca.
But when she stepped into the first spot of sunlight, his heart sank. It wasn’t his wife. Of course it wasn’t.
From the shirt, he could tell it was a staff person. She smiled at him. “You’re the only person who showed up for the craft session. Sorry, I was just in the back getting organized for the next one. Dreamcatchers—hopefully they’re more popular than bracelets.”
He gave her a tight smile. “Hopefully.”
“Come in, sit down. I’m Rachel.” She waved her hand, and a diamond glinted on her left hand. “Is this your first craft session? Do you know the drill?”
“First time, yep.”
“Okay, well I’m here to help.”
He almost begged off, but she was already setting out trays. So he followed her to a table and sat across from her. Up close, she didn’t bear much of a resemblance to Bia after all. A similar tone of voice, similar height, and they both had dark hair.
He gave his head a shake and focused on the task at hand.
At first the work was clumsy. His fingers felt too big to string the circular device, and the delicate embroidery thread kept getting tangled. But once he got the hang of it, with Rachel’s guidance, he finished a bracelet.
“Not bad,” she said, looking at his handiwork from across the table.
But not great. The start of it was looser than the end, where his pulls on the thread had gotten tighter. “Can I make another?”
“Of course. The same colors?”
He looked at the bracelet in his hand. He’d picked it because they were Bianca’s favorite colors. Blue, purple, emerald green. Then he looked at the other trays. A pale periwinkle blue caught his eye. The other colors were yellow and orange. Summery and sweet, like Grace. “I’ll make that one next.”
“Lovely.” She handed it over. “Do you remember how to start?”
“I think so.”
She watched him carefully until he was under way. This one was smoother than the first, consistent from start to finish. He liked it a lot. When he finished, he looked at the clock. There was just enough time. “I want to fix the first one to look like this one,” he said. “Can you help me?”
“Of course.” Rachel came around to his side of the table and helped him unweave the first bracelet and get it re-loomed. “There you go.”
&nbs
p; “It’s almost time for me to get my hiking lunch,” he said. “Can I come back and finish this later?”
“You can take it with you, if you’d like. Bring the loom back any time this week.”
He gave her a grateful smile. “Thanks.”
After carefully folding up his project and putting it in his pocket, he went through the main lodge, grabbed his food order, and then headed back to the cabin to get changed for an afternoon on the trails.
But as he stepped onto the porch, Grace’s door swung open.
They stopped at the same time.
It felt awkward for reasons he couldn’t really put his finger on. “Hey.”
She smiled politely. “Hello.”
“Did you find Heather?”
“Yep.”
Yes, definitely awkward. He took a deep breath. “I made you a friendship bracelet.”
She blinked at him.
“I had an hour to kill, so I went to the craft building—it’s a long story.”
“Oh.”
“Too weird?”
“No…” She crossed her arms over her chest. She looked small like that, and it poked at something deep inside. “It wasn’t what I was expecting, that’s all.” She tilted her head so she could squint up at him.
He moved back and sat down on the step.
Slowly, she joined him, still looking at him with wary curiosity. “Do you sometimes find it hard to navigate human relationships?”
He nodded ruefully. “Always.”
“Shouldn’t it be easier at our age? I see all these people—” She gestured toward the center of camp. “They all seem to understand the social rules. They’re all excited to be here and pair up, and I’m counting down the hours until my daughter arrives, so I can bury myself in mother-of-the-bride stuff.”
“How did your meeting with Heather go?”
She lifted her shoulders in a weak shrug. “It was five minutes of her reassuring me that they were having weddings all summer long here and they know what they’re doing. Tegan and Wyatt have written their own vows and it’s a short service. There’s nothing else for me to really do.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Meh. It’s fine.” She looked at the bracelet in his hand. “That’s really for me?”
“Yeah.” He held it out.
“What’s the longer version of the story?”
He took a deep breath. “I’m going for a hike this afternoon, and they’re making me a bagged lunch. It wasn’t going to be ready for an hour, so I went to the craft building.” He skipped over the part about the emotional grief crisis. “My wife made these once for other navy wives. The first one I made was for her. When I get back to California, I’ll take it to her grave and tell her about camp. Then I had time to make another one, and I thought these colors suited you.”
“That’s really sweet,” she whispered as she took it in her slim fingers. “It’s beautiful.”
“I think we’re going to get through this week together—” he said at the same time as she added, “I wasn’t sure you liked me at all, to be honest.”
They both stopped and stared at each other.
“Wait, what?” He leaned in, bracing his hand on the porch behind them. “Grace, I like you a lot. You’re funny and smart and you seem to get me even though we’re complete opposites. Why wouldn’t I like you?”
“Uh…” She turned red. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does.” He frowned.
She licked her lips. “Why?”
“Because I don’t want to push myself on you.”
Her eyes got wide. “You think you’re pushing yourself on me?”
“Isn’t that what you thought? This morning? I dragged you to breakfast, I made you go kayaking, and then at the soonest opportunity—”
“I thought you were done with me,” she whispered.
Something cracked in his chest. “No,” he murmured softly. “Not at all.”
She fiddled with the bracelet. “Oh.”
“I’m glad I made that for you, then, because I want to be your friend, Grace. I want to learn more about flowery tea and your lavender farm and backpacking through Belize.”
Her mouth bloomed into the nicest, sweetest smile, and he reached out and brushed his knuckles on her cheek. “There. That’s better.”
She laughed.
“That’s a good sound.”
“Yeah?” She turned to look squarely at him and suddenly they were very close.
His hand dropped away from her face and his heart thumped hard in his chest. She looked like pure sunshine. Warm and happy.
He hadn’t felt the sun in so long. He could feel himself leaning in, and it felt good.
And then she breathed his name. “Frank.” Or maybe it was a question. “Frank?” His brain couldn’t process it clearly, but it was enough to trip him up.
He jerked back, and she did the same.
“Frank—”
“It’s lunch time,” he said gruffly. “I’m off for a hike. See you later?”
“Sure.”
And then it was her turn to watch him stalk off.
Chapter 7
Frank headed into the woods, his lunch packed into a ruck on his back. His body creaked and protested at first, but once he got into the rhythm of the hike, it felt good to move. It felt good to be alone with his thoughts, too, in the regulated way they happened when he was in motion.
His grief counsellor had told him to go for a daily walk, which he’d laughed at pretty hard—he could run, he could sprint through an obstacle course, or bench press his weight and then some. He didn’t need to go for a walk. It was so…simple. Too simple.
But like most advice from professionals, it actually worked. Once he’d pushed through his resistance, he’d found there was something in the slower pace, in the steady push of one foot in front of another, that did something to the overwhelming thoughts in his head.
Sorted his shit out, basically.
And this afternoon, he needed his shit to be sorted, because he was pretty sure he’d almost kissed Grace, and that was insanity.
Pretty sure? What kind of fucked-up denial is that? Yeah. Right. He’d almost kissed Grace.
He’d wanted to kiss her.
He could still feel that nervous excitement in his gut as he’d leaned in.
Two days before he’d been scoffing at the idea of camp hook-ups. Now he was flirting with his next-door-neighbor and liking it. Or at least, liking it right up until the second it felt wrong, and then he ran away.
He shoved his hand into his pocket and closed his fingers around the friendship bracelet loom. Oh, Bianca, what am I doing?
There was never any answer when he spoke to her. She was gone, and everything she would say now, she’d said in the months leading up to her death.
“Don’t you die on me, too, Frank. Find your way back to a new life. Promise me.”
He had promised her. But he hadn’t given her any timeline for a reason. He was pretty sure he was going to spend the rest of his life with a hole in his heart, and any life that managed to pulse around that was a miracle.
He tried to tell the Bianca in his head that he’d almost kissed someone else. He couldn’t do it. As soon as he tried to put the words together, she shimmered away.
As he walked on, he cycled through all of those thoughts again and again, looking at them from all different directions. He shouldn’t be thinking about Bia if and when he kissed someone else anyway.
When he got to the top of the trail head, in an open clearing, he turned around and looked down the mountainside toward camp.
If and when he kissed someone, he’d have to be sure about it.
Swinging his pack off his back, he looked for a spot to eat his lunch. And then he was going to re-make his Bianca bracelet and mull over what it might feel like to be sure about something.
It was well past dinner by the time he returned to camp. That was fine. He had some snacks in his room.
Grace’s side of the cabin was dark, and he thought about going in search of her, but the conversation he wanted to have couldn’t happen at the boathouse or around the bar in the main lodge.
Instead, he decided to leave her a note.
But while he was hunting for paper, and then a pen, she returned. He heard her footsteps outside and dropped the pad of paper he’d found, wanting to catch her before she went into her room.
She turned and looked at him when he burst onto the porch. “You’re back.”
“Yeah.” There wasn’t much light. Just the stream coming from his door, and she was in shadows, closer to hers. It was hard to read her.
“How was the hike?”
“Good enough. I needed to clear my head. Any trail would have sufficed.”
“Frank—”
“I’m sorry.” He barked it out. Not a great first take. “And I’m sorry for saying it like that, I guess.” He rubbed his jaw. “You’ve been kind to me.”
She moved closer. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for. You told me that after I crawled into your bed and made a fool of myself. Now it’s my turn to give that back. We’re all human. And we get drunk, we reach out, we…” She threw her head back and sighed. “We sometimes do stupid shit.”
It hadn’t been stupid. Simply premature. “Do you ever not swear?”
“Says the guy in the navy?” She looked back at him, her eyes twinkling. “Fuck no.”
He laughed with her. Then he sobered up again. “But seriously, Grace. I think we cleared up some confusion earlier, only for me to muddy those waters again.”
“Frank…if you had kissed me, that would have been okay, too. I’ve been single for twenty years. I kiss a lot of frogs. I know it doesn’t mean anything, and sometimes it feels good. Don’t overthink it.”
He wasn’t overthinking it. Not anymore. He’d spent all afternoon thinking, and reasoning, and trying to come up with any plan other than getting his mouth on hers.
