“Sounds about right to me.” I slouch in my seat, tip down the brim of my hat and let my fingers trail through the cool river. “And it’s called paddling, not rowing.”
Jared paddles hard from his seat behind me, huffing and puffing, until I tell him to chill out and just let us glide.
And we do. Under the Marquam Bridge and the new Tilikum Bridge, across the river through steady weekend traffic, and around the east side of Ross Island, a thin gravel bar in the center of the Willamette River. It’s topped with trees and inaccessible except by boat.
I turn around and see the rudder still up on the kayak’s stern. “Pull that cord, the one behind you on your right.”
Jared does and the rudder flips into the water. “Do you mean to say all this time I’ve been pushing the foot pedals and they’ve done nothing?”
I shrug. “It taught you how to control the boat with just your paddle. Most kayaks don’t have rudders anyway. Like this so far?”
In the slender waterway between the island and the Willamette’s east bank, there are no waves, no other boats. Bird calls accent the silence.
“It’s peaceful,” Jared admits.
“Great. Time to shake it up.” I push myself up, plant one foot on my seat and the other on the side of the boat, then grasp the opposite edge with both hands and tug.
We roll.
Chapter Nine
Jared comes up a sputtering, bewildered wreck. “What the fuck, Grace?”
I swim a couple of strokes toward his paddle to keep it from floating away. “Rule one, don’t let go of your boat. Rule two, don’t let go of your paddle.”
“That’s kind of hard to do when I’m trying to swim out of the boat to avoid drowning.” His face betrays a shadow of panic.
I roll my eyes and swim back to the boat, where I give it a shove to roll it right side up again. “So melodramatic. You’re fine. You didn’t even have a spray skirt on. The river’s cold, but you’re not going to die.”
“How do you expect me to hang onto the boat and the paddle and get my head above water?”
“You’ll figure it out. You can handle multitasking, can’t you?” I bob in the water next to him, letting my life jacket hold me up. “I mean, you were busy consulting with me while you were also seducing me. That’s multitasking.”
And here I am multitasking, too: simultaneously teaching him and punishing him. I smirk.
Jared shakes his head vigorously, emptying water from his ears. “That’s the good kind of multitasking. This is just cruel.”
“You said to give you a kayak lesson. The tippy test is part of the lesson. You’ve got to flip and right yourself.” I pull a paddle float from beneath the elastic cords crisscrossing the kayak. “Stuff the paddle in that and latch it. Then blow it up.”
Jared fumbles with the yellow bag, finds the opening, and slips it over his paddle. He secures it and inflates the float so his paddle looks like a big yellow lollipop.
“Now you’ve got a pontoon.” I show him how to lever himself back into the boat while leaning on his paddle pontoon for balance. He doesn’t trust me when I tell him to go belly-first, but he makes a mess of getting back in and curses in frustration.
Then he listens. And learns. And following my directions, he manages to twist himself back to sitting upright, paddle in his hands.
“Deflate your paddle float and follow me.” I swim toward the island, leaving him in the middle of the channel with a float-crippled paddle. I force myself not to look back, trusting that he’ll get it eventually. Trust is part of the learning—trusting him to fail and figure it out.
When my sandals hit the gravel river bottom, I walk up to the shore, dripping and shivering but invigorated. I take off my life jacket and use it as a cushion as I watch Jared paddle in to shore, nearly tipping himself over again as he tries to figure out how to exit the boat.
“This is harder than it looks.” A frown still mars his face and his hair is almost black with water, curling on his forehead.
I sit and wrap my arms around my knees, letting the sun heat my shoulders and dry me off. Jared whips off his T-shirt and wrings it out, then drapes it on a log next to us to dry.
I can’t not look at his chest. The curls I explored in the dim light of his hotel room last night are glistening where the sun hits water droplets. His nipples are tight little buds from the cold, his stomach firm, and a trail of black hair leads from his navel south.
And it occurs to me that I never got a good look at him last night. Never explored him as intimately as I might have with other, more conventional lovers.
He flipped me and bent me over, and it was hot and hard and primal and intense. It made me forget all of those little things in the multi-step program that is foreplay: kiss, lick, suck, grasp, tease, take, thrust, release.