Jack glances from Vin to me and back again. “You’re not joining us? What about the tuna in—”
“No!” Vin gives a little hop to punctuate his outrage at the suggestion and nearly clips Jack’s chin with the top of his head in the process. That’s my cue to intervene.
“Mr. M.” I set a hand on Vin’s shoulder and tug him back gently. “Why don’t you go sit up top and get a little sun?”
“Sun?” Vin is clearly going for his best soap opera performance today. “You call this sun? Do you know where there is sun? In St. Barth’s. Do you know who’s in St. Barth’s? My Emilio!” His voice wavers on the last word like he’s about to cry, and I widen my eyes, silently begging him to rein it in a bit. But I also make a mental note to let Roberta know she should be sending him out for auditions.
Vin winks, then spins on his heel, flouncing to the ladder and climbing up. I take a step back so I’m shoulder to shoulder with Jack. We watch silently until Vin is settled in one of the tall chairs, his back to us as he continues to mutter to himself about “Emilio.”
“Your boss is a bit high-maintenance,” Jack says softly. The crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes crinkle, and I can’t tell if he’s amused or annoyed.
“He’s an acquired taste.”
He stares at me like he knows bullshit when he smells it. “He really came all this way and he’s not fishing?”
“He’s not...” I scrub a hand over the back of my neck, trying to figure a way out of this. “Maybe he’s humoring me.”
“You?”
I try to keep my shrug casual. “He’s not really into fishing, but I told him I wanted to go, so he said he’d make it happen.”
Jack glares up at the bridge, but he’s still keeping his voice down. “And now he’s going to hang out there?”
I don’t know what to say. “With money comes certain privileges?”
Jack laughs in acknowledgment. It’s a quiet sound low in his chest, and it hits me in exactly the same place.
“He reminds me of my brother-in-law.”
“Yeah?” I say.
He shrugs. “Well... ex-brother-in-law. Almost. I think his family has a place on Martha’s Vineyard too. You know the type. Their money opens doors everywhere they go, and they forget how real people live.”
My growing amusement fades. If he knew who I really was, would he think the same thing about me?
“So how do you want to do this?” Jack asks like nothing we’ve said is worth a second thought.
“Do what?”
He takes down one of the fishing rods lined up in a rack. “Do you want the hands-on version, or do you want to sit back and let me do the work?”
Okay, seriously. That’s a pickup line, right? Either he’s fucking with me... or he wants to be fucking with me.
But still, he’s staring with that same blankly expectant expression like he didn’t just ask me if I like to take charge in bed any more than he’s asked me any of the usual crap people want to know, like how I remember all those lines or if Dex really is secretly in love with his best friend, Leon Martinelli.
In case you’re wondering, he’s not. Dex is straight as a rail. It’s something that’s been drilled into me for years by the studio PR team because the question comes up at every single con and panel I’ve been to, and we can’t risk alienating our fan base—or that’s the fear anyway.
As I watch Jack though, I’ve never felt so off-balance in my life, and it’s not the boat rolling underneath my feet.
“Uh, I think I’d like the full experience,” I say, voice rougher than I mean it to be.
And yet again, Jack nods like nothing is amiss. He lifts hinged metal panels in the floor and pulls out nets, a curved hook, and a few tools I don’t recognize. To one side, he sets out a bucket of jiggling fish guts.
“What’s that?” I ask, taking a step back. We’re under a wide-open sky, but even with a good breeze blowing past us, the stench of rotting fish makes my eyes water.
“Bait.” Jack methodically hooks fish heads and skinned ribs to the end of lines with no more interest than if he was making a sandwich. When he’s done, he stands back and gestures to the rods mounted along the boat’s railing. “Would you like to do the honors?”
It’s been a long time since I went fishing, and back at home, it was much more of the beer-in-a-tin-boat kind of fishing than the rig Jack’s got going here, but with a little guidance, we let the lines reel out. The fish guts disappear below the water, and everything gets quiet.
