Not yet.
She had enough terrifying new things in her life at the moment. The email could wait.
Except it didn't feel like it could wait. It felt like it was burning a hole through her pocket and into her hip, radiating heat and possibility and the kind of fear that had nothing to do with Jack and everything to do with the question she'd been avoiding for three years:
What if the thing Sam said she couldn't do was the thing she was actually meant for?
Clara turned her face into the wind and let the salt air sting her eyes.
She'd think about it tomorrow.
Probably.
twelve
"You're holding it wrong."
"There's a wrong way to hold a rope?"
"It's a line, not a rope. And yes. Very wrong. You're going to lose a finger."
Jack looked down at his hands, at the line—not rope, apparently, because boats had their own language and he hadn't been issued a dictionary—wrapped haphazardly around his palm.
"I build houses," he said. "I frame walls. I install cabinetry that could survive a nuclear event. I think I can handle a piece of r—a line."
Clara, standing at the helm of her boat with the casual authority of someone who'd been doing this since shecould walk, gave him a look that could only be described as maritime pity.
"You sank your last boat, Jack."
"That was weather-related."
"You sailed into a storm. In a boat you bought from a stranger. With no marine experience."
"I had some marine experience."
"Name one."
"I've seen Jaws."
Clara closed her eyes. Opened them. Took the kind of breath that suggested she was reconsidering every romantic decision she'd made in the past month.
"Okay," she said, with the patience of a woman who had apparently chosen to love an idiot and was committed to the bit. "Let's start from the beginning. This is a cleat. You secure the line to it like this." She demonstrated a figure-eight pattern with the efficiency of muscle memory. "Your turn."
Jack tried. The line went somewhere that wasn't a figure eight. It was more of a figure nothing—a shapeless knot that defied geometry.
Clara stared at it. "How didyou make it worse?"
"Talent."
"Undo it and try again."
"I can't undo it. I don't know what I did."
Clara hip-checked him out of the way—physically moved him, one hand on his waist, pushing him aside like he was a piece of furniture in the wrong spot—and freed the line with three efficient tugs. The knot dissolved like it had never existed.
"Show-off," Jack muttered.
"Competence isn't showing off." She reset the line. "Again."
