Page 7 of Fishing for Keeps

The evening before Thursday pizza, we stay out too long. The sun drops low and turns the water to gold, and I land an actual fish, a smallmouth bass, and I bring it in myself while Trent coaches and hollers and nearly goes overboard with excitement. We release it, and my hands are shaking, and I'm laughing, and when I look up, he's watching me instead of the water.

"What?" I say.

"Nothing." He doesn't look away. "Gus was right is all. You’re a natural.”

We're standing close in a small boat. The gold light is shining on his face, and I can hear my own heartbeat over the crickets starting up on shore.

Just for the summer, I remind myself. You're leaving. Don't get attached.

But my stubborn heart doesn’t listen to my brain.

"Trent," I whisper.

"Yeah?"

"I'm going to do something stupid."

"Thank God," he says. "Me too."

I don't know which of us moves first. His mouth is warm, and he kisses me like he tells stories about Mercury Ridge—wholehearted, holding nothing back—and one of his hands comes up to cradle my jaw. I curl my fist into his shirt and kiss him back until the boat rocks and the crickets sing and I forget every plan I've ever made.

When we finally break apart, we're both breathing hard.

"For the record," he says, a little wrecked, "that wasn't stupid."

"No?"

"That was the best thing that's ever happened on this boat. And Gus once caught a record-breaking largemouth off the bow, so the bar was high.”

I laugh, and he pulls me in, and we stay out on the water until the stars come up.

Chapter Five

Trent

The for sale sign goes up on a Tuesday.

I see it on my way to her cottage with breakfast sandwiches. It’s white and red at the end of Gus's driveway, planted in the grass like it has every right to be there. There's a realtor's car parked next to Josie's, and through the front window I can see a guy in a golf shirt gesturing at the ceiling beams like he's already pricing them.

Something goes tight in my chest and stays that way.

I knew. She told me the fine print herself, at the pizza table, in front of everybody. Just for the summer. I said understood like a big boy.

But that was before two weeks of sunrises. Before I knew she hums when she paints baseboards and argues with podcasts and puts a truly criminal amount of butterscotch in her coffee because it reminds her of Gus. Before she caught her first fish and looked at me like the lake had handed her a treasure.

Josie comes out on the porch as the realtor drives off, and her smile when she sees me is the real one, the quick bright one. Then she sees my face, and her smile dims.

"You saw the sign," she says.

"Hard to miss." I hand her a sandwich and manufacture a grin. "Bold choice, red and white. Really pops against the hydrangeas."

"Trent."

I sit on the porch steps. "It's fine. It's the plan. I'm a big fan of the plan.” A total load of bullshit.

She sits next to me, and for a second we're okay again, basking in the sunlight on Gus’s porch stairs.

Then she says, quietly, "The realtor thinks it'll move fast. Cottages on this cove don't come up much. He said to expect an offer within the week."