Page 32 of From Fling to Ring

Five fucking hours?

God help us.

I look around the boat and see Lucy’s not the only person who’s started upchucking over the side of the boat.

I am in puking hell. That’s the only thing I can think to call it.

16

TYLER

After suffering through the longest five hours of my life and not seeing a single goddamn whale because I was tending to Lucy, the boat returns to the harbor and I half carry her, limp as a wet noodle, to my car. Some nice lady on the boat gave her a Dramamine, and while I’m not sure how that stuff works, at least she’s partly in sleep-land and didn’t barf once on the way back.

We get to her place and I have to hoist her up the stairs to her apartment and straight to bed. I take off her hat and coat, boots, and blue jeans, and figure she can get under the covers with the rest of her clothes on.

I look in her refrigerator and help myself to a glass of orange juice, then write a quick note and let myself out.

First, I fall asleep at our symphony date, then she gets sick as a dog on our whale watching tour. Is this some kind of sign? Should I not be pursuing this woman?

Is this how things go when you are deceiving someone, having bet on how long they will date you?

Hell, maybe I don’t deserve a nice woman like Lucy. Maybe I should stick with the puck bunnies who follow us players around like we’re gods or something, who like us for our money and status and not much more.

Or, maybe I should quit belly-aching, and keep trying.

Finally home, I shower the salt air and water off myself. My mortification on behalf of Lucy, at how she not only barfed her guts out all day but also had to do it in view of thirty-plus people, haunts me.

I throw my clothes in the wash because they are sticky from the ocean spray and find my cell phone just before I wash the damn thing. Because I was out of range all day, and occupied with taking care of Lucy, I hadn’t paid any attention to it.

I missed a bunch of calls from my father.

“Hey, Dad? What’s up?” I ask when he answers on the first ring.

He chokes. “It’s your sister, Tyler. She’s in the hospital.”

Now it’s my turn to get sick.

17

LUCY

When I started this project, this research for my ‘self-help’ book, it hadn’t occurred to me that big swinging dick fuckboys had adorable little sisters.

It also never occurred to me that one might be kind enough to hold my hair back while I got seasick on a whale-watching tour. Tyler never left my side, not even when everyone ran to the other side of the boat to see a whale breaching, slapping his tail hard enough on the surface of the water to douse its admirers.

And it certainly never crossed my mind that I might be so worked up by an emergency in his family that, as I race across town to the hospital, I blast through several stop lights.

This is not going according to plan.

Not that I had a plan.

Actually, I’m not much of a planner, to be straight-up honest. I’m more a fly-by-the-seat of the pants girl. That’s how I ended up writing for a free weekly rag rather than something more high-brow like the daily San Francisco newspaper. I studied journalism but never did the internships and networking my more ambitious classmates did. I had a job tending bar and made pretty good money, as bartenders do. I didn’t want to give that up to be somebody’s gopher at a big newspaper just to get its name on my resume.

My bad.

Sure, I was making some cash while my interning classmates were dead broke, but a few years later, they have decent-paying jobs with benefits like health care and retirement. I, on the other hand, work for poverty-level wages—at least by San Francisco standards—with no health insurance or anything beyond the frequent pat on the back from my beloved boss. Oh, and the donuts too.

Too bad that shit doesn’t pay the rent.

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