Page 55 of Falling Overboard

I settled on pivoting around and pressing forward without answering him. He seemed to correctly sense that he might have pushed me a bit too far out of my comfort zone and didn’t ask me anything further about my catastrophizing everything.

I was considering what he’d said, recognizing the truth in it. I’d always thought envisioning the worst possible outcome was the smart thing to do so that I would be prepared. Being caught off-guard by a doomsday event was awful.

Something I knew all too well.

It occurred to me that I was always holding my breath, waiting for terrible things to happen, because they always had.

The stress that constant fear caused—the pressure that I put myself under—it wasn’t good.

Hunter started whistling “Luck Be a Lady,” one of the songs fromGuys and Dolls, as we continued down the path and it felt pointed.

Like he was making a pun with the song. Only I didn’t catch the meaning.

Maybe he just liked the song and liked to whistle.

It didn’t feel that way, though.

He abruptly stopped and then said, “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”

What, he didn’t want to keep making wild but accurate guesses? “You don’t know most things about me.”

“That’s not true. I know lots of stuff. I know you sometimes have panic attacks, that you’ve lost a lot of your family, that you’re a hard worker charged with keeping the yacht clean even though you’re a messy person. You’re extremely loyal, protective, and you always follow the rules. You’re smart and funny and probably too generous with your time. Your anxiety is difficult to deal with but you do it anyway. You’re kind and thoughtful, especially with the guests. You have excellent taste in movies. I make you laugh even though you want to pretend that I don’t. And you have freakily good balance—you can carry several plates on your arms up and down narrow sets of stairs on a swaying ship.”

There was another moment, just like I’d had earlier, where it felt like he was laying my soul bare and correctly calling out everything he saw.

I didn’t want to dwell on that, this feeling of being so seen. Because that was another thing that hadn’t happened in a really long time. “I love to bake.”

“You do? That works out well for me because I love to eat.”

I’d seen him eat and that was a hundred percent true. I still got a little hot and bothered when I thought about how he devoured his food, the hunger, the focus.

Wanting to redirect myself, I announced, “I want to open a bakery.”

The confessions just kept rolling on. I had never said that out loud before, not even to my sisters. It felt like such a foolish and impossible dream, like something that couldn’t ever happen.

“That’s why I’m yachting,” I added on. “My nonna used to have an Italian bakery. She and my nonno immigrated to America from Naples and that’s where I spent all my time with her. My dream is to reopen it and carry on her legacy.”

“What happened to her bakery?”

The path had narrowed and I had to push some tall grass out of the way to continue on. “It got foreclosed on and everything inside was sold off. She had battled cancer for a few years and was really deeply in debt because she took out all these loans to pay her bills. She never told us.”

“I’m sorry. That sucks.” He must have been able to hear the pain in my voice.

Was it weird that his empathy was one of the most attractive things about him?

“What about you? What’s your dream job?” I realized that most of the time we’d spent together, it had been him asking me questions.

In part because I was afraid to get to know him better. I suspected that if I did, I would like him even more.

What I already knew, that he was funny, kind, compassionate, goofy, quick-witted, comforting, and implausibly handsome, was bad enough.

He didn’t answer for a bit and I wondered if it made him uncomfortable to talk about himself. That definitely would have set him apart from every other man I’d ever met. “I told you about my sister Harper passing. What I didn’t tell you was that she died from an overdose. She had struggled with depression and anxiety for most of her life and dealt with suicidal ideation. My parents think she took her own life but I think it was an accident.”

That stopped me in my tracks and I turned toward him. “Hunter.” Without thinking I walked over to him and wrapped my arms around his waist. I realized after the fact that I probably should have asked him first, but he returned the hug, holding me close.

“I’m sorry,” I said. My inclination was to rub his back the way he’d rubbed mine when I told him about my family, but I knew that nothing good would come from that. “Are you okay?”

“I am. Like I said, I had a lot of professional help after the fact. I mean, once I stopped acting out.”

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