Page 13 of Lakeside Little
Placing the fish back in the bucket, I wiped myself off with a wet wipe. “If you know how,” I said. “Does this thing have speakers?”
“I think it has Bluetooth,” he said. “And I saw the sign about not playing too loud, even though I think Britney would lure more fish to us, rather than spook them.” He winked at me.
“You sound so very convincing, but sure, although I think they’d go wild for ‘Toxic’, or ‘I’m a Slave 4 U’.”
“Oh my god, wait, you know your Britney.”
Offering him the biggest smile, there was still so much we didn’t know about each other. “I went to one of her concerts when I was eighteen, she’d just hit it big, and the world was going wild for her.”
“No way.”
“Yes, way.”
“Ok, so how was it?”
“Incredible, it was like one of those things that I don’t think could ever be replicated. Even her Vegas residency, which I went to, and probably the only time I’d ever go back to Vegas. It’s not the place for me. Give me green nature any day.”
The way Jack now looked at me was filled with question, and I answered every single question that came to his lips. If it kept him calm and less agitated, I would do anything.
We caught several more fish, all of them smaller than the first, but the smallest were thrown back in. We ended the trip on the lake with a haul of lake trout, two bass, and some yellow perch, which Jack commended looked like dinosaurs with the fanned fins on their back and general scale coloring.
It was a successful fishing trip on the lake, and considerably quiet given there were plenty of people out on the lake with their floaties. It was a large enough lake for people to go unnoticed though, and there were others fishing, which we didn’t get to interact with either, just a drive-by wave as we passed them.
“That wasn’t too bad, was it?” I asked as we hauled the boat in from the ramp.
Jack, now on land continued to cling to the life preserver. “I got what I needed from it,” he said. “But I think it’ll have to be a long time before I’m back out on the water.”
I gave him a hug and kissed his forehead. He wrapped his arms tight around me. “Nothing bad was going to happen to you,” I told him. “You’ve gotta believe me when I say that.”
“I did believe you, but there’s a whole lot of water out there.”
“And if you went into it, I would’ve been right behind you.” I kissed him again, this time on the lips as he met my face.“Now, I think we could do a little grilling outside. What do you think about that?”
“Like a barbeque?”
“Well, kinda.”
“As long as we get burgers, because I don’t think I could—eat one of those—” He paused to puff his cheeks with air like he was about to vomit. “At least not today.”
“Since you’ve been such a good boy today, I’ll get you whatever you want.”
“In that case, I saw some cute teddy bear printed plates and napkins in the convenience store yesterday, I think they would complete a barbecue.”
“Whatever you want, princess.”
He giggled.
We transported the boat back to its rightful owning, handing off one of the bass which was accepted with joy from Mason and a similar snarl from Oliver that I’d seen on Jack’s face, and you could tell they were related in that moment. Jack was in his dramatics, telling his cousin about how hellish it was to be suspended above the ground, when in reality, he was just on the water and very safe.
“What do you have planned for the rest of the fish?” Mason asked.
“I’ve got an outdoor grill at the cabin, but Jack doesn’t really want the fish, so I’ll probably just keep most of it on ice and hope it keeps,” I said.
“Better idea,” Oliver interjected. “We should come over, in fact, why don’t I invite Elijah and Malcolm, they’ve just become an official couple, and I think it would be a really nice thing.”
It was something I couldn’t say no to, not like I would’ve said no. I was more than open to having more people around,especially when they helped me to escape the scary thoughts that often occupied my mind when I was left to my own devices.
“You don’t have to,” Jack said. “We’ve never even met before.”
