Message in a Bottle - Nicholas Sparks [40]
He stood off to one side with his hands on his hips as she explored the interior, looking at everything. He didn’t hover over her shoulder as some men would have but instead gave her space. Still, she could feel his eyes watching her, though he wasn’t obvious about it. After a moment she said, “From the outside, you wouldn’t think it’s as large as it is.”
“I know.” Garrett cleared his throat awkwardly. “Surprising, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it is. It looks like it has everything you need, though.”
“It does. If I wanted, I could sail her to Europe, not that I’d recommend it. But it’s great for me.”
He stepped around her and went to the refrigerator, bending over to pull a can of Coca-Cola from the refrigerator. “Are you up for something to drink yet?”
“Sure,” she said. She ran her hands along the walls, feeling the texture of the wood.
“What would you like? I’ve got SevenUp or Coke.”
“SevenUp’s fine,” she answered.
He stood and handed her the can. Their fingers touched briefly as she took it.
“I don’t have any ice on board, but it’s cold.”
“I’ll try to rough it,” she said, and he smiled.
She opened it and took a swallow before setting it on the table.
As he opened his own can of soda, he looked at her, thinking about what she’d said earlier. She had a twelve-year-old son… and as a columnist, that meant she probably went to college. If she’d waited until after then to get married and have a child… that would make her about four or five years older than he was. She didn’t look that much older—that much was certain—but she didn’t act like most of the twenty-somethings he knew in town. There was a maturity to her actions, something that came only to those who had experienced their share of highs and lows in life.
Not that it mattered.
She turned her attention to a framed photograph that hung on the wall. In it, Garrett Blake was standing on a pier with a marlin he’d caught, looking much younger than he was now. In the photo he was smiling broadly, and his buoyant expression reminded her of Kevin whenever he scored a goal in soccer.
Into the sudden lull she said, “I see you like to fish.” She pointed toward the picture. He stepped toward her, and once he was close, she felt the warmth radiating from him. He smelled like salt and wind.
“Yeah, I do,” he said quietly. “My father was a shrimper, and I pretty much grew up on the water.”
“How long ago was this taken?”
“That one’s about ten years old—it was taken right before I went back to college for my senior year. There was a fishing contest, and my dad and I decided to spend a couple of nights out in the Gulf Stream and we caught that marlin about sixty miles off shore. It took almost seven hours to bring him in because my dad wanted me to learn how to do it the old-fashioned way.”
“What does that mean?”
He laughed under his breath. “Basically it means that my hands were cut to pieces by the time I was finished, and I could barely move my shoulders the next day. The line we had hooked it on wasn’t really strong enough for a fish that size, so we had to let the marlin run until it stopped, then slowly reel it in, then let it run again all day long until the thing was too exhausted to fight anymore.”
“Kind of like Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.”
“Kind of, except that I didn’t feel like an old man until the next day. My father, on the other hand, could have played the part in the movie.”
She looked at the picture again. “Is that your father standing next to you?”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“He looks like you,” she said.
Garrett smiled a little, wondering whether or not it was a compliment. He motioned to the table, and Theresa sat down opposite him. Once she was comfortable, she asked:
“You said you went to college?”
He met her eyes. “Yeah, I went to UNC and majored in marine biology. Nothing else interested me much, and since my dad told me I couldn’t come home without a degree, I thought I’d learn something that I might be able to use later.”