I wasn’t even sure the proposal had been all that important.
I closed my eyes and let out a breath. Enough thinking about the past. I was here to relax, supposedly, and perseverating on Mason wasn’t exactly conducive to that.
“You want to talk about it?” Cal asked softly from behind me.
“You sail for a living?” I asked. “I mean, that’s what you want to do with your life?”
The only answer for several moments was silence until I felt him shift again. “Yes.”
“What’s your favorite sailboat?” I was trying to distract myself from memories of my ex as well as my attraction to this sexy stranger by talking about a safe topic, one I knew we had in common.
“A Sunfish or maybe a Dart 16.”
The answer surprised me. Those little boats only cost a few thousand dollars. They were the kind of watercraft summer camps used with kids. I flipped around so I could see his shadowed profile again. “No, I mean your dream boat.”
He shrugged. “My dream is to teach kids to sail, so a small, easy-to-sail beginner boat is my dream boat.”
I came at it from another direction. “If you had all the money in the world, which boat would you buy?”
He turned his head toward me. “Jon. If I had all the money in the world, I’d buy a fleet of Sunfish or Darts. I’d start a sailing school.”
His passion intrigued me. “There’s a story there.”
Cal sighed. “Maybe. But it’s a depressing one.”
“Well, you’re clearly not ready for sleep, and I’m a good listener if I try really hard.” I lay on my side wishing I could see his facial expressions better.
“There’s a woman named Annie Jackson who runs a sailing school back home. It runs almost year-round, but in the summer she also puts on an elite sailing camp for kids from all over the country. She has a hundred acres of waterfront land on the lake. It has cabins, a big rec hall, sports fields, and walking trails. It’s awesome. I took sailing lessons there when I was around eight years old. I can’t even remember why since none of my siblings were interested. It didn’t matter, really. I fell in love with it. I liked it so much, I spent every spare minute I could there until I was old enough to get hired on. I worked on the boats as many hours as she’d give me, and when she couldn’t pay me for more, I did it voluntarily.”
He shifted to face me, the whites of his eyes flashing in the dark space between us. “I had a plan to stay there forever, but it just wasn’t meant to be.”
“Why not?”
“Annie was like a mother to me after my own mom moved overseas. We got really close over the years. Once I’d worked there for a while, she started hinting at putting me in charge one day so she could retire and travel. She said I’d need a business degree, my captain’s license, and a certain number of hours logged on the water in order to gain the trust of the parents whose children attended the camp. She takes the program’s reputation in the sailing community very seriously. It’s why I came to the Caribbean in the first place.” He sighed. “But then Annie’s nephew and wife showed up asking to take over. Which is fine. I understand family is everything. Hell, family is everything to me. But it kind of…”
“Took the wind out of your sails,” I said gently.
“Yeah. And he’s big on ‘family values’ which is basically dick-speak for being a homophobic asshole. So now I’m kind of… avoiding the issue, I guess you could say. And trying not to picture that immature jackass, who never once tried to sail his own boat the two summers he came to camp, in charge of Annie’s beloved program.”
“Can you buy it off him?” I asked, falling back onto what I knew best. Investment and acquisitions.
Cal let out a soft chuckle. “Yeah, Jon. Let me just write a check. I think I might have a couple hundred bucks in my account right now, and my spotty work history at Buoy Dan’s is exactly the kind of consistency and stability the banks like to see when loaning a twenty-three-year-old money.”
He was right. No one would give him money for something like that, even if he had the business degree and could account for his professional sailing experience.
“I’m sorry.” It was all I could think to say.
He took a breath. “It’s fine. My grandpa always says, ‘Sometimes golden opportunities are covered in horse shit and kicked to the back of the stall. If you don’t know how to work hard and get your hands dirty, you ain’t never gonna find ’em.’”
“He sounds like a good man.”
Cal swallowed. “The best. Shot down in Vietnam and made it out. Both of them, Doc and Grandpa. It’s how they met and fell in love.”