Practice Run

Sonia figured out pretty quick that holding the sign for "grace" was harder than holding a paddle.

She was twenty-three, and she'd been drawing and painting since she was old enough to ruin a couch with finger paint, so her arms were used to long hours up on a canvas. But this was different. Both hands up, palms flat, fingers spread, elbows at a height Sean kept describing as "elegant" like she was a penguin trying to look fancy. Her shoulders were already burning and they weren't two minutes in.

She stood on her paddleboard about ten feet off the dock, drifting slow in the reedy shallows at the edge of Canta. The church fair was going on somewhere behind her, back up the hill, and every so often the wind carried over a snatch of brass band and some kid yelling about churros. Out here it was mostly egrets and reeds and the wet green smell of the marsh. Sean had picked the spot on purpose. He always picked spots on purpose.

"Elbows," he said from the dock. He was sitting on the edge of it with his boots off, feet in the water, like a man watching TV. "Drop them half an inch. You're shrugging again."

She dropped them. Her hands stayed up. The sign for grace, in his version of the number they were doing Sunday, was basically two open hands rising slow off the chest, and the whole point was that it looked easy. It did not look easy. It looked easy the way a swan looks easy, all that scrambling going on under the water where nobody sees.

"That's better. Hold it."

"I am holding it," she said through her teeth.

"You're also wobbling. Grace doesn't wobble."

"Grace has never stood on a board in her life."

He laughed at that, a short huff, and she felt stupidly pleased about it. Two years in, she still hadn't figured out how to handle Sean in that particular way. He made her want to win things she didn't even know were competitions. They'd met at the art market two years ago, when he'd stopped at her table and asked her, in full sign, if the painting was for sale, and she'd had to admit she'd understood about a third of what he'd signed. She'd said yes anyway. She'd said yes to a lot of things since.

She wobbled again. Her left arm trembled and she let the hands sink a couple inches, just to shake the burn out, and he made a small note-taking sound in his throat that made her want to throw her paddle at him.

"You dropped," he said.

"I rested."

"Same thing, on Sunday, in front of two hundred people."

She glared at him. He was twenty-six and sunburnt across the nose and completely unbothered, the way he always was, like the marsh and the egrets and her dying arms were all part of one long pleasant afternoon. He'd grown up out here. He guided paddleboard tours in the summer and interpreted at the church the rest of the year, and he had this calm about him that she'd spent two years trying to crack and mostly failing.

"Bring the board in," he said. He reached for the rope they'd tied to the nose and started hauling, hand over hand, the board hissing through the weed-choked water until it bumped the dock pilings. He stood up. "Come here."

She crawled the length of the board on her knees, which was undignified, and let him haul her up onto the dock by the forearm. Her legs were unsteady from balancing and she stood there flexing her fingers, waiting for the break she figured she'd earned.

He didn't give her a break.

"Give me your wrist," he said.

She held it out before she'd thought about it. He turned it over and slid the undersleeve off, the broderie anglaise one she wore loose over her forearm because she liked how it looked with her market dresses. It was one of her nicer pieces, actual eyelet lace, the kind of thing she'd have charged real money for if it was for sale. He bunched it in his fist and looked at her.

"You brought this today," he said.

"I know what I brought."

"You know why you brought it."

She did know why she brought it. They'd talked about it two nights ago, on his couch, in the plain boring daylight way they talked about things before he did them, because that was the deal and he never broke it. He'd laid it out flat: the practice run wasn't just going to be signs. He wanted to see if her stubbornness, the same streak that made her argue with him about brush technique and race him to the dock, could be pointed somewhere else. She'd said she could handle it. She'd said it twice, because once hadn't sounded confident enough.

He took her right hand and wrapped the sleeve around it. Then the left. Then he crossed her wrists behind her back and cinched the lace through, snug, not tight, the eyelet catching on itself in a way that was probably bad for the lace and she decided she didn't care.

"Okay?" he said.

Her breath came out of her all at once, a real gasp, louder than she meant it to be. Her hands were behind her. Her hands were behind her back and she couldn't get them back without working at it, and he'd done it in about ten seconds while she stood there and let him. Something in her chest went hot and fast.

"Sonia. Okay?"

"Say the word first," she said.

"Snow," he said. "Yours?"

"Snow. Okay. Yes. Okay!"

He nodded once, like she'd confirmed an appointment, and pointed at the planks between his boots. "Kneel."

She knelt. The dock was old and grey and somebody's splinters were sharp, and she shifted until she found a spot that wasn't going to eat her knees, and by the time she'd settled he'd already walked around behind her. She heard him moving, slow, not saying anything, and the not saying anything was worse than anything he could have said. She stared straight ahead at the reeds and the water and kept her chin up because she figured that was part of it.

His finger touched the back of her neck and dragged down her spine, slow, over the top of her dress, all the way to where the lacing sat. Her whole back came up in goosebumps and she hated that he could probably see them.

"Shoulders," he said.

"They're down."

"They're up." His hand flattened between her shoulder blades and pressed, firm, not rough, just there, and her shoulders came down and her chest came up and the position got somehow both better and worse. "There. That's grace. Feel the difference?"

"I feel like a church pew."

"Church pews don't blush." His finger came around to the front and tipped her chin up a half inch. "Hold that. Two minutes."

She held it. The egrets picked their way through the reeds. The brass band played something up the hill. Her arms ached behind her back in a way that had nothing to do with holding anything up anymore, just circulation and the fabric biting in, and every time she shifted he made the small note-taking sound and she forced herself back to still.

The truth was, and she'd have denied it at the market table, she was good at this. Not calm, she wasn't calm, her heart was slamming. But she was competitive, and he'd found the one prize she wanted more than winning, which was him walking around her in a slow circle saying nothing at all and then finally saying good.

He didn't say good yet. He crouched next to her instead, forearms on his knees, close enough that