Chapter 13

We came up with a plan pretty quick. After all, this wasn't Columbus looking for the Spice Islands. We planned a menu. Talked about what would happen if the weather cratered on us.

"We can stay home."

"No," she said. "I don't have a home. Key's, well ... there's this guy she's been seeing and I told her that she'd have the place to herself. Which likely means she won't be by herself. And I get very uncomfortable with the idea of a guy staying in my apartment."

"Oh."

"So I'm your responsibility, Mister Stoney. And I think we go, rain or shine. If it's too gusty to sail, we can motor. But we go. Didn't you say you had two foul weather suits?"

"Yeah. But they're both my size. It'll be like a tent on you."

"I can make it work for the couple of hours it might take to get us out there. Your heater and stove? You have propane?"

"Yes. Two bottles. Enough for a summer with the stove. A week with the heater."

"Then we'll be warm and we can cook. Are you cooled off?"

I guess I looked puzzled.

"From earlier. Gosh, Stoney, you get me..."

"Jo, you're just a delight," I said.

"I'm glad to be your delight. Get your banjo. We need to practice."

And practice we did. My fingers were developing a better connection to my eyes. Jo's sheet music for the harp part of a Mozart concerto was a giant step up from my normal 'three chords' routine on a banjo, but I had toyed with scales and such and wasn't entirely lost when I started. Now, trying to keep up with somebody who was a featured soloist in a university orchestra, that was stretching me. And like a good stretching routine, it was paying off.

Under her tutelage I was getting over that amateur failure of coming to a dead stop when I flubbed a note. Now I was sensing them and moving right past, staying up with Jo as she played almost from memory. I was even confident enough on some passages to look up at her as she sat across from me. And when I looked up, there was the girl that had captured me from the first time I saw her, the blue-eyed redhead with a permanent smile.

"Second passage," she said. "And pay attention to the transition from harp to flute lead."

"Hai, sensei," I said.

"One, two..." and we were off. And I didn't miss a note. I even embellished a bit, where I'd been substituting quarter and half-notes for the harp arpeggios in the original score, I saw where I could toss in some bluegrass banjo rolls that had, at least in my mind, a similar sound. I saw a flash in her eyes the first time I did that. This time it worked. Just worked.

When we ended it, she sat her flute down and jumped on me, smothering me with kisses, giggling. "You're everything, Stoney. Everything! Gosh, I love you!"

"I love you too, Johanna. I get this for playing without mistakes?"

Giggle and a headshake.

"That's what I call incentive."

I didn't want to take her home this night.

We ate dinner together, she spent evenings with me studying, and yes, we got more music in and more kissing and I got more time in the shower relieving an astonishing amount of pressure.

During the week, though, the trip moved from a Saturday to Sunday jaunt to "Let's leave after my last class on Friday. Can you get out of work early?"

I had some comp time on the books, so that's what I did, and at one-thirty I was at her door. Missed Key. She has a Friday afternoon class. I shouldered Jo's gym bag and we walked to the car, hand in hand. An hour later we were at dockside, loading up. The skies were turning the color of lead and a southerly wind was gusty and heavy with moisture.

"I don't think we'll beat the rain," I said. "Let's get the car locked up. Let me get the engine started so it can warm up on the boat first."

With the wind pushing us at an uncomfortable angle to the docks, I let her handle the release of the last dockline as I held a slight pull with the engine, and we were off on the adventure, Jo sitting in the cockpit beside me. That part was good. The first drops of rain weren't. Jo scurried below and came up ridiculously dressed in oversized foul-weather gear. "Let me take the helm while you go change."

"Keep the center of the channel," I said. "There's no traffic." And I went below. Presently I was out and the wind was still gusty and the rain was steady, blowing in stinging drops. I looked at Jo. She had her jacket buttoned and zipped and cinched up leaving only the bright eyes and pert nose exposed.

She giggled. "Whose bright idea was this?"

I was catching it worse because she could turn her back to the wind and rain. I was facing it. "Oh, I dunno," I said. "Some nutcase who has the power to make me do crazy things, I guess."

We cleared the channel and got out into the bay and it got worse, the wind being unhindered by buildings and land. The shallow bay was rough with a crazy chop. A smaller boat would've been in trouble, but mine saw two and three-foot chop as insignificant. Still, the wind worked on my bare mast and the boat wanted to head off into inopportune directions. We were still constrained by the keel under the boat until we were a mile away from shore. I saw the channel marker I was waiting for and made my turn, putting my bow dead into the wind. That took care of the problem with the boat wanting to veer off.

We motored on. I was headed to a spot that had a good bottom for anchoring and was far enough away from the main ship channel with its wakes from ocean-going ships. I throttled back the engine to put us at almost a stop.

"Hold the bow into the wind and let me set the anchor," I said.

"Okay. Be careful going forward," she said.

I went to the bow, opened the anchor locker and picked my biggest anchor, made it fast to the rode and dropped it over the side. I yelled, "Put the engine in neutral!"

"Got it!" came the reply.

As we drifted back, pushed by the wind, I fed the anchor rode out slowly, keeping tension on it to keep the bow into the wind. In fifteen feet of water I let out twenty feet of chain and a hundred feet of one-inch nylon line, then cleated it off. I could feel the deck beneath my feet take a little dip as the anchor dug in. It was set.

I clambered back to the cockpit. "Let's get below," I said.

"Oh, you don't have to tell me that twice," she said. We had no more than closed the companionway hatch when the REAL rain hit, bringing with it a severe wind shift.

"Let me go on deck and make sure we don't foul the anchor. We're gonna swing big time now."

"Be careful," she said. "I'm putting water on for something warm."

"Be careful," I said.

The wind shift wasn't as sharp as I worried about. We swung almost a hundred eighty degrees, though, but when I tugged at the anchor rode, it was taut. Still set. "We're good," I said to myself. That was a good thing. The temperature was dropping fast. From the sticky dampness of the south wind, the shift around to the north brought a raw cold with it.

Something warm was below and she was at the stove. I went below. "I'm gonna light the heater," I said. "The wind changed to the north. It's gonna get cold fast."

I looked at her in the dim cabin light. "You're wet."

"Just a little," she said. "You are, too."

"Water's gonna boil soon. Got tea. And sandwiches. Go change."

I went to the master cabin and changed. When I came out, she had her bag. "My turn." Five minutes later she was in a comfy although amorphous-looking sweatsuit and two huge mugs of tea were steeping. I was laying out sandwich fixings, cheese, salami, brown bread.

"And butter. Very european, you know," she'd said when we talked about provisioning for the trip.

"I know about German ham sandwiches. Schinkenbrot. I loved 'em."

"We'll do something like that, then."

And so we did. The tea chased off the chill from the inside out and the little cabin heater worked from the outside in. And blue eyes and red hair and a smile? Made me warm all over.

She reached for her flute case. "You can get your banjo," she said. "But we're not doing anything intense. Let's just make music together and relax."

"Okay, we can do that," I said as I went to the locker that held the banjo. We sat at opposite ends of the settee.

"Gimme a D," she said. I did, and we tuned together, then she launched into a slow, plaintive piece. I played along softly, taking my cues from her fingerings.

"Good warmup, don't you think?" she smiled. "I love having a partner to play with. Key and I played a lot, but with you, when I get happy, I can stop and kiss you."

"And I appreciate every one of 'em," I said.

"As do I. I like kissing, but I'm not into doing it for the sake of doing it. But with you, the recreational aspects fit right in with the two of us being, well, us."

"I'm thinking of this as 'us' too, Jo."

"It's kind of crazy," she said. "Are we courting, Stoney?"

"Courting?"

"You know, seeing each other, learning, measuring, deciding about a future together."

"Yes, I think I've been doing that. A couple of dates is recreational to me. I've done a few of those. But past that, there's too much emotional capital in play. I just haven't seen anybody that I wanted to let myself go with." I noted she was gently setting her flute aside. "Until you."

She came across the distance between us. I opened my arms to gather her to me. "I ... You and I, we're the same. I thought I was abnormal. I sort of forced myself to give it a try with David. That was a disaster. I pulled out of the game. Until you came along. And I let my guard down. And now..."

"And now we're being too serious," I said. If she was going to push for something, I was going to make her at least push a bit harder.

"Stoney, you're the first guy I have said I loved since junior high. The first one I've REALLY REALLY kissed, not because I wanted to see what kissing was like, but because I wanted to meld with you in some way. It means something to me that I kind of understand, but I'm afraid to announce. It's kind of like watching bubbles in the sunlight. They're shimmering and beautiful and alive and dynamic and you want to possess that beauty, but if you so much as touch one..."

Okay, I can handle that metaphor. "Okay, sweet beautiful Johanna..."

"Stoney, when you say my name like that, I start melting inside."

"You're my perfect, shimmering, beautiful rainbow kaleidoscope bubble, and I've gently caught you in my palm. If I move too fast, too much..."

She kissed me, pressing me back on the cushion.

"No. I won't pop. Where's this going, Stoney?"

"There're several paths from right here, my Johanna," I said. I took a deep breath. "Will you marry me?"

"Are you sure, Stoney?" she asked. "Am I pushing you?"

"You're not pushing me, and yes, I am sure."

"Then I will marry you. It's the way we're destined to be. You have to know that I've been thinking about this."

"Me too. But it's too soon. At least that's what I kept telling myself."

"So did I," she said softly. "But I ... why should we wait? We're not stupid people who do it wrong."

"Do it wrong?"

"Yes," she said. "They bounce in and out of love and in and out of bed and then date for months before they decide to get married, if they ever do. I found you and found my magic. I haven't been in anybody's bed and I haven't really been in love and I know this is it and I think it's silly to wait."

"So when?" I asked.

"When what?" she countered.

"When do we get married?"

"After the fall semester? Is that too soon?"

"Tomorrow wouldn't be soon enough," I said.

"I know," she replied. "But I need to do this with my parents. I might be twenty-one, but I will forever be the daughter of Anders and Bridgette."