Page 28 of Heartless
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I never understood the appeal of fishing, and yet that is what I chose from my list of hobbies. And by I chose, I mean Ryan chose for me, after I spent an entire hour complaining about the Christmas wedding Madison had proposed to Matthew Scott and Sheila whatever.
The water glimmered in the mid-morning light, and there was a serene beauty to the scene that I vaguely appreciated. As I stood on the edge of a lake on a private ranch with Ryan and Tyler, I felt out of place. I fumbled with the fishing rod, feeling the weight of it in my hands, and tried to remember the steps the rancher had shown me earlier. Cast the line, let it sit, wait. It sounded simple enough, but as I attempted to cast, the line tangled around the tip of the rod.
“How long until we leave?” I asked. I wasn’t usually this impatient, but this fishing trip was tedious.
Ryan untangled the mess I had created. My line was in the water. “Now we wait,” he ignored my question, settling back into his own spot.
Waiting. I very much preferred going back to The Gem to obsess over Madison and her five weddings.
The minutes dragged on. Ryan was in his element, looking perfectly content as he watched his line, but I was growing more restless by the second. I shifted my weight from foot to foot, glanced around the lake, and sighed for the hundredth time.
“Don’t you want to leave?” I asked Tyler, who seemed as bored as I was.
“Shouldn’t we catch something first?” He answered with a question. “I mean, we drove a ways to come here.”
“What if we catch nothing?”
Ryan chuckled. “That’s part of the experience, man. It’s not about the catch; it’s about the process.”
Fuck the process. This shit was boring.
Tyler took his phone out of his pocket, no doubt texting his fiancée.
“Has your sister said anything about working at The Gem?”
Tyler’s eyes traveled from me to Ryan and back to me. “I’m not allowed to talk about my sister on this fishing trip.”
“This fishing trip is a colossal waste of time.”
Ryan chuckled again, but no one said anything more. The minutes ticked by until I felt a slight tug on my line.
“Looks like you got something,” Ryan said.
Whatever was on the other end wasn’t giving much of a fight. I pulled and pulled until I saw the catch—a small, pathetic-looking fish.
“I caught one. Mission accomplished. I’ll wait in the car.”
I passed the rod to Ryan, who shook his head with a smile, and walked away.
“Fair enough,” he said. “At least you gave it a shot. That’s progress.”
“Can I wait in the car, too?” Tyler asked. “I don’t need a hobby to keep me sane.”
We packed up our gear and headed back to the car. As we drove away from the lake, relief washed over me. Standing around all day waiting for a dumb fish to bite a fly wasn’t my thing, but at least I got up and did something different that day. Ryan said it himself. Progress. Maybe I could handle change. Maybe I could even enjoy it. It just had to be something more fascinating than fishing.
Chapter Ten
Madison
Irefused to go to my mother’s spinning class and meet the realtor she had picked for me, knowing that wouldn’t be her last attempt to introduce us. What I didn’t know was the extent of her obsession with my unmarried status and the lengths she would go in order to secure me a husband.
So when I agreed to go to dinner with her, just us two, as she herself stated when she invited me, I had no reason to doubt that anything would go wrong. It wasn’t until I arrived at the restaurant that I realized it was a setup.
There was a man sitting next to my mother. And you didn’t have to be a genius to figure out who he was.
By the grin on his face, I would say that he enjoyed the sight of me, and he really was attractive, like my mother said, but the idea ofmarrying him and giving him children made him as desirable to me as Lyme disease.
