“You do?” She couldn’t hide her shock.
He laughed so hard he quit paddling.
“Wait a minute… Is that the truth? Do you really have an engineering degree from MIT?”
Still laughing, he struggled to catch his breath. “No. It’s not true.”
Fuming, she lifted her paddle, considering whether she might give him a good splash.
“I’d think long and hard before you do that,” he said, with a mischievous grin. “Because I’d be perfectly happy to take a little swim right now, and take you with me.”
A giggle escaped before she could catch it. “I wasn’t really going to do it. I just wanted to scare you.”
“Hmmm… Is that the truth?” He started paddling again, gradually increasing their speed, and she turned forward to balance the kayak.
“I never agreed to answer that question.”
“It doesn’t matter. I can totally tell whether you’re lying.”
She ignored his taunt, more interested in the hint of his past. “Did you go to college?”
“Business degree from Stanford.”
This time, she could tell he was being truthful. Maybe she was getting better at reading him.
“How about you?” he asked.
“English degree. Villanova. But how did you end up being a personal trainer if you have a business degree?”
He hesitated. “You might not want me to tell you. It has to do with the cancer, and I don’t want to make you sad.”
“Oh, I’ll be fine. Really.” Something inside her wanted to know him better. Even if a dating relationship couldn’t work, they could be friends. “To be honest, I admire your attitude about life, even though you walk a little too close to the edge, in my opinion.”
She waited quietly until he started speaking again, his voice tight, like it had been the night before.
“When the cancer came—it’s been seven years, now—I lost everything. My job. My girlfriend. I even let the bank have my house back, and moved in with one of my brothers.”
“I have to say she wasn’t much of a girlfriend if she left because you had cancer.”
“She had a lot of issues. Me dying was too much for her.” His sigh was so heavy, she could hear it over the paddling. “I’m the one who cut off the relationship. I could see what it was doing to her.”
“If I were her, I would’ve slapped you up the side of your bald head for making that decision for me.”
“Ms. Carson!” he exclaimed, in mock outrage. “I do believe you are teasing again, something you swore you’ve never done.”
“I wasn’t teasing. I was serious.”
“Is that the truth? Would you have actually slapped a guy who’d lost his hair from chemo?”
“Okay, no. But I still wasn’t teasing. I was joking.”
“Same thing.”
“No. Teasing is provoking someone. Joking is saying something funny.”
“Guess I won’t argue semantics with an English major.”
As he fell silent, the only sounds were the birds and frogs, with the steady splash of his paddle. She wondered if she’d hurt his feelings with the girlfriend comment. “Gary, I didn’t mean to criticize your girlfriend—”