Tack & Jibe Read online

  Copyright © 2020 Lilah Suzanne

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 13: 978-1-945053-93-1 (trade)

  ISBN 13: 978-1-945053-94-8 (ebook)

  Published by Interlude Press

  http://interludepress.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and places are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, either living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

  Book and Cover Design by CB Messer

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Interlude Press, New York

  “The glitter of sunlight on roughened water, the glory of the stars, the innocence of morning, the smell of the sea in harbors, the feathery blur and smoky buddings of young boughs, and something there that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thorn of spring, the sharp and tongueless cry—these things will always be the same.”

  —Thomas Wolfe

  Contents

  Ch. 1

  Ch. 2

  Ch. 3

  Ch. 4

  Ch. 5

  Ch. 6

  Ch. 7

  Ch. 8

  Ch. 9

  Ch. 10

  Ch. 11

  Ch. 12

  Ch. 13

  Ch. 14

  Ch. 15

  Ch. 16

  Ch. 17

  Ch. 18

  Ch. 19

  Ch. 20

  Ch. 21

  Ch. 22

  Ch. 23

  Ch. 24

  Ch. 25

  Ch. 26

  Ch. 27

  Ch. 28

  Ch. 29

  Ch. 30

  Ch. 31

  Ch. 32

  Ch. 33

  Ch. 34

  Ch. 35

  Ch. 36

  Ch. 37

  Ch. 38

  Ch. 39

  Ch. 40

  Ch. 41

  Ch. 42

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About The Author

  Ch. 1

  Willa Rogers wakes to the mournful bellow of the Porter Island ferry. She swings her legs to the floor, the ever-present sand gritty on the soles of her feet, and rises from bed right on schedule. Her bosses at Porter Sails don’t mind if she’s late—island time and all—and she’s never had much use for an alarm. Thanks to the clockwork timing of the ferry blaring when it picks up commuters to take them to coastal North Carolina’s mainland, Willa couldn’t oversleep if she tried.

  Her roommate Bodhi is still blissfully snoring away, twisted in the sheets on the lower bunk bed in her room with long sandy-colored hair flopped messily over her face. Willa plucks her phone from the charging port beneath the TV stand, pours a bowl of dry cereal and a glass of the combined last dregs of three different Gatorade bottles, and scrolls through Instagram. She’s already showered and dressed in board shorts, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and her favorite worn Vans when Bodhi finds her leaning out over the railing as far as she can, on the upstairs deck.

  “Don’t jump,” Bodhi says, then yawns and stretches leisurely. “Or do. Whatever.”

  Willa locks her feet more securely around a post and doesn’t take Bodhi’s lack of concern for her safety personally; even if she was going to jump—or fall, more likely—the house sits on soft, gray sand and swishing patches of sea grass and is two whole stories of charming beach cottage or one whole story raised on stilts. The open garage below stores Bodhi’s jumble of outdoor equipment: tents and a kayak and a fishing boat, her bicycle and fishing gear and mud-crusted hiking boots. Neither of them has a car; the island is small enough that it’s not necessary. And when summer vacationers take over the cottage, Bodhi’s equipment becomes part of the vacation package. Porter Island is small and rural and only accessible via ferry or boat and appeals to those who like to consider themselves outdoorsy, but only for a week or so.

  “I’m running out of morning-view shots.” Willa aims her phone camera through the branches of a loblolly tree, hoping to catch a shot of clear blue sky contrasted against an unfocused cluster of shiny green leaves. In the spring and summer, the tree is speckled with fat, snowy white flowers but in the chill of late October the tree is decidedly uninspiring.

  “Here’s your morning view,” Bodhi says and flips her the bird.

  Willa climbs down from the railing and pockets her phone. As they go inside, she comments, “I doubt that’ll go over very well,” though Bodhi’s sun-freckled beach-bum look could be almost tailor-made for Instagram, if she cared about such a thing.

  She’s known Bodhi for five years now, since just before Willa started working after high school at the newly opened sailing store that Bodhi’s parents own. For nine months out of the year they share Willa’s grandparents’ beach cottage—from the day after Labor Day until the end of May—and for the other three, Willa couch surfs and borrows patches of floor and Bodhi camps or sails wherever the wind blows her in a sturdy little sailboat for one. Bodhi, for the most part, does what she wants, funded by her parents, as do most of the young adults stuck on this island. Willa has had to be responsible for herself since before she even knew what that word meant.

  “Are you going to the store today?” Bodhi asks while standing in front of the open fridge door. The contents are sparse as Bodhi’s holey T-shirt and sweatpants.

  “I guess I could,” Willa says, hoping her tone conveys how very much she does not want to do that.

  “Nah, it’s cool.” Bodhi scrapes grape jelly onto a tortilla, pours cereal on top, and then rolls it up like a burrito. Bodhi can’t be bothered to do regular grocery shopping, but since she’s the only one who pays her own rent, Willa can’t afford much shopping and she can’t let Bodhi know that her simple beach-bum lifestyle is by necessity, not choice. No one is funding Willa’s cereal-and-jelly burritos.

  Willa fishes in the change jar on the counter. She comes up with enough money for an actual breakfast and grabs her keys from the fake-seashell key hook and her skateboard from the porch. “I’m going by The Sand Dollar. I’ll pick you up something.”

  “That’s cool,” Bodhi says, her mouth full of jelly-and-cereal burrito, providing an answer that’s neither affirmative nor negative but standard for her.

  Willa winds through the flat streets of Porter Island with her curly hair flying behind her and the cool autumn air making her eyes water. She glides out of their neighborhood, where the little cottages with cedar shake siding in soft grays and blues and browns and greens are made to blend in with the surrounding trees and sand, then on to the streets closer to the shore where stately beach houses and upscale resorts are painted in bold pastels to stand out dramatically against the pale sky. The resort areas are quiet now in the off season; tourist activity is down to a trickle until spring break comes around again and changes the fabric of the town from quiet little beach town to vacation hot spot.

  At the main road Willa guides her board up onto the sidewalk where the row of beach-side businesses starts. She rolls past The Oyster Bar and a waterfront seafood restaurant, a vintage, family-owned motel, a bike rental shop and a hammock store. There’s a gas station and a tiny hardware store and an overpriced general store with only the bare basics at jacked up prices. A big grocery store at normal prices is a ferry ride and car rental, another reason not to bother. The ocean comes into clear view, choppy today, a moody dark blue with white-capped waves. She glides past a clutch of shops, a pier, and a hot dog stand down
to a marina where sailboats sway and flutter like butterflies perched on the sea. Next to the marina and down a white-stone path is where the sea-shanty-looking Porter Sails has set up shop.

  Willa detours right, curving around the southern tip of the island past the nicer hotels and shops and slows to a stop at The Sand Dollar Cafe. She orders a breakfast sandwich for Bodhi to have whenever she happens to swan into work and a pumpkin spice latte for herself. She’s not crazy about them, really, but they’re a popular hashtag right now with fall in full swing. Under one arm, Willa tucks a paper bag with the sandwich inside; she juggles the open latte carefully with the other—no lid, so the foam art isn’t ruined before she can get a picture. She hustles out the door already opening her camera app and hops back on her skateboard without looking at what’s ahead of her. She has a perfect morning-view photo idea: the latte held up against the brooding ocean and mellow mid-morning sun with the caption “Autumn in the Outer Banks.” Maybe not her best post ever, but if she picks the right hashtags and makes sure to tag both the cafe and the sail shop it should—

  “Hey! Watch out!”

  Willa snaps to attention, but too late; she just barely manages to avoid colliding with someone by taking a hard turn to the right—too hard. She tumbles off the board. Her pumpkin spice latte flies from her hand, lands at the feet of the person she nearly skated right into, and splashes them from knee to very expensive-looking shoe tips and, most tragically, ruins Willa’s last hope for any #morningview likes and comments.

  Ch. 2

  “Ugh! Are you kidding me?”

  The woman has chin-length black hair, dark eyes, and a rich alto voice. She also picked the worst possible day to wear white slacks.

  “Crap.” Willa scrambles up, registering a sting on her right palm and an ache on her right elbow. She collects her skateboard and the bag of food and digs inside of it to find a napkin as she approaches the woman. “Here you go.” Willa extends the napkin toward her; it has some bacon grease stains and little chunk of melted cheese on it. The woman scowls at the napkin and turns away, returning to her completely ineffective method of trying to brush the huge, brown, wet spots off of her pants with her hands.

  Willa shrugs, then realizes her shoulder hurts too. She hasn’t taken a spill like that in quite a while. “I’ll go get some clean napkins,” she tries, but the woman waves that off.

  “Don’t bother, I’ll change at my office.” Disdain drips from her words. “Luckily I plan for these sorts of things since apparently half the population here spends most of their time fucking around.” She says the last part with a deliberate glare.

  Willa frowns; that’s unfair. Sure they have a decent amount of retirees who live here full time and unemployed surfers who pile by the dozens into the snug beach cottages, and, yes, most of her friends are sort of biding their time until they go to work for their parents, and Bodhi’s moms technically pay her rent for a house that is technically not theirs, but still, that’s not Willa.

  “You could have moved out of the way,” Willa retorts with a scowl of her own, dropping her skateboard back onto the pavement with a petulant clack.

  “Moved out of the way? You were so busy staring at your phone you almost ran me over!” The woman’s dark eyes narrow, and her chin lifts. She has sharp cheekbones and a strong jaw and dark, arched eyebrows—nice body too. She’d be hot if she wasn’t such an asshole. “You could pay attention to the real world instead of getting the perfect selfie!”

  Willa swallows the retort on her lips, that she wasn’t taking a selfie because she only does those on Selfie Saturdays. “Yeah. Well.” Willa huffs a few times for lack of a better response and finally settles on, “Sorry I ran into you or whatever.”

  “Yeah, me too.” The woman turns on her heel and stomps out of the parking lot. Now a little shaky and out of sorts, Willa growls in frustration and hops back on her board. And she’s injured. Ugh, tourists.

  Work is quiet when Willa gets in and stays that way for the rest of the morning. She raids the first aid kit in the back office. Moving a little slower than usual with one arm bandaged up, she’s alone for the entire morning. Robin and Jenn have some sort of bank business to deal with. Bodhi remains a no-show. The odds are fifty-fifty that she went back to sleep or headed over to the other side of the island to kayak in the calm, shallow waters of the sound. On her lunch break, Willa eats half of the now-cold breakfast sandwich she picked up for Bodhi. A few customers come in looking for cold weather sailing gear—waterproof Gore-Tex jackets and neoprene boots and thick rash-pants—then Willa spends the early afternoon unloading boxes of new merchandise: sailing gloves and multitools and quick-release harnesses. It takes longer than it should because Willa carries the boxes one-by-one instead of in a stack the way she usually could. After opening a box of sports watches, Willa slips an elegant, leather-banded watch on her wrist and ducks outside.

  The marina next door houses the boats of residents and visitors, as well as a small stock for sale. Willa glances around and quickly boards a beautiful Marlin Heritage daysailer. She props her phone against the base of the mast, sets the timer on the camera, and carefully but quickly sits on the edge of the bow, facing out toward the water, making sure her arm with the watch is in frame and her injured arm is out of it. She quickly hops back out of the boat, already scrolling through the photos to find the best one. Crossing the gravel path back to the shop, Willa picks the perfect shot, where the sun is everywhere: a burst of light obscuring half of her body and face, bright on the polished deck of the sailboat, shining in the twists of her curls, reflecting the dance of the waves onto the gunwale of the boat. Before posting she captions it. Time is like the ocean; you can only hold a little in your hands. She tags the watch manufacturer, then carefully chooses a few hashtags for maximum engagement, and pockets her phone as she hits the doorway.

  “There you are.” Bodhi’s mom—and her boss—Robin calls from the cash register. She must have come in while Willa was sneaking around on other people’s boats with a lifted watch. Willa’s stomach twists. She casually slips the watch off and positions it on the display rack with the other watches and timers. “Did you take that?” Robin says, not looking up from the till. She’s a tall, broad-shouldered woman with short gray hair and red-framed glasses that rest alternatively on the edge of her nose or on a silver chain around her neck.

  “Yep,” Willa says. “Just doing a sponsored post.”

  “Did it do okay?”

  Willa doesn’t have to look to know that it did. The sailing posts always do well, racking up thousands of likes and hundreds of followers on a regular basis. Sailing-Willa is vastly more interesting than any other iteration of herself that she’s tried.

  Bodhi appears from the back of the store with a head nod and a “wassup.” She’s windswept and smells like bug spray and sunscreen, so Willa was right about her being off kayaking in the sound. “Did you get something at the cafe?” she says after yawning.

  “Yeah, but I ate half of it.” Grimacing at the ache in her bruised shoulder and scraped palm and elbow, Willa hefts the rest of the boxes of new merchandise to stock the apparel section. “Sorry.”

  “That’s cool,” Bodhi says, ambiguously once again, then, “Hey, did you wipe out?”

  “Oh. Yeah.” Willa tries to shift the weight of the boxes to her left side. “Almost ran into some pain-in-the-ass tourist not watching where they were going.”

  Robin tuts. “Ooh. On your bad shoulder too. I’ll get some ice.”

  Willa drops the boxes. Right. She’d forgotten. “Yeah, it seemed like it was finally starting to get better too.” She makes a show of rubbing her right shoulder and grimacing more dramatically. Yes. Her injured shoulder. The one that she told everyone is preventing her from ever sailing again. That injured shoulder. The fake one.

  Ch. 3

  It didn’t start as a lie. She really did injure her shoulder right before she got
the job at Porter Sails. It was stupid injury: She was at a party the night before her interview and was a little tipsy when she tripped and went down shoulder first. So at the interview, when Bodhi’s other mom Jenn asked how often she sailed, Willa took a breath and shrugged, meaning to tell her that well, actually, she didn’t, and that certainly disqualified her from working at a sailing store, but the movement made her hiss and wince.

  “Oh, are you injured?” Jenn asked then, her soft brown eyes full of the sort of sympathy and caring and attention that Willa yearned most for back then. So she played it up, just a little.

  “Yeah, I—” Willa winced and tenderly touched her shoulder for dramatic effect. “I think maybe I tore something? Like, permanently?” Well, for all she knew, she had.

  Jenn frowned sympathetically. “That makes sailing difficult, I bet.”

  Willa had read an article about applying for a job when you aren’t qualified for it and remembered that it said to not talk about one’s shortcomings and instead to emphasize transferable skills. “That’s what makes this job so perfect! I can share my love of sailing without being out on a boat!”

  That was true. And if Robin and Jenn assumed that she had injured herself sailing and that she could never sail again and that all of her sailing expertise was from personal experience and not YouTube videos and secondhand knowledge, well, she hadn’t outright lied. And she does love sailing—in theory. She also really needed a job, or her grandparents were going to kick her out, and the tiny island doesn’t exactly have a wealth of jobs to choose from.

  Her work mostly consists of running the cash register and answering customer questions, plus promoting the store on social media, so the experienced sailor facade is fairly easy to maintain. Today, as on most days since the weather turned, she’s not even doing that. Instead, Willa scrolls Instagram and zones out, hunched over the checkout desk with her chin propped on her fist. Bodhi tries on life vests nearby.