No Home Like Nantucket by Grace Palmer

Author:Grace Palmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grace Palmer

22

Brent

The morning sun was stabbing ice picks into Brent’s eyes. Lord have mercy, it was a bright and a hot one today. Wait—today? Sun? Morning? It took his beer-addled brain an embarrassingly long time to put all the pieces together.

He’d fallen asleep on Jenny Lee out at the Garden of Eden fishing spot. He must have slept the night away. How long had it been since he’d done that? Heck, he hadn’t gotten more than two hours of consecutive restful sleep in the last four months. And now he’d gone and slumbered until maybe an hour after dawn, by the looks of it. Where had that come from?

He hadn’t thought there was much solace to be found out here, but the fact of his sleep begged to differ. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes again to take stock of himself and his surroundings.

Sleep or no, however, any peace he’d found last night was long gone. Now, the only sensation he was aware of was a god-awful hangover. His mouth was bone-dry, his eyes were crusted and throbbing, and his head felt like someone had gone to town on the inside of his skull with a drill bit. Oof, and the nausea! He’d never been one to get seasick, not since he first set foot on a boat. But right now, the rocking was too much to bear. He leaned over the side and hurled his guts up once, twice, three times. When he had nothing left to retch, he leaned back and rinsed his mouth out with the only thing he had available. Unfortunately, that was a warm beer. He almost puked again at the acrid taste, but he managed to hold it back.

He used the heel of his hand to grind some wakefulness into his eyes, but it didn’t do much good. He just felt terrible, plain and simple. What was he thinking coming out here? He should’ve gone home. At least then he would’ve woken up hungover on his couch instead of eight miles out at sea. He felt like an idiot.

Pulling himself together, he got the boat in motion and headed back into shore. It took every ounce of willpower to keep his eyes on his destination and his hands on the wheel. Stuff the cat dragged in, death warmed over—he was starting to run out of metaphors to describe how bad he felt each morning.

His mood was not improved when he got into the marina area and saw some tourist who was bungling the process of putting his own boat in the water. It wasn’t such an uncommon scene. Half the guys who came down here to launch boats had never done it before. High-flying finance types from Connecticut or Jersey or wherever who’d made some money doing Lord knows what and decided to splash it all on a big, expensive toy. Problem was, they didn’t know the first thing about watercraft. More often than not, they made a huge mess of things.

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