Page 37 of Catch and Release
Shawn tipped his head to the side. “What about your parents?”
Willa sighed, her lips curling up. “They live in London these days. Dad is the high-powered career type. Mom’s a socialite.”
The pieces of Willa started falling into place. He gave her the space she gave him—let her sit in silence, deciding what she wanted to share.
“They’ve always been jet-setters, and sometimes I think they don’t know what to do with me,” Willa added with a chuckle. “We’re so different. But I know they love me, and I love them—even if our relationship looks different than most parents and kids. They have never once made me feel lesser than for pursuing a yoga career rather than some big-wig corporate job. They’re extremely supportive. They’re just a little… absent. It’s something I made peace with a long time ago.”
She brought her legs up to her chest as she reeled her line.
Shawn decided to throw her a bone. A few moments of silence passed before he asked her, “How’s yoga going at the hotel?”
“It’s alright,” she responded, perking up a bit at the subject change. “Had more than ten people there today, so that's an improvement.”
“How’d you get into yoga anyway?”
She was quiet for a moment.
“I wanted to be a ballerina. I know it sounds dumb. What little girl doesn’t want to be a ballerina when she grows up? Usually people grow out of that. But I was—well, at the risk of sounding extremely full of myself—I was really good.”
She sighed.
“I started doing yoga in college at the suggestion of one of my instructors. My body was basically falling apart. Being a dancer can be brutal. The pressure is… intense. I’ve never experienced anything like it. I would dance for eight hours a day and barely eat enough to make up for all the calories I was burning. It didn’t help that the boyfriend I had at the time encouraged that sort of behavior. He commented on my weight, my body, every chance he got. My self esteem wasn’t great. Ballet is competitive, you know? At the time, I was willing to do whatever it took to make it. And I’ve never been great at picking boyfriends. Obviously.”
Shawn’s jaw ticked, anger coursing through him stronger than he knew he was capable of.
“I’ll never forget my first yoga class. The instructor said we could just lay in child’s pose whenever we needed a break. And I laid in child’s pose the whole time. That’s when I realized how exhausted I was. Not tired, the way a long day makes you. Exhausted to my core. In my body, mind, and soul.”
She reeled in her shrimp, saw that it was still there and intact, and cast it out again.
“I started going to yoga every day and… honestly, I know it sounds cliché, but it healed me. It helped me love my body again—not for what I could make it do, but for what it did for me. And so I decided to do the yoga teacher training just to deepen my practice, and about halfway through it, I realized ballet hadn’t made me happy in a long time. So I dropped out of the program I was in, finished my yoga certification, became a yoga teacher, and tried to help other people find solace in yoga the way I did.”
Shawn closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He didn’t know where to begin.
This woman—this beautiful, strong, intelligent, fierce, compassionate woman—had just shared with him something so deeply personal that he was endeared to her even more. Anger and sadness coursed through him for her, for what she went through. But mostly, he felt gratitude that she shared with him something so raw and vulnerable. And he didn’t know how to put that into words.
Suddenly, his fishing rod dipped down.
There was something on the end of it.
He grabbed it tightly and began reeling in. It was heavier than expected. Usually, fishing off the wharves in the Bay could yield decent-sized fish, but typically nothing over ten pounds.
You had to venture closer to the Gulf for that. He’d fished enough to be able to tell pretty quickly how large a catch would be—and his gut was telling him this was at least 15 pounds. Maybe more.
“Shit, this sucker is big,” he grunted, and Willa set her rod in the stand and grabbed a net from where it was hanging.
“Well, this is exciting,” Willa said with a breathless grin.
Suddenly, her rod bent forward dramatically from where it was in the stand.
“Shit,” she said, dropping the net she’d grabbed to reel her own line in.
“Tug it back, then reel, Greene,” he said.
“I know what I’m fucking doing,” she snapped. “Focus on your own damn line.”
He chuckled, losing himself in the steady rhythm of reeling the fish in. His got close to the wharf and he saw the outline of it before releasing an expletive.
“Goddamn carp.”