“U-uh … ,” I stammer, trying to recover my wits. “You know I’m serious about my photography. In fact, you know lots about me. But I don’t know all that much about you. I mean, the new and improved you.”

“Sounds to me like you’ve been snooping around if you’re talking to Bunny … ,” he murmurs.

I ignore that and crane my neck to see around him. “Which boat are we taking? I don’t want to lose the light.”

He mumbles some mildly foul things under his breath and nods with his head, leading me down a short wooden dock to an ugly orange boat. Not a yacht. Not a houseboat. Not even one with a tarp to keep out the sun. Just a little boat with four seats, a motor, and a steering wheel.

“This is your boat?”

“Not mine,” he says. “It’s a boat. I would not name my boat ‘Big-Enough.’ ”

He’s not kidding. I take a second look at the peeling letters on the side.

“Okay, wow. It’s making the Fun N Sun look pretty good,” I say, glancing back at the boat sitting up on blocks, upon which we had our little tête-à-tête. “This is a family boat?”

“ ‘Family’ isn’t a word I’d choose to describe it. But hey. It’s the boat my dad said I could use,” he says, holding up a key ring and shrugging as his mouth curls up into something I’d call a smirk. Yep. He’s smirking. What a jerk. A cute jerk, but … “We dock a lot of boats here. There’s a system. It’s complicated. It’s not like you can just put keys in a car and drive it out.”

“I’ll bet it’s not,” I say.

Smirk.

“Besides. This one had a leak. We’re testing it out. So it’s a double-duty thing.”

“A leak?”

“We repaired it. It’s fine. We do good work. But it’s smart to test it.”

Smirk.

“Fine,” I say.

“Okay?”

I nod. “Let’s go. It’s ‘big enough,’ right? I’m just taking photos.”

He holds out a hand to help me inside. “Ladies first. Careful now. Don’t want to tip the boat over. Your choice of four seats here. Care to sit in the captain’s chair?”

“Is that a nautical pick-up line?”

“No. ‘Want to go for a ride on my dinghy?’ is a nautical pick-up line.”

I pretend to gag. “A bad pickup line for a badly named boat—which, by the way, I refuse to say again during our outing today.”

He laughs. “It’s so bad,” he admits. “The dude who owns it is a total dumbass. He doesn’t know anything about storing boats for winter. Remember that old rusted boat near the North Star with the holes in the bottom? It was almost that bad.”