Rock the Boat Read Online Free PDF

before I lost my shit. When I ran out of land, I found the sea.
    The guys didn’t have to follow me, but they did. They’re most likely the reason why I’m still alive and not in rehab. The first couple days after Shay passed, I drank nonstop until it became impossible to get my fingers to play a single chord on my guitar. I started forgetting the lyrics and fucking up every song on the playlist. But as long as they kept the song I wrote for Shay in the rotation, there was no way I could sing it sober.
    “It’s been a year, Easton. Shay would want you to continue living. She wouldn’t want you to give up touring to protect her memory. The guilt you feel doesn’t have to exist.”
    “Some days it feels like yesterday. Others I struggle to remember the sound of her voice. I can’t decide which is worse.”
    “They’re both terrible and I hate that you’re even in this position, but this is the end of your second contract with the cruise line. In another week you’ll have to make a decision about your career whether you meet this girl or not. Whatever you decide, I want it to be what you want . Not what you think has to happen.”
    “How do you think I feel, Gina? I don’t like living like this.”
    She stands up, walking over to where I’m leaning against the wall. Placing her hand over my heart, she says, “Keep Shay here, but let yourself live again. She won’t hate you. If you can’t live with her, live for her.”
    I could argue that she’s putting words into Shay’s mouth, but she’s not. Toward the end, I had more than one conversation with Shay before she moved to hospice care. She made me swear that when the right girl came along, I would love her the way she deserved—that I wouldn’t hold back because I was scared or missing her. At the time, the thought was incomprehensible. The only girl I’d ever been in love with, the one I swore I would spend the rest of my life with, was begging me to love someone else. It made me angry she was encouraging me to move on while she was still my fiancée. Mostly because I was in denial I was ever going to lose her in the first place.
    I’m human—I don’t want to spend the rest of my life alone. I crave affection as much as anyone else, but that’s the exact reason why I fell into bed with other women. I needed to feel as much as I needed to forget. But as hard as I tried to forget, when I closed my eyes, I pictured Shay. I guess that makes me a pretty sick bastard.
    Regardless of the way I feel about myself, I still promised Shay I would try. I didn’t let her down when she was alive, and I’m not about to do it now.
    “One drink,” I tell Gina before sitting on the edge of the bed. One drink might kill me, but I’ll do it.
    “Thank fuck,” Dom mutters from the couch. I just made his life a hell of a lot easier now that Gina’s beaming.
    She hands the Perfect Match letter back to me. “All you have to do is message her. Imagine how excited she is after finding your name in her own letter.”
    I do as I’m told, typing out my simple request—to meet me in the lounge in thirty minutes. I do it for Gina, but after I press send, I don’t regret it as much as I thought I would. Clearly, I’m spending too much time with these two fools.

I haven’t been this nervous to meet a girl since high school. It was prom night when I went to pick up Courtney and found her two older brothers waiting for me on the front porch. One had a box of condoms in his hand, the other a rifle. Luckily for them, I wouldn’t need either of those things—Courtney and I were nothing more than family friends.
    Shay had been too sick and battling another bout of pneumonia. I didn’t want to go to the dance at all, but she insisted it was a rite of passage every high school senior should experience. Since I’d do anything to make her happy, I went to the prom against my better judgement.
    The second Shay was feeling well enough to go outside, Courtney helped me plan a