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“What about Leo…and Casper…and—”
“We may not share the same DNA, but they’re my family. My brothers. There’s always something to fight about and argue over, but we understand each other. They understand me. They know what makes me tick and when I get overwhelmed and need to…blow off steam.”
“Is that why Casper was at the house the other morning and why you had the stamp of his ring on you?” My eyes flicker to his collarbone. Even though the mark is gone, I can still picture it as if it’s left an invisible scar only I can see.
“He’s my sparring partner because sometimes I need…I need to feel something so I can be in control of what I don’t. I get anxious about a lot of things, but as intelligent as I am, my brain can process what I’m anxious about, and if I don’t distract myself from it, then I get in a rut. I can’t let that happen.”
“You told me that it was okay for me to be sad. That it’s okay for me not to be okay.”
Freddie stiffens at my statement, and without warning, he jumps into the water, taking me with him. The ice-cold tears through my body, pushing out all the air in my lungs in a loud scream that’s silenced in the dark depths. I’m in complete shock, so much so that if he wasn’t holding me as he kicks us back to the surface, I might drown.
“That’s what it’s like in my head. All the time.”
“Wha-wha-what?” I’m shivering as he continues holding me and keeping us afloat.
“You were screaming, right? You could hear yourself scream, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t hear you. That’s what it’s like, and if I don’t kick back, I’ll drown.”
My chest tightens at the dejected look on his face. All this time, I knew he was hurting inside. I’m not blind—I can see when someone is suffering. I feel his turmoil. Yet, I had no idea that this is how he’s lived his life.
“Why is it like that for you?”
“Because—” An audible swallow cuts through his cloudy breaths. “—because I’m like my dad, but I don’t want to end up like him.” Looking to the distance, he focuses on the woods we rode through before he tells me, “He let himself drown, and one day…”
“One day…?”
With a shrug, he sniffs as though he’s trying to stop the tears in his eyes from falling again. “One day he gave up. He walked into those woods, and he never walked back out.”
My heart stops. It lurches to a halt at the sound of his gritted sob. Freddie doesn’t stop kicking though; if anything, he might be doing it harder as he holds me tighter. Even though my limbs are almost frozen, I kick along with him because there is no way I’m ever going to let him drown on my watch.
“Hey.” I nudge his chin with the tip of my nose, trying to get him to look away from the tree line. “Look at me.”
It takes him a moment and a few deep inhales. However, he gives me what I want, looking at me with a strained smile on his face even as tears roll down his handsome face.
“Don’t leave me,” he whispers.
The sound of the heartbreak in his words is enough to make me want physically superglue myself to him for life.
“You listen to me, and you listen good. I will never leave you. It’s always going to be you and me, my love. We’re going to keep swimming. Keep kicking. Together. No matter what. What was it you said about swans?”
Not that I’ve forgotten, but I think that the best way for him to accept and trust what I’m telling him is by saying it himself.
“Once they mate, they’re bound for life and beyond death.” The strained smile hitches a little higher to one side. “One can’t survive without the other. Their souls are so intertwined that they call from the grave, drawing the other from the world.”
“So by your own logic, you understand that I’m your swan. Ergo, I’ve always been yours. I’m always going to be yours. In this world. In the grave. In the afterlife. It’s always going to be you and me.”
“You and me, Swan,” he tells me with a deep, steady exhale.
Before I can wrap myself around him, he takes us to the steps and lifts me out of the water. It’s so cold that the air brushing my skin almost feels as warm as the summer sun.
“Fuck me, I forgot how cold that water gets at night.” Walking up the steps, he grabs his shirt and uses it to dry me before himself.
When he sits beside me again, he drags me closer before lying back and wrapping the spare blanket around us. It’s thick and big enough that when he pulls me into him, it cocoons us completely.
“You warm enough?” he asks me after a while.
The silence is bliss as he holds me and I hold him, the quiet allowing me the percussion of his steadying heartbeats as he brushes his fingers through my hair, over and over.
“Toasty,” I reply, trying my hardest not to fall asleep because I don’t want to miss a single second with him ever again.
