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“Not s-scared,” I say.
Nervous? Sure. Excited? Around Kai? All the time.
But scared? Never.
Kai swallows, his throat bobbing. We’re so close now, I can make out brown flecks in those vivid green eyes. I can feel his body heat against my front, even in this humid greenhouse, and feel his pulse tip-tapping in his wrist against my fingertip.
“Tell me how to help,” Kai says at last, his voice so low, and I don’t even realize I’m swaying toward him until I nearly lose my balance and topple forward. When I catch myself against his strong chest, Kai flattens a sturdy palm over my hand, tugging me closer.
“Tell me,” he says again.
I shrug, wishing like hell there was an easy answer. Like: push this magic button, and I’ll talk to you like a normal girl! If only.
My smile is heartbroken.
Kai smiles back, world-weary and so sad.
And his lips part like he’s going to say something—but behind us, the door creaks open, and we both leap apart as Jeremiah calls, “Hello? Anyone here yet?”
Freaking early birds. Why couldn’t Jeremiah sleep in, just this once?
Five
Kai
When I was a kid, I was terrified of the ocean. All those critters under the surface, watching clueless swimmers with their googly eyes; all those riptides and whirlpools and freaky still patches; all those jellyfish stingers and shark’s teeth. Get in there? Willingly? I wasn’t crazy! I point blank refused to even learn to swim until I was nine years old, when my old man had enough of my bullshit and tossed me in the deep end of a neighbor’s pool.
I thrashed and fought and choked down chlorine-flavored water. I didn’t just make a meal of it—I served up a whole damn feast, fighting like a pool-sized kraken was trying to drag me under.
But my father watched from the pool’s edge, arms crossed and face patient. And after a while, once it became clear that he wasn’t buying my drowning act, I stopped fighting the water and just… floated. Heart pounding but my narrow kid’s body so light.
“There you go,” my dad rasped, his voice ruined by smoke and by singing along with the radio at top volume as he drove supply trucks across the country. He crossed to a sun lounger and tugged a paperback out of his back pocket before sitting down. “Get practicing, ‘cause we’re going in the sea on Saturday.”
And that was that.
I’d be lying if I said that I never get the shivers out on the ocean anymore, even as a grown man. Sometimes, when a tendril of seaweed brushes my leg or something spooks the seagulls further out, sending them squawking up into the sky, my heart thumps so fast it feels like it might burst.
But I still get my butt in that ocean every morning before work. I still spend hours on my board each weekend, drifting and bobbing, and when the waves are good, I soar like a goddamn eagle. Nothing else makes me feel so alive… except maybe Eden’s fingers wrapped around my wrist.
You can live with fear—that’s all I’m saying. You can learn to sit with it.
Nerves can become old friends.
“Ever heard of immersion therapy?”
Eden’s running through the standard weekly checks in the greenhouse, strolling from plant to plant with a clipboard and stubby pencil. It’s a basic sweep to check for obvious signs of disease and predation—for anything I might need to troubleshoot, basically. It’s a vital task, but after watching her work for several weeks, I trust Eden to do it.
She glances over at me, frowning as she smiles. “N-no. What’s that?”
This girl has said more to me over the last few days than in the whole month before that. She’s getting quicker, too, smoothing her way through simple sentences, and she stammers less—not that I’m gonna point it out.
“It’s when people treat phobias by kinda throwing you in the middle of ‘em. So say you were scared of spiders—”
“N-not a lie.” Eden ticks off a box on the checklist, grinning at me as she steps off-path into a small grove of banana trees. The fruits hang in clumps, like fistfuls of curved green fingers. Not ripe yet.
“Right. Yeah, exactly.” What was I saying? It’s so hard to focus when Eden lets me close to her side, with her long, dark ponytail swishing between her shoulder blades. There’s that whiff of mint and tea tree shampoo again. “So you’re afraid of spiders, and then to treat you, they put you in a giant spider tank.”
“Oh my god.” Eden shudders, clutching the clipboard tight before turning back to her list. “I’d r-rather stay scared.”
