“Please,” she replied.
I left the room, not caring that I was stark naked, grabbed the ice cream, and padded back to her as fast as I could.
We ate it with one spoon, feeding each other. Every now and then, she nudged my knee when I stole the bigger bite than what I gave her.
It was effortless being with her. I didn’t ever want it to end.
I studied her as she talked about meeting her dad tomorrow, telling me what she was worried about, sharing more about her life growing up along the Californian coast. I devoured every word, every gesture, and she couldn’t stop. I loved it.
Whatever I’d thought intimacy was, it had never asked me to stay present like this, to be seen this way. Being with hermade everything else disappear, not because it mattered less, but because she mattered more. The idea of tomorrow no longer made sense unless she was part of it.
And I knew it right then, staring at this beautiful woman in my bed, I was willing to do anything to keep her.
45
Teddy
I should have been at training.
That thought came and went, softened by the sound of the ocean, by the way the tide rolled in slow and steady, like it had nowhere else to be. I stood barefoot in the sand with my shoes hanging loose from my fingers, the cool grains pressing into my skin.
The air stayed warm against my skin despite the sun fading on the horizon. My eyes closed, my sensations multiplied as the world narrowed to the steady rise and fall of my breath.
I loved the beach, the salt-heavy air sweeping in and settling into my lungs, easing something tight and overworked inside me. Out here, the world felt wider, less demanding. I needed to remember to come here more.
The familiar thump of boots on the wooden promenade behind me brought me back to here and now. I knew that sound. Had known it my whole life, memorized it every time he walked away from me. Except now, he was here, and my body felt likeit might split right open if I didn’t look at him and check he was real.
He stopped beside me, close enough that a faint stir of air brushed my arm.
I didn’t look yet, though. A part of me worried he wasn’t real. Or that he’d changed so much that I wouldn’t recognize him.
“You should be at training,” he said. Disbelief swept into my chest, trying to escape, but I managed to keep it down. The man was missing days ago, and he’s worried about me missing training?
“I should.” The words were empty when they shouldn’t have been. Missing training wasn’t something I did, ever. Yet here I was, doing just that and not caring.
I was untethered. Out of sequence with myself.
Today, I didn’t have the strength to carry everything at once—the team, the expectations, the love I hadn’t planned for, the anger I didn’t know where to put, the grief that didn’t belong neatly to any one moment. So I stood there instead, letting myself be quiet in a way I rarely allowed.
The wind lifted my hair, tugging it loose around my face, and I didn’t bother pushing it back. I focused on the waves instead, the way they broke and pulled away again, never rushing, always being pulled by something bigger than themselves. I wished I could have moved through things like that. Arrive, retreat, repeat, without carrying everything with me. But I was learning that wasn’t a way to live.
“I watched the replay before the flight in,” he said after a moment. “You were solid out there.”
I exhaled slowly, not wanting to delve into that. “That’s not why we’re here.”
He went quiet. I wanted to shake him and shout at him, tell him how angry I was for trying to leave me like that. How reckless he was for not caring enough. But none of that was thetruth. Instead, I decided to do something neither of us had done for a long time. I was honest.
“When they couldn’t find you,” I said, keeping my eyes on the horizon, “it was the first time I felt the loss of mom.”
The breeze pressed against my back, warm and insistent, but I barely felt it.
“I never understood the weight of it,” I went on. “Not really. I didn’t miss her, and I know that sounds harsh, but I couldn’t.” I shook my head slightly. “You can’t miss someone you never had, right?”
I looked at him then, noticing how much he’d changed. His hair was more gray at the sides now, his eyes framed with deeper lines, the kind left by years I hadn’t witnessed. There were fresh grazes along his cheekbone, a beard I’d never seen before—evidence of a life lived beyond the version of him I remembered.
It’d been well over a year since I’d seen him last, more probably. My appearance hadn’t changed like his, not beyond my hair being longer, I suppose. Everything he didn’t know, he couldn’t see. I hadn’t softened. I hadn’t even learned how to be smaller, or quieter—at least, not until now. I wondered what he saw when he looked at me. Whether he noticed how much I missed something from him that I never really had.
When I spoke again, my voice was quieter.
