"River."
"Nadine."
She exhales through her nose and goes back to the doors. I give her ten more seconds before I make the suggestion that's going to solve her current problem: she's trying very hard not to think about what happened an hour ago, and her body has not received that memo.
"Pool's probably empty," I say.
She turns so fast that she has to catch herself on the doorframe. "The pool?"
"Yeah. It's two in the morning. No one's going to be there."
"Oh, that's … yeah. That sounds good."
We need to leave now, because if I spend another second watching her wearing my shirt, we might not make it to the pool. We might not make it anywhere except back to the bed.
The resort'squiet in the way places get after midnight when the staff has clocked out, and the guests have made their decisions about the night. String lights still on. Restaurant dark.
Nadine's three steps ahead of me on the stone stairs, wearing a bikini that looks suspiciously like dental floss. It barely covers anything. Normally, I'd be wary about her looking like this in full view of other men, but it's just us, so it's fine.
"Did you know bougainvillea isn't actually just a flower?" she says halfway down.
I look at the back of her head. "Nad."
"What people think are petals are modified leaves called bracts. The actual flowers are so tiny, people don't even notice them."
"Is there a reason you're telling me this right now?"
She casts me a glance over her shoulder. "You said you wanted to know about the landscaping."
I didn't say that. She knows I didn't say that. Even the petal on the ground knows that.
She reaches the pool and sits at the edge before I'm at the bottom step, feet in the water, looking at the infinity line where the pool meets the dark.
"Did you know that Mosasaurus isn't actually a dinosaur? It's a massive marine lizard."
"So why was he named Mosasaurus?"
"No idea, but I'll read up on that. But it was an apex predator, obviously. It also had a double-hinged jaw and over a hundred teeth."
"So it ate pretty much everything in the ocean?"
"Yup! Including sharks."
I'm listening to Nadine talk about Mosasaurus at two in the morning, and I'm going to remember this night for the rest of my life.
She turns to me and splashes me with her feet. "Am I being weird?"
"No. You always talk about random things all the time."
"So, it's a no?"
"You're being your usual brand of weird."
"What does that even mean?"
"You're being Nadine."
She kicks more water at me, and it lands on my shin, warm from the heat still sitting in the pool.
